The Confronted Community

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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: itis the internal war of an enclosed city, of a civility, of an urbanity, which arein 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 conceptbreaks, a distended figure shatters, a yawning gap appears.

This war is not a war of religions either, or else all so-called wars of religionare wars internal to monotheism, a religious schema of the West and a schemawithin that West of a division which, here again, takes itself to the edges and tothe extremities: on to the Orient of the Occident and right to the crack and thegaping hole in the very middle of the divine. For that matter, the West will havebeen nothing but the exhaustion of the divine, with respect to all forms ofmonotheism, and whether it be a case of exhaustion by atheism or by fanaticism.

What is coming upon us is an exhaustion of the thought defined by the One

and by a unique destination for the world: this thought is exhausting itselfthrough a unique absence of destination, through an infinite expansion ofgeneral equivalence or, then again, and as a repercussion of this, in the violentconvulsions that reaffirm the all-powerfulness and the all-presence of a Onebecomeor re-becomeits own monstrousness.1 How, ultimately, to be seri-ously, absolutely, unconditionally atheist whilst able to make sense and truth ofthis 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 aboutit (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 goto the ends of monotheism and of its constitutive atheism (or what one might callits 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 andall-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, inthis gap, their condition of possibility and their fundamental schema. Thiscannot 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 powerin 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 isobstinacy in making demands for justice; resistance and revolt are too. But it isnevertheless also necessary relentlessly to think a world that abandons, in a

simultaneously slow and brutal way, all its established conditions for truth, formeaning and for value.

The enormous economic disequilibrium, that is to say the disequilibrium oflife, of hunger, of dignity, of thought, is the corollary of the development of aworld that is no longer reproducing itself (that no longer renews either its ownexistence, or its own meaning) but that produces an illimitation of its ownworldness, 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 isnothing other than an unequalness of the world to itself, an impossibility ofendowing itself with meaning, value and truth, a precipitation into generalequivalence that is progressively becoming civilisation as a work of death. Notonly 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, eithernew or old.

From this quarter and that comes the wish to dress the wound with theusual tatters of worn-out finery: god or money, petrol or muscle, informationor incantation, which always ends up signifying one form or another ofall-powerfulness and all-presence.

All-powerfulness and All-presence, this is what one always asks of thecommunity or what one seeks in it: sovereignty and intimacy, presence to selfwithout flaw 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 itspropriety.

It is not enoughit is far from enoughto denounce here an imperialism andthere a fundamentalism (designations that can, moreover, be placed in achiasmatic relation). These denunciations are right and fair, just as it is rightand fair to denounceas a first stepthe effects of an exploitation and ahumiliation of entire peoples, who are thus made available for other exploita-tions and instrumentalisations. But, in the end, since 1939, wars no longer take

place as confrontations inside a world that makes a place for them (althoughthis place may be disastrous): war has become the war of a world that is tearingitself up because it yearns to be or to invent what it must be: a world, that isto 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 notidealistic: 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 thename of globalisation, it is indeed the community which is separated from andconfronted with itself. In times past, communities were able to think of them-selves as distinct and autonomous without seeking their assumption in a generichumanity. But once the world completes the task of becoming global and onceman 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 astrange uniqueness (as if there should only be the one, and as if it should possess

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a unique essence of the common), then the community takes in the fact that itis the community itself that gapesyawningly open to its unity and to its absentessencesand that it confronts within itself this break. It is community against

community, foreign community against foreign community and familiar com-munity against familiar community, each rending itself in rending the others thatare themselves lacking the possibility of communication, of communion too.

Monotheism in itself confronted with itselflike theism and like atheismis, forthis reason, the schema of our present condition.

That this confrontation with self may be a law of being-in-common and itsvery meaning, this is what is on the task sheet for the work of thoughtimmediately accompanied by this other project of thought: that the confron-tation, in grasping the fact of itself, grasps the fact that mutual destructiondestroys all the way along to the very possibility of confrontation, and with thatdestruction the possibility of being-in-common or being-with.

For, if the common is the with, the with designates the space lackingall-powerfulness and all-presence. In the with there can be none but the forcesthat confront one another because of their mutual play, and the presences that

part from one another because they must always become something else apartfrom pure presences (given objects, subjects comforted in their certainties, aworld of inertia and entropy).

How to enable ourselves to look squarely at our gaping lack, our confron-tation, not in order to sink into it, but in order to draw from it, despiteeverything, the strength to confront ourselves: first, 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 forcomparison, if the others gaze never opens upon anything but the unfathomable:upon absolute strangeness, upon a truth which cannot be verified but which mustnevertheless 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 isnecessary, against an altruistic morality too blandly recited, to hold onto therigour of the relationship to the stranger, wherein strangeness is a strictcondition of existence and of presence. And it is necessary to hold onto thatwhich, out in front of us, exposes us to the sombre, radiating dispersal of ourown future and of our own fissure. It is neither a question of making theOccident guilty nor of reasserting a mythic Orient: it is a question of conceivinga world that is in itself and of itself broken, by a break that comes forth fromthe 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 itsobscure meaning; not an obscured meaning but one where the obscure iselemental. It is difficult, it is necessary. It is our need in the two senses of theword: it is our poverty and our obligation.

***

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[The following text is being published in Italy, where it was first commissioned,in the circumstances to which the text itself points (it will appear as the prefaceto a new edition of Maurice Blanchots The Unavowable Community, i n a

revised translation for SE Editions, Milan: my thanks to Alessandro Fanfoni forhis invitation)].

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SE Editions, of Milan, have asked me to write the introduction to a revisedtranslation of Maurice Blanchots La Communaute inavouable [The UnavowableCommunity].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 authorexpressly set it up to resonate with an article I had published, entitled LaCommunaute desoeuvree [The Inoperative Community].c This request struck meas having the very precise interest value of inviting me to revisit an episodeentailing stakes which I had failed to accurately assess at the time.

The history of 1980s philosophical texts about community deserves to bewritten 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 thattimea current that is still carrying us along, although in a context that haschanged a good deal and where the motif of community, instead of coming intothe light seems to be sinking from view in a kind of obscurity (especially at thetime of writing these lines: mid-October 2001). In The Inoperative Community,I had evoked the beginning of this history, but too briefly. I return to thatbeginning here, thanks to this preface, with the benefit of hindsight which allowsme to understand things better.

At the same time, the weighty context that I have just evokedcommunitarianfury and wars of every kind and of every world (the old, the new, the third andthe 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 becauseit first 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 proposedtheme was, formulated thus: Community, number.

The perfectly executed ellipse contained in this statementwhere prudencerivals elegance, in the manner that was Baillys great artgripped me as soonas 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 musthave been almost entirely confined to the institutional usage of the Europeancommunity. Today, almost twenty-five years later, we know to what extentdiscussion of the concept employed in this usage is still pending: nor is this issueremoved from the question of community as it haunts us, as it abandons us oras it embarrasses us. Whether we knew it then or not, the word and its conceptcould 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 reactionon the left, and the translation of my book, in 1988, was treated as a Nazi textin 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 thetitle, Return of communism. This pair of anecdotes seems to me to sum up theamphibology, the equivocation and perhaps the aporia, but also the obstinateinsistencenot necessarily an obsessive onethat the word community dragsaround with it.) I might add that what still remained, in 1983, of socialist-leaning

confidence, to whatever degree and in whatever form this might take, held ontoits affection for the word communism (that is, of course, provided the original

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demands of the word were retrieved from real communism, which no longerheld 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 communitythat is not given, that it sets itself as a target. In Baillys formulation, Iimmediately understood: What is the matter with community?as if it was aquestion that had been quietly substituted for another: Which communistproject, 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 bya 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 invitationhad 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-communistleft, in party terms.) The highlighting of the word, alone, set it up as ananalytical programme and doubtless as a problematic.

Number was also unexpected, in another way. It served as a suddenreminder of the obviousness not only of the substantial multiplication of theworlds population, but, along with that plain factas its effect or as itsqualitative corollary, of the obviousness of a multiplicity escaping unitaryassumptions, of a multiplicity multiplying its differences, dispersing itself insmall groups, indeed in individuals, in multitudes or in populations. From thispoint of view, number meant the reformulation and the displacement of whathad 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 otherangles, in accounts from after the war. Now, we knew that the various fascismshad been operations carried out on the masses, whilst the various communismshad been carried out on classes, one and all assigned to the house-arrest ofhistorical mission.

Baillys formulation could thus be read as a dazzling abbreviation of theproblem that we had inherited as the problem of totalitarianism(s)no longerposed 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, iscommunity if number becomes the unique phenomenon by which it is knowneven the thing in itselfand if there remains no communism or socialism ofany kind, either national or international, underpinning the least figure ofcommunity nor even the least form, the slightest identifiable schema of com-munity? And what, then, is number if its multiplicity no longer counts as a massawaiting its mise en forme (formation, conformation, information), but rathercounts, all in all, for its own sake, within a dispersal we wouldnt know whetherto name dissemination (seminal exuberance) or crumbling (sterile pulverisation)?

It so happened that at the time when Bailly was proposing this theme, I wascoming to the end of a years coursework devoted to Bataille, from the point ofview of politics. I had, very specifically, been looking in Bataille for newelements untouched by fascism or communism, and equally free of democratic

or republican individualism (not yet citizen, then, as in the notion that has sincesought to address the same problem, but has scarcely diminished it). In fact, I

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was looking in Batailles work because I already knew that the word and themotif of community circulated within itand the motive for this research wasthe same as for Baillys formulation (Bailly, of course, knew Bataille, without

however referring to him). This line of research was undoubtedly significant foreach party, but there was a lack of clear awareness of the stakes involved, a lackof a posing of the problem that was, in the first place, not directly or notexplicitly political: ahead or retreating from the political4, e there was this toconsider, that the common exists, the together exists, and the numerousexists, and that we no longer knew at all, perhaps, how to think about this orderof the real.

The course work had left me dissatisfied. Bataille had not provided me withthe possibility of entering into a new politics. On the contrary, he had, in moreways than one, banished political possibility as such. In his post-war texts, andright until the end, he had distanced himself from the political climate of hispre-war thinking. In an analagous way, he had distanced himself from anycompetition with a sociological science, as from any attempt to found a groupor a college. There was no longer any question that a sacred sociology shouldtake up from the fascisms the driven and activist energy in which he had seentheir main motivating force. Heterological agitation had failed and the warconcluded through the victory of democracies, instead of throwing extatic forcesinto the light, left political projects in the shadows.

In the same way, then, that he made sovereignty a concept that was notpolitical 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. Thelatter 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 transgressivebreachwas deposited outside of itself within itself, in an intimacy for whichthe political remained beyond reach.

I had the impression that I recognised, here, an aspect of the observation thatthe entire epoch was dimly beginning to make: there was an uncoupling of thepolitical and being-in-common.5 But on either side of the equation, communityof intense intimacy or society of a homogenous and extensive bond, Bataillesreference point looked like this to me: the desired position (whether oneachieved it in love or whether one renounced it in society) of a community asan assumption in interiority, as a presence to self of a realized unity. It thereforeseemed to me that this presupposition of community required analysisbe itclearly designated as the impossible, and thereby converted into a communityof those who are without community (formulation that I am quoting frommemory and without knowing whether it is from Bataille or from Blanchot. Idecided to write these lines without returning to the texts, leaving space here formemory, since memory alone can retrieve the movement once followed andimprinted on me: rereading would make me rewrite history).

Thus I came under the aegis of the thinking that had persisted across the spanof the philosophical tradition, right up to Batailles surpassing or exceeding of

it (and, before that, doubtless, right up to Marxs): a representation of com-munity to which the reflexion upon totalitarianisma reflexion that marked

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this entire period, that demanded of everyone a deep catching of the breathmade me attribute this essential characteristic: community effecting itself as itsown work.6 The thinking that Batailles difficult, anxious and in part unhappy

reflexion, by contrast, invitedthinking with it but going beyond itwas whatit seemed to me I could call the unoccupied community [la communautedesoeuvree ].f

Unoccupancy was taken from Blanchot, thus very nearly from Bataille, fromthe community or communication called friendship and endless conversationbetween the two. From this very singular and silent, in some ways secretcommunication a word came to me with which to try to set the dice in motiononce more for a restart of play.

The years to come were to show how much the motif of community, once putback into play a first time, could seize hold of peoples interest, and hownecessary it was to attempt to redescribe this sphere of man or of being that wasno longer borne by any communist or communitarian project. Describing itotherwise meant, when it came down to it, no longer qualifying it by referenceto itself, getting out of the tautology where community is self-constituting andself-valorising (and always, no doubt, bearing a more or less Christian value:original community of the apostles, religious community, church, communionBatailles filiations were, for that matter, very clear in this respect). There was,after Blanchots book and my own, a series of works thematising and definingcommunity; this series continues to grow, but in a context where a communitar-ianism 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

[TheInoperative Community], and while I was already working to extend it into abook. I was utterly gripped by this reply, first of all because the attention thusdisplayed by Blanchot indicated the importance of the motif, not only for himbut, through him, for all those who were experiencing an imperative, evenviolent need to start work all over again on the thing that communism had justas powerfully hidden as thrown up: the case of the commonbut also theenigma or the difficulty 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 simul-taneously an echo, an amplification and a riposte, a reservation, and, for thatmatter, in some ways a reproach.

I have never completely clarified this reserve or this reproach, either in a textor for myself, and not in correspondence with Blanchot either. I am speaking ofit here for the first time in this preface.

I had not performed this clarification because I never felt (nor do I, today, toany greater degree) either capable of or authorised to shine a light on the secretthat Blanchot clearly designates with his titleand even through his text, sincetoward the end he speaks of the unavowable quality of a death offered out oflove, of a love offered in death (and that very thing is most precisely notavowable even when it is said).

The unavowable secret doubtless obtains from the following (but is notcontained in it): at the point where I claimed to reveal the work of community

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as societys death sentence7 and, as a corollary, to establish the need for acommunity refusing to constitute work, thus preserving the essence of an endlesscommunication (communicating to itself an absent sense, to speak once more

with Blanchot, along with the passion of this ab-sense, or rather the passion inwhich this ab-sense is constituted)at that very point, then, Blanchot informsme of or rather indicates to me the unavowable. Apposed but opposed to theunoccupied of my title, this adjective proposes to think that beneath theunoccupancy 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 futurereaders) that the community of those who are without community (all of us, fromnow on), the unoccupied community, does not let itself be revealed as theunveiled secret of being-in-common. And, consequently, it does not let itself becommunicated, even though it is the common itself and doubtless because it is.

The unavowed community instead deepens the secret, and it emphasises theimpossibility of acceding to it, or rather the interdiction forbidding access toitor else the inhibition, the reserve or the shame about doing so (all theseinflexions appear, I think, in Blanchots text).

What is unavowable is not unsayable. On the contrary, the unavowable doesnot cease to be spoken, to speak itself in the intimate silence of those who couldbut cannot avow. I imagine that Blanchot wanted to intimate to me this silenceand what it says: prescribe it for me and introduce it into my intimacy, asintimacy itselfthe intimacy of a communication or a community, the intimacyof 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 commonthat is not a common secret.

I have not gone further, up to now, with a reworking of the analysis, as Imight have done in particular by replying in turn to Blanchots text. I did not doso in my occasional correspondence with him, because letters should scarcely getmixed up with texts: the latter must communicate among themselves, accordingto their own order. (What, for that matter, is a correspondence? What type ofco-or com- is engaged there?) And I did not do so in a text, either, because ithappened that, in the order of work in the strict sense, I did not pursue the wordcommunity either as a seam or as a theme.

In effect, I have preferred to substitute, little by little, the graceless expres-sions, being-together, being-in-common, and finally being-with. There werereasons for these moves and for resigning myself, at least provisionally, to thesedisgraces of language. On several sides I saw approaching the dangers inspiredby the usage of the word community: its invincibly full resonanceindeed aresonance bloated with substance and interiority, its quite inevitable Christianreference (spiritual and brotherly community, communial community) or morebroadly religious one (Jewish community, community of prayer, community ofbelieversumma), its usage to support the claims of supposed ethnicities

could only put one on ones guard.8 It was clear that the emphasis placed upona necessary but as yet under-elaborated concept went at least hand in hand,

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during this period, with a reviving of communitarian and sometimes fascisturges. (In 2001, one can see where we are in all this, and by what routes we havealready travelled so far as urges of this kind are concerned.)

I therefore preferred, in the end, to focus the work around the with: almostindistinguishable from the co- of community, it brings with it however aclearer indicator of the removal at the heart of proximity and intimacy. Thewith is dry and neutral: neither communion nor atomisation, just the sharingand sharing out of a space, at most a contact: a being-together withoutassemblage. (In this sense, we need to take much further the analysis ofHeideggers Mitdasein, left pending in his work.)

That work around the with will perhaps lead me anew toward Blanchotsbook. This new Italian edition is a first opportunity. As if Blanchot, across theyears that have passed and other signs exchanged between us, once moreadmonished me: Be on your guard against the unavowable! I believe Iunderstand it thus: beware any assumption of community, be it by the name ofunoccupied. Or else, you must follow even further in the direction that thisword points. Unoccupancy comes after work but also comes from it. It is notenough to hold society back from making a work of itself in the sense desiredby the Nation-Sates or Nation-Parties, the universal or autocephalous Churches,the Assemblies and the Councils, Peoples, companies or brotherhoods. It is alsonecessary to consider that there has been, already, always already, a work ofcommunity, an operation of sharing out that will always have gone before anysingular or generic existence, a communication and a contagion without whichit 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 aco-existence or of a co-belongingthough this belonging be no more than abelonging to the fact of being-in-common. There has already been, amongstusus all together and by distinct gatheringsthe sharing out of a common thatis no more than its sharing out, but which, through its sharing out, createsexistence and goes right to existence itself in as much as this existence isexposure at its own limit. This is what has made us us, separating and bringingus close again, creating proximity through the remove amongst usus in thestate of extreme indecision in which this collective or plural subject braces itself,condemned (but this is its greatness) never to find its own voice.

What has been shared out? Doubtless somethingthe unavowable, thenthat Blanchot points to in the second part of his book9 and by the very fact ofpairing, in this book, a reflexion upon a theoretical text and another upon a storyof love and death.10 In both cases, Blanchot writes in relation and writes hisrelation 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 remainat the point of a negative or hollow consideration of unoccupancy, while theother would provide access not to a worked up community, but one broughtabout in secret (the unavowable) through the sharing out of an experience oflimits: 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 pathssomewhere, between the two parts of the book as between the social-political

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order and the intimate-passionate order. At some point, it would be advisable toconceive the enigma of intensity, of eruption and of loss, or abandonment, whichallows simultaneously plural existence (birth, separation, opposition) and singu-

larity (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 figuresthat of sovereignty and that of intimacya passionthat cannot be displayed except as the unavowable in general: its avowal wouldbe 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 kindof being-together, that is on being, full stop. We would have given up on thatwhich, according to the order of a sovereignty and an intimacy drawn back intoa discretion without end, brings us into the world. Because what brings us intothe world is also what carries us from the outset toward the extremes ofseparation, of finitude, and of infinite encounter where each of us falters uponcontact with others (that is to say, with oneself, also) and with the world as aworld of others. What brings us into the world just as soon shares out the world,stripping it of any unity, first or last.

Unavowable is thus a word that makes mingle here, indiscernibly, indis-cretion and its discretion. Indiscrete, it announces a secret; discrete, it declaresthat the secret will remain secret.

What is silenced in this way is known by the one who is silent. But thisknowledge is thus not to be communicated, itself being at once knowledge andcommunication, the law of which must be not to communicate itself because it

is not of the realm of the communicable, without however being ineffable: butthis law opens up all speech.

At this point, I will conclude by returning to the event that is spreading acrossthe world at the present time (let me say it again, October 2001) and especiallyacross the Western world and along its edges, upon its internal and externalconfines (if there are any longer any external confines), taking on all the traitsof an unleashing of passion. It is self-evident that figures of passionwhetherthat of an All-Powerful God or that of a Liberty that is no less theurgiccoverup and reveal by their confronted gestures everything that one knows about theextortion, the exploitation, the manipulation that the present movement of theworld is displaying, allowing to unfold. But it is not enough to unmask, eventhough that is necessary at the outset. What must also be considered is that thesefigures 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 wrathfulgod, as much as the affirmation, In God we trust, instrumentalises in asymmetrical fashion a need, a desire, an anxiety of the being-together. This calland this affirmation each renews being-together as a workat the one time aheroic gesture, an impressive spectacle, an insatiable trade. In doing so, thesetwo 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 avowablename 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 orbeing-with?

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We have not yet sufficiently thought through the unoccupancy of community,thought through what the possibility of sharing out a secret without divulgingmight 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 profit, a task presentsitself, one of daring to think the unthinkable, the unattributable, the intransigentqualities of being-with, while not subjecting it to any kind of hypostasis. It is nota 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 ofcivilisations, we are in an internal tearing apart of the only civilisation thatcivilises and barbarises the world in the one action, since this civilisation hasalready come up against the extremity of its own logic: this tearing apart pressesthe world back entirely into its own keeping, presses the human community backentirely into its own keeping and into the keeping of its own secret, without godand 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 withconfronting the with. A confrontation doubtless belongs essentially to com-munity: 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 testoneself, so as to divide oneself in ones being by a remove that is also thecondition of that being.

15 October 2001

LA COMMUNAUTE AFFRONTEE

Jean-Luc NANCY, Editions Galilee, Janvier 2001

Notes1 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 thosewhere the dialectic or the deconstruction of monotheism has not been carried out, whether becauseChristianity (in this case, Latin American) has otherwise structured thought (in a more pagan way, as theysay, or a less metaphysical one), or else because monotheism has not penetrated the thoughts that areheterogenous to it (India and China do not think, to put it crudely, in terms of the One, nor in terms ofPresence). On the one hand, the West and its auto-exhaustion are spread everywhere about, and on the otherhand this disparity, always to a depth of at least three worlds in the world, certainly conceals the chancesand the risks of the future. [Editors note: for an inflected account bearing on the point regarding Indiasnon-monotheism, see Ashis Nandys article, A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods andGoddesses in South Asia, Postcolonial Studies, 4(2), 2001, pp 125142.]

2 Counter-example: when Rome conducted policing wars at the outskirts of the Empire (as the United Statesdoes, ceaselessly), Rome was not simultaneously one half of the world confronting another: the Empire wasan order unto itself; singular peoples constituted another order.

3 He was to close it down just a few years later, and would then seek to establish another journal, a moresignificant 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 multipleproject because we refused to define ourselves according to a line or a manifesto. The days of journals builtupon 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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of journals that generated a community, not that this word was used. Our group, a fluctuating one,moreover, did not form a community. A history of journals in France after 1950 would certainly shed lighton the gradual disappearance of groups, collectives and communities of ideas, and thus on the evolutionof the representation of a community in general. The journal set up by Bataille, Critique, had a completelydifferent premise, quite removed in its conception from a theoretical identity. Critique nevertheless had, inthe 1960s and 1970s, a network effect: it was a meeting place for those who distanced themselves fromall communities.

4 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 researchinto 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/with-drawing] was intended to indicate an imperative urging a retracing and not a backing away from (as somebelieved to be the case) the political, bereft from that time onwards of its distinct and identified contours.This work was, all in all, parallel to that on community, which was to come later: but, in a sense, theseparallels never crossed paths and were evidence precisely of the impossibility of founding a politics upona well understood community, just as it is impossible to define a community from the starting point of apolitics thought to be true or just. I would say, today, that this gap between the motifs of the political andof the communitarian was also, in itself, a symptom of a difficulty that has become ever more precisely

defined. 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 firstly leads back tothe fascist environment, as will be discussed further). Once more, nothing coincidental and nothing personalhere: one could, moreover, link these details to numerous other works of scholarship and numerous othernames in the history of those years.

5 Disappearance of politics as the destiny of peoples through the disappearance of peoples themselves, atleast in their political assumption in the shape of the Nation-state. Correspondingly, disappearance of thepolitics of State in favour of the newly coined civil society (via the history of Solidarnosc in Poland), orelse diminishment of the political via the alert exercise of the rights of man.

6 On this precise point a cross-over occurred with Lacou-Labarthess reflexion upon Nazism, and singularlywith that of Heidegger, as national-aestheticism.

7 And this was meant in all the senses that the word can entail, including that which goes to the institutionof the death penalty in a political communityif something of this sort exists, if the community can bepolitical, 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 societythat can think of itself as a community and not only as a society.8 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 equalitybe substituted for community.

9 The first part (that discusses The Inoperative Community) is entitled, The Negative Community, thesecond, The Community of Lovers.

10 La Maladie de la mort [The Malady of Death], by Marguerite Duras.

Translators notesa The essay that is translated here, for the first 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 entitledLa 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 consistingin two distinct texts, sits under the single title provided, as is the case in the original French volume. In theoriginal, the dedication to Blanchot, placed here under the title, occupies an entire page between the titlepage and the first text. The essays two parts are distinguished by the fact that the first is in italics. Thisdevice is reproduced here.

b Maurice Blanchot, La Communaute inavouable, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983; The Unavowable Com-munity, trans. Pierre Joris, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, c1988.

c Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaute desoeuvree, [Paris]: Christian Bourgeois, 1986, 1990; The InoperativeCommunity, in The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor (ed), trans. Peter Connor, et al. Minneapolis andOxford: Univ of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp 142 (notes, pp 156159).

d The word communial is offered to render the term communiel that has currency in a strand of Frenchethnology, from the 1930s, and occurs in Bataille. It inflects the communal in terms of religious or magic

participation.e While the published translation of the work alluded to in Nancys note 4 is Retreating the Political (SimonSparkes (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 Nancyand Lacoue-Labarthe could mean retracing but be misunderstood as advocating retreat.

f See Amanda Macdonalds Working up, Working out, Working through: Translators Notes on theDimensions of Jean-Luc Nancys Thought, in this issue, on the translation of the adjective desoeuvree andthe corresponding nominal form, desoeuvrement by unoccupied and unoccupancy, respectively.

g First published in Alea, 4 [Spring], 1983, in the special issue entitled, la communaute, le nombre, to whichNancy has been referring.

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Documents

The Confronted Community