References for Theme: The Inoperative Community
- Nancy, Jean-Luc
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.19) In his sense, Bataille is without doubt the one who experienced first, or most acutely the modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space Itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.2) Not that totalitarianism was already present, as such, in Marx: this would be a crude proposition, one that remains ignorant of the strident protest against the destruction of community that in Marx continuously parallels the Hegelian attempt to bring about a totality, and that thwarts or displaces this attempt. But the schema of betrayal is seen to be untenable in that il was the very basis of the communist ideal that ended up appearing most problematic: namely, human beings defined as producers (one might even add: human beings defined at all), and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.31) This is why community cannot arise from the domain of work. One does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it - the experience of finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would presuppose that the common being, as such be objectifiable and producible (in sites, persons, buildings, discourses, institutions, symbols, subjects). Products derived from operations of this kind, however grandiose they might seek to be and sometimes manage to be, have no more communitarian existence than the plaster busts of Marianne. Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called " unworking," referring...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.32) Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional. The unworking of community takes place around what Bataille for a very long time called the sacred. Yet he came around to saying, "What I earlier called the sacred, a name that is perhaps purely pedantic ... is fundamentally nothing other than the unleashing of passions"
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.35) Community is given to us- or we are given and abandoned to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated. it is not a work to be done or produced.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.39) But ecstasy comes at a price: at the risk of being nothing more than an erotic or fascist work of death, ecstasy passes through the inscription of finitude and its communication. Which is to say that it also presupposes, necessarily, works (literary, political, etc.). But what is inscribed, and what passes to the limit in inscribing itself, exposes and communicates itself (instead of trying to accomplish a meaning, like speech): what is shared is the unworking of works.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.40) The political, if this word may serve to designate not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such, the destination of its sharing, must not be the assumption or the work of love or of death.
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.60) Absence of community represents that which does not fulfil community or community itself inasmuch as it cannot be fulfilled or engendered as ~ new individual. In this sense, " the appurtenance of every possible community to what I call ... absence of community must be the ground of any possible community." In the absence of community neither the work of community, nor the community as work, nor communism can fulfil itself; rather, the passion of and for community propagates itself, unworked, appealing, demanding to pass beyond every limit and every fulfilment enclosed in the form of an individual. It is...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.72) It is here, in this suspension, that the communion less communism of singular beings takes place. Here takes place the taking place (which is itself without a place. without a space reserved for or devoted to its presence) of community: not in a work that would bring it to completion even less in itself as work (family, people, church. nation, party, literature, philosophy). but in the unworking and as the unworking of all its works. There is the unworking of the works of individuals in the community ("writers," whatever their mode of writing might be), and there is the unworking...
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.73) The work - be it what we designate as "a work" or be it the community presenting itself as work (and the one is always in the other, and can be made into capital, made profitable by the other, or else exposed again) - must be offered up for communication. This does not mean that the work must be "communicable": no form of intelligibility or transmissibility is required of it. It is not a matter of a message: neither a book nor a piece of music nor a people is, as such, the vehicle or the mediator of a message....
- The Inoperative Community (1991)
(p.74) For the moment , we need not stop to evaluate the element of retrospective illusion in this interpretation, which represents for Marx the truth of "communal labor in its spontaneously evolved form as we find it among all Civilized peoples at the dawn of their history.'" What is important, beyond the nostalgic ideology that is common to Marx and to many others is the thinking of community that in spite of everything still comes through 'here-for it is a thinking, not merely an idyllic narrative ready to be transformed into a future utopia. Community means here the socially exposed particularity,...
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