Hill - Nancy, Blanchot: A serious controversy

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ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-887-1

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I should like here to record my thanks to all those who first prompted, then encouraged me to write this book, and in diverse ways assisted me in completing it: Philip Armstrong, Andrew Benjamin, Christophe Bident, Jonathan Degenve, Mauro Di Lullo, Chris Elwell, Christopher Fynsk, Tania Ganitsky, Kevin Hart, Andrew Hass, Sabine Kaufman, Holly Langstaff, Ian Maclachlan, Jrmie Majorel, Parham Shahrjerdi, and Daniel Wilhem, not forgetting the staff at Warwick University Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Bibliothque nationale de France, and, in particular, Jean-Luc Nancy who on several occasions graciously gave of his time to exchange views on Blanchots work and his own thinking. I am grateful too for the support and forbearance of Juliet Hill, Susie Hill, and Mig Kerr. It goes without saying that responsibility for the arguments presented in the book is mine and mine alone. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

Extracts from The Unavowable Community reprinted by permission from The Unavowable Community by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press, 1988. English translation copyright 1988 by Station Hill Press. Originally published in French as La Communaut inavouable, copyright 1983 by Editions de Minuit.

Extracts from The Inoperative Community reprinted by permission from The Inoperative Community by Jean-Luc Nancy, edited and translated by Peter Connor, The University of Minnesota Press, 1991. English translation copyright 1991 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally published in French as La Communaut dsuvre, copyright 1986 by Christian Bourgois Editeur.

Extracts from The Infinite Conversation reprinted by permission from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Susan Hanson, The University of Minnesota Press, 1993. English translation copyright 1993 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Originally published in French as LEntretien infini, copyright 1969 by Editions Gallimard.

Extracts from The Disavowed Community reprinted by permission from The Disavowed Community by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Philip Armstrong, Fordham University Press, 2016. English translation copyright 2016 by Fordham University Press. Originally published in French as La Communaut dsavoue, copyright 2014 by Editions Galile.

During the last thirty-five or so years, within a certain everyday social, political, or at times philosophical and literary discourse, few expressions, it would seem, have been so frequently used or abused, now as proof of an urgent historical challenge, now as an expression of pious, sentimental nostalgia, as the word community. Its currency is in any case arguably only one of many symptoms of that enduring crisis of the political with which all aspects of life in the Western world (and elsewhere) are increasingly synonymous and which events in recent decades, in Europe, the United States, and other countries, have made more acute than ever. The meaning or meanings of community are admittedly not simple. Over time they have travelled back and forth between the religious and the secular, the military and the civil, the economic and the ethical; they have migrated from notions of national, regional, or linguistic affiliation to assumptions regarding ethnic, confessional, or sexual identification, not to mention the dismal servitude associated with consumer branding. They have at times been used to promote reactionary nationalisms, while at others they have been enlisted to support radically different aspirations; and they have been routinely applied to feelings and opinions, property and interests, rights and liabilities, with the consequence that each of these complex, differentiated, intensely contested registers finds itself facing the threat of being submerged or overtaken by any one or more of its fellows. Today, as a result, it is sometimes hard to resist the conclusion that the concept of community, in its inflation or its poverty, raises many more questions than it provides answers, and increasingly functions as a kind of all-purpose vehicle for the thwarted yearnings and seductive compensations of its own history, merely a sign, so to speak, of an unfulfilled, even fantasmatic exigency, all of which renders its value, and the values it promotes, arguably more contradictory and more compromised than ever.

But are there truly concepts, asked Maurice Blanchot, novelist, literary critic, and sometime political activist, in La Communaut inavouable (The Unavowable Community), disaster or disaster, meaning the exigency of dispersion together with the dispersion of exigency, that is, anything but the mute acceptance of catastrophe, more a recognition of the radical impossibility, both vacancy and resistance, encountered at the core of possibility itself, and inseparable from a redoubled injunction to think again, to think anew, and to think otherwise.