The Disavowed Community (Commonalities)

The Disavowed Community (Commonalities)

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes <em>The Unavowable Community</em> (1983)-a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on "the inoperative community"-<strong>Nancy responds in turn with </strong><strong><em>The Disavowed Community</em></strong><strong></strong>. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly's initial proposal to think community in terms of "number" or the "numerous," and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot's text, <strong>Nancy's new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot's thinking</strong>, from Bataille's "community of lovers" to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist.<strong> A key rethinking of politics and the political</strong>, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.<br>