Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.

2336, 2003

The confronted communitya

JEAN-LUC NANCY
Translated by Amanda Macdonald For Maurice Blanchot The present state of the world is not a war of civilisations. It is a civil war: it is the internal war of an enclosed city, of a civility, of an urbanity, which are in the process of fanning out to the very limits of the world, and, because of this, spreading right to the extremity of their own concepts. At its limit, a concept breaks, a distended gure shatters, a yawning gap appears. This war is not a war of religions either, or else all so-called wars of religion are wars internal to monotheism, a religious schema of the West and a schema within that West of a division which, here again, takes itself to the edges and to the extremities: on to the Orient of the Occident and right to the crack and the gaping hole in the very middle of the divine. For that matter, the West will have been nothing but the exhaustion of the divine, with respect to all forms of monotheism, and whether it be a case of exhaustion by atheism or by fanaticism. What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought dened by the One and by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting itself through a unique absence of destination, through an innite expansion of general equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this, in the violent convulsions that reafrm the all-powerfulness and the all-presence of a One becomeor re-becomeits own monstrousness.1 How, ultimately, to be seriously, absolutely, unconditionally atheist whilst able to make sense and truth of this One? How to, not so much exit religionsince, when it comes down to it, that is already done, and the imprecations of the fanatical can do nothing about it (they are, indeed, the symptom of it, like the god engraved on the dollar) but exit the monolithism of thought which has remained ours (simultaneously, History, Science, Capital, Man and/or their Nullity ). That is to say, how to go to the ends of monotheism and of its constitutive atheism (or what one might call its absentheism) in order to grasp, from the reverse side of its exhaustion, whatever might be extracted from nihilism, brought out of it from the inside? How to think the nihil without turning it back into an all-powerful and all-present monstrousness. The yawning gap that is taking shape is that of meaning, of truth, of value. All forms of fracture and rupturesocial, economic, political, culturalhave, in this gap, their condition of possibility and their fundamental schema. This cannot be ignored: the primordial stake must be taken to be a stake in thought, including those times when it is a question of its most material implications (of death through AIDS in Africa or of poverty in Europe or of struggles for power in Arab countries, for example, among a hundred examples). Political and
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/03/01002314 2003 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879032000080384

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military strategy is necessary, as is economic and social regulation, and as is obstinacy in making demands for justice; resistance and revolt are too. But it is nevertheless also necessary relentlessly to think a world that abandons, in a simultaneously slow and brutal way, all its established conditions for truth, for meaning and for value. The enormous economic disequilibrium, that is to say the disequilibrium of life, of hunger, of dignity, of thought, is the corollary of the development of a world that is no longer reproducing itself (that no longer renews either its own existence, or its own meaning) but that produces an illimitation of its own worldness, in such a way as to appear able only either to implode or to explode: because at the centre of the illimitation a deepening rift is appearing which is nothing other than an unequalness of the world to itself, an impossibility of endowing itself with meaning, value and truth, a precipitation into general equivalence that is progressively becoming civilisation as a work of death. Not only a form of civilisation, but Civilisation, the history of humanity perhaps, and perhaps with it the history of nature. And no other form on the horizon, either new or old. From this quarter and that comes the wish to dress the wound with the usual tatters of worn-out nery: god or money, petrol or muscle, information or incantation, which always ends up signifying one form or another of all-powerfulness and all-presence. All-powerfulness and All-presence, this is what one always asks of the community or what one seeks in it: sovereignty and intimacy, presence to self without aw and without any outside. One wants the spirit of a people or the soul of a gathering of faithful, one wants the identity of a subject or its propriety. It is not enoughit is far from enoughto denounce here an imperialism and there a fundamentalism (designations that can, moreover, be placed in a chiasmatic relation). These denunciations are right and fair, just as it is right and fair to denounceas a rst stepthe effects of an exploitation and a humiliation of entire peoples, who are thus made available for other exploitations and instrumentalisations. But, in the end, since 1939, wars no longer take place as confrontations inside a world that makes a place for them (although this place may be disastrous): war has become the war of a world that is tearing itself up because it yearns to be or to invent what it must be: a world, that is to say, a space of meaning, be it one of lost meaning or empty truth.2 To speak of meaning and of truth in the middle of military agitation, geopolitical calculations, suffering, the grimaces of stupidity or else of lies is not idealistic: it is to get to the very nub of the thing. On this side and that of the gaping hole of the world, hollowed out in the name of globalisation, it is indeed the community which is separated from and confronted with itself. In times past, communities were able to think of themselves as distinct and autonomous without seeking their assumption in a generic humanity. But once the world completes the task of becoming global and once man completes the task of becoming human (it is in this sense, too, that he becomes the last man), once the community sets itself to stammering a strange uniqueness (as if there should only be the one, and as if it should possess 24

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a unique essence of the common), then the community takes in the fact that it is the community itself that gapesyawningly open to its unity and to its absent essencesand that it confronts within itself this break. It is community against community, foreign community against foreign community and familiar community against familiar community, each rending itself in rending the others that are themselves lacking the possibility of communication, of communion too. Monotheism in itself confronted with itselflike theism and like atheismis, for this reason, the schema of our present condition. That this confrontation with self may be a law of being-in-common and its very meaning, this is what is on the task sheet for the work of thought immediately accompanied by this other project of thought: that the confrontation, in grasping the fact of itself, grasps the fact that mutual destruction destroys all the way along to the very possibility of confrontation, and with that destruction the possibility of being-in-common or being-with. For, if the common is the with, the with designates the space lacking all-powerfulness and all-presence. In the with there can be none but the forces that confront one another because of their mutual play, and the presences that part from one another because they must always become something else apart from pure presences (given objects, subjects comforted in their certainties, a world of inertia and entropy). How to enable ourselves to look squarely at our gaping lack, our confrontation, not in order to sink into it, but in order to draw from it, despite everything, the strength to confront ourselves: rst, with utter awareness; then, in such a way as to really scrutinise ourselveswithout which scrutiny the confrontation is nothing but an indistinct and blind shoving match? The challenge of this duly acknowledged, to look squarely at a gaping chasm and to confront oneself with an intense gaze are not without grounds for comparison, if the others gaze never opens upon anything but the unfathomable: upon absolute strangeness, upon a truth which cannot be veried but which must nevertheless be clung to. Threefold strangeness: that of the distant other, that of the withdrawn same, that of history turned toward the un-encountered, perhaps the unbearable. It is necessary, against an altruistic morality too blandly recited, to hold onto the rigour of the relationship to the stranger, wherein strangeness is a strict condition of existence and of presence. And it is necessary to hold onto that which, out in front of us, exposes us to the sombre, radiating dispersal of our own future and of our own ssure. It is neither a question of making the Occident guilty nor of reasserting a mythic Orient: it is a question of conceiving a world that is in itself and of itself broken, by a break that comes forth from the furthest reaches of its history and that really must, by one means or another, for the worst and perhapswho knows?for the least worst, establish its obscure meaning; not an obscured meaning but one where the obscure is elemental. It is difcult, it is necessary. It is our need in the two senses of the word: it is our poverty and our obligation. *** 25

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[The following text is being published in Italy, where it was rst commissioned, in the circumstances to which the text itself points (it will appear as the preface to a new edition of Maurice Blanchots The Unavowable Community, in a revised translation for SE Editions, Milan: my thanks to Alessandro Fanfoni for his invitation)]. 26

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SE Editions, of Milan, have asked me to write the introduction to a revised translation of Maurice Blanchots La Communaute inavouable [The Unavowable Community].b The Italian public, I am told, does not have a clear view of the circumstances in which this book was written and published, although its author expressly set it up to resonate with an article I had published, entitled La Communaute desoeuvree [The Inoperative Community].c This request struck me as having the very precise interest value of inviting me to revisit an episode entailing stakes which I had failed to accurately assess at the time. The history of 1980s philosophical texts about community deserves to be written up with great care, since it is, along with others but moreso than others, a history that is revealing of a profound current of thought in the Europe of that timea current that is still carrying us along, although in a context that has changed a good deal and where the motif of community, instead of coming into the light seems to be sinking from view in a kind of obscurity (especially at the time of writing these lines: mid-October 2001). In The Inoperative Community, I had evoked the beginning of this history, but too briey. I return to that beginning here, thanks to this preface, with the benet of hindsight which allows me to understand things better. At the same time, the weighty context that I have just evokedcommunitarian fury and wars of every kind and of every world (the old, the new, the third and the fourth, the north and the south, the east and the west)makes it useful, perhaps, to retrace a movement that does not arise out of thought except because it rst belongs to existence. In 1983, Jean-Christophe Bailly proposed a theme for an forthcoming issue of Alea, which he was then publishing with Christian Bourgois.3 The proposed theme was, formulated thus: Community, number. The perfectly executed ellipse contained in this statementwhere prudence rivals elegance, in the manner that was Baillys great artgripped me as soon as I received the call for papers, and I have never ceased to admire its aptness. Community was a word unknown, then, to the discourse of thought. It must have been almost entirely conned to the institutional usage of the European community. Today, almost twenty-ve years later, we know to what extent discussion of the concept employed in this usage is still pending: nor is this issue removed from the question of community as it haunts us, as it abandons us or as it embarrasses us. Whether we knew it then or not, the word and its concept could not help but be abruptly sidelined along with the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, community of the people, in the well-known sense of the term. (In Germany, moreover, the word Gemeinschaft was still provoking a strong, hostile reaction on the left, and the translation of my book, in 1988, was treated as a Nazi text in a leftwing Berlin newspaper. In 1999, by contrast, another Berlin newspaper, coming out of the ex-East, discussed the same book in a positive way under the title, Return of communism. This pair of anecdotes seems to me to sum up the amphibology, the equivocation and perhaps the aporia, but also the obstinate insistencenot necessarily an obsessive onethat the word community drags around with it.) I might add that what still remained, in 1983, of socialist-leaning condence, to whatever degree and in whatever form this might take, held onto its affection for the word communism (that is, of course, provided the original 27

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demands of the word were retrieved from real communism, which no longer held any secrets). Whereas communism points to an idea and a project, community seemed to denote a fact, a given. Communism declares itself to be for a community that is not given, that it sets itself as a target. In Baillys formulation, I immediately understood: What is the matter with community?as if it was a question that had been quietly substituted for another: Which communist project, a communitarian or a communial one?.d What is the matter?, indeed, What is its being? What ontology accounts for the matter that is pointed to by a well-knowna commonword, but endowed with a concept that has, perhaps, grown extremely indistinct?. The concept alone called for examination, and in this regard Baillys invitation had already displayed restraint with respect to the very nature of the general project. (Bailly came from an intense, if not an extreme left, a non-communist left, in party terms.) The highlighting of the word, alone, set it up as an analytical programme and doubtless as a problematic. Number was also unexpected, in another way. It served as a sudden reminder of the obviousness not only of the substantial multiplication of the worlds population, but, along with that plain factas its effect or as its qualitative corollary, of the obviousness of a multiplicity escaping unitary assumptions, of a multiplicity multiplying its differences, dispersing itself in small groups, indeed in individuals, in multitudes or in populations. From this point of view, number meant the reformulation and the displacement of what had been the masses or the crowd in many an analytical account from before the war (Le Bon, Freud, etc.), or different things again, looked at from other angles, in accounts from after the war. Now, we knew that the various fascisms had been operations carried out on the masses, whilst the various communisms had been carried out on classes, one and all assigned to the house-arrest of historical mission. Baillys formulation could thus be read as a dazzling abbreviation of the problem that we had inherited as the problem of totalitarianism(s)no longer posed directly in political terms (as if it were a problem of good government), but in terms that needed to be understood as ontological: what, then, is community if number becomes the unique phenomenon by which it is known even the thing in itselfand if there remains no communism or socialism of any kind, either national or international, underpinning the least gure of community nor even the least form, the slightest identiable schema of community? And what, then, is number if its multiplicity no longer counts as a mass awaiting its mise en forme (formation, conformation, information), but rather counts, all in all, for its own sake, within a dispersal we wouldnt know whether to name dissemination (seminal exuberance) or crumbling (sterile pulverisation)? It so happened that at the time when Bailly was proposing this theme, I was coming to the end of a years coursework devoted to Bataille, from the point of view of politics. I had, very specically, been looking in Bataille for new elements untouched by fascism or communism, and equally free of democratic or republican individualism (not yet citizen, then, as in the notion that has since sought to address the same problem, but has scarcely diminished it). In fact, I 28

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was looking in Batailles work because I already knew that the word and the motif of community circulated within itand the motive for this research was the same as for Baillys formulation (Bailly, of course, knew Bataille, without however referring to him). This line of research was undoubtedly signicant for each party, but there was a lack of clear awareness of the stakes involved, a lack of a posing of the problem that was, in the rst place, not directly or not explicitly political: ahead or retreating from the political4, e there was this to consider, that the common exists, the together exists, and the numerous exists, and that we no longer knew at all, perhaps, how to think about this order of the real. The course work had left me dissatised. Bataille had not provided me with the possibility of entering into a new politics. On the contrary, he had, in more ways than one, banished political possibility as such. In his post-war texts, and right until the end, he had distanced himself from the political climate of his pre-war thinking. In an analagous way, he had distanced himself from any competition with a sociological science, as from any attempt to found a group or a college. There was no longer any question that a sacred sociology should ` take up from the fascisms the driven and activist energy in which he had seen their main motivating force. Heterological agitation had failed and the war concluded through the victory of democracies, instead of throwing extatic forces into the light, left political projects in the shadows. In the same way, then, that he made sovereignty a concept that was not political but ontological and aesthetic or ethical (as one would say today), Bataille came to consider the strong bond (passionate or sacred, intimate) of community as being reserved for what he called the community of lovers. The latter came by way of a contrast with the social bond and as its counter-truth. What it had been supposed must structure societybe this via a transgressive breachwas deposited outside of itself within itself, in an intimacy for which the political remained beyond reach. I had the impression that I recognised, here, an aspect of the observation that the entire epoch was dimly beginning to make: there was an uncoupling of the political and being-in-common.5 But on either side of the equation, community of intense intimacy or society of a homogenous and extensive bond, Batailles reference point looked like this to me: the desired position (whether one achieved it in love or whether one renounced it in society) of a community as an assumption in interiority, as a presence to self of a realized unity. It therefore seemed to me that this presupposition of community required analysisbe it clearly designated as the impossible, and thereby converted into a community of those who are without community (formulation that I am quoting from memory and without knowing whether it is from Bataille or from Blanchot. I decided to write these lines without returning to the texts, leaving space here for memory, since memory alone can retrieve the movement once followed and imprinted on me: rereading would make me rewrite history). Thus I came under the aegis of the thinking that had persisted across the span of the philosophical tradition, right up to Batailles surpassing or exceeding of it (and, before that, doubtless, right up to Marxs): a representation of community to which the reexion upon totalitarianisma reexion that marked 29

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this entire period, that demanded of everyone a deep catching of the breath made me attribute this essential characteristic: community effecting itself as its own work.6 The thinking that Batailles difcult, anxious and in part unhappy reexion, by contrast, invitedthinking with it but going beyond itwas what it seemed to me I could call the unoccupied community [la communaute desoeuvree ].f Unoccupancy was taken from Blanchot, thus very nearly from Bataille, from the community or communication called friendship and endless conversation between the two. From this very singular and silent, in some ways secret communication a word came to me with which to try to set the dice in motion once more for a restart of play. The years to come were to show how much the motif of community, once put back into play a rst time, could seize hold of peoples interest, and how necessary it was to attempt to redescribe this sphere of man or of being that was no longer borne by any communist or communitarian project. Describing it otherwise meant, when it came down to it, no longer qualifying it by reference to itself, getting out of the tautology where community is self-constituting and self-valorising (and always, no doubt, bearing a more or less Christian value: original community of the apostles, religious community, church, communion Batailles liations were, for that matter, very clear in this respect). There was, after Blanchots book and my own, a series of works thematising and dening community; this series continues to grow, but in a context where a communitarianism worthy of further examination has reinvented itself in the United States. Blanchot wrote the The Unavowable Community as a response to the article that I had published under the title La Communaute desoeuvreeg [The Inoperative Community], and while I was already working to extend it into a book. I was utterly gripped by this reply, rst of all because the attention thus displayed by Blanchot indicated the importance of the motif, not only for him but, through him, for all those who were experiencing an imperative, even violent need to start work all over again on the thing that communism had just as powerfully hidden as thrown up: the case of the commonbut also the enigma or the difculty of it, its non-given, non-available character, making it, in this sense, the least common quality in the world. But I was also gripped by the fact that Blanchots response was simultaneously an echo, an amplication and a riposte, a reservation, and, for that matter, in some ways a reproach. I have never completely claried this reserve or this reproach, either in a text or for myself, and not in correspondence with Blanchot either. I am speaking of it here for the rst time in this preface. I had not performed this clarication because I never felt (nor do I, today, to any greater degree) either capable of or authorised to shine a light on the secret that Blanchot clearly designates with his titleand even through his text, since toward the end he speaks of the unavowable quality of a death offered out of love, of a love offered in death (and that very thing is most precisely not avowable even when it is said). The unavowable secret doubtless obtains from the following (but is not contained in it): at the point where I claimed to reveal the work of community 30

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as societys death sentence7 and, as a corollary, to establish the need for a community refusing to constitute work, thus preserving the essence of an endless communication (communicating to itself an absent sense, to speak once more with Blanchot, along with the passion of this ab-sense, or rather the passion in which this ab-sense is constituted)at that very point, then, Blanchot informs me of or rather indicates to me the unavowable. Apposed but opposed to the unoccupied of my title, this adjective proposes to think that beneath the unoccupancy there is still work, an unavowable work. It prompts the thought (once again, I am writing without rereading the texts, I am writing not to produce resolution, but to open up the attention of future readers) that the community of those who are without community (all of us, from now on), the unoccupied community, does not let itself be revealed as the unveiled secret of being-in-common. And, consequently, it does not let itself be communicated, even though it is the common itself and doubtless because it is. The unavowed community instead deepens the secret, and it emphasises the impossibility of acceding to it, or rather the interdiction forbidding access to itor else the inhibition, the reserve or the shame about doing so (all these inexions appear, I think, in Blanchots text). What is unavowable is not unsayable. On the contrary, the unavowable does not cease to be spoken, to speak itself in the intimate silence of those who could but cannot avow. I imagine that Blanchot wanted to intimate to me this silence and what it says: prescribe it for me and introduce it into my intimacy, as intimacy itselfthe intimacy of a communication or a community, the intimacy of a style of intimate work more deeply buried than any unoccupancy, making that unoccupancy possible and necessary but not letting itself be dissolved in it. Blanchot was asking me not to settle for the negation of communial community, and to think further ahead than this negativity, toward a secret of the common that is not a common secret. I have not gone further, up to now, with a reworking of the analysis, as I might have done in particular by replying in turn to Blanchots text. I did not do so in my occasional correspondence with him, because letters should scarcely get mixed up with texts: the latter must communicate among themselves, according to their own order. (What, for that matter, is a correspondence? What type of coor com- is engaged there?) And I did not do so in a text, either, because it happened that, in the order of work in the strict sense, I did not pursue the word community either as a seam or as a theme. In effect, I have preferred to substitute, little by little, the graceless expressions, being-together, being-in-common, and nally being-with. There were reasons for these moves and for resigning myself, at least provisionally, to these disgraces of language. On several sides I saw approaching the dangers inspired by the usage of the word community: its invincibly full resonanceindeed a resonance bloated with substance and interiority, its quite inevitable Christian reference (spiritual and brotherly community, communial community) or more broadly religious one (Jewish community, community of prayer, community of believersumma), its usage to support the claims of supposed ethnicities could only put one on ones guard.8 It was clear that the emphasis placed upon a necessary but as yet under-elaborated concept went at least hand in hand, 31

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during this period, with a reviving of communitarian and sometimes fascist urges. (In 2001, one can see where we are in all this, and by what routes we have already travelled so far as urges of this kind are concerned.) I therefore preferred, in the end, to focus the work around the with: almost indistinguishable from the co- of community, it brings with it however a clearer indicator of the removal at the heart of proximity and intimacy. The with is dry and neutral: neither communion nor atomisation, just the sharing and sharing out of a space, at most a contact: a being-together without assemblage. (In this sense, we need to take much further the analysis of Heideggers Mitdasein, left pending in his work.) That work around the with will perhaps lead me anew toward Blanchots book. This new Italian edition is a rst opportunity. As if Blanchot, across the years that have passed and other signs exchanged between us, once more admonished me: Be on your guard against the unavowable! I believe I understand it thus: beware any assumption of community, be it by the name of unoccupied. Or else, you must follow even further in the direction that this word points. Unoccupancy comes after work but also comes from it. It is not enough to hold society back from making a work of itself in the sense desired by the Nation-Sates or Nation-Parties, the universal or autocephalous Churches, the Assemblies and the Councils, Peoples, companies or brotherhoods. It is also necessary to consider that there has been, already, always already, a work of community, an operation of sharing out that will always have gone before any singular or generic existence, a communication and a contagion without which it would be unthinkable to have, in an absolutely general manner, any presence or any world, since each of these terms brings with it the implication of a co-existence or of a co-belongingthough this belonging be no more than a belonging to the fact of being-in-common. There has already been, amongst usus all together and by distinct gatheringsthe sharing out of a common that is no more than its sharing out, but which, through its sharing out, creates existence and goes right to existence itself in as much as this existence is exposure at its own limit. This is what has made us us, separating and bringing us close again, creating proximity through the remove amongst usus in the state of extreme indecision in which this collective or plural subject braces itself, condemned (but this is its greatness) never to nd its own voice. What has been shared out? Doubtless somethingthe unavowable, then that Blanchot points to in the second part of his book9 and by the very fact of pairing, in this book, a reexion upon a theoretical text and another upon a story of love and death.10 In both cases, Blanchot writes in relation and writes his relation to these texts, which he thereby also puts into relation with one another. He distinguishes them, it seemed to me, as two texts, one of which would remain at the point of a negative or hollow consideration of unoccupancy, while the other would provide access not to a worked up community, but one brought about in secret (the unavowable) through the sharing out of an experience of limits: the experience of love and death, of life itself exposed to its limits. Perhaps he is sayingthis is what a re-reading must look forthat these two approaches to the essenceless essence of community cross one anothers paths somewhere, between the two parts of the book as between the social-political 32

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order and the intimate-passionate order. At some point, it would be advisable to conceive the enigma of intensity, of eruption and of loss, or abandonment, which allows simultaneously plural existence (birth, separation, opposition) and singularity (death, love). But the unavowable is always entailed in birth and death, love and war. The unavowable denotes a shameful secret. It is shameful because it institutes, via two possible guresthat of sovereignty and that of intimacya passion that cannot be displayed except as the unavowable in general: its avowal would be unbearable but at the same time would destroy the force of that passion. Whereas, without that passion, we would long ago have given up on any kind of being-together, that is on being, full stop. We would have given up on that which, according to the order of a sovereignty and an intimacy drawn back into a discretion without end, brings us into the world. Because what brings us into the world is also what carries us from the outset toward the extremes of separation, of nitude, and of innite encounter where each of us falters upon contact with others (that is to say, with oneself, also) and with the world as a world of others. What brings us into the world just as soon shares out the world, stripping it of any unity, rst or last. Unavowable is thus a word that makes mingle here, indiscernibly, indiscretion and its discretion. Indiscrete, it announces a secret; discrete, it declares that the secret will remain secret. What is silenced in this way is known by the one who is silent. But this knowledge is thus not to be communicated, itself being at once knowledge and communication, the law of which must be not to communicate itself because it is not of the realm of the communicable, without however being ineffable: but this law opens up all speech. At this point, I will conclude by returning to the event that is spreading across the world at the present time (let me say it again, October 2001) and especially across the Western world and along its edges, upon its internal and external connes (if there are any longer any external connes), taking on all the traits of an unleashing of passion. It is self-evident that gures of passionwhether that of an All-Powerful God or that of a Liberty that is no less theurgiccover up and reveal by their confronted gestures everything that one knows about the extortion, the exploitation, the manipulation that the present movement of the world is displaying, allowing to unfold. But it is not enough to unmask, even though that is necessary at the outset. What must also be considered is that these gures of passion do not happen along by accident to occupy an empty space: that empty space corresponds to a truth of community. The call to a wrathful god, as much as the afrmation, In God we trust, instrumentalises in a symmetrical fashion a need, a desire, an anxiety of the being-together. This call and this afrmation each renews being-together as a workat the one time a heroic gesture, an impressive spectacle, an insatiable trade. In doing so, these two actions ensure the revelation of the secret all the while withholding its spark. In truth, they mask its secret, and quite precisely beneath the all too avowable name of God. It falls to us to think from this starting point: without god or master, without common substance, what is the secret of community or being-with? 33

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We have not yet sufciently thought through the unoccupancy of community, thought through what the possibility of sharing out a secret without divulging might consist in: in what it might consist to share that secret out precisely without divulging it to ourselves, amongst ourselves. Faced with the monstrous outcomes of thought (or of ideology) that confront one another for no less monstrous stakes of power and prot, a task presents itself, one of daring to think the unthinkable, the unattributable, the intransigent qualities of being-with, while not subjecting it to any kind of hypostasis. It is not a political or economic task; it is more serious yet than that and it commands, in the long run, both the political and the economic. We are not in a war of civilisations, we are in an internal tearing apart of the only civilisation that civilises and barbarises the world in the one action, since this civilisation has already come up against the extremity of its own logic: this tearing apart presses the world back entirely into its own keeping, presses the human community back entirely into its own keeping and into the keeping of its own secret, without god and without any market value. It is with these elements that work must be done: with community confronted by itself, with us confronted by us, the with confronting the with. A confrontation doubtless belongs essentially to community: it is a question simultaneously of a confrontation and of an opposition, of an encounter where one goes out to meet oneself, so as to challenge and test oneself, so as to divide oneself in ones being by a remove that is also the condition of that being. 15 October 2001 LA COMMUNAUTE AFFRONTEE Jean-Luc NANCY, Editions Galilee, Janvier 2001

Notes
1

No coincidence if the regions of the world that remain, for the moment, pretty much observers of the war (all the while taking part in globalisation, for their increased growth or for their impoverishment) are those where the dialectic or the deconstruction of monotheism has not been carried out, whether because Christianity (in this case, Latin American) has otherwise structured thought (in a more pagan way, as they say, or a less metaphysical one), or else because monotheism has not penetrated the thoughts that are heterogenous to it (India and China do not think, to put it crudely, in terms of the One, nor in terms of Presence). On the one hand, the West and its auto-exhaustion are spread everywhere about, and on the other hand this disparity, always to a depth of at least three worlds in the world, certainly conceals the chances and the risks of the future. [Editors note: for an inected account bearing on the point regarding Indias non-monotheism, see Ashis Nandys article, A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia, Postcolonial Studies, 4(2), 2001, pp 125142.] Counter-example: when Rome conducted policing wars at the outskirts of the Empire (as the United States does, ceaselessly), Rome was not simultaneously one half of the world confronting another: the Empire was an order unto itself; singular peoples constituted another order. He was to close it down just a few years later, and would then seek to establish another journal, a more signicant one, with a number of people of whom I was one (along with Lacou-Labarthe, Alferi, Froment-Meurice ). No publisher could be found to go along with this essentially complex and multiple project because we refused to dene ourselves according to a line or a manifesto. The days of journals built upon an ideology seemed to us to be over (with Tel Quel and several others). That is also to say the days

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THE CONFRONTED COMMUNITY

of journals that generated a community, not that this word was used. Our group, a uctuating one, moreover, did not form a community. A history of journals in France after 1950 would certainly shed light on the gradual disappearance of groups, collectives and communities of ideas, and thus on the evolution of the representation of a community in general. The journal set up by Bataille, Critique, had a completely different premise, quite removed in its conception from a theoretical identity. Critique nevertheless had, in the 1960s and 1970s, a network effect: it was a meeting place for those who distanced themselves from all communities. In 1981, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and I had put forward the concept of with-drawing from politics [retrait du politique] as an initial emblem for work to be conducted at a Centre for philosophical research into politics, housed at the Ecole Nationale Superieur in la rue dUlm thanks to the hospitality of Derrida, and of Althusser too, although he was never able to participate in it. This expression [retrait/withdrawing] was intended to indicate an imperative urging a retracing and not a backing away from (as some believed to be the case) the political, bereft from that time onwards of its distinct and identied contours. This work was, all in all, parallel to that on community, which was to come later: but, in a sense, these parallels never crossed paths and were evidence precisely of the impossibility of founding a politics upon a well understood community, just as it is impossible to dene a community from the starting point of a politics thought to be true or just. I would say, today, that this gap between the motifs of the political and of the communitarian was also, in itself, a symptom of a difculty that has become ever more precisely dened. There was also, for all that, a persistent gap between Lacoue-Labarthe (more political) and myself, within the framework of our common endeavours (for him, community always and rstly leads back to the fascist environment, as will be discussed further). Once more, nothing coincidental and nothing personal here: one could, moreover, link these details to numerous other works of scholarship and numerous other names in the history of those years. Disappearance of politics as the destiny of peoples through the disappearance of peoples themselves, at least in their political assumption in the shape of the Nation-state. Correspondingly, disappearance of the politics of State in favour of the newly coined civil society (via the history of Solidarnosc in Poland), or else diminishment of the political via the alert exercise of the rights of man. On this precise point a cross-over occurred with Lacou-Labarthess reexion upon Nazism, and singularly with that of Heidegger, as national-aestheticism. And this was meant in all the senses that the word can entail, including that which goes to the institution of the death penalty in a political communityif something of this sort exists, if the community can be political, qua community and directly so. But, as against this, one must ask oneself if the death penalty, when it is in force, does not bear witness to a certitude, well-founded or illusory, about being in a society that can think of itself as a community and not only as a society. Objections or reservations were quick to emerge, even friendly ones such as that coming from Derrida, who opposed himself on this point to both Blanchot and myself; or like Badious, which demanded that equality be substituted for community. The rst part (that discusses The Inoperative Community) is entitled, The Negative Community, the second, The Community of Lovers. La Maladie de la mort [The Malady of Death], by Marguerite Duras.

6 7

9 10

Translators notes
a

b c

The essay that is translated here, for the rst time in English, appeared in book form, in November 2001, through Editions Galilee, in a slim volume within the collection, La philosophie en effet, and was entitled La Communaute affrontee. We thank Jean-Luc Nancy for making his text available to Postcolonial Studies, and thank Galilee for permission to translate and republish. The essay reproduced here, although consisting in two distinct texts, sits under the single title provided, as is the case in the original French volume. In the original, the dedication to Blanchot, placed here under the title, occupies an entire page between the title page and the rst text. The essays two parts are distinguished by the fact that the rst is in italics. This device is reproduced here. Maurice Blanchot, La Communaute inavouable, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983; The Unavowable Com munity, trans. Pierre Joris, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, c1988. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaute desoeuvree, [Paris]: Christian Bourgeois, 1986, 1990; The Inoperative Community, in The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor (ed), trans. Peter Connor, et al. Minneapolis and Oxford: Univ of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp 142 (notes, pp 156159). The word communial is offered to render the term communiel that has currency in a strand of French ethnology, from the 1930s, and occurs in Bataille. It inects the communal in terms of religious or magic participation. While the published translation of the work alluded to in Nancys note 4 is Retreating the Political (Simon Sparkes (ed), London; NY: Routledge, 1977), the present translation of Nancys note favours a strategic

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JEAN-LUC NANCY
anglicisation of the latinate French word, retrait, to give with-drawing, in order to make clear how Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe could mean retracing but be misunderstood as advocating retreat. See Amanda Macdonalds Working up, Working out, Working through: Translators Notes on the Dimensions of Jean-Luc Nancys Thought, in this issue, on the translation of the adjective desoeuvree and the corresponding nominal form, desoeuvrement by unoccupied and unoccupancy, respectively. First published in Alea, 4 [Spring], 1983, in the special issue entitled, la communaute, le nombre, to which Nancy has been referring.

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