Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy 1786608898, 9781786608895

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Nancy, Blanchot

Philosophical Projections Series Editor: Andrew Benjamin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, Kingston University, UK, and Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought, Monash University, Australia Philosophical Projections represents the future of Modern European Philosophy. The series seeks to innovate by grounding the future in the work of the present, opening up the philosophical and allowing it to renew itself, while interrogating the continuity of the philosophical after the critique of metaphysics. Titles in the Series Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition, Eran Dorfman The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence, Richard A. Lee Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy, Leslie Hill

Nancy, Blanchot A Serious Controversy Leslie Hill

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 by Leslie Hill All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-887-1 ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-888-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available ISBN 978-1-78660-887-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78660-888-8 (pbk: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78660-889-5 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements Permissions

vii ix

1

Community and Its Discontents

2 3 4 5 6

Shared Legacies Community, Sacrifice, Writing Dissenting Opinions From Myth to Religion to Politics Serious Controversy

Chronology Short Bibliography Index

1 15 65 103 179 239 247 253 261

v

Acknowledgements

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 Degenève, Mauro Di Lullo, Chris Elwell, Christopher Fynsk, Tania Ganitsky, Kevin Hart, Andrew Hass, Sabine Kaufman, Holly Langstaff, Ian Maclachlan, Jérémie Majorel, Parham Shahrjerdi, and Daniel Wilhem, not forgetting the staff at Warwick University Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and, in particular, Jean-Luc Nancy who on several occasions graciously gave of his time to exchange views on Blanchot’s 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.

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Permissions

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 Communauté 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 Communauté désœuvrée, 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 L’Entretien 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 Communauté désavouée, copyright 2014 by Editions Galilée.

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ONE Community and Its Discontents

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

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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 Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community), 1 that slim, testamentary volume written partly in response to the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s famous essay “La Communauté désœuvrée [The Inoperative Community],” published only a few months earlier in the journal Aléa 2 — are there truly concepts, words such as “community” or its disenchanted cognate, “communism” — or even the much‑vaunted, frequently misleading term “democracy” — of which it may be said that they have been so thoroughly betrayed or dishonoured by what they have come to signify that they should simply be discarded? But if we do choose to abandon them, Blanchot went on, as being no longer “appropriate” (or “‘convenables’”), no longer capable of living up to what they once promised, their contradictory legacy still remains, impossible to endorse perhaps, but likewise impossible to reject, and surviving only as a sign of interminable disquiet and as a kind of spectral memory or promise, inspiring both obstinate desire and unrelenting suspicion, bearing disillusioned hopes of something other, yet to be determined, whose only realisation, if at all, belongs to an unforeseeable future. The failures or failings of the past, then, insisted Blanchot, are not all. Beneath history’s ruins, he contended, lay something else, prior to positivity and negativity alike, what the writer in his reply to Nancy, as already three years earlier, was prompted to call: désastre 3 — disaster or dis‑aster, 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. As Blanchot’s writing or rewriting of disaster testifies, what counts are not the inherited or inherent meanings of words, but the uses to which they are put, what Georges Bataille in a dictionary entry for Documents in 1929 once described as their besognes, their often messy, misshapen, and provocative materiality. 4 In this regard, the fortunes of the word “community” have been diverse enough. Many thinkers, alongside Nancy and Blanchot, have left their stamp on what it designates or implies, and how that may then be understood, addressed, or even named, from Hobbes to Kant, Heidegger to Bataille, Barthes to Derrida, Agamben to Esposito, not to mention numerous other recent or not so recent commentators. The challenges of living together, it seems, have become more demanding than ever, and the chances of untroubled unanimity increasingly more remote. Such was the incontrovertible, often chilling evidence of the twentieth century, and such, too, are already the lessons of this barely adult twenty-first century too. But if so, if community is inseparable from

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the necessary possibility of disagreement or dissensus, antagonism or violence, this itself is no doubt compelling proof of the importance of contemporary debates as to what it is that makes or unmakes it in the first place. For Nancy, who first launched or relaunched the word in 1983 at the suggestion of Jean-Christophe Bailly, having until then only ever encountered it, he claims, somewhat surprisingly, in the work of Georges Bataille (where the term is in fact far less frequent than is often supposed), 5 to address community was to engage with the possibility of philosophy itself. “It would appear,” Nancy wrote in characteristic vein in 1988, “that between philosophy and community there is not only communication, but necessary community. What the second of the two designates, then, is not only a theme for what the first designates, but it could also be shown that community is the theme of themes of all philosophy, and that it perhaps even exceeds or precedes all ‘thematics’ as such in philosophy.” 6 Two years earlier, replying in part to Blanchot’s 1983 volume, Nancy made a similar point about literature, not however, he emphasised, insofar as it might be identified with a new founding mythology in the manner of the Jena Romantics, but, on the contrary, as that which was critically at odds with any kind of regressive, essentialist appeal to national or nationalist myth. “Myth,” Nancy explained, “is interrupted by literature to the exact extent that literature is not a completion.” On that definition, literature, too, or at least some literature, as far as Nancy was concerned, was already another word for community. “If it is possible to argue,” he wrote, partly echoing Blanchot’s earlier formulation, but with his own signature blend of conjecture and decisiveness, or possible at least to attempt to argue, fully realising the inappropriateness of doing so [l’inconvenance: the word recalls Blanchot’s earlier use of the cognate “convenable”], that being-in-common is literary, that is to say, if we can attempt to argue that it has its very being in “literature” (in writing, in a certain voice, a singular music, but also in painting, dance, and the practice of thought . . . ), then one will have to use “literature” to refer to that being itself, in itself, i.e., this singular ontological quality, which gives it in common, which does not reserve it, either prior or posterior to community, as an essence of man, or of God or the State achieving the communion that fulfils him or it, but makes for the fact that this being is only in so far as it is shared [partagé] in common, or rather that its quality of being, its nature and structure, are sharing [le partage] (or exposition). 7

True enough, in the pages that followed, Nancy struggled to distinguish convincingly between the extent to which literature might still be appropriated by myth, or become its own myth, and how “literature,” as he put it, might nevertheless resist and refuse such assimilation. In the end what was decisive, he argued, was the way writing, by touching the limit,

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forcibly excluded all mythic communion. “It can always be objected,” he conceded, that it is because there is literature that there is the myth of communion, and moreover the myth of literary communion. In this regard, the literature that corresponded to the great modern interruption of myth immediately produced its own myth. But from now on that myth is what is interrupted in its turn. And this interruption shows that it is because there is community that there is literature: literature inscribes being-in-common, being for others [pour autrui] and by others [par autrui]. It inscribes us as exposed to one another and to our respective deaths, through which, at the limit, we mutually touch one another. 8

On the evidence of La Communauté inavouable, published three years earlier, and similarly deeply suspicious of all religious or pseudoreligious, humanistic or political communion, Blanchot seems to have largely concurred, suggesting for his part, in words Nancy had cited more or less approvingly earlier in his discussion, that “there is a sense in which community, in its very failure, is inseparable from a certain kind of writing.” 9 Admittedly, Blanchot’s original sentence did not end there but, in a continuation silently excised by Nancy (though one the latter’s summary appeared to accept), went on to gloss the restriction to “a certain kind writing.” This Blanchot did by quoting from some of the closing pages of Le Pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond), that fragmentary volume written in the aftermath of the events of May 1968, in which reference is made to a writing “which has nothing more to look for except the last words: ‘Come, come, all of you, come, one and all, to whom no injunction, prayer, or expectation might apply [Viens, viens, venez, vous ou toi auquel ne saurait convenir l’injonction, la prière, l’attente].” 10 And to reinforce the point, Blanchot in a footnote underlined the close relationship between writing understood in this way and the infinite finitude articulated by Nancy by quoting two sentences from Derrida’s recent essay, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy”), initially delivered as a paper at the famous 1980 Cerisy conference (Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida) organised by Nancy together with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in which, as Blanchot will have noted on receipt of Derrida’s slim volume in February 1983, Derrida had taken the opportunity not only to cite various fictional texts by Blanchot, but also to mention in passing Marguerite Duras’s recent L’Homme assis dans le couloir (The Man Sitting in the Corridor). In his presentation, Derrida had lingered too on what he termed “the event” of the word “Viens,” “Come,” as enacted in the Book of Revelation, suggesting, in a phrase clearly responding to Blanchot’s, that “[i]n this affirmative tone, ‘Come [Viens]’ marks in itself neither a desire, nor an order, nor a prayer, nor a demand.” “Couldn’t one therefore describe the apocalyptic,” Derrida had earlier wondered, “as a transcendental condition of all

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discourse, of all experience even, of any mark or any trace?” Transcribing these words later in the year, but speaking now for himself, Blanchot responded in his turn by asking: “Does that mean one can say that community, therefore, is where the apocalyptic voice, prior to all understanding [entente] and as its very condition, may be heard?” To which he then replied, in answer to his own question, by offering a single, grudging word: “Perhaps.” 11 If literature and writing were terms to be treated with caution, then, this was manifestly even more so in respect of the word “community.” From the outset, it was far from clear whether Nancy’s reflections on the topic were descriptive or prescriptive in intent, that is, whether the aim was to account (de facto) for relations between people or existences as they actually are in the world or to promulgate (de iure) a model of the way relations ought to be, or whether, in the impossibility of overcoming that opposition, it did not forcibly remain suspended on its own undecidability — an indecision which, in Nancy’s later thinking, would translate into the unbridgeable divide between politics and ontology. And there was the risk too that, despite the precautions taken, simply retaining the word community would leave in place that selfsame metaphysics of the subject (of Subject as origin and origin as Subject) which Nancy, like Blanchot, a similarly strong reader of Heidegger, thought it essential to deconstruct. Whence Nancy’s decision in subsequent texts to replace the term “community,” increasingly seen as weighed down by its religious or, more specifically, Christian associations, with such necessary if, as he freely admits, sometimes clumsy semi-neologisms as being-together, being-incommon, or being-with, 12 or even to abandon all nouns or substantives as such, in order to devolve the task of thinking to verbs, including the reclassifying of the verb “to be” as a transitive verb, as first suggested by the Heidegger of Was ist das — die Philosophie? (What Is That — Philosophy?), meaning much the same as German “versammeln,” i.e., to collect or gather up, 13 or else to simple adverbs, or even to such often untranslatable Latinate syncategorems such as avec, entre, en, or à (with, between, in, or to), though in time, on the evidence of a late work such as Sexistence (where Nancy ventures the argument that “there is no ‘with,’ any more than there is any ‘being’”), these too would likewise be put under erasure. 14 Such attempts at reformulation were of course more than token discursive adjustments. For what Nancy’s protracted second thoughts suggested, as Blanchot had perhaps rightly intuited in 1983 in proposing to overwrite the word désœuvrement (worklessness or unworking) with a term more explicitly aware of its conceptual limitations, i.e., the inavouable or unavowable, was that what Nancy had begun by calling “community” was something for which there was not only no proper name or designation, but also no stable or sufficient concept either. This need to renew his initial philosophical vocabulary was only one of Nancy’s concerns. Contemporary political events throughout the late

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1970s and early 1980s also played an important part in sending his thinking in new directions. Among others, the impending collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc, the contradictory resurgence of religious belief and beliefs throughout much of the world, war in the Middle East, social conflicts and civil disobedience in France and elsewhere, and the increasingly rampant phenomenon of technological globalisation, factors which would each become ever more acute with passing decades, could not do other than add to the urgency of Nancy’s agenda. This is plain to see over the years from his numerous interventions in the public sphere, by way of articles in the press, journal interviews, or appearances on radio, like, for instance, his response to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. 15 To rethink the question of community, in other words, was no disinterested intellectual exercise. It was a necessary part of Nancy’s concerted and unwavering responsiveness to what he took to be the abiding questions and challenges of the last century and of its lingering aftermath. “La Communauté désœuvrée” in 1983 had admittedly already concluded with a promise borrowed for the occasion from Bataille’s unfinished postwar manuscript “La Souveraineté [Sovereignty].” “We cannot do other,” Bataille had announced, and Nancy now strongly agreed, “than keep going further.” 16 There could be — and would be — no turning back and, in his effort to rethink community or being-in-common, keep going further Nancy tirelessly did, authoring as he did so, in the years and decades that followed, an extensive list of publications on the question of community and its various avatars. Suitably reworked and prolonged, now supplemented by two further texts, his inaugural 1983 article by 1986 became a book, then, four years later, with the addition of two more essays, an enlarged version of that original book. And in subsequent years Nancy continued to publish on or around Bataille and Blanchot, with the result that in 2001 he was invited, curiously enough, to preface a new Italian translation of La Communauté inavouable, with his essay appearing in the original French as a slim volume titled La Communauté affrontée (The Confronted Community) which he dedicated to Blanchot, now in his nineties, who for his part, in public at least, opted to maintain a studied silence. Following Blanchot’s death in 2003, Nancy returned to the fray in rather different vein, devoting to what he now insisted was the still active Christian dimension in Blanchot’s atheism (or “absentheism,” as he once called it) two probing essays which became a crucial centrepiece (literally so, since the two texts appear in the very middle of the volume) in the first of his two books on the deconstruction of Christianity, La Déclosion (Dis-Enclosure). 17 Alongside several other interventions, this renewed account of Blanchot’s alleged debt to Catholicism — a Catholicism Nancy had shared until early adulthood — was followed in 2011 by another preface to a text by Blanchot, in this case an unpublished letter from

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December 1984 the writer had addressed to his friend, the novelist, philosopher, and critic Roger Laporte, in which he detailed aspects of his political evolution from the uncompromising nationalism in the 1930s to the better known leftist radicalism of the postwar years, and which had originally been due to appear in the — abortive — special issue of the Cahiers de L’Herne that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe had agreed to edit in the mid-1980s, in which they thought it essential that the question of Blanchot’s politics should be addressed in some detail. In 2014, amidst further controversy about Blanchot’s politics, Nancy published a fresh rejoinder to La Communauté inavouable, significantly revising his earlier response to the book, providing ample proof perhaps, as the list of texts, interviews, or broadcast discussions by Nancy dealing explicitly or implicitly with Blanchot grew ever longer, of the enduring fascination — attraction and repulsion alike — exerted over his thinking by Blanchot’s 1983 volume, albeit that Nancy’s engagement, postponed and prolonged as it was, was often in the form of a deferred encounter, a sign of both unusual persistence and exceptional prevarication, testifying no doubt both to a need to clarify something of his own investment in “community” and the seeming impossibility of ever having done with it. Already from the outset the exchange between the two was far from straightforward. For some, rather than a meeting of minds, what was most clearly in evidence was the seemingly irreconcilable collision between Nancy’s post-Heideggerian ontology and Blanchot’s post-Levinasian ethics. 18 Others, conversely, argued that the distance between the two on the question of community was relatively insubstantial, reflecting little more than a change of emphasis or a minor divergence in vocabulary, and consisting principally in what Ian James calls “a difference in philosophical or rhetorical strategy, a difference in gesture,” 19 with the result that Blanchot’s “measured, sophisticated response,” 20 as Ignaas Devisch rather blandly calls it, is often viewed, in routine fashion, as a slight companion piece alongside Nancy’s, of only secondary, largely anecdotal interest. Still others have strongly disputed this view, suggesting that the apparent or partial proximity of language between Nancy’s La Communauté désœuvrée and Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable is deceptive, and indicative of only superficial agreement between the pair, as the use of loose or truncated quotations by both writers seems to confirm. 21 Crucial to the exchange between the two was the question of how best to understand the thought of Bataille which features centrally both in “La Communauté désœuvrée” and in La Communauté inavouable. This too has prompted diverse responses on the part of critics. Some take the view that Nancy’s philosophical reading of Bataille is by that token unacceptably reductive, 22 or even that it risks falling victim to the very problems it sought to overcome. 23 Yet another group, in often tetchily partisan or defensive terms, claims that Blanchot’s nuanced commentary on Ba-

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taille’s work is in fact entirely at odds with the latter’s pre- and postwar thinking, more revealing of Blanchot’s own supposedly compromised political past and allegedly pious ethical concerns from the 1960s than of the violently subversive thinking of his late friend. 24 The undoubted polemical energy displayed in the debate did little at the time, however, to prevent other potentially interested parties from remaining unconvinced as to the value or importance of the appeal to the concept of community at all, and sceptical as to the pertinence of what seemed more akin to bewildering metaphysical abstraction than to practical engagement with pressing, concrete sociopolitical circumstances. And readers will recall the reaction of Jacques Derrida, who had longstanding intellectual and personal ties to both men, but was more sensitive than most to what he viewed as the irretrievably religious, androcentric assumptions of the term “community,” which led him to query the supposed opposition between “community” and “communion” that structured the debate, not to mention both Nancy’s and Blanchot’s seemingly unquestioned recourse to the (masculine) language and values of fraternity, and, as a result, at the very least to reserve judgement as to the necessity or effectiveness of their joint appeal to “community,” irrespective whether it was deemed “workless” or “unavowable.” 25 Having first explained in 2001 in La Communauté affrontée how, nearly twenty years earlier, albeit without saying so, he had been “struck by the fact that Blanchot’s reply [i.e., the publication of La Communauté inavouable] was simultaneously an echo, a resonance and a rejoinder, a reservation, or even in some sense a reproach,” 26 Nancy in 2011 ventured significantly further. “When, as a result of that issue of Aléa,” he now asserted, the opportunity presented itself of explicitly resuming a thinking of “community” which he may well have felt bound to keep private [discrète] or even secret, [Blanchot] took it in a direction — incidentally, quite removed from my own, not to say diametrically opposed to it — which conjured up in the darker recesses of community [faisait surgir dans le fond obscur de la communauté] a kind of “communion” in several guises (erotic, Christological, and literary). It is entirely possible that, through the prism of the word “communism” revisited, he was restaging something of what in different terms and at an earlier time [i.e., as a journalist in the nationalist press during the 1930s] he had found so alluring [quelque chose de ce qui l’avait aimanté naguère sous d’autres termes]. 27

Nuanced though it is (“it’s no longer a question of ‘right’ or ‘left,’” Nancy hastened to add, “it has to do with a register deeper than politics, that of being-in-common which is irreducible to politics”), the charge was serious and far-reaching. But if in 2011 it was advanced more in passing than as the conclusion to any detailed historical or philosophical analysis, Nancy went on to repeat the argument, with greater force and at greater length, though still with little, if any, proper historical evidence, in a

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subsequent book on the subject, La Communauté désavouée (The Disavowed Community), claiming that, during the entire thirty years since La Communauté inavouable was first published, nobody at all, including himself, had yet properly read Blanchot’s volume as a whole, a task that, following the deaths of Blanchot (2003), Duras (1996), Derrida (2004), and Lacoue-Labarthe (2007), he now considered it his particular responsibility to fulfil. 28 The situation was not however without ambiguity, or the potential for significant conflict of interest, insofar as it forcibly placed Nancy at one and the same time in the role of plaintiff and spokesman, witness and self-appointed judge, contestant and final arbiter. The impact of Nancy’s volte-face was at any event considerable. It coincided with a number of other, more narrowly polemical attacks on Blanchot which inevitably it helped legitimate, while also finding justification in them in its turn. Chief among these was a special issue of the leftist review Lignes, edited by Michel Surya, on the topic of “Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot, 1930–1993 [Maurice Blanchot’s Political Positions 1930–1993],” 29 to which Nancy contributed a discussion with one of the journal’s editorial committee members, Mathilde Girard, while other, equally speculative and even less easily defendable articles aimed to establish, on the basis of vanishingly small actual historical evidence, Blanchot’s complicity with French fascism in the 1930s or alleged sympathies with Vichy France, or the supposed similarities, after the war, between Blanchot’s case and that of Heidegger. That none of this happened to be true or valid was seemingly of secondary importance to those concerned. 30 The effect was nevertheless to prompt a timely, if often ill‑informed reassessment not only of Blanchot’s political itinerary as a whole, but also of the extent to which the unacknowledged and allegedly unthought legacy of the writer’s political past was still present and active in the later literary and critical writings for which, in his native France and elsewhere, Blanchot is today far better known — and known, as Hélène Cixous once put it, next to Proust, as one of the French language’s two greatest twentieth-century writers. 31 In some respects, this questioning of Blanchot’s past political commitments was nothing new. Already in 1980, on the basis of a forced and partial reading of a small number of texts in the prewar right-wing monthly Combat (to which Blanchot contributed in all eight A4 pagelength articles between 1936 and 1937), which he set alongside some of Blanchot’s later critical essays, Jeffrey Mehlman claimed that behind Blanchot’s apparent fascination with the silence that inhabited the literary was to be found a damaging and unavowed silence of his own, pertaining to his prewar political involvement with the nationalist, so-called protofascist right. 32 That more than a quarter of a century later Nancy should advance a broadly similar thesis on the basis of a quite different corpus of material demonstrates, if nothing else, that the philosophical and political issues raised by Blanchot’s work have lost nothing of their

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actuality, which it is therefore incumbent on readers of Blanchot and of Nancy to reexamine anew. And here, let me say, lies the raison d’être of both the present book and its companion volume dealing with Blanchot’s political thinking as a whole. The issues at stake in the protracted but oddly one-sided exchange between Blanchot and Nancy turn on four closely related, often overlapping areas of debate. The most conspicuous or explicit, as already mentioned, has to do with the pair’s differing assessment of the philosophical, political, and literary work of Bataille, and in particular their understanding of the implications of the latter’s recourse to the figure of sacrifice, notably in relation to Acéphale, that enigmatic secret society or abortive secular religion which Bataille founded, or toyed with founding, between 1936 and 1939, and which, according to some commentators, was meant to culminate in human sacrifice. More than twenty years after Bataille’s death, when politics once more seemed to be facing a similar sense of exhaustion and crisis as in the late 1930s, what was Bataille’s intellectual legacy, Nancy and Blanchot each asked themselves, and what lessons might be learned from his endeavours to reach beyond a politics founded on the oppressive duopoly of State tyranny or consumerist individualism to embrace an ecstatic experience of sovereign excess, and in so doing defeat the threat of fascism, whose most effective recruiting sergeant, in the 1980s, as both before and since, remained the heady irrationalism of nationalist, religious, ethnic, or racial myth? Second, as this last point suggested, there was the question of the part played by literature in what, provisionally at least, Nancy and Blanchot agreed to call “community,” and the extent to which writing or fiction might be said to contribute to its working or unworking, even to what Nancy, for his part, if only for a short while longer, and only under the protection of a pair of quotation marks, was willing to call “‘literary communism.’” 33 How too, in that case, might literature be securely distinguished from myth or the mythic, as Nancy felt able to argue in 1986, and how might literature’s interruption of myth find expression — or not — in such narrative works, say, as Bataille’s Madame Edwarda or Marguerite Duras’s 1982 story La Maladie de la mort (The Malady of Death), to which the second half of La Communauté inavouable was devoted, but which, strangely enough, Nancy does not mention at all in his remarks prior to 2001, yet the interpretation of which, on his later submission, lies at the secret — mythic — heart of Blanchot’s book? All of which makes it all the more imperative to specify in what way myth and literature might or might not be differentiated, how it might then be possible to decide (or not) which had precedence or priority over the other, and on what grounds the one (but which?) might be deemed foundational and the other antagonistic to all foundation. That the question might hold particular significance for an author who once explicitly structured a book called L’Espace littéraire (The Space of Literature) around an essay on the

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myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and again had recourse to that myth as a kind of oblique signature in La Communauté inavouable only served to reinforce the importance of what was at stake. 34 Third, there was the telling, if still tantalisingly obscure dissymmetry announced in the respective titles of the two 1983 texts, which some commentators, as we have seen, take merely to be an indication of stylistic or idiomatic differences, others, however, as evidence of revealing conceptual divergences, or even, like Nancy in his more recent interventions, as compelling proof of an unbridgeable philosophical divide. But there is much that remains unclear. If it is the fate of “community” to be “unavowable,” what is it that is or can no longer be avowed, by whom, and for what reason, political, ethical, or philosophical, and as a result of what conditions of possibility, overriding principle, general strategy, or localised tactic? And similarly, if “community” is to remain “unworked,” what positivity or negativity does this imply, what work or absence of work, what activity or refusal of activity, and how might such a state of affairs be recognised, maintained, or affirmed? Finally, then, and perhaps most crucially of all for both Nancy and Blanchot, there was an abiding question as to the future of politics and the prospects of what might be called a politics of the future. For implicit in their whole exchange was a shared responsibility: not only responsibility for a certain historical or political legacy that came from the past, but, no less importantly, responsibility for one that was forcibly premised on the future. For in the end, whatever their divergences, what was at stake in the very notion of “community” for Nancy and Blanchot alike, far from the moralising propaganda often associated with the word, was a pressing political sense, here and now, of the intractable immediacy of an irreducible demand for justice, and of the need to defend as yet unforeseen modes of freedom and new relations with others, as Blanchot described them, and resist what Nancy for his part, in 1990, would identify as the four sources — the four apocalyptic horsemen — of contemporary distress: extermination, expropriation, simulation, and technicity. 35 All of this suggests, then, that time is now ripe to revisit the controversy between Nancy and Blanchot, or between Blanchot and Nancy, which Nancy himself in recent years, in Blanchot’s absence, has been so willing to revisit à sa façon — unless of course, conversely, it is the recurring spectre of community itself, with its questions and its challenges, its disappointments and its nostalgia, its promise and its threats, that is so intent on revisiting us, whoever or whatever “we” may think “ourselves” to be, in which case it may be more pressing than ever to attempt to say, assuming the task to be possible at all, in what “community” for Nancy or for Blanchot may therefore be said to consist — and in what way, if at all, it may come to exist.

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NOTES 1. Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983); The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988). 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” Aléa 4 (February 1983): 11–49. The essay is dated August–October 1982. 3. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 10; The Unavowable Community, 1. On this use of the term “disaster,” see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (New York: Continuum, 2012), 279–300. 4. Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–1988), I, 217; Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. 5. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Demokratie und Gemeinschaft, im Gespräch mit Peter Engelmann (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2015), 49. 6. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Bourgois, [1986, 1990] 3rd ed. 1999), 210. Wherever possible, I refer in what follows to the English translation of Nancy’s book, The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lina Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Readers should note however that only the first three chapters in each of the two books are the same. When therefore no reference to this 1991 translation is provided here, this simply means the relevant essay is not included in the book. For an overall summary and assessment of Nancy’s work on community, see Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 152–201; and Ignaas Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, translated by Joeri Schrijvers and Sigi Jotkandt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). For a wide-ranging analysis of the vicissitudes of the concept of community throughout history, see Roberto Esposito, Communitas: origine et destin de la communauté, translated by Nadine Le Lirzin, with a preface by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: P.U.F., 2000); Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, translated by Timothy Campbell (without Nancy’s preface) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 7. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 161; The Inoperative Community, 64; emphases in the original; translation modified. 8. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 165–66; The Inoperative Community, 66; translation modified. 9. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 160; The Inoperative Community, 64; translation modified. For the original text, see Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 26; The Unavowable Community, 12; translation modified. 10. See Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 185; The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 135; translation modified. Blanchot’s injunction, combining as it does the familiar second person singular (tu) with the more formal or plural vous, defies simple translation. A more literal English version might read: “Come [singular], come [singular], come [plural], you [plural] or you [singular] to whom [in the singular] no injunction, prayer, or expectation might apply.” On the relationship between Le Pas au-delà and the May 1968 événements, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 231–47. 11. For the two sentences Blanchot takes from Derrida’s paper, see La Communauté inavouable, 26n1; The Unavowable Community, 57n5. For Derrida’s original remarks, see Jacques Derrida, D’ un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983), 77–78, 93; “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” translated by John P. Leavey Jr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 57, 65. Blanchot will most likely have first read Derrida’s presentation in Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, edited by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: [Galilée, 1981] Hermann, 2013), where the passages quoted may be found on pages 471, 476. On the similarities between Duras’s L’Homme assis dans le couloir and

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her later story La Maladie de la mort to which I turn in due course, see my Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London: Routledge, 1993), 57–63, 151–58. 12. See Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté affrontée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 42; “The Confronted Community,” translated by Amanda Macdonald, Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 32. For an alternative translation of the main body of Nancy’s text (by Jason Kemp Winfree), see The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 19–30. 13. Martin Heidegger, Was ist das — die Philosophie? (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1956), 13; What Is That — Philosophy?, translated by Eva T. H. Brann (Annapolis, MD: St John’s College, 1991), 16–17. 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (Paris: Galilée, 2017), 51. 15. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Que faire? (Paris: Galilée, 2016), 105–19. 16. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VIII, 275; The Accursed Share, translated by Robert Hurley, 2 vols. (New York: Zone Books, 1988–1991), Vols. II & III, 228. Compare Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 49; La Communauté désœuvrée, 102; The Inoperative Community, 41; translation modified. 17. See Nancy, La Déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, I) (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 129–46; Dis-Enclosure, the Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 85–97. 18. See for instance Robert Bernasconi, “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot,” Research in Phenomenology XXIII (1993): 3–21; and Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 83–87. 19. Ian James, “Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community,” Culture, Theory and Critique 51, no. 2 (August 2010): 171–87 (p. 177). 20. Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, 24. 21. See Jonathan Degenève, “A partir de quels modèles Nancy et Blanchot comprennent-ils la communauté?,” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 3 (Autumn 2014): 40–49. 22. See Jean-François Pradeau, “Impossible politique et antiphilosophie,” Les Temps modernes 602 (December 1998–January/February 1999): 132–46 (p. 145). 23. See Sylvain Santi, “Bataille, le sujet: une ligne de fuite,” in Georges Bataille, cinquante ans après, edited by Gilles Ernst and Jean-François Louette (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2013), 275–97 (p. 292). 24. See for instance Philippe Sollers, Éloge de l’infini (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 803; and Michel Surya, Sainteté de Bataille (Paris: éditions de l’Éclat, 2012), 93–112. 25. See Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 56n1, 329–39; The Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 46n15, 296–305. Derrida reiterates the point in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 35–36; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 22–23. Nancy endeavours to rebut the criticism in general terms in Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 44, 104; Being Singular Plural, translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 197n28, 203n69, while Blanchot, as we shall see, might similarly have pointed out that one of the express purposes of the second part of La Communauté inavouable, in addressing the work of Marguerite Duras (which Derrida, rather strangely, fails to mention), is to displace this emphasis on fraternity towards a thinking of the aporetics of sexual difference. 26. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 38; “The Confronted Community,” 40; translation modified. 27. Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 31. 28. See Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désavouée (Paris: Galilée, 2014), 12–19; The Disavowed Community, translated by Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 2–4.

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29. See “Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot 1930–1999,” Lignes 43 (March 2014). An extended version of Surya’s own contribution to the issue was subsequently published as L’Autre Blanchot: l’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), to which I return later. For another characteristically myopic account of Blanchot’s work that only succeeds in trivialising the debate even further, see Henri de Monvallier and Nicolas Rousseau, Blanchot l’obscur ou la déraison littéraire (Paris: Autrement, 2015). 30. For a partial and somewhat unsatisfactory overview of Blanchot’s output as a political journalist up to and shortly after France’s defeat at the hands of the Wehrmacht, see Maurice Blanchot, Chroniques politiques des années trente, 1931–1940, edited by David Uhrig (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). For a detailed account of Blanchot’s politics as a whole, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot politique: une réflexion jamais interrompue, forthcoming. 31. See Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, “Bâtons rompus,” in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, edited by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 195–96. 32. See Jeffrey Mehlman, “Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror,” MLN 95, no. 4 (May 1980): 808–29 (p. 817). 33. On “‘Le Communisme littéraire’” [sic], see Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 175–98; The Inoperative Community, 71–81. Nancy explains why he later abandoned the term in La Communauté désœuvrée, 230. 34. For the essay “Le Regard d’Orphée [The Gaze of Orpheus],” first published in 1953, see Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 179–96; The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1982), 171–76; translation slightly modified. For Eurydice’s ghostly presence in the 1983 text, to which I return later, see Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 77; The Unavowable Community, 46. 35. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 31–48; A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 15–27. It may be noted that only five of the eleven chapters contained in the French volume are translated in the corresponding English text, which adds however material from L’Impératif catégorique, La Pensée dérobée, and elsewhere.

TWO Shared Legacies

I NANCY: RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS For Nancy and Blanchot alike, then, the question of community was no mere academic topic, but one characterised by compelling political and philosophical urgency. “La Communauté désœuvrée” and La Communauté inavouable, together with the numerous publications of diverse kinds by both Nancy and Blanchot that would follow, were far from simply occasional pieces. Each marked a calculated intervention into a continuing debate, and each implied a specific, multiple context or series of contexts which it is necessary to reconstruct in order to grasp the extent of the common objectives or divergent priorities of the two thinkers. The theme of community was itself nothing new. As Esposito points out, in an analysis much indebted to the work of Nancy, it had roots reaching back to ancient Greece and to early Christianity. 1 And it was far from coincidental that it should receive one of its most influential or symptomatic formulations in the pioneering work of Ferdinand Tönnies in late nineteenth-century Germany, a country which, amidst a series of deep-seated upheavals affecting many regional, localised populations, often threatening in the process long-rooted traditions of idiom, religious belief, or geographical affiliation, had only recently acquired the problematic status of a unified or unitary nation state. In his famous treatise of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Association), which, after an inauspicious beginning, had by 1936 run into eight separate editions, Tönnies contrasted two conceptual models of social organisation, describing them as normative rather than ideal types (“Normaltypen,” not “Idealtypen”). 2 “Gemeinschaft,” he famously wrote, “is characterised 15

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through the social will [the prime mover in Tönnies’s sociology] as harmony [Eintracht], customs [Sitte], and religion, Gesellschaft through the social will as convention [Konvention], politics, and public opinion.” 3 The first of the two, Tönnies explained, was grounded in family ties, rural life, shared language, and religious ritual, and found expression in an organic sense of local, communal, confessional, or national solidarity. The second, on the other hand, relied on a more abstract set of contractual, legalistic arrangements between autonomous individuals existing each for themselves within a public sphere structured primarily by commercial exchange. Tönnies was keen to make it clear, however, that, in his view, insofar as they were primarily theoretical entities, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were nowhere to be found in pure empirical form, but only in a range of diverse and often heterogeneous combinations. And although history, he conceded, clearly showed how Gemeinschaft tended everywhere to be superseded by Gesellschaft, he rejected the notion that his theory privileged the one over the other and dismissed claims his ideas were a recipe for Romantic nostalgia or somehow confirmed Spenglerian prognostications regarding the impending “Decline of the West.” Indeed, Tönnies’s own reputation was that of a sociologist with progressive sympathies, who in 1930, at the age of seventy-five, became a member of the socialist SPD in reaction to the growing influence of the Nazi party, only to be forcibly discharged from his emeritus position at the University of Kiel by the Nazis when they took power three years later. As Raymond Aron pointed out in 1935, summarising for French readers what he saw at the time as the achievements of recent German sociology, the conservative appeal of Tönnies’s version of Gemeinschaft was nevertheless unmistakeable. “The reaction against mechanical civilisation and against abstract order,” Aron observed, “has adopted the return to community [le retour à la communauté] as its slogan.” “All the movements of revolt against present-day society in Germany,” he went on, referring to the German youth movement and early National Socialism, “have the same ideal in mind, of shared feelings, authentic union, and harmony with nature. And they have the same enemies in their sights, the individualism of homo œconomicus, the rivalry of opposing interests, brutal competition, and the inhuman organisation created by laws, conventions, or economic processes.” 4 And as the corrosive effects of modern Gesellschaft came to be experienced with ever greater severity in the years following the First World War, combined with serious economic and political instability, so there were many throughout Europe, as Aron’s diagnosis suggested, of diverse political persuasions, positioned both on the left and on the right, who, in denouncing what they saw as the loss of an organic sense of community and the increasing dominance of alienating and schematic contractual relations, did so by projecting into the political future an imagined or mythic past in which they believed they had enjoyed the security of stable national, local, familial, religious, or

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linguistic bonds, and which they fervently thought they would be able to enjoy afresh. But it was quickly apparent to all who paused to consider the matter that what announced itself as a desire for radical renewal was premised on little other than a nostalgic, violently manichean fantasy grounded in mystified beliefs about national identity, race, and religion. The opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft nevertheless proved a potent intellectual as well as political preoccupation. It was in this sense hardly surprising, when his early lectures on Hölderlin, written in autumn 1934 in the aftermath of his resignation from the Rectorate, were finally published in 1980, to discover that Heidegger too, who in May 1933 had spoken enthusiastically of the Volksgemeinschaft (or “community of the people”) unifying the “efforts, endeavours, and capacities of all orders and members of the Volk,” and of the Kampfgemeinschaft (“community of struggle”) uniting teachers and students alike, 5 had begun his rethinking of the relationship between poetry or Dichtung and the “Volk” just over a year later by contrasting — making, as he did so, an obvious political point of his own — what he called “the crude insertion of the all-too-many within some so-called organisation” with the fusional intimacy of that “true gathering of individuals within original community [die wahrhafte Sammlung der Einzelnen in eine ursprüngliche Gemeinschaft]” announced, he contended, both in and by the poems of Hölderlin. “Original community,” Heidegger explained, citing as his prime, admittedly sole example the “comradeship of soldiers at the front,” “does not arise solely through the taking up of reciprocal relations — only society [Gesellschaft] arises in that way — since community [Gemeinschaft] much rather is through the prior binding of each individual to that which, by transcending each one, binds and determines every one of them.” 6 Whether Nancy or Blanchot read these lectures when they appeared in print, almost half a century after they were first delivered, is hard to say, though, given the importance of Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin for both thinkers, it would be unlikely for them not to have at least taken cursory account of them, and this is arguably one reason why the divergences between the two later came to be framed by their respective responses to the unspoken implications of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. At the same time, this appeal to Gemeinschaft as a vehicle for conservative nostalgia was not everything. As history shows, the promotion of the organic over the abstract or the communal over the individualistic can just as easily be thought to be an indication of progressive, reformist values as of regressive, reactionary ones. In this respect it was far from surprising for readers of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, notably the lengthy pages best known as Die deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology), when they were first published in Moscow in 1932 (with extracts in French translation following five years later), to find the future author of Das Kapital also having recourse to the word Gemeinschaft, admittedly in

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a different sense to that defined by Tönnies — that is to say, not as an alternative to Gesellschaft — to describe a future without personal property, social class, division of labour, or alienation. Marx for his part took care however to distinguish between “real” community and its “apparent” or “illusory” double. The fact remained, as he put it, that “the transformation of personal powers (or relations) into material powers by the division of labour cannot be abolished by dismissing from one’s mind the way it is generally represented, but only by individuals subsuming these material powers under themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without community [Gemeinschaft: the standard French translation uses the word ‘communauté’]. Only within the community does the individual receive the means of developing properly in all directions; only in the community is personal freedom therefore possible.” “In real community [in der wirklichen Gemeinschaft],” Marx added, “individuals gain their freedom simultaneously in and through their association [Assoziation].” 7 From its earliest days, then, the ideological ambiguities attached to the thought and word “community” were considerable. From the perspective of the 1980s, this was both an advantage and a disadvantage. For if on the one hand it gave ample opportunity to commentators, including both Nancy and Blanchot themselves, to rethink, rearticulate, even deconstruct what the term implied, it also represented a danger, which was that, by using the word, one would be simply reiterating, rather than overcoming, its often disturbing, frequently compromised political past. The problem was readily apparent to all. As late as 2001, Nancy still found himself having to confront that ambivalent past, as exemplified among others, he remarked, by the contradictory reception given to his 1986 book in Germany. “Community, at the time,” i.e., in the 1980s, he claimed, rather surprisingly, “was a word ignored by the discourse of thought.” “Whether people realised it or not,” he remarked, “both the word and the concept could not be other than entirely overshadowed [passés à la trappe] by the Nazi idea of Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘community of the people (the Volk),’ with which we are sadly only too familiar.” “In Germany, as a result,” he went on, “the word Gemeinschaft still provoked an immediately hostile reaction on the left, and the translation of my book in 1988 was attacked for being Nazi in one leftwing Berlin journal. In 1999, on the other hand, another Berlin journal, from the former East, referred to the same book in a positive manner under the title: ‘The Return of Communism.’” “These two anecdotes seem to me,” he concluded, “to summarise clearly the amphibology, the equivocation, and perhaps the aporia but also the obstinate, though not necessarily obsessive insistence that the word ‘community’ brings with it.” 8 Nancy’s observation is well made. And it followed that the concept of community could not do other than remain synonymous with its own ambiguous, divided history, which in turn explains why the debate about

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community between Nancy and Blanchot should in the end turn on divergent views regarding the political legacy of the 1930s. For it was not only in Germany that the notion of Volksgemeinschaft, having first been used under the Weimar Republic across a relatively wide spectrum of political opinion, came to achieve more limited currency as code for the corporatist, totalitarian fascist state. In the occupied France of 1941, for instance, in his capacity as head of state in the collaborationist Vichy regime, Philippe Pétain declared to all those listening how it was that “man receives his fundamental rights from nature,” but that these were “guaranteed only by the communities [communautés] that surround him: the family which raises him, the profession which nourishes him, the nation which protects him.” Addressing an audience of workers and factory owners in Saint-Étienne in March later that year, Pétain made the similar point that “in reality, the causes of class struggle can only be abolished if the worker [le prolétaire] today, overwhelmed as he is by his own isolation, rediscovers in a community of work [communauté de travail] the conditions for a free and dignified life and reasons to live and hope.” “That community,” he went on, was “the workplace,” and “its transformation will alone provide the basis for organised professional activity, which is itself a community of communities [une communauté de communautés].” 9 That one of Blanchot’s once closest prewar political associates, JeanPierre Maxence, with whom he had collaborated on such journalistic ventures as Le Rempart (1933), Combat (1936–1937), and L’Insurgé (1937), but with whom he seems to have had no subsequent dealings, should endorse Pétain’s “communitarian” agenda by setting up a “Centre communautaire [Communitarian Centre],” for which two years later he would also draft a Manifeste communautariste (Communitarian Manifesto), and whose initial June 1941 programme served to denounce “democratic liberalism, Marxism, and economic dirigisme” as the “successive products of the selfsame conception of the social based on the opposition between the individual and the State [la cité]” 10 — this, and much else no doubt, did little to reassure Blanchot, whose reticence in using the word “community” was largely motivated by the word’s sinister past. All the more surprising, therefore, is the fact that Nancy, in the course of a public discussion hosted by the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in February 2016, should feel able to advance the claim, speaking to his audience in German, that “community [Gemeinschaft] was never a fascist term in France,” and that “under Vichy, there was never any mention of national community [nationale Gemeinschaft].” 11 In any event, long before the concept of community or being-in-common emerged as an explicit theme in his work, there was on Nancy’s part already a significant intellectual history. This had begun in the early 1960s in the pages of the left-leaning, predominantly Catholic journal Esprit, to which Nancy continued to contribute on an intermittent basis

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until 1968, and did so again, on one further occasion, in 2014. His initial involvement in Esprit was no coincidence. The journal at the time was politically and philosophically France’s most influential progressive Christian monthly, which by 1964 enjoyed a healthy circulation of between fifteen thousand and nineteen thousand copies. And by that point Esprit too had a longstanding history of its own. 12 Launched in 1932, at a time of severe religious, ideological, and political crisis, its explicit purpose was to act as the effective mouthpiece for an increasingly impatient and disenchanted younger generation which it sought to mobilise, under the guiding principle of the “primacy of the spiritual,” as standard bearers for a third way, between or beyond atomistic individualism on the one hand, which it identified with exploitative free-market capitalism, and on the other the authoritarian Statist collectivism it found embodied in antireligious Soviet-style communism and the politics of the Third International. As part of this project of religious and cultural renewal, and to overcome what it saw as the debilitating effects of secular this-worldliness, Esprit in its early years aimed to promote two key values. The first was that of the person or “personne,” as created by God, endowed with free will and an inborn yearning for spiritual transcendence, and therefore irreducible to the solipsistic, self-interested individual typical of acquisitive capitalism, but incompatible in equal measure, too, with the bleakly downcast hostage of collectivist rule. The second key emphasis, an exact corollary of the first, was the importance of affirming the shared, horizontal dimension of community or “communauté.” Summing up the journal’s general orientation in 1935, in a collection of articles published in its pages since its launch three years earlier, Emmanuel Mounier, Esprit’s founding editor and charismatic leader, did so by calling the book Révolution personnaliste et communautaire (The Personalist and Communitarian Revolution). 13 In a piece for the inaugural issue of October 1932 he spoke for instance of “the need to grow accustomed in a new way to the [human] person [la personne] and to seeing all human problems from the point of view of the good of the human community [la communauté humaine], not the vagaries of the individual. Community is not everything, but an isolated human person is nothing. Communism is a philosophy of the third person and the impersonal. But there are two philosophies of the first person, two ways of thinking and speaking of the first person: we are opposed to a philosophy of the ‘I’ — in favour of a philosophy of the ‘we.’” 14 Throughout the 1930s, as the promise of revolution first beckoned, then the disturbing prospect, then the frightening reality of war loomed, and during the ensuing dark years of Nazi Occupation, Esprit followed a complex, often fraught, sometimes controversial, and not always unambiguous political course, finding itself at various moments attacked, now by the Catholic hierarchy for its sympathies with the secular left, now by

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Communists and others for its sympathies with the religious right, even as it also left some of its readers uneasy with its initial proximity to the Vichy regime. 15 Having been eventually closed down by the Vichy authorities in July 1941 for “the general tendencies it displayed,” 16 it was however in December 1944 one of only a handful of journals to be allowed to reappear after the Liberation relatively unchanged. Many others were discontinued or banned, as was the formerly prestigious Nouvelle Revue française, appropriated by the Nazis in 1940 under the collaborationist editorship of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, which had to wait until 1953 before reappearing under the wittily amended title of the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française. Much else in the immediate political and ideological vicinity had by then undergone a sea change, and although Esprit was still closely identified with the doctrine of personalism, it made the conscious choice, in the aftermath of the Resistance, to display a greater degree of openness towards the atheistic, Marxist left as well as maintaining its traditional appeal to socially progressive Catholics and Christians in general. This resulted in a dramatic, fourfold or fivefold increase in circulation, and in the decades that followed many of those formerly or still close to Esprit would go on to play a significant part in the intellectual, cultural, or political life of France’s Fourth and Fifth Republics, including such leading figures as Hubert Beuve-Méry, the founding editor of the newspaper Le Monde, together with his collaborators Jean Lacroix and Pierre-Henri Simon, in charge of the philosophy and literary sections of the paper respectively, or others like the writer Jean Cayrol, the literary critic Claude-Edmonde Magny, the filmmaker Chris Marker, the theologian and future cardinal Jean Daniélou, and the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Brice Parain, Paul Ricœur, and Jean Wahl, not to mention the wide-ranging influence on contemporary literary and philosophical debate exerted by Esprit’s postwar publisher, the éditions du Seuil, under the direction of Jean Bardet and Paul Flamand. 17 Mounier at the time saw it as his main task to reassess the stakes and relevance of personalism in the much altered postwar intellectual, religious, and political context. This he endeavoured to do in a sequence of programmatic volumes, including such titles as Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme? (What Is Personalism?), which appeared in 1947, and Le Personnalisme (Personalism), which came out a year before his sudden death in March 1950 at the young age of forty-four. 18 In both works, Mounier insisted that personalism, rather than being a fixed, deterministic system, corresponded instead to a dynamically evolving, self-challenging set of guiding principles. These he described as follows. First, he argued, there was a belief, grounded in a renewed interpretation of Christianity, in “the indissoluble union of body and soul.” 19 Human existence, in other words, far from being a bundle of discrete and abstract traits, was always embodied, simultaneously flesh and spirit. “‘I exist subjectively’ and ‘I

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exist bodily,’” Mounier claimed, “are one and the same experience.” “I cannot think without being, and be without my body,” he went on. “I am exposed [exposé] by it,” he argued, in words Nancy might remember some twenty years later, “to myself, to the world, to others, and it is through the body that I escape the solitude of a thinking which would only be a thinking of my thinking.” 20 Equally crucial to this conception of the human person, and marking a decisive rejection of all materialist or mechanistic immanence, was a deep commitment to spiritual interiority and to the importance of humanity’s God-given yearning for transcendence and the absolute. This in turn was inseparable from an unyielding affirmation of the irreducibility of human freedom, which was why personalism, now asserting itself as an uncompromising Christian humanism, viewed with equally deep suspicion what Mounier called “the two alienations,” the first produced by capitalist, free-market individualism, and the second generated by the oppressed and oppressive totalitarian realm of the impersonal. “The person is not opposed to the we which founds and nourishes it,” he maintained, “but to irresponsible and tyrannical impersonality [au on, using the third-person impersonal pronoun]. Not only is [the person] not defined by incommunicability and withdrawal, but of all the realities of the universe it is the only one which is properly communicable, which is towards others [vers autrui] and even in others [en autrui], towards the world and in the world, before being in itself [en soi].” 21 No person, then, exists in isolation, but is always in contact with others. “The person,” Mounier explained, “is exposed [s’expose], expresses itself: it faces up, it is face [visage].” 22 Fully to be such, then, was necessarily to be both spiritually and politically engaged on the side of what one day, according to Mounier, beyond the joint perils of liberal atomisation or collectivist servitude, would come to be as “the total community of men [la communauté totale des hommes],” based on “the communication between existences, existence with others,” and on what, making an initial stab at translating Heideggerian Mitsein, as Nancy may have subsequently remembered, he at one point calls “comexistence.” 23 Between the human person and community, he added, the relationship was one of pleonastic redundancy: the one, so to speak, was always already exactly synonymous with the other. 24 Writing in Esprit over a decade later, the twenty-two-year-old Nancy was willing enough to declare his allegiance to the values and imperatives of personalist humanism, though it had now become clear, he argued, that a new and different language was needed to address the challenges facing his own rising generation which found itself standing at a fresh crossroads in history. Old answers, which may have seemed right in 1932 or 1944, or even in 1950, were no longer enough. They had lost sight of their own questions, he complained, and too easily took themselves for granted. “We are living a language of solutions and not

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significations,” he told his audience. Language had to be restored, he went on, and made contemporary with the present. “What we need,” he explained, “is to master a language that carries vertically, that is, to recover our language as an indication of our profundity and our transcendence. Our words must become our own: the revealing of man to man, to the man who already encounters man in every corner of his civilisation, and the revealing of man to mystery.” From this, he argued, flowed two essential consequences. The first, on the basis of what was given, was what Nancy in 1963 described as the renewed possibility of “giving sense [donner sens],” i.e., “[t]o give, that is to receive and to give while constituting a sense [un sens], our sense, which nevertheless transcends us.” The second was the hope of a new language, one he called “prophetic,” meaning “a language that questions in the name of a more profound reality, obscured by man, and announces that reality.” “Language,” he put it, “should not be something already self-evident. Which is also to say that language in this sense is a total spiritual adventure.” 25 Though progressive Catholicism, as these words suggest, was a powerful formative influence on Nancy’s thinking, it did not hold sway for long. Already by the early 1960s, according to the account given to PierrePhilippe Jandin in 2013, Nancy had begun to abandon his commitment to Christianity, which was increasingly alien to his more immediate political concerns as a member of the newly founded non-Communist leftwing trade union, the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail), which split from its Catholic forerunner, the CFTC (Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens), in 1964. 26 That same year, after successfully passing the agrégation, and having earlier completed a maîtrise on Hegel’s philosophy of religion under the supervision of Paul Ricœur, a longstanding contributor to Esprit, Nancy opted to teach in Alsace, with the intention of studying theology at Strasbourg University, which, as he explains to Peter Engelmann, was the only public institution in France where theology was taught, as a result of the fact that, when the strict separation of Church and State was enacted in 1905 by the French Third Republic, Alsace, as a consequence of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, was still part of Germany, and because, after the First World War, the Paris government was unwilling to antagonise French Catholics living in Alsace, largely hostile to German control, by imposing upon them the same secular regime as prevailed elsewhere in the country. 27 Nancy’s theology studies proved however short-lived, and he soon found himself teaching philosophy at Strasbourg University, where he embarked on a wide range of fresh initiatives, alone or jointly with his newly encountered colleague and future collaborator, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. A revealing trace of Nancy’s rapid intellectual evolution during that period may be found in another Esprit article published in October 1967. Writing from a position of growing detachment from his former beliefs, even — or all the more so — in the wake of the Second Vatican Council

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which, in his eyes, he explained, had simply come too late, Nancy still maintained the hope of some future dialogue between philosophy and religious thought — a hope that in future years, now as a thinker of deconstruction, he would of course endeavour to realise. For “if from this point forward there can only be atheistic philosophy,” he argued, “one should in return perhaps entertain the hypothesis that there cannot be any philosophy either which ignores the possibility of a relationship between man and God, discourse and mystery, a relationship of exclusion and mutual reference — but not of foundation.” “The truth of faith,” he concluded, is today in a state of antinomy and equivocation. We cannot make decisions about the word of God: such was always the lesson of faith. Faith no longer teaches this, but the lesson risks still having to be heard. Neither nostalgia, nor apostasy, nor invention are on the agenda. Only a certain perseverance, without knowing towards what or for what, while cautiously remaining both concerned yet independent, because, if we obviously know that God does not speak to us, so long as we cannot tell how man speaks to man, we cannot know if and how God will speak to us at all. 28

Reading these early texts, it is not hard to see, in rough outline at least, how some of the issues Nancy would come to address later under the rubric of “community” are already in evidence. At the same time, it would doubtless be misleading to reduce Nancy’s subsequent thinking to these diffuse, youthful beginnings. On the other hand, reading a book such as 1996’s Être singulier pluriel, with its indictment of “coalescence and concentration culminating in uniformity and anonymity” and of “atomisation or codispersion leading to idiocy in both the Greek sense of private property and the modern one of impenetrable stupidity,” and its ambition to go beyond “the impasses of a metaphysics — and of its politics — for which social co-appearance [la com-parution sociale] is only ever thought as a transitory epiphenomenon, and society itself as a stage in a process always leading either to the hypostasis of togetherness or of the common (community and communion), or to the hypostasis of the individual,” 29 it is difficult not to recognise the enduring legacy of debates current in the 1930s and after, a legacy that is arguably ever more prominent in Nancy’s critical reassessment of Blanchot’s own response to the theme of “community.” True enough, in a sentence added to the February 1983 version of “La Communauté désœuvrée” when the article reappeared as a chapter in the 1986 book, Nancy signalled his determined abandonment of personalism — but also, by that very token, something of a valedictory attachment to at least some of its concerns — when he asserted with perhaps revealing force that “‘personalism,’ or Sartre,” as he put it, “only ever managed to serve up the most classic kind of subject‑individual in a moral or sociological sauce [une pâte morale ou

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sociologique]; they never inclined it [ils ne l’ont pas incliné] outside itself, on that edge which is the edge of its being-in-common” 30 — which was to dismiss both doctrines not because of what they had sought to do, but because of their failure to achieve it. Far more important, in any event, than his early reliance on Christian humanism is the way in which Nancy in his subsequent work undertook to transform its intellectual concerns by responding in a new and original way to its abiding questions. It is nevertheless symptomatic, notwithstanding his harsh criticisms of both Christian personalism and atheistic existentialism, that Nancy’s starting point in rethinking “community,” i.e., his dual rejection of the Scylla and Charybdis of atomistic individualism and collectivist immanentism (which also lay behind his unfulfilled hope, as he put it, that the work of Bataille might offer “the possibility of a fresh approach, irreducible to fascism and communism and to democratic or republican individualism alike”), 31 plainly bears an uncanny resemblance to what Mounier had begun by denouncing half a century earlier — which can but raise the question, that Derrida was quick to identify, 32 whether any thinking of community, including that of Nancy, or even of being-in-common, can properly liberate itself from its Christian origins, or, alternatively, how it is that the legacy of the Christian tradition, like an unexpected spirit or unwelcome ghost, is always and forever likely to return to trouble or complicate conceptual articulation of what is deemed to be “in common.” Like that of many philosophers and writers of his generation, Nancy’s intellectual debt to Christianity is impossible to disregard yet hard to delimit. This in itself is surely one reason why, having long abandoned any personal commitment to Catholicism, Nancy in later years returned to the question of Christianity as an object of historical, philosophical scrutiny. That the articulation of this project for the deconstruction of Christianity should have coincided with a significant shift in his reading of Blanchot, with a marked willingness to rediscover in the latter a fellow lapsed Catholic, and an increasingly explicit conviction that an unthought submissiveness to Catholicism remained active in Blanchot’s writing — an undeconstructed Christianity, if one will — all this raises many questions too, not the least of which is the issue of the similarity or difference between, on the one hand, Nancy’s passage from religious belief to something that is properly neither a theism nor an atheism (insofar as the one, according to Nancy, as Blanchot had already argued in L’Entretien infini [The Infinite Conversation], is but a mirror image of the other), 33 and, on the other, Blanchot’s convergent (but, in Nancy’s eyes, problematic) abandonment of the values associated with his early provincial Catholic upbringing and subsequent career as a writer and critic deeply suspicious of all identitarian rootedness. Between Blanchot and Nancy on the topic of religion, then, much remains to be elucidated

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which, so far, even in Nancy’s own work, has been left strangely buried: both unacknowledged and unspoken. The question of religion is not however the only stage on which Nancy’s belated dispute with Blanchot found fresh vigour. There is also the equally probing question of literature’s relationship with philosophy — and philosophy’s relationship with literature. This, it will be remembered, was an important focus of the work of both Nancy and LacoueLabarthe during the 1970s. In 1976, for instance, Nancy published a volume titled Le Discours de la syncope (The Discourse of the Syncope), 34 the purpose of which, according to its author’s preamble, was twofold. First, it was to challenge the often facile recourse to the concept of the undecidable by those literary critics who, during the 1970s, following Barthes and others, almost universally viewed “undecidability” as an oppositional countervalue — but one which, by that very token, Nancy pointed out, was invariably still subject, with contradictory consequences, to the reigning norms it was otherwise presumed to be bent on subverting. Second, it was to explore Kant’s often paradoxical, self-questioning language of self-presentation, with radical implications not only for the stability and coherence of Kantian schematism, but also for any attempt to police the question of the difference between “literature” and “philosophy,” a difference that, on Nancy’s submission, owed its very existence to the work of Kant. This, in any event, was the book’s argument, i.e., “it is from Kant onwards,” Nancy put it, “that the express distinction between literature and philosophy (and therefore, the joining and disjoining of both concepts and terms, and the posing of the question itself) became possible and necessary.” 35 This is not to say that the relationship between the philosophical and the literary, Nancy went on, might be authoritatively policed. But while it might be deemed undecidable, this was not because the undecidable was external to that which it affected. On the contrary, it was inseparable from all sameness “as such,” even to the point of being constitutively synonymous with it. The logic is one that Nancy deploys elsewhere, notably in thinking community and its others, or the relationship between myth and its interruption, or similarly the opposition between Christian monotheism and atheism, with each alternative sharing with its fellow, so to speak, the same conditions of possibility, with the result that the deconstruction of Christianity, say, rather than standing in opposition to Christianity, is like a continuation of Christianity by other means, just as Christianity itself is always already engaged in the task of its own deconstruction. The undecidable, in other words, is not secondary, but foundational, were there to be any such thing as a foundation: “The undecidable,” Nancy explains, is the sameness of the same [la mêmeté du même] produced by the same [le même] as its alteration. This alteration does not have the fertile nega-

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tivity of the dialectical Other in the Same: it is the impossibility “itself” of the same [l’impossibilité “même” du même]. Or, rather, it is the dialectic of the Same, and therefore the dialectic itself, as its own impossibility. In fact, it would be better to avoid saying that the undecidable is this or that [ . . . ]. Perhaps the least untenable statement is along the lines of: the same undecides itself [le même s’indécide]. The same undecides itself: it undoes itself in and by constituting itself, fissures itself by dint of the very gesture or moment that overcomes, repairs, effaces those fissures.

“One should not claim that ‘it fissures (itself),’” he added, however, “or that ‘there is no Self to which this action relates,’ since that is precisely the self-same of the same [le soi-même du même], its aseity [aséité].” 36 In mounting this argument, as the case required, Nancy displayed a high degree of presentational virtuosity and self-consciousness of his own. The range of sources and intertexts cited in his book is impressively diverse. But at the beginning and the end of Le Discours de la syncope, two particular points of reference stand out, each in the role of propitious familiar: the names Bataille and Blanchot. For Nancy in his preamble started out by invoking, not once but twice, a brief passage from the conclusion to Bataille’s L’Érotisme (Eroticism) of 1957. “One cannot ponder enough,” Nancy argued, “[ . . . ] nor repeat enough, over and over, or wear down to the barest of bones Bataille’s suggestion to the effect that ‘[o]nly language, at the limit, reveals the sovereign moment when it no longer holds. But in the end whoever is speaking avows their impotence.’” 37 As these words echoed through Nancy’s book (and continue to do so into his response to La Communauté inavouable), they encountered, on the very last page, another quotation, this time from Blanchot, whom Nancy, in a calculated, throw-away remark, describes as “Kant’s most rigorous commentator [le plus rigoureux commentateur de Kant],” notwithstanding the fact that Blanchot in his published work hardly ever writes explicitly or expressly about Kant at all. Blanchot’s role in Nancy’s demonstration, like that of Bataille, was nonetheless to sum up at least part of the book’s argument, which was that “[p]hilosophical discourse,” as Blanchot had put it in 1971, in a tenthanniversary obituary tribute to Merleau-Ponty, “always at a certain moment loses itself [se perd: i.e., loses its way or dies out]: it may even be no more than a relentless way of losing and of losing oneself [une manière inexorable de perdre et de se perdre].” 38 There was of course a purposeful degree of abyssal self-reflexive Witz in Nancy’s use of these two quotations from Bataille and Blanchot (and, similarly, from Hegel, Cicero, JeanPaul, Descartes, Schlegel, De Quincey, Musil, Kafka, and many others too numerous to mention). 39 As such, their effect was several. First, in framing Nancy’s own discourse, it was to provide his reading of Kant with a measure of external validation, so to speak, by enlisting the support of two of his most prominent near-contemporaries in whose work the border between “literature” and “philosophy,” without ever disappearing as

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such, was subjected to what Le Discours de la syncope called “constant interference [un brouillage permanent].” 40 Second, and conversely, it was to fracture that discursive frame and disperse it beyond its own bounds, according to the logic of what Nancy elsewhere formulates as the figure of partes extra partes, 41 and simultaneously inscribe the writing of Bataille and Blanchot within Nancy’s own text while inscribing his own writing within theirs. This in turn, third, was to reinforce Nancy’s main claim, which was that, just as all indecision was always already lodged within the possibility of decision, and vice versa, so all constitution was necessarily synonymous with its deconstitution, and that the community of thought which Nancy’s book discreetly invoked was accordingly only possible to the precise extent it was impossible, only workable at all, that is, to the degree it was already unworked. II BEYOND ROMANTICISM Even before the exchange with Blanchot on the topic of community properly occurred, then, there was already on Nancy’s part a thinking of worklessness prompted at least in part by Blanchot. Many similar concerns were in evidence in 1978 too, when Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, under the title L’Absolu littéraire (The Literary Absolute), jointly edited an anthology of texts by the early German Romantics, notably the two Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich, together with their collaborators Schelling and Novalis, in whose writing and thinking, the two editors maintained, the theoretical and historical origins of literature in its modern sense were to be located. Again, the purpose behind the collection was anything but simply academic. It was to remind contemporary French literary theory (primarily, as Patrick ffrench suggests, Barthes and the literary avant-garde associated with the journal Tel Quel) 42 to what extent current, influential definitions of literature as a mode of fragmentary or infinitely self-referential textuality corresponded in fact to an unwitting repetition of a metaphysical legacy reaching back to the Romantics. This the book did, among others, with the help of Benjamin and Heidegger, by arguing that Friedrich Schlegel’s famous definition of the literary fragment as something “entirely separate from the surrounding world, like a miniature artwork, complete in itself like a hedgehog,” clearly displayed, in spite of all, the unmistakeable symptoms of a profound nostalgia for the totalising artwork and what they called “the self-equal auto-production of the Subject-Work [l’Œuvre-Sujet], the Self-Knowing-Work [l’Œuvre-Savoir-de-soi].” 43 The Schlegelian fragment, in other words, and in principle any fragment at all, they in-

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sisted — with damaging consequences — “blocks upon itself, so to speak, both completion [l’achèvement] and incompletion [l’inachèvement], or else, in even more complex fashion, it would no doubt not be impossible to argue that it simultaneously completes and incompletes the dialectic of completion and incompletion. In that sense, fragmentation may be thought to amount to concentrating or precipitating on a single point the process by which philosophical discourse, as in Hegel, can designate its own incompletion, master it, and assimilate it to the element of ‘pure thought’ which is its completion,” a criticism that Nancy, many years later, with dogged persistence, would endeavour to apply not to the fragment, but to Blanchot’s nonconcept of “the neuter.” 44 Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s argument was in a sense, however, nothing new. Blanchot had made a similar observation in his 1964 article “L’Athenaeum,” where he had occasion to describe the object of the Romantics’ aesthetic endeavours, in a phrase duly cited by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in their introduction, as “the work of the absence of work [l’œuvre de l’absence d’œuvre].” 45 But there was also more to it. At stake in the Romantics’ turn to the fragment, Blanchot added, presaging a movement that would extend its questioning beyond the defensive, speculative claim that “speaking is subjectivity [la parole est sujet],” was what he described as “the non‑Romantic essence of Romanticism,” which was “that to write is to create a work of language [faire œuvre de parole], but that this work [œuvre] is worklessness [désœuvrement], and that to speak poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speaking whose task is not to state things (and to disappear into what it signifies) but to say (itself) by letting (itself) be said, but without making itself into the new object of this language without object.” 46 In the first instance, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy seem to have accepted this formulation, and concluded their presentation of fragmentary writing in the work of the Jena Romantics by sharply contrasting what they again termed incompletion (inachèvement) and what, explicitly following Blanchot, they now called worklessness (désœuvrement). “Worklessness,” they explained, “is not incompletion; incompletion [ . . . ] completes itself, and that is what the fragment is as such; whereas worklessness is nothing, only the interruption of the fragment.” 47 Admittedly, the distinction remained precarious, a function of its inescapable undecidability, and before long this question of the philosophical status and implications of fragmentary writing would provide a further arena of tense debate between Blanchot on the one hand and LacoueLabarthe and Nancy on the other, much of it oblique. Indeed, it was soon apparent that, both separately and together, the two philosophers had deep misgivings, not without reason, about the opposition between incompletion and worklessness they had earlier defended so confidently. And it was these reservations they chose to voice, in abyssally playful, witty manner, as was their wont, in a 1982 pastiche of the Jena Romantics

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titled “Noli me frangere,” prompted in part by Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre, that volume of fragmentary writing published less than two years earlier. 48 In responding to Blanchot, the pair’s text, part sequence of fragments, part Romantic dialogue, evoked a certain impossibility inseparable from the fragment or fragmentation as such — either because any fragment, insofar as it implied a past or future whole, was by that token immediately recuperated by the discursive dialectic it claimed to challenge, or because fragmentation, being a condition of all writing, had in fact always already occurred, or because, in any case, fragmentation was not something that could be willed since the very effort of willing it transformed it into a work. In their discussion, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy turned their attention to one seemingly exemplary fragment in L’Écriture du désastre, where Blanchot had written as follows: The fragment, as fragments, tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes and sweeps aside in the direction of the dissolution whence it is not formed (properly speaking), to which it is exposed only so that, in disappearing, and, along with it, all identity, to maintain itself [se maintenir] as the energy of disappearing [énergie de disparaître], as repetitive energy and the very limit of mortal infinity — or else work of the absence of work [œuvre de l’absence d’œuvre] (to say this again and in repeating it consign it to silence). Whence the fraudulent nature [imposture] of the System — the System raised by irony to an absolute absolute [un absolu d’absolu] — which is one way for the System still to impose itself by the discredit with which the demand of the fragment [l’exigence fragmentaire] credits it. 49

As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, Blanchot’s text is one of several in L’Écriture du désastre that address the stakes of fragmentary writing within the fragmentary idiom itself. As such, reports one of the (anonymous) opening fragments in “Noli me frangere,” it had the effect of interrupting the writing of a previous, different text planned by one of Blanchot’s two commentators — so much so, it may be noted, that Blanchot’s own fragment, cited earlier in full, is in turn forcibly interrupted in mid-sentence or mid-quotation by the pair, at the exact point where it evokes “the energy of disappearing,” leaving the remainder of Blanchot’s text itself to disappear without trace. As far as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were concerned, “the energy of disappearing” was the nub of the matter. “Basically,” says the one called Lothario (Lacoue-Labarthe?) to his companion Ludovico (Nancy?) — both names are from Schlegel’s 1800 “Gespräch über die Poesie” — “I have some difficulty understanding that sentence of Blanchot’s you’ve emphasised because, if I follow you right, it seems to you to be the best possible translation of ‘the demand of the fragment’ (as opposed to ‘the fragmentary will’ of the Romantics); I have some difficulty understanding the ‘maintain itself [ . . . ] as the energy of disappearing’ — this kind of negative sublation [relève] which would make no sense at all unless, precisely, an energy, i.e., a

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putting to work [une mise en œuvre] were not being maintained.” Ludovico agrees. “What I found in the kind of passage I quoted,” he avers, “was a strange dialectical resurgence, and quite precisely, as you rightly put it, the maintaining of an intent of the work [la maintenance d’une visée de l’œuvre]. Just like Hegelian Spirit, the energy of the work, if you will forgive me the pleonasm, may be thought to be what is maintained in fragmentary death. That Blanchot in this sense should write just to one side of the dialectical means precisely that he is repeating, if you will, its outer contours. And that all of us, in that way, are asking not to be broken.” 50 It could of course be objected that this was indeed Blanchot’s point, i.e., as Lothario himself suggests, that the dialectic was in a sense indestructible — except that the dialectic, insofar as it puts death to work, is nevertheless reliant on the impossibility that, inhabiting the possible, has always already withdrawn all authority from the dialectic, interrupted its power, and sidelined its organicist teleology. The energy of the work, in other words, is far from being covertly endorsed in Blanchot’s text, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy suggest. It is itself much rather blocked by the repetitive recursiveness of the fragmentary and by its refusal to develop in the direction of any work at all. “To criticise the System properly,” Blanchot put it, further down the same page, does not consist (as is so often lazily assumed) in catching it out or in interpreting it insufficiently [ . . . ], but in making it invincible, beyond criticism or, as the current phrase is, inescapable [incontournable]. In which case, with nothing eluding it by virtue of its omnipresent unity and its gathering together of everything, there is no place left for fragmentary writing except for it to emerge as the impossible necessary [le nécessaire impossible: later, reversing the two adjectives, Blanchot writes: necessary impossible death, la mort impossible nécessaire]: that which writes itself through time outside time, in a suspension that, without restraint, breaks the seal of unity precisely by not breaking it, but leaving it to one side without anyone being able to tell. 51

The question, then, was how far Blanchot’s writing of the fragment — or discourse on the fragment, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insisted on calling it — remained trapped within a kind of negative theology, secretly dependent on some totalising whole beyond predication, or whether, by citing or bracketing off and thereby ignoring the would-be omnipotence of the dialectic, it did not necessarily forestall or interrupt all possibility of totalisation, including a negative one. The point, as LudovicoNancy concedes, is at the very least arguable. In a previous fragment he had already offered a version of his own of this preemptive interruption of the dialectic resulting in the deferral or suspension of proper and improper, spirit and flesh, the immanent and the transcendent (readers may remember that it is in similar terms that Blanchot describes the neuter).

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“What is indestructible,” Nancy now suggested, rather than the omnipotent dialectic, which it nevertheless traverses as a kind of inaugural precariousness prior to any fragment as such, is fragility itself, more meagre, more trembling, more untenable than any fragmentation. The fragility there is in beginning to speak or in writing. In opening one’s mouth or tracing a word. It’s there, and at that point, that things break — nowhere else, at no other moment in time. The fragility of a glorious body [un corps glorieux] (neither transcendent nor immanent, neither yours nor mine, neither body nor soul) breaks a throat or a hand [brise une gorge ou une main]. There arises a way of speaking, a discourse, a song and a writing, in which the glorious body will not cease repeating this order as fragile as an entreaty: Noli me frangere [Break me not]. 52

It is only later in the discussion that the reader is given an explanation for these two glancing references to the New Testament, the first to Philippians 3:21 (with its invocation of “the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself”), 53 and the second, comprising a minor play on words, to John 20:17 (“Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not [Noli me tangere, in the Latin Vulgate]; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God).” 54 (It may be remembered that the expression “noli me tangere” also names the morsel of skin belonging to Christ left behind in the hands of Mary Magdalene: a fragile remnant, so to speak, that in its very fragility retains the power and the glory of the transcendent body from which it is detached.) In glossing the two quotations, and justifying his counterversion of the fragmentary under the heading of “fragility,” Nancy makes a rather sudden and startling admission — or avowal: “il faut,” he says, “que je fasse un aveu.” “I did not,” he now reveals, “deduce the discourse of these fragments from a thought of the glorious body. On the contrary, it was that Gospel phrase alone that first resounded in my ears. Noli me tangere, in this Latin laden with ancient echoes of the Church, like a chant or solemn recitation. I can’t explain why. (Might it be that L’Écriture du désastre, having interrupted my work, having touched me in the complex way I was describing, made me say: touch me not? I do not know.) But the phrase forced itself upon me, together with the dim memory of a [Bible] story.” 55 The reason for Nancy’s oddly abrupt free association, which he has no hesitation in making public, is not easy to establish. On the one hand, there was plainly a childhood memory of encountering the New Testament in the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Greek or some other more easily accessible francophone text, as a brief footnote in La Déclosion seems to suggest. 56 Elsewhere, in response to a presentation by Hannes

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Opelz, Nancy recalls the strong impression made upon him by a passage in Le Pas au-delà (which he misremembers as featuring in L’Écriture du désastre) in which Blanchot, recasting or reclaiming the Libera me of the Catholic Office of the Dead, as he does on several occasions in that book, refers to “[a] speaking without presence, the perpetuity of dying [mourir], the death eternal [la mort d’éternité] from which the Requiem Mass [le chant d’Église] calls powerfully for us to be delivered, acknowledging in it the space or speech always bereft of God, that is, delivered from presence.” 57 A knowledge of Catholic liturgy, one might however object, particularly when, as here, it is redeployed as a sign of divine absence, does not in itself, either in Blanchot or in Nancy, constitute compelling proof of enduring faith in Christianity. After all, irrespective of any commitment to the Catholic Church as such, the Libera me will be more than familiar to any keen listener of the music of Fauré or Verdi or numerous other composers. For Nancy, however, the opposite seems to be the case, insofar as Blanchot’s reworking of the liturgical text is cited as evidence, he declares, that “Blanchot here was tipping a wink to Catholics, or even acting, unconsciously [inconsciemment], as though his book was being read only by Catholics.” Nancy adds the caveat that in his view this is not necessarily a criticism. The fact remains, as “Noli me frangere” suggests in closing, that for both Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (as Nancy would continue to insist) all recourse to the fragment, “even in Blanchot,” they argue, “is too much a hallmark of the Modern.” “It is quite impossible,” they went on, “to extract [arracher] [the fragment] from the Modern” 58 — which was also to say, from nostalgic Romanticism. In voicing his allergic, haptic reaction to Blanchot’s writing, Nancy was not alone in recalling the scene by the open tomb where Mary Magdalene encounters the risen but not yet ascended Christ. Much earlier in his writing life, already by way of the Latin Vulgate, as Nancy rightly points out, Blanchot too had linked the fate of literature to a similar moment of resurrection or, better, of resurrection suspended and reversed, such as was embodied in Lazarus — the “Lazarus of the tomb,” that is, “not the Lazarus restored to the light, but the one that already stinks, who is Evil, the Lazarus lost and not the Lazarus saved and resuscitated.” 59 To the glorious body of the one, it would appear, so the putrefying corpse of the other, some thirty-three years earlier, had already provided a ripost. And in May 1983, just over a year after the publication of “Noli me frangere,” and preceding La Communauté inavouable by a matter of months, Blanchot once more had occasion to remember Christ’s words, which he similarly paraphrased, twice over, now in the form of a self-quotation, now with a shift in grammatical subject, in “Après coup” (“After the Fact”), that fifteen-page postscript added to a new edition of his two prewar stories collected as Le Ressassement éternel (Vicious Circles). 60 In re‑presenting these stories written almost half a century earlier, Blanchot not only explained the impossibility for any writer to read what

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he or she may once have written, a point he had already stressed four years earlier in an essay on Roger Laporte, and which he had first made thirty years before in the opening chapter of L’Espace littéraire under the subheading “Noli me legere (Read me not).” 61 As he repeated the argument, Blanchot also recalled being told by Bataille in the mid-1950s that the latter was considering adding a sequel to his brief 1941 narrative, Madame Edwarda. Blanchot at the time was horrified at the thought, and immediately told his friend as much: “That cannot be. Please, do not touch it [C’est impossible. Je vous en prie, n’y touchez pas].” 62 True, what was at stake here was not Christ’s risen body, but the equally uncertain integrity of a literary text, albeit one in which the eponymous protagonist, according to the narrator, was GOD herself. 63 Here, too, in any event, was a singular body which, while inviting testimony as to her or his presence, nevertheless resisted the desire to grasp, retain, and cling to it. And what remained, according to Blanchot, prior to all literature as such, and irreducible to the totalising economy of any subject, was less a transfigured body than a trace without trace of “the nakedness of the word: writing [écrire], equal to the feverish exhibition of one who, for a night, and henceforth for all time, was [fut, using the French past historic] ‘Madame Edwarda.’” 64 Insofar as Blanchot’s remarks were already by way of an oblique rejection of Nancy’s (and Lacoue-Labarthe’s) strictures, not least by demonstrating the constitutive impossibility of the totalisation or closure of any work, it is not surprising that Madame Edwarda, as Nancy notes, should feature again in strikingly similar terms later the same year in La Communauté inavouable 65 as a kind of spectral double of Duras’s La Maladie de la mort, a story which also turns on a question of male and female sexual desire, an experience without experience of death or dying, and a possible encounter with the divine. What this proved, if proof were needed, as Nancy and Blanchot were both aware, was that what began as a largely philosophical exchange between the two, and worked its way through the vagaries of much literature and contemporary literary theory, was destined in the end, by a tortuous but no doubt necessary circle, to find its proper-improper terrain in the field of religion. But this again was not all. For the debate between Blanchot and Nancy belonged not only to a particularly insistent set of religious, philosophical, or literary imperatives. It had political significance too. Blanchot’s essay “L’Athenaeum,” written in the wake of the collapse of the project for the Revue internationale, partly as a result of the fierce anticommunism of its West German contingent, had already indicated as much by emphasising how far Romanticism, in early nineteenth-century Germany, “though much less so in France,” as he rightly observed, “was a political issue [un enjeu politique]” 66 — albeit one, as he went on to show, that had a complexity and ambiguity entirely its own.

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Blanchot and Nancy in the late 1970s and early 1980s were each only too aware of the urgency of the contemporary political agenda they both broadly shared, but whose precise articulation also set them apart. For as their contrasting intellectual careers indicate, while both had a deeprooted commitment to politics or the political, each assumed the role of public intellectual in a very different way. Nancy, from the outset, and particularly from the late 1970s onwards, was a tireless and prolific public presence, seeking to intervene in the name of philosophy (or thought, or thinking, as he preferred to call it) in order to analyse and assess the broader ontological implications involved at every given juncture. Blanchot’s position, however, was almost exactly the opposite. When in the late 1950s he returned to active politics, no longer however as a journalist but as a writer and literary critic, he did so primarily, if not exclusively, at times of crisis corresponding to moments of political hiatus, as for instance when, amidst the turmoil of the Algerian War, and in disputed, what many thought to be illegitimate circumstances, the French Fourth Republic gave way to the Gaullist Fifth, or when in 1968 it was de Gaulle’s turn to lose his grip on power amidst further social and political upheaval. But while seeking in a series of incisive and fiercely polemical writings to exacerbate these moments of constitutional interregnum, he did everything possible to shun the spectacular or specular public stage, preferring to claim for himself as a writer what he once called “the right to the unexpected word,” i.e., the right (but not the duty, insofar as duty was necessarily dependent on the prior authority of a moral code) to intervene on behalf of this or that urgent cause or person not in routine, normative fashion, always prone to be ignored or recuperated, but only in such a way as to challenge those norms and the implicit definition of the political they embodied. 67 Notwithstanding their differences of background and approach, Nancy and Blanchot were however at one in identifying in the France of the late 1970s and early 1980s a period of transition, not to say deep-seated crisis. Opposing forces pulled in different directions. For while on the one hand the aftermath of May 1968 had, for many, turned into a dismal tale of failure, disenchantment, and retreat, so, in the eyes of others, the realignment of the French left for which it was indirectly responsible finally seemed to be bearing fruit in that it culminated in 1981 in the election of François Mitterrand to the French Presidency, the first time a Socialist had held that office under the Fifth Republic, which de Gaulle had established in 1958 largely in order to guard against any such eventuality. Then again, few believed Mitterrand would be able or allowed by international capital, or in the end even willing, to deliver the programme of radical political change he had promised. Blanchot summed matters up from his perspective when, in a letter to Alain Coulange written some three months afterwards, he wrily commented how “10 May [the date of Mitterrand’s election] was for me a happy event, even if happiness is

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fated not to last.” 68 In offering only lukewarm support in this way, Blanchot was not alone, and it was not long before supporters of the new administration were complaining that, while the left had won an important electoral victory, it was already losing the battle of ideas, increasingly dominated by a resurgent conservatism. There was therefore a pressing need for left-wing intellectuals to demonstrate their support for the new president. Inevitably, many of these appeals fell on deaf ears. The ensuing controversy nevertheless resulted in a flurry of reactions in the press from the last week in July and through August 1983, just as many readers were about to depart on holiday or were busy returning. 69 As far as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were concerned, none of this came as a surprise. Already by 1979 they shared the sense that, as the decade was reaching its close, politics or the political were everywhere in a distressed (and distressing), not to say exhausted state, and it was this that prompted the pair to organise their landmark 1980 Cerisy conference on Derrida. Looking back thirty-three years later, introducing a reissue of the papers given at the conference, Nancy commented how at the time “the self-evident truths of technical as well as social, cultural, and political progress had begun to split apart. Politics in particular, since 1968 at least, had lost the established foundation on which to base its choices, convictions, and active commitments. Thought was aware of being impatient to emerge from a Marxist, humanistic, idealistic cocoon which ‘we,’ meaning those of us who were between twenty- and forty-years-old at the time, knew to be already outdated, without having yet gauged all the consequences and opportunities of that obsolescence.” 70 The impact of the conference was such that in November that year, at Derrida’s suggestion, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy agreed to set up an exploratory study group, the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (Centre for Philosophical Research into the Political), to which Lyotard, Etienne Balibar, Claude Lefort, Jacques Rancière, and several others would contribute in the period that followed, but whose work Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy “interrupted,” as they put it, sine die, four years later, in part for personal and institutional reasons, but, more fundamentally, because the original impetus behind the Centre had been lost, they argued, obscured by an increasingly conservative consensus that, in their view, “privileged the ethical or the aesthetic, even the religious (at times the social) to the detriment of the political.” 71 The initial purpose of this newly formed Centre, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explained in their inaugural opening statement, was to construct or, better, deconstruct, outside of all received political science or political philosophy, what, for want of a better word, drawing inspiration from Heidegger, they called the essence of the political. In addressing that agenda, their strategy, neatly summed up by the phrase re-trait du politique, first proposed by Christopher Fynsk at Cerisy, was twofold. It was “to withdraw [se retirer] from the political [le politique] as the ‘already

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known’ and the self-evidence (blinding self-evidence) of politics [la politique], from the ‘all is political’ that can serve to describe our confinement within the closure of the political [la clôture du politique]; but also to redraw [retracer] the political, to re-mark it, and bring forth the new question, which is, for us, the question of its essence.” 72 To withdraw from an inherited conception of the political and redraw what was at stake within or before it, the pair hastened to add, was anything but an abandonment of the political arena. Indeed, they insisted, it was quite the opposite. In articulating their programme, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy opted in the first instance to concentrate on the divided legacy of two dissymmetrical but exemplary cases of political thinking, each marked in different ways by the legacy of Romanticism, and each of which, reaching a certain limit, had in their view gone seriously awry in response to fascism and its Cold War aftermath: that of Heidegger and of Bataille. 73 For while the first had notoriously acquiesced in the subordination of the question of Being to the historical — “historial” — destiny of the German Volk and been held hostage by the very metaphysics of the Subject he had sought to destroy, Lacoue-Labarthe argued, so the second, according to Nancy, in seeking to harness for a left-wing cause the unconscious affective and fantasmatic energies that Mussolini and Hitler had exploited for authoritarian purposes of their own, had likewise pushed his own irregular philosophy of the subject to its limit only to founder at that limit. What was crucially important in either case, the pair maintained, was the way in which, now under the heading of the “Volk,” now under the rubric of “sovereignty,” understanding of the political throughout the twentieth century had fallen victim — with dire consequences — to a metaphysical, archeo-teleological concept of “the Subject.” 74 III BLANCHOT: POLITICS, WRITING, READING For Blanchot, reading Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in 1981 as he undoubtedly did, the names Heidegger and Bataille were anything but indifferent. From the late 1920s onwards, few thinkers had so decisively claimed the writer’s attention as Heidegger, whom he first read as a student in the company of Levinas in 1927 or 1928, 75 and few other writers had been so close to him as Bataille, intellectually and in other ways, too, as Blanchot’s few extant letters bear witness, from the moment of the pair’s first meeting in December 1940 until Bataille’s premature death in July 1962 at the age of sixty-four. 76 Clearly, then, Blanchot could not do other than take a keen interest in the work associated with Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s Centre, and it is worth noting that, when in 1987

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and 1988 the so-called Heidegger affair erupted in France following Victor Farias’s rediscovery of the extent of the thinker’s membership in the Nazi party, one of the few texts Blanchot chose to foreground in his response to the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur was Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay on Heidegger’s politics first published in the initial volume of papers from the Centre. 77 There was also the no less relevant fact that since the mid-1940s, as his novel Le Très-Haut (The Most High) testifies, Blanchot had been articulating what would be one of the key preoccupations of the Centre, i.e., the notion that, as far as the present was concerned, “everything was political,” but that politics itself was not everything. 78 There was, in other words, an irreducible exteriority prior to the political, without which, for Blanchot and Nancy alike, though the pair conceived of it in divergent ways, no adequate engagement with the political was possible at all. That Blanchot’s interest in the work of Nancy and of Lacoue-Labarthe predated the 1983 exchange is to be reminded that he too brought to the debate on community a complex and lengthy intellectual history of his own. Like many of his generation, cultural background, and social class, Blanchot was born into a provincial French Catholicism for which resistance to the secular Third Republic was an unquestioned article of faith. During the mid- to late 1920s, eschewing the distractions of moving to Paris, the writer spent his student years at the University of Strasbourg, where, by a curious but for Blanchot probably noteworthy coincidence, Nancy would find himself working and teaching some forty years later. And as in Nancy’s case, so too in that of Blanchot, according to his biographer Christophe Bident, there was perhaps the attraction of France’s only public Theology Faculty. 79 In the years following the First World War, Strasbourg was however a very different place to what it became after the Second. Having been part of the German Reich between 1871 and 1918 and having only recently been returned to France under the Treaty of Versailles, the city then, on the grounds that Prussian militarism (or “Germanism,” as it was more frequently called) bore absolute and exclusive responsibility for the devastation, human and physical, caused by the First World War, was a remarkable hotbed of anti-German ressentiment and patriotic French nationalism (even if the latter, oddly enough, in order to assert itself, was on occasion forced to do so in German). But while this meant that, from quite an early stage in his adult life Blanchot was immersed in France’s deep-seated and longstanding suspicion of expansionist German foreign policy, he also enjoyed unparallelled access, as did his friend Levinas, to the German language and to German thought, philosophy, and literature. Blanchot by the early 1930s was in any event no stranger to the belief, which he manifestly shared, and which was in any case widespread in personalist circles of both right and left, that the modern world — this “world without soul,” as it was duly impugned in 1932 by the prolific

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essayist and historian Daniel-Rops (Henri Petiot), a leading figure within the group calling itself L’Ordre nouveau — was in a state of deep spiritual confusion, as reflected in the “divisiveness and atomisation” of the social fabric due essentially to “the individualism of modern man.” 80 “The World Without Soul,” Blanchot summarised it in an August 1932 review, “is not a world riven by economic crises, nor one that technological progress has thrown into disarray. It is one marked by a certain baseness and by a frightening taste for mediocrity that recoils before nothing. This spiritual decadence has had a devastating effect: few are the areas that have remained intact.” 81 While largely endorsing Daniel-Rops’s diagnosis, Blanchot demurred at the notion that the remedy lay in a kind of spontaneous revival of “the properly revolutionary tenor of a doctrine that proclaims: ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’” 82 and was seemingly unconvinced by the claim that “all disquiet is pointless, if it does not seek to transform itself into a [new] order and which, being without hope, does not aspire to some resting place.” 83 Indeed, many years later, no doubt remembering L’Ordre nouveau’s open letter to Hitler, published in the November 1933 issue of the journal, in which, despite their stated opposition to “fascism,” they nevertheless welcomed National Socialism’s “victories,” while charging the newly appointed German Chancellor with having so far failed to live up to the promises of his “revolutionary” electoral programme, Blanchot in his 1984 letter to Laporte would recall how the very expression L’Ordre nouveau was apt to “send shivers down one’s spine” and, because of these fascistic overtones, was the reason he refused to contribute to its journal, notwithstanding the involvement, as he put it, of at least two “decent men, and talented writers,” whose sympathies were anything but fascistic, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu. 84 And whereas Daniel-Rops in his book had also lingered at some length on the ravages caused by the consumerist materialism of the United States, for which, he argued, “quantity counts for more than quality,” 85 it was revealing, Blanchot pointed out, that Daniel-Rops had next to nothing to say about the Soviet Union. In Blanchot’s eyes, the omission was a damaging one, not because Soviet communism offered a viable alternative to the American way of life, but because, rather than merely offering the “promise of universal material happiness,” 86 as Daniel-Rops put it, the Soviet State openly acknowledged, in theory at least, the revolutionary yearnings shared by all. In reality, however, Blanchot insisted, far from living up to those principles, the Stalinist regime was but a cruel and manipulative sham, a repressive semblance calculated to produce the very opposite to what it claimed, i.e., the ultimate suppression of all desire for revolt. “The Communist State,” he argued, “is frequently criticised for sacrificing the human person [la personne] to the collective; but it does not do this by forcing a person to serve an ideal he or she refuses; its aim is much rather to extinguish all need for refusal itself.” 87 This, then, for Blanchot, was Stalinism’s poisoned chalice. “Marxism,” he argued, in

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words some might think stereotyped, but others premonitory, “appeals to that power of refusal inspired in each of us by the disordered need to be and to be alone — and exploits it to build a society in which all refusal is not only illegitimate, but senseless and inconceivable. It cannot be realised without the individualism that places revolt in its service — and can only express itself by handing over the individual to the limitless domination of the State.” 88 Writing some six months later, now on the front page of the Journal des débats, in response to Les Années tournantes, also by Daniel-Rops, himself a regular contributor to the paper, Blanchot concurred that “many young men today, including some of the most mature minds of all, in the effort to re‑establish order, refuse to found it on the principles of present-day society and reject the world ‘as it currently is.’” But “rather than accepting the apparent, but already questionable stability and true anarchy this world offers them,” he insisted, “they will not hesitate to adopt an attitude of refusal, then revolt, and carry out in the name of the spirit a revolution which will be inspired by the spirit.” 89 “Rebuffing the negations that come with consent and the constraints that come with acceptance,” he wrote in another article a month later, still following DanielRops and, as he did so, explicitly laying claim to an alternative version of contemporary personalism, “rejecting what nullifies him including even a part of himself, the rebellious spirit searches obstinately, amidst these defeats and deaths, for something that is proper to him and expresses him fully. [ . . . ] His act of refusal casts aside everything that is not his own person [sa personne] and manifests him as a personal existence [une existence personnelle], the realisation of which is the final object and safeguard of refusal itself.” 90 By 1937, as the political temperature continued to rise, Blanchot, together with several other like-minded activists, had become increasingly dismissive of Daniel-Rops, not so much because of the latter’s ideas, but because of the increasingly hackneyed and complacent manner in which, in Blanchot’s view, they were now expressed. Admittedly, he continued to agree with Daniel-Rops, as Blanchot put it, that this world in which we are living, in which we believe ourselves to be living, is a world in which man has abdicated and spirit has abandoned its demands. The notion of existence is almost foreign to each one of us. On one side, material living conditions which allow only a destiny without grandeur to a vast number; on the other, intellectual and spiritual habits which authorise only an ideal without reality. Two kinds of people find themselves in an equal state of misery: those who are condemned by their work or lack of it to be something less than themselves and suffer the oppression of a social regime which deprives them of even the desire to rebel; and those who, believing they can take refuge in the fine sites of pure intelligence, suffer the exhaustion of a

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cultural regime which deprives them of even the instinct for true thought. Both represent a worthless civilisation [qui s’abolit]. 91

At the same time Blanchot had grown impatient with the lack of urgency in Daniel-Rops’s thinking. “Everything he writes,” Blanchot complained, “tirelessly contradicts everything he would have us believe.” 92 What was paramount, from Blanchot’s perspective, was the importance of pushing ideas to the limit, and translating them into forceful and immediate action. Self-satisfied confidence in spiritual renewal no longer seemed an option, and it was this, no doubt, that lay behind the increasingly vehement, often violent language used by Blanchot in his political journalism of the mid-1930s. In January 1937, reviewing Denis de Rougemont’s Penser avec les mains for L’Insurgé, the short-lived nationalist syndicalist weekly to which Blanchot contribued a regular political column between January and July 1937 (and one final time in the paper’s last issue at the end of October), he had broadly explained why. “The character of our age,” he wrote, closely following de Rougemont, one of the founding editors of L’Ordre nouveau who had remained close to Esprit, who was also a friend of Pierre Klossowski and a regular attender of Bataille’s Collège de sociologie (where in November 1938, shortly after the conclusion of the Munich crisis, he presented a paper on “Arts of Loving and Arts of War”), is no longer to have any common measure [de commune mesure]. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany have each tried to construct a universe such that each man, in what he thinks and does, is made to follow the common order and remain faithful to his vocation. Both have failed. The USSR gave men and culture the task of realising and glorifying the Five-Year Plan. National socialism imposes upon them the organisation of a totalitarian community [une communauté totalitaire]. In both cases, the artist partakes of the destiny of all by taking the very themes of his creation from the reality that commands him, the State. He has to produce a personal work while being assimilated. He is forced into things rather than being reconciled with them. As a spokesman for the people or for the proletariat as conceived by official doctrine, he encounters communal action only by departing from himself — in an exact counterpart to that liberal rationalism by which the artist thinks he can encounter himself by leaving the world behind, but as a result grasps only a phantom. 93

Between Soviet or Nazi collectivism on the one hand and liberal individualism on the other, then, each offering an inverted mirror image of the other, the future, for the Blanchot of the mid-1930s, hung in the balance. The argument is expressed with nothing less than vitriolic force, but its terms are far from unfamiliar. Indeed, notwithstanding Blanchot’s polemical but revealing rejection, later in the same January 1937 article, of what he called “the dangerous muddle of the acrobatic thinkers at Esprit,” 94 it is not hard to see how much of what he advances here as a

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journalist — admittedly, and significantly enough, without recourse to any explicitly Christian or religious vocabulary — was premised on much the same search as Mounier and others for an elusive third way, beyond atomistic individualism on the one hand and collectivist totalitarianism on the other, and in time, as a result, beyond capitalism and communism, nationalism and internationalism alike. This, in any event, was the conclusion to Blanchot’s frequently misrepresented valedictory article of December 1937 in the nationalist monthly Combat, in which he declared, in fine, that [i]n reality, what is crucial is not to be above [political] parties, but to be against them. It is not to repeat the vulgar slogan: neither right nor left [ni droite ni gauche], but to be really against the right and against the left. In such circumstances it will be realised that the true communist dissident is one who abandons communism, not in order to move closer to capitalist beliefs, but to define the true conditions of struggle against capitalism. Likewise, the true nationalist dissident is one who neglects the traditional formulas of nationalism, not in order to move closer to internationalism, but to combat internationalism in all its forms, including the economy and the nation itself. 95

These words have often been hastily misinterpreted, most controversially perhaps by the political scientist and historian Zeev Sternhell, who, on the grounds that Blanchot in the article is somehow proposing a “synthesis” between “left” and “right,” provides “a perfect definition of the fascist mind-set [l’esprit fasciste].” 96 This was plainly to ignore the explicit distinction made in the text between the fascist slogan that supplied Sternhell with the title of his book (“Ni droite ni gauche”) and Blanchot’s own, strikingly different rejection of all partisan political parties. In reality, Blanchot’s position was much closer to that which had long been adopted by his longstanding political ally of those years, the newspaper proprietor Paul Lévy, who began his career many decades earlier as a journalist on Georges Clemenceau’s republican and famously Dreyfusard newspaper, L’Aurore, where he had met the subsequent chef de cabinet or principal private secretary of the “Tiger,” the future nationalist député, minister, and subsequent Resistance leader Georges Mandel who is said to have provided Lévy with most of his inside political information. 97 Indeed, three years previously, in a series of personal interventions in his daily paper Aujourd’hui, following earlier public statements by Mandel, Lévy had responded to the controversy caused by the dramatic 6 February 1934 demonstrations against Daladier’s coalition government and the French National Assembly as a whole — judged by many to be mired in financial corruption and totally incapable of meeting the pressing economic and diplomatic challenges France was facing — by declaring the time for unrepresentative “party-political governments” to have passed, and pressing the case for a “government of national unity.” 98

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Two days later, Lévy reiterated this call for radical change by declaring what he dubbed “national revolution [la révolution nationale]” to be “on the march.” “Nothing will stop it again, France will become French again, France wants to be governed by men worthy of her and to retain its status as a leading international power.” 99 These were, for some readers at least, stirring words, and Lévy’s satirical weekly Aux écoutes, for which Blanchot now served as editor-in-chief, both then and later, even into the dark days immediately following France’s defeat in May 1940, would continue to deploy the term “national revolution” as a rallying cry for the kind of national and nationalist revival they had in mind, as did various other groupings, sometimes with very different motives, but who were equally keen to oppose France’s unstable parliamentary system, too easily hostage, they thought, to the lobbying of special interest groups, diplomatic compromise, financial speculation, and the cyclical crises of international capital, and to combat what they also saw as the threat of socialist or communist revolution dictated by Moscow. Recently, much has been made by opportunist critics of the fact that Lévy and Blanchot continued to use the slogan of “national revolution” in July 1940, that is, after France’s defeat, the signing of the armistice at Compiègne, and the subsequent self-dissolution of the Third Republic nearly three weeks later, to be immediately replaced by the Vichy French State under Pétain’s leadership. But by 18 June, as he would later recount, that is, by the time of de Gaulle’s famous radio broadcast from London, Lévy had fled to Morocco (a French protectorate at the time) in the hope of making contact, as he put it, with “the Resistance government,” 100 leaving Blanchot in the temporary role of directeur to sign off three issues of Aux écoutes, the last of which was dated 27 July. In the brief interregnum following France’s collapse, Lévy and Blanchot presumably considered there was still a dim (though, as events proved, quite unrealistic) chance that some real kind of “national revolution” might yet be possible, in which case it was plainly out of the question simply to abandon the paper. Such as they were, their efforts were in vain, and the paper would be closed down by the Vichy authorities in August, after which a very different, collaborationist “revolution nationale” would prevail. It was not however until October that year, and somewhat reluctantly, that Pétain himself used the expression. 101 Contrary to what some recent commentators have claimed, there is no evidence that either Lévy or Blanchot was at all sympathetic to the policy of collaboration with Hitler’s Germany, which in any case was itself not properly adopted by Vichy until the end of October 1940, following Pétain’s notorious meeting with Hitler in the station at Montoire. And in any case it would be a strangely obtuse reader of Aux écoutes who in July 1940 might somehow imagine the paper had suddenly abandoned the fierce opposition to Nazi Germany (and the “racist barbarism” it embodied) that it had expressed since before the declaration of war. 102

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The paper’s opposition to Hitler’s Germany was no last-minute conversion. It was both principled and longstanding. In a series of editorials published throughout January and February 1938, for instance, only weeks after Blanchot’s valedictory contribution to Combat, Lévy continued to call for “a government of national emergency [un gouvernement de salut public],” composed of “a small number of leading political figures who inspire confidence,” charged with the task of responding effectively to France’s growing economic and financial crisis and to the threat of war with Germany, a sentiment largely echoed, notwithstanding a marked difference in tone, in an unsigned front-page editorial published, soon after Germany’s annexation of Austria, in the 14–15 March issue of the Journal des débats — where Blanchot similarly had major editorial responsibilities — and likewise, for instance, in another leader article on 10 April, in which it is again hard not to detect the discreet personal thumbprint of the paper’s thirty-year-old editor-in-chief. 103 And finally, when, in the last days of September 1938, the Munich accords were signed by Chamberlain, Daladier, and Hitler, claiming to guarantee “peace in our time,” as the British prime minister famously put it, but in fact making the prospect of war all the more inevitable, Aux écoutes, while other papers sighed with self-congratulatory relief, was one of the most outspoken publications of all, deeply critical of what Lévy, in an editorial published a week earlier, roundly condemned as “the gravest diplomatic defeat Britain and France have experienced in their history.” 104 And the paper went on to cite with evident approval Churchill’s famous verdict, delivered to a group of Czech journalists a few days before, to the effect that “France and Britain had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame, and they will get war, too.” 105 By the early 1980s, much of this historical sequence, with its numerous ambiguities, its enduring questions, and its frequently unthought legacy, had become a distant memory. Few recalled its motivations, its hopes and its fears, its contradictions and its doubts. Some insight, however, into Blanchot’s private or personal thinking during the mid-1930s is provided by his early story “L’Idylle” (“The Idyll”), written in 1936, he later reported, but left unpublished. Indeed, it did not appear in print, in a vanishingly small number of copies, until 1947, though it was subsequently reissued in 1951 alongside its companion piece “Le Dernier Mot” (“The Last Word”), written for its part in 1935, with the two stories being brought together under the collective title of Le Ressassement éternel, an expression Blanchot would gloss the following year in an essay reproduced in L’Espace littéraire. 106 This 1951 volume, which reappeared as a photographic reprint in 1970, Blanchot in May 1983 republished now for a second time, midway through the exchange with Nancy, with the addition of the retrospective postface mentioned earlier, as Après coup, or, more precisely, under the oddly chiastic overall title Après coup, précédé par Le Ressassement éternel, with the result that these early stories, the only

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texts from the prewar period that Blanchot was ever willing to have republished (with the exception of the first Thomas l’Obscur, completed in 1940, and three book reviews from 1937 included in Faux Pas), themselves forcibly became part of that ongoing debate. 107 The fact that he republished the stories at all, prompted on this occasion by Daniel Wilhem’s 1974 study of the earlier of the two, i.e., “Le Dernier Mot,” 108 was on the one hand by way of illustrating that “endless recapitulation [ressassement éternel]” of which his texts were the object or the vehicle. But it was also, on the other, to offer a coded gesture of self-explanation following renewed criticisms or questions regarding his prewar politics, which it is worth noting that, other than by setting the historical record straight, Blanchot was never minded in public to justify as such. Of those two early stories, if “Le Dernier Mot” may be thought to describe an enigmatic, quasi-apocalyptic experience of language within the interstices of the city or polis, then it is “L’Idylle” that offers itself more plausibly to an ideological interpretation. From the outset, two remarks made by the protagonist’s detention-centre guard set the tone: “No one,” he tells his charge, “escapes the spectacle of happiness,” and, a few moments later, he warns him: “Please, follow my advice: don’t trust appearances.” 109 It is of course not only the protagonist, a certain (or uncertain) Alexandre Akim, who would be well advised to follow these suggestions, but the reader too, starting with the very title of the story, which, in the first instance, is self-evidently ironic, as Blanchot concedes in his 1983 postscript, albeit in a rhetorical question, but which, at the same time, points to its own idyllic, i.e., contestatory, alternative status as a knowing repudiation of the real. At strategic moments in the story, the word “happiness” is used by Akim to describe his impression of the state of the marriage of Pierre, the prison governor (or directeur) and his wife, Louise. Replying to his guard’s account of their relationship, Akim comments that “what you have just been describing is unruffled happiness, quite out of the ordinary, the feeling that is at the heart of every idyll — true happiness without words.” “Yes,” he cheerfully asserts two pages later, “I believe their marriage has been a true idyll. I’ve rarely come across such a perfect union.” Later still, now replying to Pierre’s worried questioning, he is however less confident: “An idyll? Yes, why not?” 110 As the guard’s opening words had announced, things are indeed not what they seem. If the prison seems to offer the spectacle of happiness, it is no doubt because the spectacle of happiness is itself already a prison, and the idyll, according to at least one of its meanings, but a deceitful façade behind which lie despair, cruelty, and homicidal violence. Pierre and Louise, in other words, according to the story’s elderly inmate, “made a fatal mistake. They thought it was love drawing them together, whereas in fact they hated one another. Various signs led them to believe they were bound to the same destiny, but it was only the desire to tear each other apart in disagreement and torment.” 111

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What is true here of marriage in the story (and confirmed by Akim’s decision to use his imminent marriage as a means of escape, which only serves however to precipitate his final punishment and execution) is also true, more generally, of the city depicted in Blanchot’s story: for even as Akim and his fellow inmates are looked after in seemingly caring and charitable fashion, it is not long before they are given to witness both in themselves and in others the oppressive violence of the institution to which they are confined. This, then, is a society characterised at one and the same time by brutal individualism and coercive conformity, which is again made clear early in the story when the protagonist asks the orderly responsible for his hygiene what fate lies in prospect. When, he inquires, will he be allowed to return to the community and what he calls “communal living [la vie commune]”? The response he receives is nothing if not telling: “Communal living [la vie commune]?” the orderly interjects, with some surprise. “Here, each one of us lives on top of everyone else, but there is no shared [or communal] existence [existence en commun: existence in common].” To which Akim replies, in an undertone heavy with the lesson of Blanchot’s entire narrative, “No, what I’m talking about is freedom [la vie libre]” 112 — which explains why the writer thought the story still worth publishing in the context of the much changed political circumstances of 1947. Indeed, when it first appeared, in spring 1947, it did so shortly before Blanchot sent his novel Le Très-Haut to the publisher, and only a year or so before the publication of L’Arrêt de mort, and some two years before “Un récit,” better known under its revised title of La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day). Despite numerous literary and other differences between these texts, it would not be hard to show that what they share is the oblique manner in which they allow Blanchot to reexamine aspects of his political trajectory since the mid-1930s. Blanchot in “Après coup” notes that, to the best of his recollection, at the time of writing “L’Idylle,” he was, he puts it, “astonishingly unaware of the literature of the period.” 113 But this is not to say his story, though, was ignorant of its political context. Completed in July 1936, according to Blanchot, the text was first written, he once explained in a draft letter addressed to Evelyne Londyn, 114 as a reaction to the Spanish Civil War, which at the time offered a disturbing picture of the fate which might plausibly befall the French Republic too, particularly in the wake of the electoral success of the French Popular Front early in May 1936, brought to power, as its Spanish counterpart, the Frente popular, had been, albeit much more narrowly only three months earlier, on the basis of a joint programme of reform promoted by Socialists, Radicals, and Communists alike, with the Communist Party in France preferring to support Léon Blum’s coalition administration from a safe distance without being actually involved in government. As it turned out, one of the first actions of Blum’s government in the second part of June, implementing a law passed by the previous administration some six months earlier, was to

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disband various extraparliamentary right-wing organisations, sharpening fears at least, as far as France was concerned, of possible civil war similar to that which would soon break out in Spain following Franco’s failed military coup of 17–18 July. This was no idle concern. Blum himself would later confess in a letter to his wife that one of the chief reasons for the Popular Front’s much disputed policy of nonintervention in Spain was the anxiety that to act otherwise risked provoking civil war in France. 115 And pro-Franco opinion in France, some of it profoundly sympathetic to Hitler, lost no time in exploiting the potential parallels, claiming, with vitriolic bluntless, that “the Popular Front,” as the example of Spain allegedly showed, “is civil war.” 116 Read against the backdrop of these disturbing political developments, it is soon apparent that Blanchot’s story can be interpreted as a rejection not only of the actions of Franco’s Falangist rebels, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, but also of the parallel involvement of the Stalinist Comintern, primarily serving as it did the interests of the Soviet Union. And there was also another, specifically French dimension. For if the date of composition of “L’Idylle” is correct, this also means the text is readable too, at least in principle, as an indirect response to final ratification of the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, signed some three months earlier between Vladimir Potemkin on behalf of the Soviet Union and Pierre Laval, at the time France’s Foreign Minister. The purpose of the 1936 Treaty was in theory clear enough. As in the case of its forerunner, the already lopsided 1892 Franco-Russian Alliance, which, having failed in its prime objective of preventing war, nevertheless remained in force until 1917, 117 it was to encircle and to attempt to isolate the German Reich, notably in this instance not the Wilhelmine Second, but the Hitlerite Third. It was however hotly contested by commentators and, though formally adopted by both countries, never put to any practical use. Even worse, as events proved, it was felt by some to give Hitler a pretext for his decision in March 1936 to remilitarise the Rhineland, directly contravening the Versailles Treaty, and launching Germany on the path that would culminate just over three years later in war in Europe. The Treaty between France and the Soviet Union proved, in other words, to be a diplomatic blunder, merely a sign of the endemic weakness and empty formalism of French foreign policy, as Blanchot the journalist would charge with characteristically withering rhetoric in an article for Combat in March 1936. Between France and the USSR, he insisted, there was no longer any community of interest, as the architects of the pact seemed to assume. “France’s interest,” he argued, “is to maintain the territorial status quo in Europe, to maintain the peace that guarantees that State, and to maintain the moral and material strength that guarantees peace. The interest of the Soviet Union is to overturn the new Europe that is the supreme expression of national oppression, to prevent peace which is an insurance against revolution, and to develop its own power

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and ambitions irrespective of frontiers, established rights, and historical necessities. France’s position is absolutely conservative. The Soviet Union’s position is infinitely revisionist.” And this was why, he concluded, “the pact being foisted upon us is a vast confidence trick [une immense duperie], exposing us to war to no end and giving us no guarantees against war.” 118 But if “L’Idylle” was a twofold indictment of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany together with Fascist Italy, alongside their diverse French or Spanish counterparts, this did not mean it was in any sense an endorsement of the so-called democratic status quo. Indeed, the evidence of the story itself is that France’s parliamentary regime was no more effective in delivering what it promised than its totalitarian rivals. In this regard, as he looked across the Franco-Iberian border, Blanchot could plausibly not do otherwise than sympathise with the rejection of both the Falange and the Frente popular (despite grudging support for the latter) by the indigenous anarchosyndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), as Blanchot would perhaps remember ten years later, in a postwar review of André Malraux’s Spanish Civil War novel of 1937, L’Espoir (Days of Hope), written for the volume in the short-lived Actualité series that Bataille was editing at the time on the theme of L’Espagne libre (Free Spain), in the course of which Blanchot paid belated homage to those very same anarchists whose “individualism,” he wrote, was “essentially fraternity.” “The freedom [the anarchist] demands,” Blanchot added, “and which he wants to live at all costs (precisely without any thought for the cost), is thus not the solitary freedom of the autonomous individual; it is however total freedom, lived with others, gained for others, and affirmed and pushed to the limit in an extreme convulsion of existence.” 119 It was of course far from indifferent that, in belatedly expressing his support for Republican resistance to Franco, nearly a decade after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Blanchot did so in an article on L’Espoir, a novel published well before the outbreak of World War II by a writer generally acknowledged at the time to be a Communist fellow traveller, but who from the early years of the Occupation had firmly rejected the Stalinism of the French Communist Party in favour of the patriotic conservatism of General de Gaulle, as whose Minister of Information he would then serve between November 1945 and January 1946, that is to say, at the very moment when Blanchot was putting the finishing touches to his review of the novel in January 1946. But even as it was he, as witnessed by a letter to Bataille dated 8 May [1945], who insisted how imperative it was to address the work of Malraux and “the question of communism” in the volume on Spain that Bataille was planning, Blanchot could but concur with the novelist that one abiding political contradiction remained, notably in the realisation that no political goal was ever likely to be achieved without organisation, but that the fact of organisation risked destroying that desired end itself. “Indeed, it soon becomes

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apparent,” Blanchot noted in the margins of Malraux’s text, “that the organisation of hope endangers that hope.” 120 The paradox, or the aporia, as Blanchot would continue to argue in years to come, was insurmountable. It could only be maintained so long as neither horn of the dilemma was subordinated to the other. Particularly exemplary in this regard, he suggested, was the figure of Manuel in L’Espoir, “who starts out being a communist, then learns how to become one,” such that he is able, without forfeiting his independence, observed Blanchot, nevertheless to “retain fully a concern for his own destiny, and wanting to fulfil a certain idea of himself.” “The party, war, struggle, all that is essential,” Blanchot put it. “But the person,” he added, surely remembering his own past, “who, in the party, through war and struggle, is in search of himself, searching for the extremity of self, that too is essential.” 121 Blanchot in the mid-1930s was no doubt already deeply aware of this inescapable condition of all political commitment, according to which whoever wills the ends, at the risk of being entirely ineffectual, must forcibly will the means. On the evidence of “L’Idylle,” whose protagonist, as we have seen, does not find freedom in political action, and whose desire to escape leads only to failure, it would appear however that by 1936 politics for Blanchot had reached something of an impasse. Of course, desperate straits demanded desperate solutions, and this would explain Blanchot’s increasingly strident personal output as a political journalist during 1936 and 1937, and how, in July 1937, in a not uncharacteristic piece of sophistry or discursive gymnastics, he could argue in provocative, hyperbolic vein in a notorious article in L’Insurgé published little more than two months after the destruction of Guernica by Nazi bombers under instructions from the Falange — and arguably for that very reason, the political effectiveness of righteous indignation, however legitimate, being after all somewhat slight — that the only sure way of overcoming the unacceptable choice between Berlin or Moscow, Hitler or Stalin, which he saw playing itself out in Spain, was to lend full support to Franco with the aim of winning him over to French interests rather than those of Nazi Germany. 122 This was of course not to happen, despite the best efforts of Philippe Pétain, appointed by Daladier in February 1939 as French ambassador to the Madrid government in an attempt to ensure Spanish neutrality in the impending war. The contrast between the admittedly implicit politics of the July 1936 story and the 1937 article, written almost exactly a year later, is striking. But rather than illustrating, say, Blanchot’s political opportunism (or worse), it testifies more plausibly to the crucial dissymmetry between the writer’s prewar journalism and fictional output of the time. The acts of the day, in other words, were subject to different constraints to the experience of the night. The article in L’Insurgé is a case in point. For it was quite clearly polemical in intent and, for that very reason, written with calculated, overstated zeal, even violence, in the hope of eliciting an

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equally strong reaction on the part of its readers, while the 1936 story, not initially intended for publication, Blanchot later explained, could afford to adopt a more considered, subdued, oblique, reflective, even pessimistic — idyllic — stance. Suffice it to say that critics wishing to discredit Blanchot’s fiction (or critical writing) by invoking his prewar nationalist journalism still have to demonstrate how the one translates into the other. There is admittedly no explicit reference to any broader political context at any stage in “L’Idylle.” It is reflected obliquely, however, in the unusual onomastics adopted in Blanchot’s story. On the one hand, several of the given names used in the text are clearly current in French (Pierre, Louise, Alexandre, Nicolas, or Grégoire) and in some instances have local autobiographical connections, such as the mention of a “neighbouring area [département limitrophe],” where there is a place called Samard, 123 a cryptic reference to the town of Simard, some three kilometres south of the author’s native Quain. And it is not without relevance that Alexandre was also one of Blanchot’s own middle names, passed on to him from his maternal grandfather. At the same time, as Christophe Bident suggests, at least some of the story’s names, notably those of Pierre, Alexandre, or Nicolas, are also silently evocative of the history of Czarist Russia (in the course of which the figures of Peter the Great, and the Czars Alexander and Nicholas loom large). 124 Moreover, several additional names in the story, as Gary Mole has shown, notably those of Alexandre Akim and Isaïe Sirotk, are patently borrowed or derived by condensation or conflation from Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which had only recently been newly translated into French, in which the narrator Alexandre Petrovitch (as the French text has him) encounters among his fellow inmates in his Siberian prison camp the aristocratic Akim Akimytch, the Jew Isaïe Fomitch, and the orphan Sirotkine. 125 Also clearly adapted from Dostoyevsky are the words of Blanchot’s prisoners’ song (“Pays de ma naissance / Pourquoi t’ai-je quitté / Je n’ai plus d’innocence / et suis infortuné. / Maintenant sans amour, / Ma mort sera ma délivrance”), which is based on a very similar one reproduced in Souvenirs de la maison des morts (“Pays de ma naissance, / Mes yeux t’ont dit adieu. / Je suis un innocent, / Qui vit dans le tourment, / Condamné pour toujours. / Adieu, oh! mes amours. / Sur le toit le hibou pleure / et la forêt lui fait écho. / Mon cœur se serre en un étau. / Jamais plus, jamais plus là-bas, / Jamais on ne me reverra”). 126 Several narrative motifs, too, including the violent floggings and the pointless forced labour to which the inmates are subjected, their habitual thieving, the “superb and victorious sky” as an emblem of liberation, even the possibility, faint though it is, of “the beginning of a new life,” 127 are also clearly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s fictionalised memoir. Even certain turns of phrase used in “L’Idylle” owe something to Souvenirs de la maison des morts. At one point, for instance, Akim comes to blows with Isaïe Sirotk, whom he is described as seeing, in a bold use of narrative

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point of view, in terms that, as Mole points out, are strongly reminiscent of antisemitic stereotype, with “large protruding ears, eyes without irises, hideous features [oreilles décollées, yeux sans iris, traits hideux].” 128 As Blanchot is sure to have noticed, a similar phrase is used in Dostoyevsky (“long protruding ears, hideous features, dishevelled clothing [longues oreilles décollées, traits hideux, habits en désordre]”) not to refer to Sirotkine, who, unlike Sirotk, is not a Jew, and is the only inmate, according to Dostoyevsky, “able to boast he was handsome,” but to describe all the other inmates who were “frightening to see.” The effect of these slippages between one text and the next is nothing if not oblique. It nevertheless allows Blanchot to insert into his prison-camp story an explicit reference not only to Jews (in the guise of Isaïe Sirotk) but also to antisemitism as a symptom of the disaggregating consequences of what the story calls the absence of “esprit de corps” between the inmates, each of whom, it goes on, “lived for himself,” such that “it was taken as given that living on top of each other in this way gave rise to insidious hostilities.” 129 Blanchot’s interest in Dostoyevsky is itself well established. 130 It is possible that he read The House of the Dead, alongside other works by the writer, at the recommendation of Levinas, a keen admirer of the Russian novelist. And perhaps he also had in mind Daniel-Rops’s suggestion, in 1932’s Le Monde sans âme, that “only Dostoyevsky, in writing The Possessed, understood the true sense of the word ‘revolution,’ just as he stressed, with genial force, how revolution, if limited to the desire for satisfaction, was the supreme betrayal of Spirit.” 131 In any event, Blanchot would later return to Dostoyevsky, notably to the figure of Kirilov in both L’Espace littéraire and La Communauté inavouable. 132 And, importantly too, as Derrida points out apropos L’Instant de ma mort, 133 between 1936 and 1947 Blanchot experienced his own Dostoyevskian moment — his interrupted, failed execution — which, even in his own eyes, no doubt cast fresh light on his prewar fiction. As far as “L’Idylle” was concerned, adopting Dostoyesky’s prison memoir as a canvas for the story, set in some indeterminate city where the powers-that-be were French and the foreign migrants Slavs (or Jews), allowed Blanchot to respond to current events by merging on the one hand autocratic Czarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany, as he did in much of his journalism of that period, and on the other by portraying contemporary France as a far from satisfactory alternative, whether as a place of refuge (or “terre d’asile”) or a State in its own right, mired as it was in the hypocrisy of atomised and alienated individualism. What this in turn demonstrated, according to Blanchot, was at one and the same time the bankruptcy of a politics based on material progress or identitarian coercion and the deep continuity between liberal democracy and totalitarian rule, whether of right or left, insofar as what both sought to promote was none other than spiritual servitude. If then there was a third way, as far as “L’Idylle” was concerned, it did not lie for

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Blanchot, as it did for Mounier and Esprit, or even Daniel-Rops and L’Ordre nouveau, in a renewed, quasi-religious or fusional sense of community, nor did it lie in adulation for Mussolini or Hitler, as it did for such fervent supporters of fascism as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle or Robert Brasillach. As Alexandre Akim repeatedly reminds the authorities, surely speaking now on behalf of another Alexandre, i.e., the story’s author himself, one Maurice Léon Alexandre Blanchot, the only real alternative lay in a desire for freedom, freedom not as a relative value limited by compromise, but as an unfettered or unrestricted absolute, even if that quest for freedom might entail or culminate in death. And it is not by chance that it is in conversation with the bookseller in charge of maps of the area and in possession of books and writings about it, who provides him with the plans needed for his escape, that Akim sums matters up in exactly those terms: “To be free [Être libre],” he says, “that’s what counts.” 134 Reading Nancy in 1983, then, it is perhaps not hard to imagine how Blanchot may have felt himself transported back to the 1930s, and to those numerous debates about the future of politics that exercised so many of his contemporaries, including himself — not, however, because he had a vested interest in the concept or actuality of “community,” but much rather the reverse. For it is one of the singular aspects of his exchange with Nancy that the word “community” which served, and continues to serve, as shorthand for the controversy between them is not a word that has much visible currency at all in Blanchot’s own writing. When it does occur in his earlier work, it is almost invariably in a purely descriptive sense. 135 And even in La Communauté inavouable, the term is used reluctantly, more as a placeholder for an enduring question rather than as evidence of any faith in its availability, desirability, or even possibility. 136 When the word is deployed in an explicitly political context, as it is for instance in “Le Communisme sans héritage [Communism Without Legacy],” Blanchot’s best known, though at the time unattributed intervention during the May événements, which Nancy cites as one of the starting points for his own reworking of the concept, which prompted him to attempt to (re)constitute or (re)create it, 137 it is in largely negative terms, as part of a definition of “communism” as “that which excludes (and excludes itself from) any already constituted community [toute communauté déjà constituée].” 138 And when the word reappeared some five years later, in Le Pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond), in a rather different setting, it did so too only fleetingly, as a name for a lapsed entity characterised mainly by indifference. 139 In the six essays or articles Blanchot devoted to Bataille prior to La Communauté inavouable, in 1943, 1955, 1956, 1962, and 1963 respectively, the concept of “community” similarly plays only a limited, largely negative role. 140 True enough, several times over, as elsewhere in his critical writing, as for instance apropos Hölderlin in 1946, 141 or as a chapter title

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in L’Espace littéraire, 142 Blanchot had explicit recourse to the cognate term communication, most likely having borrowed it from L’Expérience intérieure (Inner Experience), where it is given a decisive if idiosyncratic new meaning. 143 But as his initial 1943 review of the book in the Journal des débats made clear, Blanchot from the outset had little doubt that communication in Bataille was irreducible to the transfer of discursive knowledge from one member to another or any quasireligious fusion of subject with object. “It is no more the participation of a subject with an object,” Blanchot observed, boldly correcting the impression left by at least some of Bataille’s words, “than it is their union in language. It is the movement by which, when subject and object have been relinquished, abandonment pure and simple becomes unadorned loss into the night.” 144 Returning to this question of communication nearly twenty years later, some three months after Bataille’s death, Blanchot characterised the singular, affirmative intensity of his late friend’s relationship to speech in similar terms. “No doubt it is not just any way of speaking,” he wrote: “it does not contribute to discourse, it adds nothing to what has already been expressed, it would want only to lead to that which, outside of all community [hors de toute communauté], might come to be ‘communicated,’ if in the end, ‘everything’ having been consummated [‘tout’ ayant été consommé], there was nothing left to say: other than speaking the ultimate exigency.” 145 Communication, then, for Blanchot was no longer bounded by community, but necessarily overwhelmed it. And it was in a similar vein that he concluded the last of his essays on Bataille published the following August, in which, taking care not to fall into the trap of ventriloquising his subject, Blanchot lingered on the implications of writing not as discourse or dialogue nor even now as communication, but as a plural speaking without horizon, unity, or closure, for which he suggested the name “entretien,” meaning a holding between, and at the same time necessarily a holding apart, a relation without relation, in other words, a relating without relata, a binding that occurs only because it is simultaneously an unbinding. “Perhaps by now,” he remarked, “it has become apparent why this form of expression [i.e., plural speaking] goes beyond the very movement of communication. It is excessive of all community and is designed neither to communicate anything nor to establish between two existences a common relation, even through the intermediary of the unknown.” 146 It was not just that terms such as “communication,” “community,” or even “being-with,” each of which Blanchot mentions, then discards, were inappropriate, and might therefore be replaced by others more adequate. It was rather that the very notion of appropriateness, or even adequation, was itself deceptive, and that no single concept at all could unite self and other under the same rubric: that is, under the rubric of sameness as such. Blanchot had forcefully argued as much almost two years earlier in response to Levinas’s Totalité et infini. As one of

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the speakers in L’Entretien infini put it, “[t]he Other [Autrui] is the entirely Other [le tout Autre]; the other is who or what exceeds me absolutely; and the relation with the other that is autrui is a transcendent relation, which means that there is an infinite and, in a sense, unbridgeable distance between myself and the other, who belongs to the other shore, shares with me no common homeland, and cannot in any way be ranked within the same concept, as a member of the same set, constitute a whole, or be counted alongside the individual that I am.” “Autrui,” Blanchot later added, “is the Other, when the other is not a subject” — but “not an object either.” 147 Elsewhere in his discussion, Blanchot admittedly queries Levinas’s use of the term transcendence, not least because of its theological implications (“But let us leave God to one side,” one of Blanchot’s speakers rejoins, “the name is too imposing,” before then adding, taking a significant risk as he did so, that “perhaps everything that can be affirmed of the relation of transcendence — the relation of God to creature — must initially (for my part I would say only) be taken to apply to the social relation”). 148 The essential argument remained however the same: what was primary in “the possibility of being-together,” as Blanchot opted to call it apropos of May 1968 in La Communauté inavouable, 149 was this “relation without relation [rapport sans rapport],” by which relation occurred, but without negativity, and therefore without determining either partner as the subject or object of the other. Blanchot has admittedly sometimes been mocked for reaching too readily for such seemingly selfcontradictory, paradoxical, or aporetic expressions as “relation without relation,” or “x without x” more generally. But the use of such constructions was anything but wilful or gratuitous. It much rather corresponded, as Derrida had occasion to point out more than once, to a fundamental imperative of thinking, on which it was incumbent always to question the self-identity of the same, always to affirm the difference, however hidden, that necessarily always traversed repetition as a sign of the irreducibly other. And so it is here. For what is this “strange relation,” asks one of the voices in L’Entretien infini, “which consists in there not being any relation”? It “consists,” replies her or his partner, “in preserving the terms that are in relation from what might be held to denature them, it therefore excludes ecstatic bewilderment (of fear), mystical participation, but also appropriation, all forms of conquest, even including that grasping that in the end is what understanding always is.” 150 Crucially at stake here, then, was a thinking of relation that, simultaneously withdrawing and redrawing itself, and the one by virtue of the other, only occurred by dint of the unbridgeable separation between its terms, and because — rather than in spite — of the absence of all mediation. But “if so,” wonders another, or perhaps even the same voice in Blanchot’s dialogue, does this not imply — as the writer would no doubt

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recall when he came to read La Maladie de la mort two decades later — that “the human relation, such as it asserts itself in its primacy, is something terrible”? Yes, “the most terrible,” agrees a second voice, “but without terror.” No, rejoins the first, “the most terrible, in that it is tempered by no intermediary. Between human and human there is therefore neither god, nor value, nor nature. It is a naked relation, without myth, devoid of religion, free of sentiment, bereft of subordinated reason and capable of giving rise neither to pleasure nor to knowledge: a neuter relation [un rapport neutre] or the very neutrality of relation.” 151 Relation without relation, then, always prior to such hypostatic thematisations as “community,” the “in‑common,” or “being-with,” according to Blanchot, takes place, if it takes place at all, neither as a dialectic of the same, assimilating the other to a mirror image of the self, nor as an instantly effusive, pseudoreligious identification with the other, effecting in either case a totalising, immanent unity of self with other or other with self, but only ever otherwise, as an interval of separation which, excepting itself from power, is radically inappropriable “as such,” to the extent of suspending in turn any thought of the “as such” “as such.” NOTES 1. See Esposito, Communitas: origine et destin de la communauté, 13–34; Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, 1–19. 2. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), xlv. 3. Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 251; Community and Association, translated by Charles P. Loomis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), 270; translation modified. Nancy was no stranger to Tönnies’s work, as he points out in discussion with Pierre-Philippe Jandin in La Possibilité d’un monde, dialogue avec Pierre-Philippe Jandin (Paris: Les Petits Platons, 2013), 55; The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin, translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 53–54. 4. Raymond Aron, La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (Paris: [Alcan, 1935] P.U.F., 1966), 20–21; German Sociology, translated by Mary and Thomas Bottomore (London: Heinemann, 1957), 17; translation modified. 5. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), 15, 18; “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” translated by Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38 (March 1985): 467–502 (pp. 476, 479); translation slightly modified. 6. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 8, 72; Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 7, 66; emphasis in original; translation slightly modified. 7. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1964), 395–96; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, translated by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 83; translation modified. 8. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 26–27; “The Confronted Community,” 27; translation modified. 9. Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français 17 juin 1940–20 août 1944, edited by JeanClaude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 363, 111; emphasis in the original.

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10. Martial Buisson, Serge Dairaines, Marcel Delanney, Maurice de la Gatinais, Jean-Pierre Maxence, Roger Mouton, and others, La Révolution nationale sera communautaire: raisons, directions, moyens d'action (Paris: Centre communautaire, 1941), 9–10. 11. See https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/the-literary-absolute/ (accessed 27 January 2018). 12. On the history of Esprit during its early years, see Michel Winock, Esprit: des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, rev. ed. (Paris: Seuil, [1975] 1986), and John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 13. See Emmanuel Mounier, Révolution personnaliste et communautaire (Paris: Aubier, 1935). The book is reproduced in Mounier, Œuvres, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1961–1963), I, 127–416. 14. Mounier, Œuvres, I, 166. 15. For a detailed account of Mounier’s shifting relationship with the Vichy regime, see Michel Bergès, Vichy contre Mounier: les non-conformistes face aux années 40 (Paris: Economica, 1997). 16. Winock, Esprit: des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, 245. 17. See Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 207. For a comprehensive list of Esprit’s contributors up to 1950, see Winock, Esprit: des intellectuels dans la cité 1930–1950, 449–59. 18. See Emmanuel Mounier, Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme? (Paris: Seuil, 1947), and Le Personnalisme (Paris: P.U.F., 1949). The text of the two books is reproduced in Mounier, Œuvres, III, 177–245, and 429–525, respectively. 19. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 441. 20. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 447; emphasis in the original. The concept of “exposure” also had roots in Heidegger’s notion of freedom as “exposure to the disclosedness of beings [Aussetzung in die Entborgenheit des Seienden].” 21. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 208–9; emphasis in the original. 22. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 470. 23. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 208, 211. 24. Mounier, Œuvres, III, 453. 25. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Un certain silence,” Esprit 316 (April 1963): 555–63 (pp. 559, 561, 562); emphasis in the original. For his own account of his involvement with Esprit at the time, see Nancy, La Possibilité d’un monde, 16–19; The Possibility of a World, 9–12. 26. See Nancy, La Possibilité d’un monde, 14–15; The Possibility of a World, 7–8. 27. See Nancy, Demokratie und Gemeinschaft, 11–12. 28. Nancy, “Cathéchisme de persévérance,” Esprit 364 (October 1967): 368–81 (pp. 379, 381). Between 1966 and 1968, Nancy published three further articles in Esprit: “Marx et la philosophie,” Esprit 349 (May 1966): 1074–87; “André Breton,” Esprit 355 (December 1966): 848–49; and “Nietzsche mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?,” Esprit 369 (March 1968): 482–503. More recently he published an interview with the journal under the title “Quand le sens ne fait plus monde,” Esprit 2014 (March/April 2014): 27–46, in which, among others, he returns to his involvement with Esprit in the 1960s, while also commenting again on his revised understanding of the work of Blanchot. 29. Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 66, 80–81; Being Singular Plural, 45, 59; translation modified. 30. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 17; The Inoperative Community, 4; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 31. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 30–31; “The Confronted Community,” 28; translation modified. Compare Nancy, Le Sens du monde (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 173; The Sense of the World, translated by Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 111; and Esposito, Communitas: origine et destin de la communauté, 13. 32. See Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 68; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 54. 33. See Nancy, La Déclosion, 29; Dis-Enclosure, 16. Compare Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 367–93; The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 246–63. Nancy cites this

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essay by Blanchot on several occasions, most notably in La Déclosion, 129–30; DisEnclosure, 85–86. 34. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope: 1 Logodaedalus (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976); The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, translated by Saul Anton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 35. Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope, 27; The Discourse of the Syncope, 19; translation modified. 36. Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope, 13; The Discourse of the Syncope, 9–10; translation modified; emphases in the original. 37. Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope, 11; The Discourse of the Syncope, 7–8; translation modified. For the original text, see Bataille, Œuvres complètes, X, 270; Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood (London: Boyars, 1987), 276; translation modified. 38. See Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope, 148; The Discourse of the Syncope, 138–39. For the original essay on Merleau-Ponty, see Blanchot, “Le ‘Discours philosophique,’” L’Arc 46 (1971): 1–4 (p. 4); and La Condition critique: articles, 1945–1998, edited by Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 332–37 (p. 337). 39. On the problematic of Witz in Nancy’s work of the mid-1970s, see Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, edited by Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2015), 15–33; Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, translated by Robert Bononno (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 7–21. 40. Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope, 100; The Discourse of the Syncope, 90. 41. See Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 137–38; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 119. 42. See Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (London: Legenda, 2007), 138. ffrench extrapolates in wildly implausible manner, however, when he claims that “what Nancy implies is that a re-consideration of community as a concept arises as a result of the dissolution of the community of Tel Quel.” 43. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 78; The Literary Absolute, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 55; translation modified. For Schlegel’s definition of the fragment, see Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, edited by Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 6 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1988), II, 123; Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 143; translation modified. 44. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire, 71; The Literary Absolute, 50; translation modified. For Nancy’s later claim, offered in the form of a casual rhetorical question (“Is one not here,” he asked, when considering Blanchot’s “neuter,” “as close as possible to what Hegel calls ‘pure thought,’ which takes place only outside language, when subject and predicate each pass into the other”), see Nancy, “Autorité de Blanchot,” paper delivered in November 2016 at the conference “Blanchot: Escritura y poder,” Instituto de Humanidades UDP, Santiago (Chile), to which one can but object, with Blanchot, that the “neuter,” insofar as it “is” anything at all, far from being “pure thought,” is, like différance, radically inseparable from the anoriginality of writing. . . . 45. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 517; The Infinite Conversation, 353. Compare LacoueLabarthe and Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire, 80; The Literary Absolute, 57. For a wide-ranging discussion of Blanchot’s reading of the Romantics, see Blanchot Romantique: A Collection of Essays, edited by John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). 46. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 524; The Infinite Conversation, 357; translation modified. 47. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, L’Absolu littéraire, 80; The Literary Absolute, 57; translation modified. 48. See Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, 195–207; The Birth to Presence, translated by Brian Holmes and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 266–78. The text first appeared in French as “Noli me frangere,” Revue des sciences humaines 185 (1982): 83–92. On the pair’s fondness for pseudo-Romantic role-play, see

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Nancy, “Un commencement,” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’“Allégorie” (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 129. 49. Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 99–100; The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 60–61; translation modified. 50. Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, 200–201; The Birth to Presence, 270–71; emphases in the original; translation modified. 51. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 100; The Writing of the Disaster, 61; translation modified. 52. Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, 197–98; The Birth to Presence, 268; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 53. Or, in the words of the standard 1744 French translation by David Martin, “le Sauveur, le Seigneur Jésus-Christ; Qui transformera notre corps vil, afin qu’il soit rendu conforme à son corps glorieux, selon cette efficace par laquelle il peut même s’assujettir toutes choses.” 54. In the words of the Martin Bible: “Jésus lui dit: ne me touche point; car je ne suis point encore monté vers mon Père; mais va à mes Frères, et leur dis: je monte vers mon Père, et vers votre Père, vers mon Dieu, et vers votre Dieu.” 55. Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, 204; The Birth to Presence, 274, emphasis in the original; translation modified. 56. See Nancy, La Déclosion, 142n2; Dis-Enclosure, 183n19. 57. Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà, 46; The Step Not Beyond, 30–31; translation modified. For Nancy’s improvised commentary, see Penser en commun?: un “rapport sans rapport”: Jean-Luc Nancy et Sarah Kofman lecteurs de Blanchot, edited by Isabelle Ullern and Pierre Gisel (Paris: Beauchesne, 2015), 69–70. For an alternative reading, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 178–79. 58. Nancy, Demande: littérature et philosophie, 207; The Birth to Presence, 277; translation modified. Nancy in 2014 (in La Communauté désavouée, 75; The Disavowed Community, 31) would similarly argue that La Communauté inavouable was also dedicated to the idea of “a sublating of unworking or the work of worklessness [relève de l’inopération ou œuvre du désœuvrement]” (translation modified). 59. Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 316; The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 327; translation modified. 60. Blanchot, Après Coup (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 85–100; Vicious Circles, translated by Paul Auster (New York: Station Hill Press, 1985), 59–69. 61. Blanchot, Après Coup, 85; Vicious Circles, 59. For the two earlier references, see Blanchot, La Condition critique, 352–53; and L’Espace littéraire, 14; The Space of Literature, 23. 62. Blanchot, Après Coup, 90; Vicious Circles, 63; translation modified. By 1983, the phrase was already something of a self-quotation in other ways too: in L’Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence), for instance, published in 1948, one of the female protagonists, J., seeming close to death, is found sleeping by the narrator. “I told myself,” he comments, “that what had occurred the previous night, from which I had been banished, was starting up again, and that J., drawn by something terrifying but perhaps also seductive and tempting, was of her own accord in the process of returning to those last minutes during which, while waiting for me, she had succumbed. I think that was true. I even think that something then happened, something that made me quite despair, because I gently took J. by the wrist (she was asleep at the time), and scarcely had I touched her than she sat up, with her eyes open, staring at me with a furious look, and pushed me away, saying, ‘Do not touch me ever again [Ne me touchez plus jamais].’” See Maurice Blanchot, L’Arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, [1948] 1971), 44–45; Death Sentence, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1978), 25; translation modified. 63. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 26. 64. Blanchot, Après Coup, 91; Vicious Circles, 63; translation modified.

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65. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 79–80; The Unavowable Community, 47–48. For Nancy’s rather inconclusive response, see La Communauté désavouée, 48n2; The Disavowed Community, 94n4. 66. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 515; The Infinite Conversation, 351; translation modified. For an overview of the Revue internationale and the reasons for its failure, see Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champvallon, 1998), 403–17; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, translated by John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Roman Schmidt, Die Unmögliche Gemeinschaft (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009); and Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 235–48. 67. On the underlying logic of Blanchot’s political interventions of the 1950s and 1960s, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 231–53. 68. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 369; “There Is No Guardian Silence,” translated by Michael Holland, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 22. Blanchot’s letter, dated 12 August, was first published by Coulange in Contre toute attente 4 (October 1981): 1. 69. The polemic was first launched by the majority Socialist government’s main official spokesman, the novelist and historian Max Gallo, in an article published in Le Monde for 26 July 1983, under the title “Les Intellectuels, la politique et la modernité [Intellectuals, Politics, and Modernity].” In the days and weeks that followed, until the debate was declared closed by the paper at the beginning of September, Le Monde published some three dozen articles or letters on the topic, representing a wide variety of supportive or dissenting opinion. There were later contributions to the paper too, including Jean Baudrillard’s “La Gauche divine” (21–22 September), later collected in the book La Gauche divine: chronique des années 1977–1984 (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 85–104; The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977–1984, translated by David L. Sweet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 81–97, in which Baudrillard, turning the argument on its head, argued that if intellectuals could no longer measure up to the contemporary world, the same applied even more so to political power in general in that both were symptomatic of a totally etiolated, bankrupt world order. Taking a different tack a fortnight later, Jean-François Lyotard joined the debate with his celebrated piece on the demise of the intellectual as universal conscience, “Le Tombeau de l’intellectuel [Tomb of the Intellectual]” (8 October), collected in Lyotard’s Le Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers (Paris: Galilée, 1984), 11–22; Political Writings, translated by Bill Readings (London: U.C.L. Press, 1993), 3–7. It was to this last intervention that, the following March, Blanchot would himself reply, indirectly at least, with an article (subsequently republished as an independent volume) in Pierre Nora’s bimonthly Le Débat, under the title “Les Intellectuels en question [Intellectuals under Scrutiny],” now in Blanchot, La Condition critique, 390–416; The Blanchot Reader, edited by Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 206–27. For an overview of the controversy, see Martyn Cornick, “The Silence of the Left Intellectuals in Mitterrand’s France,” in The Mitterrand Years: Legacy and Evaluation, edited by Mairi Maclean (London: Macmillan, 1998), 300–313. It is worth noting that when Nancy in later texts discusses Blanchot’s article, as he does for instance in his conversation with Mathilde Girard, “Reste inavouable,” in Lignes 43 (March 2014): 173–76, he rather surprisingly makes no mention of this broader context, which allows him to cast unnecessary suspicion on Blanchot’s use of the word “intellectual,” a term Blanchot does not himself endorse wholeheartedly either, but which he retains as a reminder to the reader of the polemical debate culminating in Lyotard’s article that had often featured under that heading on the front page of Le Monde throughout the preceding summer. 70. Jean-Luc Nancy, “1980–2013, aujourd’hui (en guise d’avant-propos),” in Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, 2013 reprint, 7–8. Like his co-organiser Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, born in July 1940, was almost exactly forty years old when the conference took place. 71. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, unpublished letter to participants and interested others, dated Strasbourg, 16 November 1984, in English transla-

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tion in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, edited by Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 143–47. 72. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Ouverture,” in Rejouer le politique (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 18. For the earlier discussion, see Christopher Fynsk’s paper and Lacoue-Labarthe’s response in Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, 487–97. 73. See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Ouverture,” 22. 74. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Ouverture,” 24. 75. See Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, edited by Eric Hoppenot (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 230–31; Political Writings, 1953–1993, translated by Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 123. I discuss Blanchot’s critical engagement with Heidegger at greater length in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 77–91, and Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 103–23. 76. Blanchot’s surviving correspondence with Bataille, comprising some ninety-one mainly unpublished letters, leaves no doubt as to the deep affection in which he held his friend and the bond he felt with their shared experience. In a letter dated 2 September (1961), written shortly before Bataille’s death, he expressed his feelings in the following terms, which go some way towards explaining what was personally at stake for him in the subsequent exchange with Nancy. “It seems to me,” Blanchot told Bataille, “that, in these days of distress, these entirely ordinary days therefore, something has been given to us in common [en commun], to which we must also respond in common, as though, at the extreme limit of our strength, we had each silently to continue to keep watch over this relation with I know not what, that is very lowly [je ne sais quoi de très bas] (perhaps physical, perhaps metaphysical, and necessarily both).” It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that the entirety of Blanchot’s writing on Bataille was concerned with addressing this unthematisable “I know not what” which the two writers had “in common.” 77. See Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, translated by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987); Heidegger and Nazism, translated by Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). For Blanchot’s response, see Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1958–1993, 155–63; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 119–23. Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, “La Transcendance finit dans la politique [Transcendence Ends in Politics],” is republished in the author’s L’Imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 135–73; and in Typography, edited by Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 267–99. Blanchot had already signalled the importance of the essay four years earlier in “Les Intellectuels en question,” La Condition critique, 392; The Blanchot Reader, 225n2. 78. For an assessment of the political implications of Le Très-Haut, see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 181–206; and “L’Itinéraire de Blanchot,” in Maurice Blanchot: La littérature encore une fois (Geneva: éditions Furor, 2017), 99–115. 79. Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible, 35; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, 2018. As Bident explains, familial and financial reasons also most likely played a part. 80. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme (Paris: Plon, 1932), 54, 100–101. On DanielRops’s membership on the editorial board of L’Ordre nouveau and his proximity to Esprit, see Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des années 30: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris: Seuil, [1969] revised edition 2001), 87–129, 180–84; and Nicolas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 213–22. 81. Blanchot, “Le Monde sans âme,” La Revue française 3 (25 August 1932): 460–70 (p. 461); Chroniques politiques des années trente, 74–88 (p. 76). Blanchot follows DanielRops in distinguishing between “tools” which supplement human prowess and “machines” which take the place of their human operators. The “spiritual decadence” in which the modern world found itself was not however the result of “machinism” as such. “If the machine threatens humanity,” Daniel-Rops argued in Le Monde sans âme,

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“no salvation is to be gained in rejecting them; it is not a matter of retreating into the past, but of moving on and finding a better use for machines” (p. 71). 82. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, 180; emphasis in the original. 83. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, 13. 84. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: passion politique, 48–49. In their deceptively titled Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Rieder, 1931), Aron and Dandieu, in the effort to identify a more authentic embodiment of core French political values, reached back to 1793, to the early French Revolution, before its legacy came to be usurped and betrayed, they argued, by Napoleon, whose despotic imperialism, not unlike that of Mussolini, they viewed as a forerunner of 1930s fascism. In so doing, what they sought to promote instead was what they described as the concrete “revolutionary individualism” of those years, an individualism having its roots in freedom, universality, and patriotism (not to be confused with its subsequent “nationalistic perversion,” this “sinister dream,” they called it, “of modern Caesarism” [p. 241]), and in that respect radically different from the abstract, liberal individualism based on the primacy of commercial and capitalist economic relations that had supplanted it from the early part of the nineteenth century onwards, and which Aron and Dandieu now identified with the rising power and influence of corporate America, and what, in a 1931 volume under that title, they opted to call Le Cancer américain (The Cancer of America). 85. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, 126. 86. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, 157. 87. Blanchot, “Le Monde sans âme,” 466. 88. Blanchot, “Le Monde sans âme,” 469. 89. Blanchot, “Les Années tournantes,” Journal des débats (21 March 1933): 1; Chroniques politiques des années trente, 95. 90. Blanchot, “Le Marxisme contre la révolution,” La Revue française (28th year) 4 (25 April 1933): 506–17 (p. 516); Chroniques politiques des années trente, 112; emphasis in the original. 91. Blanchot, “Ce qui meurt et ce qui naît, par Daniel-Rops,” L’Insurgé 12 (31 March 1937): 5. 92. Blanchot, “Ce qui meurt et ce qui naît, par Daniel-Rops,” 5. Two months earlier, in an article on Denis de Rougemont in L’Insurgé 3 (27 January 1937), Blanchot was already voicing his growing irritation with all those “distinguished thinkers,” of whom Daniel-Rops was obviously one, “who in their elegant words go on about the world without soul every six months.” 93. Blanchot, “Penser avec les mains, par Denis de Rougemont,” L’Insurgé 3 (27 January 1937): 5. On this notion of “common measure,” see de Rougemont, Penser avec les mains (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936), 7–123. 94. The phrase, if it is indeed Blanchot’s, is strongly reminiscent of the violent attack on the ecumenism of Esprit by Thierry Maulnier, his most consistent close associate at the time, published in de Fabrègues’s La Revue du XXe siècle 6 (May/June 1935): 10, in which Maulnier accused the journal of trying unscrupulously to play traditional Catholicism and leftist electoral interests one against the other. 95. Blanchot, “On demande des dissidents,” Combat 20 (December 1937): 154–55 (p. 155); Chroniques politiques des années trente, 477–78. 96. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Gallimard, [1983] 2012), 534; Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 223; translation slightly modified. 97. On the career and politics of Mandel, see John M. Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), and Bertrand Favreau, Georges Mandel ou la passion de la République, 1885–1944 (Paris: Fayard, 1996). Blanchot notes the importance of Mandel’s influence on Lévy and (indirectly) for his own political stance in the letter to Laporte, in Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: passion politique, 51–53.

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98. Lévy, Aujourd’hui, 6 February 1934. On the much disputed events of that month, see Serge Berstein, Le 6 Février 1934 (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1975). 99. Lévy, Aujourd’hui, 8 February 1934. 100. Paul Lévy, Journal d’un exilé (1949), in Œuvres complètes, 4 vols. (Paris: Le Rouge et le Noir, 1960–1961), III, 16. 101. See Pétain, Speech of 9 October 1940, Discours aux Français, 84. 102. Unsigned article, Aux écoutes, 2 September 1939, 19. The interpretation presented by David Uhrig in “Blanchot, du ‘non-conformisme’ au maréchalisme,” Lignes 43 (March 2014): 122–39, which relies in part on attributing to Blanchot two unsigned pieces in the Journal des débats there is no evidence he in fact wrote, and one in Aux écoutes for which he was only indirectly responsible (137n1–2), and subsequently repeated in his edition of Chroniques politiques des années trente (13, 482n1), suggesting that Blanchot was sympathetic to the new regime in Vichy, is in this respect not only tendentious and anachronistic; it is profoundly implausible, too. 103. See Aux écoutes, 29 January and 12 February 1938; and Journal des débats, 14–15 March and 10 April 1938. 104. Lévy, “Le Sedan diplomatique,” Aux écoutes, 24 September 1938. 105. Aux écoutes, 24 September 1938. Churchill’s phrase is reported also in Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years (London: Frederick Muller, 1957), 198. 106. See Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 259; The Space of Literature, 246, where the phrase is translated as “eternal repetition.” 107. See Blanchot, Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 260–61, 278–86; Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 227–28, 244–51. 108. See Daniel Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La Voix narrative (Paris: U.G.E., 1974), which Blanchot silently acknowledges in Après Coup, 92; Vicious Circles, 64. 109. Blanchot, Après Coup, 9; Vicious Circles, 3; translation slightly modified. 110. Blanchot, Après Coup, 38, 40, 44; Vicious Circles, 23, 24–25, 28; translation slightly modified. 111. Blanchot, Après Coup, 28; Vicious Circles, 16; translation modified. 112. Blanchot, Après Coup, 11; Vicious Circles, 4; translation modified. 113. Blanchot, Après Coup, 92; Vicious Circles, 64; translation modified. One may think, of course, that Blanchot here is overstating his ignorance. 114. In her Maurice Blanchot romancier (Paris: Nizet, 1976), 189, Londyn however simply notes that L’Idylle was “inspired by the Spanish Civil War.” Blanchot’s draft letter, which is undated, and was most likely written before the publication of Londyn’s book in April 1976, is reproduced in Cahiers de L’Herne: Maurice Blanchot, 2014, edited by Eric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté, 165–66. In it, Blanchot makes some of the same points regarding his political evolution as in his 1984 letter to Laporte. 115. See Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 382. 116. See for instance L’Ami du peuple, the mouthpiece of Pierre Taittinger’s Parti Républicain National et Social, 20 July 1936. Some twelve days earlier, one of the paper’s leading columnists, Marcel Espiau, under the pretext of providing “a glimpse into present-day Germany,” offered a dithyrambic portrait of Hitler as “the unadulterated embodiment of German spirit, emerging from the harps of Valhalla and the odes of Klopstock and Wieland in order to join together with the youth of today on Siegfried’s horse” [sic]. 117. On the part played by the Franco-Russian Alliance in the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, see Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2013), 293–313, 433–50, 498–506. 118. Blanchot, “La Guerre pour rien,” Combat 3 (March 1936): 42–43 (p. 42); Chroniques politiques des années trente, 369, 371. 119. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 51; “Days of Hope by Andre Malraux,” translated by Michael Holland, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 5–12 (p. 10).

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120. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 48; “Days of Hope by Andre Malraux,” 7; translation slightly modified. 121. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 50, 52; “Days of Hope by Andre Malraux,” 9, 11; translation modified. 122. See Blanchot, “Pour combattre l’Allemagne, il faut soutenir Franco,” L’Insurgé 26 (7 July 1937): 4; Chroniques politiques des années trente, 465–66. 123. Blanchot, Après Coup, 13; Vicious Circles, 5; translation slightly modified. 124. Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible, 130–33; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, 2018. 125. See Gary D. Mole, Levinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 36–37. Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead appeared in France under the title Souvenirs de la maison des morts in a new translation by Henri Mongault and Louise Desormonts in 1932. 126. Compare for instance Dostoyevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, translated by Jessie Coulson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 197, which translates as follows: “My eyes will never see that land, / The land where I was born. / Condemned to torment without end, / Guiltless I lay forlorn. / Above the roof the screech-owl calls, / The woods the echoes hear; / My sad heart aches, my spirit falls — / I never can be there.” 127. Blanchot, Après Coup, 56, 51; Vicious Circles, 36, 32. 128. Blanchot, Après Coup, 19; Vicious Circles, 10. See Mole, Levinas, Blanchot, Jabès, 52. 129. Blanchot, Après Coup, 34; Vicious Circles, 20; translation modified. 130. See Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible, 276–78 and passim; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, 2018. 131. Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, 155. 132. See Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 96–103; The Space of Literature, 96–103; La Communauté inavouable, 28–29; The Unavowable Community, 13–14. 133. See Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 63–64, 71, 97; Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 52, 57, 74. The presence of Malraux’s name towards the end of L’Instant de ma mort was also surely prompted by the knowledge that Malraux too had experienced what he would later describe in Antimémoires as a staged or failed execution. See Malraux, Œuvres complètes, 6 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989–2010), III, 11, 160–62. 134. Blanchot, Après Coup, 45; Vicious Circles, 28. Blanchot’s 1946 essay on L’Espoir concludes on much the same note—that is, that “hope always has the same name, freedom.” 135. See for instance Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 58; The Space of Literature, 62, where the term is used apropos of Kafka’s commitment to “the world” (of work, family, marriage). 136. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 12; The Unavowable Community, 3. 137. See Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 16; La Communauté désœuvrée, 25; The Inoperative Community, 7. Nancy also recalls the importance of Blanchot’s phrase in suggesting his original article in La Communauté désavouée, 27–28; The Disavowed Community, 8. 138. Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, 160; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 93. The text adds, in a similar vein: “The proletarian class, this community [is] without any common denominator except penury, dissatisfaction, all manner of need”; translation modified. 139. See Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà, 87, 186; The Step Not Beyond, 61, 137. 140. Blanchot’s six essays on Bataille before 1983 are collected in the following volumes: Faux Pas, 47–52; Faux Pas, 37–41; Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 231–33; The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 189–91; L’Entretien infini, 300–313, 313–22; The Infinite Conversation, 202–11, 211–17; and L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 9–20, 326–30; Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1–11,

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289–92. It is at the very least surprising that, in his numerous responses to Blanchot apropos of the latter’s account of Bataille, Nancy never once discusses any of these texts. 141. See Blanchot, La Part du feu, 115–32; The Work of Fire, 111–31. When Blanchot does have occasion to use the word “community,” as he does once or twice in this essay, it is because it is already, so to speak, a virtual quotation, in this case from Hölderlin. 142. See Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 207–16; The Space of Literature, 198–207. Here too, as in the discussion of Bataille, “communication,” for Blanchot, is inseparable from “contestation.” 143. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 110–15; Inner Experience, translated by Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 96–100. It was perhaps while remembering Bataille’s remarks on Proust in L’Expérience intérieure that Blanchot in Le Livre à venir likewise observed of the Narrator’s struggle to do literary justice to the three trees at Hudimesnil that “here, communication remains incomplete and is still open, disappointing and agonising for him, in which case however it is perhaps less deceptive than any other, and thus closer to what communication in general requires.” Later in the same volume, reading the stories of Henry James, Blanchot similarly notes that “what cannot be spoken is what brings us closer and attracts our otherwise separated ways of speaking towards each another. It is around what eludes direct communication that their community reforms.” See Le Livre à venir, 26, 189; The Book to Come, 18, 153; translation modified. 144. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 51; Faux Pas, 40; translation modified. Contrast Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 21; Inner Experience, 16, where one reads that, for Bataille, “experience in the end achieves the fusion between object and subject, with non‑knowledge as subject, and the unknown as object”; translation modified. 145. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 312; The Infinite Conversation, 210–11; translation modified. 146. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 320; The Infinite Conversation, 216; translation modified. In concluding his essay on Bataille in reply to Nancy in La Communauté inavouable, 45; The Unavowable Community, 24–25, Blanchot makes exactly the same point apropos of Bataille’s wartime diaries. “It may be said that what is designated — denounced — in these apparently confused notes, is the limit of a thinking without limit which requires the ‘I’ in order to rupture itself in sovereign manner and requires the exclusion of that sovereignty in order to open itself to a communication that cannot be shared [ne se partage pas] because it involves the very abolition of community”; translation modified. 147. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 74, 100; The Infinite Conversation, 52, 70; translation modified. 148. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 71, 77; The Infinite Conversation, 50, 54; translation modified. 149. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 52; The Unavowable Community, 30. 150. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 73; The Infinite Conversation, 51; translation modified. 151. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 84; The Infinite Conversation, 59; translation modified.

THREE Community, Sacrifice, Writing

I THE DEATH OF THE OTHER The question of “community,” if not necessarily the word itself, nevertheless featured importantly, if sometimes only implicitly, while at others more sporadically, in a range of published and unpublished texts by Bataille from the 1930s, 1940s, or early 1950s. It was on these that the debate between Nancy and Blanchot would crucially turn. For it was with regard to a select but diverse number of texts written during those years, notably the material that appeared in the journals La Critique sociale (1933) and Acéphale (1936–1939), in L’Expérience intérieure (1943) or as part of Bataille’s writings on Nietzsche (1944–1945), or was contemporary with — or part of — the unfinished projects La Limite de l’utile (1939–1945) and La Souveraineté (Sovereignty, 1953–1954), that Nancy in 1983, boldly systematising the writer’s thinking, ventured the claim that “it was Bataille, without any doubt, who first, or in the most acute manner, had the modern experience of community: as neither work to be produced nor lost communion, but the very space, and spacing, of experience.” 1 Nancy’s turn to Bataille as part of his reassessment of the destiny and chances of community in the modern era was itself both opportune and opportunistic. It was opportune insofar as Bataille, having himself witnessed the endemic crisis of the political from the early 1930s onwards, arguably had much to say still to that postwar, and particularly post-1968 generation of which Nancy, as we have seen, was a not untypical member (though his grudging assessment of the événements — which he would later revise — as an ambiguous, Romantic expression of nostalgia for some “political field-day,” owing something to “fascist orgiasm,” dif65

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fered sharply from that of Blanchot). 2 But it was also opportunistic on Nancy’s part in that his main concern, as subsequent developments showed, lay not with Bataille’s work itself, but with the broader philosophical questions of which the latter’s writings were arguably symptom and partial diagnosis. Moreover, as in his discussion of the “undecidability” of the relation between the literary and the philosophical after Kant, it was clear that Nancy had become increasingly impatient with the dogmatic, self-congratulatory reception of Bataille by the 1970s avant-garde, and sought instead to utilise his reading of Bataille not as an end in itself, but as a springboard for his own further thinking. At issue here once more was the continuing legacy of that complex entanglement of the religious and the political — “this forever festering wound,” Lacoue-Labarthe would later call it 3 — which found such potent expression in the work of so many influential writers and thinkers during the French 1930s. For Bataille too found himself faced at the time with a political landscape dominated by atomistic, free-market capitalism on the one hand and by the diverse but equally authoritarian statist regimes of the USSR, Italy, and Germany on the other. The only possible choice, as far as he was concerned, was evidently no choice at all, and it was Bataille’s uncompromising dissatisfaction with both the status quo and all the available alternatives that motivated his several unquiet, unstable, and frequently excessive political or other initiatives throughout that prewar decade: his intense involvement with André Breton’s Surrealist movement but equally impassioned rejection of it, his short-lived editorship of the art journal Documents, his controversial collaboration with the dissident communist monthly La Critique sociale and brief membership of Souvarine’s Cercle communiste démocratique, his stuttering endeavours now in collaboration with Breton to coordinate the intellectual response to Fascism under the auspices of the Contre-attaque group, then, following the May 1936 elections which brought the French Popular Front to power, the launch of the journal Acéphale and of the parallel but distinct secret society of the same name, and finally, in 1937, with the sometimes reticent collaboration of Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, the creation of the Collège de sociologie, whose debates, like the intermittent appearance of Acéphale, were brought to an abrupt but hardly unexpected close by the outbreak of war. 4 Throughout these diverse endeavours there was but a single driving force: in the face of the poverty of all existing politics, and always at the risk of taking the mystified nationalism of fascist ideology at its face value, the aim was to channel the pseudoreligious, mythic frenzy that fascism had so far made its own in the direction of a radical assault on authoritarian, monocephalic political or discursive power in general. That Bataille’s efforts at refounding something resembling community along these lines achieved little that was durable came as a surprise for nobody, least of all Bataille himself, whose express purpose was to over-

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turn all conformist complacency or immobilism. He had however begun the decade denouncing Breton for having turned surrealism into a religion, 5 only then, several years later, as he looked back on his own activities, to be forced into the realisation that he too, absurdly enough, had tried his hand at something not very different. “It was all,” he now admitted, “a monstrous error.” 6 If base materialism was what he had initially put forward in 1930 as an alternative or antidote to Christianity, 7 it was only to find himself proposing instead, some fourteen or so years later, on the basis of a garbled translation of Nietzsche, 8 an idiosyncratic “hyperchristianity” of his own, which, as his friend and occasional nemesis Pierre Klossowski took every opportunity of reminding him, bore an uncanny resemblance to what he had once so forcefully rejected. Whence Klossowski’s acerbic rejoinder to Bataille (“You’re just a Catholic,” he told him), when the pair met in February 1948 at the Club Maintenant where Bataille was giving a presentation on the theme of “Surrealist Religion.” “You think I’m a Catholic?,” Bataille is said to have retorted, “I won’t protest because I can’t see what I can say about it. I can also be whatever one wants.” 9 And if Bataille sought at one stage to elaborate a timely critique of “the psychological structure of fascism,” as he called it, drawing on French sociology, German phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, 10 it was only for his study to remain an incomplete torso, abandoned as such, abstract and schematic, a victim of its own ambition and clumsy conceptual underpinning, and for its author to be irresistibly sidetracked, so to speak, into embroidering a fiction based on a similarly topical theme, the novel Le Bleu du ciel (Blue of Noon), which would remain unpublished for more than twenty years. Bataille’s work has been much debated — its sloppiness derided or applauded, its aberrations dismissed or endorsed, its risks denounced or celebrated. It is true, admittedly, as Derrida was wont to stress, that every legacy, by its very structure, is always divided against itself, always incomplete, and always open to challenge. Already in 1962 Blanchot had pointed out to what extent fidelity was impossible and that, if all commentary was a case of unavoidable betrayal, this was doubly so in respect of Bataille. 11 The fact was, he argued, there was nothing stable, regular, or conceptually closed about Bataille’s thinking, which at every stage was traversed, interrupted, or derailed by something inassimilable, even to the point of making his prose style an incongruous mixture of formal clarity and awkward impenetrability. As a result, when they have not dismissed him entirely, as Sartre famously did on reviewing L’Expérience intérieure in 1943, Bataille’s readers have mainly been tempted to subordinate the author’s writing to a single privileged, systematising theme: such as transgression, expenditure, ecstacy, the sacred, or, indeed, “community.” This perhaps explains why, far more than most, and probably no less than the work of Nietzsche, reception of Bataille has been beset by numerous polemical claims and counterclaims, and why responses to

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Bataille, as in the case of Nietzsche, invariably reveal more about the interpreter than they do about the interpreted. In using Bataille to address the question of community, Nancy in 1983 began, then, by rehearsing a familiar tale of two near symmetrical impasses. On the one side was that of official Soviet-style communism, now on the brink of final collapse, not because what it had originally promised had been betrayed — which it had — but because what it offered from the outset, by defining “man” in terms of production and self-production, condemned existences to a totalised, not to say totalitarian world, bereft of all transcendence, governed by what Nancy now proposed calling “immanentism.” “It is indeed,” he argued, “the immanence of man in man, or man, absolutely, considered as the immanent being par excellence, that represents the stumbling block for any thinking of community. A community assumed or meant to be a community of men assumes that it realises, or that it is meant to realise, as such, in integral fashion, its own essence, which is itself the realisation of man’s essence.” 12 But if communism had morphed into a sinister byword for oppression and exploitation, the free-market alternative, on Nancy’s submission, was scarcely any better. What ruled here, as an equally failed, reverse image of what it fiercely opposed, was abstract, atomised individualism. The individual, however, Nancy contended, was nothing radically different; it was “another and symmetrical figure of immanence: the absolutely detached foritself, treated both as origin and as certitude.” 13 Nancy’s two impasses, not unlike Mounier’s two alienations of 1947, were far from unfamiliar to readers schooled in dissident (or not so dissident) right- and left-wing debates from the 1930s and after. This was clearly why Bataille provided Nancy with such a convenient starting point for his attempt to renew understanding of community. The appeal to Bataille did more, however, than simply return the debate to where it had stood, unresolved, and with tragic consequences, throughout most of the 1930s. For while Bataille had seen the fatal complicity between Nancy’s two symmetrical figures of immanence, he had also glimpsed the possibility of their interruption or suspension — perhaps even their destruction — in the form of an ecstatic tear or fissure in the experience of what, for want of a better word, might provisionally be called the subject. In that rending of experience there was otherness, there was transcendence, and, as both Bataille and Nancy were concerned, there was therefore community. “The question of community,” Nancy therefore observed, “is inseparable, from our perspective, from a question of ecstacy [extase],” that is, he explained in 1986, now adopting an unmistakeably Heideggerian note, “a question of Being considered as something other than the absoluteness of the totality of beings” 14 — and of ecstacy understood not only as a postreligious eclipse of the self, but also as art, literature, thinking, as practised, albeit only in marginal or covert fashion, according to Nancy in 1983, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian

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Revolution or in the texts of Benjamin, Blanchot, or the early or late (i.e., pre- or poststructuralist) Barthes. 15 Much of this innovative excess, Nancy went on, had gone unnoticed by official communism. For this there was a troubling, deep-seated reason. The question of community, he argued, was also the site of a longstanding mystification, a delusional nostalgia, so to speak, based on the mythic belief that prior to the current fragmented state of the social an unsullied communal wholeness had somehow reigned unchallenged. Tönnies, in other words, though he may not have thought it, was a fantasist, a purveyor of seductive but regressive illusions, in much the same way, according to Nancy, as such other Christian or would-be postChristian thinkers as Rousseau, Schlegel, and Hegel, and, later, Bakunin, Marx, Wagner, and Mallarmé. 16 The implications of this double status of “community” in Nancy’s thinking were considerable. For there were in fact two initially synonymous, yet radically opposed and competing versions of the concept of community he was anxious to revisit. The first corresponded to a falsified, mythic figure of communion, a deathly — and deadly — fantasy of fusional immanence, he called it, which had its origins in Christianity, including that most Christian of modern beliefs, the story of God’s death and resurrection, and which, rather than belonging to any identifiable history, was nothing more than a compensatory fiction, a mere symptom of modernity’s political and social distress. There was however a second possibility, Nancy insisted, a thought of community resistant to mythic figuration or figurality, which revealed itself in the unworking of all immanence by death or dying as such. “Death,” he explained, now invoking Freud as well as Heidegger, “is inseparable from community, since death is how community is revealed.” “The motif of the revelation of being-together, or being-with, by death,” he continued, “and the crystallisation of community around the death of its members, i.e., around the ‘loss’ (the impossibility) of their immanence — and not around their fusional elevation [assomption: used here in the theological sense] into some collective hypostasis — takes us into a space of thinking incommensurable with all past problematics of sociality and intersubjectivity (even the Husserlian problematics of the alter ego) in which philosophy, however much it has tried, has remained trapped.” 17 “If community is revealed in the death of others [la mort d’autrui],” he concluded, in a development Blanchot, with explicit approval, would cite at some length, “it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings: their impossible communion. Community, then, occupies this singular place: it takes on the impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian-being [un être-communautaire] as a subject. Community takes on and in some way inscribes the impossibility of community.” 18 In time, Nancy would differentiate more explicitly between these two seemingly irreconcilable versions of community, between communion,

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on the one hand, and being-with on the other. As he did so, however, there was always the danger that, by defining the one in opposition to the other, as he frequently did, his discourse would unwittingly accredit the idea that communion was at bottom merely a perverted version of community, and community similarly a somehow corrected version of communion. The question of their mutual dependence or reciprocity in other words remained. At one stage, for instance, seeking to contrast communion and community more reliably, Nancy suggests that “[w]hat, of community, is ‘lost’ — the immanence and intimacy of a communion — is lost only in the sense that any such ‘loss’ is constitutive of ‘community’ itself.” 19 In the passage that follows, he repeats his claim that what was seemingly “lost,” i.e., the myth of fusional immanence, was, properly speaking, not lost at all, since it never existed except as a myth: had it really been effective, he explains, it would have meant “the suicide of any community that modelled itself upon it,” as was precisely the case, he argued, with the sacrificial and self-sacrificial genocidal “community” put in place in Nazi Germany. Communion, Nancy insisted, was a murderous fantasy. But if so, how can its “loss” be “constitutive,” as Nancy puts it, of “community”? And, in that case, how far is “community,” placed within quotation marks, clearly distinguishable — or not — from the “unworked community” which Nancy in his writing of the early to mid-1980s sought to name and promote? Might “communion,” in other words, inadvertently yet inexorably, somehow hold the secret and manifest the truth of Nancy’s thought of “community” in general? In any event, confusion between the two, between “communion” and “being-with,” was, it seems, always possible, and it is revealing that this is the precise burden of Nancy’s critique or delimitation of Bataille’s thinking of community (and, in time, it would similarly be the crux of his critical return to Blanchot). For Bataille too, Nancy argued, had fallen victim to the negative effects of a similar amphibology or ambiguity. On the one hand, according to Nancy, Bataille had drawn the only possible consequences from the “ecstacy” of inner experience, namely, that “sovereignty is NOTHING,” “that is to say,” Nancy explained, again highlighting the apparent overlap between Bataille and Heidegger, “that sovereignty is sovereign exposure to an excess (a transcendence) which does not present itself, does not allow itself to be appropriated, and does not even give itself (to which being [l’être] is much rather abandoned): which is not, in a sense perhaps not far removed from the way in which Heideggerian Being ‘is not.’” 20 But, on the other hand, more damagingly, according to Nancy, Bataille had also found the fantasy of religious, orgiastic, even fascistic communion so compelling he was unable to resist its fascination. And it was this that supposedly culminated in Bataille’s failed effort at founding a paradoxical, decapitated, atheistic religion. As it did so, maintained Nancy, Bataille had forcibly realised “that this properly divine truth — the workable, resurrectional truth of death — was not the

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truth of the community of finite beings, but that on the contrary it plunged into the infinity of immanence. It was not the horror, but the total absurdity — or puerility — of this work of death [cette œuvre de mort] that must have forced him to withdraw from all communitarian enterprises.” “It was not the horror,” Nancy put it more emphatically three years later, “but, even beyond the horror, the total absurdity — or disastrous puerility — of death’s deadly work [l’œuvre de mort de la mort], considered as a work of communal living. And it was that absurdity, which is at bottom an excess of sense, an absolute concentration of the will to sense, that must have forced him to withdraw from all communitarian enterprises.” 21 Reading Nancy’s 1983 essay soon after it appeared, Blanchot quickly found himself in familiar territory. Nancy’s argument, as we have seen, aimed to pick up and redevelop questions that, in the work of Bataille and others, lay at the centre of political and ideological debate throughout the 1930s. Therefore, it is entirely possible that in reading Nancy’s text, political and philosophical intention aside, Blanchot was reminded, to some degree at least, of the ultimately ambiguous way in which such former political associates as Jean-Pierre Maxence had throughout the 1930s, even during the Occupation, routinely denounced in equal measure the oppressive rule of free-market capitalism and statist communism. 22 This is presumably why in his own essay he felt it legitimate to situate himself in that prewar debate by referring to Bataille’s various collective endeavours as belonging to a more protracted sequence constituting “our history,” 23 notwithstanding the fact that, as Pierre Prévost records, the two men first met in December 1940, 24 long after the period to which Bataille’s early writings on the question of community belonged. It was also the case that, just as he and Lacoue-Labarthe had done in L’Absolu littéraire, Nancy had explicitly quoted Blanchot’s work as the source for the concept of désœuvrement or worklessness announced in his essay’s title. 25 There was therefore every reason why Blanchot might feel implicated in Nancy’s argument, not to say personally addressed by it. His reaction was in any event immediate. On 16 March 1983, only weeks after Nancy’s article first appeared, he took the opportunity of an exchange concerning the retranslation into French (by Jean-Luc and Hélène Nancy) of a text of his first published in Italian in 1964, to convey to Nancy, as he put it, “how struck I was by your pages in Aléa which, at various points, seemed to me to be decisive, particularly since I encountered them while feeling impelled to draft a text on the theme of ‘Communism and Community’ in the wake of G.B. (I have just finished reading an [Italian] MS on G.B.’s politics in which precisely everything was said, save the essential.)” 26 At first sight, then, there was a large measure of agreement between Blanchot and Nancy. This perhaps explains why their two texts on “com-

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munity” are so often linked, sometimes even merged in the minds of readers, as though both belonged to a single, shared, common, or even communal intellectual project. On closer scrutiny, however, significant divergences immediately become apparent. True enough, Blanchot begins by rehearsing more or less faithfully Nancy’s two figures of immanence: on the one hand “the principle of a transparent humanity, produced essentially by itself alone,” as exemplified by the humanism of a Herder, as Nancy had already suggested, and, on the other, now typified by the solipsism of a Sade or Stirner, the domain of the imperious, autonomous individual “with his [sic] inalienable rights, refusal to have any origin other than himself, indifference to any theoretical dependence on another who might not likewise be an individual, just like himself, indefinitely repeated.” 27 But at this point Blanchot made a very different move, one that would guide and determine his response to Nancy’s analysis as a whole. He began by resisting the widely shared, easily defensible but nevertheless timeworn notion of the solidarity or symmetry between (State) communism and (liberal) individualism, an idea which already had the status of an unquestioned article of faith among right-wing nationalist or dissident leftist circles in the 1930s (which is why, in a characteristically elliptical gesture, La Communauté inavouable traces it back to such strange bedfellows as the reactionary Catholic thinker, Joseph de Maistre, and the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx). In so doing, Blanchot’s aim was to examine more closely the logic of sameness underpinning the alleged reciprocity between these two opposing doctrines. And his objection was that Nancy’s dual critique of individualism and collectivism as representing the two equally unsustainable sides of the same immanent coin (or coin of immanence) was itself reliant on a figure of immanence that found expression in that very reciprocity. This was no minor quibble. For in Blanchot’s view it was essential not only to reject the “immanentism” of communism and individualism alike, a proposition of Nancy’s he plainly endorsed, much as he had done in 1936, but also to dismantle the concept of self-identical immanence itself, together with everything it implied, not least the disturbing prospect of the third-way dialectical overcoming of the individualist-collectivist duopoly which would result in yet another tempting but dangerous figure of self-identical — immanentist — community. This delimitation of Nancy’s argument had far-reaching consequences. Already on the opening page of La Communauté inavouable Blanchot had queried his interlocutor’s confident recourse to the word “commun” as a gloss on what was at stake in the words “community” or “communism,” no doubt fearing that what it announced was again a questionable hypostatisation of the demand it sought to voice. 28 Moreover, once the concept of reciprocity was abandoned, the whole concept of community was itself forcibly placed under erasure. And this is indeed

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what happens to the term “community” in Blanchot’s reply. For “if the relation of human to human ceases to be that of the Same with the Same,” he argued, “but introduces the Other as irreducible and, in his or her equality, as always dissymmetrical with whomsoever is considering the Other, then an entirely different kind of relation imposes itself, and another form of society imposes itself too, which one would barely dare call ‘community.’ Or one may accept the idea of calling it that while asking oneself what is at stake in the thought of a community and whether, no matter if one existed or not, community does not always in the end posit the absence of community.” 29 To reinforce his point, Blanchot turned to a brief text by Bataille not cited by Nancy, first published in November 1946, and only recently reprinted by Alain Coulange in Contre toute attente, in October 1982, in which Bataille had insisted that “perfect unruliness (abandonment to the absence of boundaries) is the rule of an absence of community,” and that “nobody is at liberty not to belong to my absence of community.” 30 In returning to Bataille, Blanchot’s primary concern was not simply to trade quotations with Nancy, not least because quotation in general and in the case of Bataille in particular, as he had argued in 1962, was by its very nature always an act of infidelity. It was crucial, in other words, rather than mobilising this or that proposition forcibly taken out of context, to attempt to respect the inner turbulence of Bataille’s writing. But the principle had more general validity too, insofar as it clearly also applied to Blanchot’s own writing. For over the years the latter’s conceptual vocabulary had similarly shifted. Having persistently had recourse to the term “désœuvrement” in the 1950s and early 1960s — not however as a word for dialectical negativity, political resistance, or the rejection of aesthetic closure, but much rather as a thinking of the incompletion of being — Blanchot was increasingly drawn to replace it in such later books as L’Entretien infini and L’Amitié with the rather unusual expression: “absence de livre [i.e., literally: absence of book],” less easily hostage, perhaps, to the reversible logic by which, as in the case of the Jena Romantics, worklessness or unworking risked turning into its opposite, that is, into an unfinished work, both literary and political, resolutely dwelling in its own immanence. Notwithstanding its original occurrence in Bataille, then, the use of the phrase “absence of community” was also a deliberate, signature-like gesture on Blanchot’s part, and a proposed adjustment to Nancy’s reliance on the adjective “désœuvré(e)” (which the latter would continue to use well beyond the early 1980s). As such, it did not go unnoticed, and Nancy at times also adopted the phrase himself, now agreeing with Blanchot, albeit only in negative terms, that “the absence of community represents [ . . . ] that which does not complete community, or community itself in so far as it does not complete itself, and does not generate itself as a new individual.” “It is therefore not an absence,” Nancy went on, without any certainty that Blanchot might find

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this fresh paraphrase more satisfactory, “but a movement, unworking [désœuvrement] in its singular ‘activity,’ that is, the propagation, even contagion, or communication of community itself, propagating itself or communicating its contagion by its very interruption.” 31 Having explained from the outset why in principle he thought it impossible to be entirely satisfied with the concept of “communauté désœuvrée,” 32 Blanchot nevertheless took care in what followed to enumerate those several decisive points where he did find himself fully in agreement with Nancy. He concurred for instance that existence, in that it was limited by being born and dying, was incomplete, and that, as Bataille repeatedly insisted, it therefore necessarily implied “community,” and that all such “community” was “finite, in that it in turn has as its principle the finitude of the beings [la finitude des êtres] that compose it and who would not allow it (i.e., community) to forget to accentuate the finitude constitutive of them to an ever higher degree.” It ought therefore to be seen, Blanchot and Nancy agreed, as “the community of finite beings [des êtres finis] and, as such, itself as finite community, that is, not a limited community when compared with infinite or absolute community, but the community of finitude because finitude ‘is’ communal [communautaire] and because nothing other than finitude is communal.” 33 And where the pair were also in accord was in recognising in community the possibility and danger of pseudoreligious communion, on the model of eucharistic incorporation, as found in various closed or restricted groups, from Christian monks, writes Blanchot, to Hassidic revivalists or kibbutzim, or scientists to lovers, where community, he adds, “appears to offer itself as a tendency to communion, even fusion, i.e., as an effervescence that may be said to gather elements together only in order to produce some unity (or superindividual entity), open to the same objection as the simple consideration of a single individual locked in immanence.” 34 But where Blanchot and Nancy began to diverge again was when they each came to address the implications of that most ambivalent and problematic of Bataille’s communal enterprises in the second part of the 1930s, the secret society Acéphale. At issue here was not only the logic of sacrifice underlying political belief and religious ritual in general, but the even more fundamental question of death and dying as the cause and symptom of human finitude and, to that extent, as something like the possible or impossible foundation of all politics and all “community.” As far as this second issue was concerned, it is plain that Nancy and Blanchot were each quite explicitly in debt to Heidegger, even as both approached the latter’s thinking with caution. Indeed, for his part, as he later suggests, 35 Nancy initiated the project of thinking community partly in response to the challenges and deficiencies of Heideggerian Mitsein, an endeavour which left its imprint on much of the argument of “La Communauté désœuvrée,” a situation that was unlikely to have escaped the attention of a reader such as Blanchot similarly schooled in Heideggerian thinking.

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It was seen earlier how, in principle, if not in every particular, Nancy was keen to forge a degree of continuity or complementarity between Bataille’s thinking and that of Heidegger. This is particularly true of his treatment of the motif or theme of death. “If a human being sees a fellow human [son semblable] die, he or she can no longer subsist except outside themselves [hors de soi],” wrote Bataille, in a phrase cited and glossed by Nancy and Blanchot alike. 36 Of the two, Nancy’s reading was the one that cleaved the closer to Heidegger, though not in unqualified fashion. He began by recalling Heidegger’s influential thesis in Sein und Zeit that “the dying of Others is not something that we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just ‘there alongside.’” “By its very essence,” Heidegger maintained, “death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all.” 37 The implications here were significant. For what Heidegger’s analysis meant, Nancy observed, was that “the specular structure of the self recognising himself or herself in the other, which presupposed the other recognising them in the self, and thus the institution [l’instance] of the subject, was at the very least, dare I say, turned inside out like a glove [retourné comme un gant].” Consequently, “[w]hat I now recognise,” he added, “is that in the death of the other there is nothing recognisable.” 38 Beyond or before or otherwise than according to the subjective logic of specular reciprocity, Nancy explained, now reverting to the vocabulary used by Bataille, my fellow human [le semblable] “resembles” me in so far as I myself “resemble” him or her, that is, in that there is no original identity nor any origin, but in that the “origin” is the sharing [le partage] of singularities. Which means that the “origin” — and the “origin of community” or “originary community” — is nothing other than the end, i.e., the limit itself. The “origin” is the delineating of the borders along which singularities are exposed. We are fellow humans [des semblables] because we are each exposed [exposés] to the outside [au-dehors] that we are for “ourselves.” My fellow human [le semblable] is not the same as me [le pareil]. I do not refind myself nor recognise myself in the other: I experience (its) alterity or alteration which “in me” puts my singularity outside of myself, and finishes it infinitely. 39

Community, then, on Nancy’s submission, is a being-with or being-together in which, as Heidegger has it, each one of “us” is required to confront the otherness that, in the form of impossibility, i.e., our always imminent or impending death, inheres in our very own possibility as such. And it is only thus, in encountering our otherness to ourselves, by dint of the logic of partage which simultaneously disjoins and conjoins, that we forcibly also encounter the otherness to themselves of our fellow humans, who, in like fashion, are each bound by the same condition, i.e., the possibility of their own impossibility. Community, in other words, was neither a political nor a social imperative, but a founding structure of Dasein as such. As Nancy put it in a 1986 addition to the passage cited

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previously, “[c]ommunity is the singular ontological regime in which the other and the same are fellows [le semblable]: that is, the sharing of identity [le partage de l’identité].” 40 In what sense turning the logic of specularity inside out like a glove constituted a decisive departure from ontotheology or merely a further specular inversion of the logic of intersubjective reciprocity is not a question Nancy, even in his revised 1986 text, thought it necessary to address. But this perhaps explains why, rereading Nancy’s 1983 essay later that same year, notwithstanding his continuing willingness to endorse some of its key arguments, Blanchot remained in part unconvinced. His commentary in response to Bataille’s original proposition was in any event somewhat different from that of Nancy. He began by prefacing his remarks with the following passage, distinctly at odds with the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit. “What is it that questions me most radically?” he asked, voicing in his own terms the question raised by Heidegger as to Dasein’s defining limit, a question that for Blanchot could not even be a question without what Bataille called the “principle of insufficiency,” according to which no existence could ever be thought or considered alone, without the always prior implication of others. And Blanchot answered: Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being towards death or for death [être à la mort ou pour la mort: Blanchot’s translation of Heideggerian Sein zum Tode], but my presence towards the other [autrui: Blanchot, as earlier, uses the oblique impersonal pronoun similarly preferred by Levinas], in so far as this other absents himself or herself [s’absente] in dying. To keep myself present in proximity to the other [autrui] who in dying definitively withdraws [s’éloigne: literally: grows distant], to take upon myself the death of the other [la mort d’autrui] as the only death which concerns me, this is what puts me outside myself [hors de moi] and is the only separation that can open me, in its impossibility, to the Open [l’Ouvert] of a community. 41

Blanchot and Nancy agreed, then, that it was in the experience without experience of death or dying that “community,” or whatever such a word might be thought to name or misname, was disclosed. Both in other words acknowledged the importance of Heidegger’s celebrated thesis to the effect that “death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein [die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit].” 42 But despite having long achieved proverbial status, Heidegger’s argument remained tantalisingly uncertain. For how can an impossibility be possible and a possibility impossible? In what way might the inappropriability of dying be appropriated by Dasein, and the impropriety of the end somehow made proper? In its very formulation, as Derrida and others have argued, Heidegger’s thesis itself marks a limit. “As such,” insofar as it can be subordinated to the self-identity of the expression “as such” “as such,” it testifies to an aporetic impasse which cannot be overcome, dis-

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missed, or explained away, since to do so would be to assume an exit from what patently admits of none. This is not to say the implications of Heidegger’s formula might not be diversely interpreted. As Derrida suggests in Apories (Aporias), much, not to say everything, hinges on its syntax: is the possible governed, so to speak, by the impossible, or the impossible by the possible? As Derrida then added, with knowingly deceptive simplicity, in the course of a brief but telling summary of the yawning gap between Heidegger and Blanchot, “it is only [seulement] a matter of knowing in what sense (in the sense of direction and route) the expression: ‘possibility of impossibility’ is read.” 43 As far as Blanchot was concerned, it was plainly the impossible that, by virtue of its invincible weakness, took precedence — precedence without precedence — over its dependent other, which it conditioned, traversed, and delimited, as poverty does riches, finitude the infinite, or the neuter negativity. Not for nothing, then, did Blanchot begin his discussion of “community” by asking how matters stood with “this possibility that is always implicated in one way or another in its own impossibility,” and not for nothing did he point immediately after to the inescapable paradox of Bataille’s reference to “my absence of community” in order to ask “how might the absence of community remain mine, unless it be ‘mine,’ as my death would insist on being, which can but ruin any belonging to anybody, as well as the possibility of an appropriation always mine?” 44 Already in L’Écriture du désastre three years before, Blanchot had dramatised how Heidegger’s “possibility of impossibility,” insofar as it named what could never occur “as such,” necessarily inverted itself into what, borrowing the phrase from Levinas, he now called “the impossibility of all possibility.” 45 What this meant was that possibility, in the guise of death in Hegel or in Heidegger, in order to affirm itself as what it was, i.e., as power or mastery or as the truth of existence, could do so only insofar as it put death to work or subordinated it to the true, and overcame its inappropriable impossibility — which was also to say, paradoxically, and contrary to expectation, that possibility, under the auspices of the dialectic or as the guiding feature of the analytic of Dasein, always came second, was always already interrupted by the impossibility that preceded it and which it sought in vain to harness to the projects it declared its own. For Blanchot, who argues as much on virtually every page of his book, not only apropos death and dying, but also in respect of community, selfhood, inner experience, reading, love, and much else besides, it was therefore not in sharing the possibility of impossibility that sharing consisted, but in sharing — impossibly — the impossibility that preceded, exceeded, and thereby set aside and interrupted all possibility “as such.” Returning, then, to Bataille’s words at the heart of the exchange with Nancy, Blanchot now prolonged or glossed them by adding: “The silent conversation [l’entretien muet] which, holding the hand of ‘the other who

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is dying [autrui qui meurt],’ ‘I’ thereby pursue with them, I do not pursue simply to help them die but in order to share [partager: Blanchot’s pointed emphasis] the solitude of the event which seems to be their most proper possibility [sa possibilité la plus propre] and unshareable possession [possession impartageable] in so far as it dispossesses them absolutely.” Claiming a share without share in Nancy’s logic of sharing, Blanchot gave to what it sought to name an entirely different inflection. For what is shared in the other’s dying, according to Blanchot, is the impossibility of any share in that inappropriable experience without experience, with the effect that both self and Other in that relation without relation are forcibly expropriated of what Nancy, rather oddly, was earlier still willing to call “identity.” And if “community” for Blanchot is therefore the sharing of what cannot be shared, it follows that what is said between the one and the other as the other dies cannot be put into words. What holds between them, in their singularity and their multiplicity — their “entretien” — can only be silent, wordless, and mute, not because it is prior to language or beyond language, but because it is the secret without secret inherent in all speaking as the groundless ground on which all utterance is founded — and founders. If Blanchot, then, took his lead from the impossibility of all possibility, Nancy for his part chose to follow a rather different tack. Commenting on Heidegger’s proposition in his turn, he insisted in Être singulier pluriel in 1996 that “the relation with proper death,” otherwise than was claimed in Sein und Zeit, necessarily implied the so-called equiprimordiality of “being-with.” And Nancy went on: If being-with is indeed co-essential to being in general [l’être tout court], or rather within being itself [dans l’être lui-même], then the most proper possibility is co-essentially a possibility of the “with” and as “with” [de l’avec et comme avec]. My death is a co‑possibility — “the most proper” — of the proper possibility of other existences [existants]. It is, it “will be” my death in their words saying “he [sic] is dead”: in this way, it is, will be, nowhere else. It is “my” possibility in so far as the possibility of that which is “mine” withdraws into it: that is to say, in so far as this “mineness” is handed on [remise] to the singular plural of alwaysother-mineness [la mienneté-toujours-autre]. 46

In lines such as these, as elsewhere in his work, Nancy subjects the terms and the logic of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein to a number of significant deconstructive displacements. But even as the proper possibility of my dying ceases to be appropriable by me alone, and its standalone possibility, so to speak, eclipsed by the co-possibility of “being-with,” it is nevertheless apparent throughout Nancy’s rethinking of Heidegger that the horizon of ultimate possibility — Nancy will in time call it “world” — is insistently maintained. All the more striking therefore is the fact that Nancy precedes this analysis with a brief quotation from Blanchot’s

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1947–1948 essay “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” which reads as follows: “Death speaks in me. The fact that I speak gives notice that death, at this very moment, is let loose in the world, that between me who am speaking and the person [l’être] I am addressing, death is suddenly there: it is between us as the distance that separates us, even as that distance is what prevents us from being separated too, since it is the condition for all mutual understanding [entente].” 47 At issue here, then, for Blanchot in 1948 and for Nancy nearly half a century later, was the need, which both recognised, to provide the separation between existences caused by Heideggerian mineness (Jemeinigkeit) with a possibility of communication, sharing, or “community,” and thereby to uncover within the impossibility of relation the possibility of relation under the auspices of “relation without relation.” The concern, as we shall see, is one that recurs constantly in Blanchot’s critical writing from the mid1940s onwards. Nancy’s reasons for quoting Blanchot at this stage in his argument are in this sense clear enough. It is because both share an overriding concern, which is to think the “mineness” of dying simultaneously, so to speak, with Mitsein or being-with (even if the term does not appear as such in the extract from Blanchot). But as readers will recall, Blanchot’s main emphasis in “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” notwithstanding the reference to Hegel and to Heidegger, was not on death as possibility — the possibility of language, communication, and “community” — but, following Levinas, on its radical impossibility. “So long as I am alive,” Blanchot explained, “I am a mortal human, but, when I die, ceasing to be human, I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and the death that is announced horrifies me, because I see it for what it is, no longer death, but an impossibility of dying.” 48 It did not therefore take the writer long, as he burrowed further into Heidegger’s aporetic “possibility of impossibility,” again to find it reverse itself, and make it therefore necessary to delimit, punctuate, or even overturn its reliance on the horizon of worldly possibility. And the implications were not solely philosophical. For those limits of possibility and the interruption of worldliness they implied also had much to do with Blanchot’s thinking of literature, as witnessed by his reading of Kafka’s story fragment “Der Jäger Gracchus [The Hunter Gracchus],” with its tale of a man travelling “from town to town, borne on rivers, recognised by some, helped by none, with the error of ancient death sniggering at his bedside,” who finds himself in the “strange condition” of having “forgotten to die” 49 —which is also why, for the artist Kafka wanted to be, Blanchot writes, “all that exists is the outside, the streaming of the timeless outside [le ruissellement du dehors éternel],” 50 or likewise the memory of Lazarus, similarly omitting to be raised from the dead, and lingering on the threshold of death’s possibility as a sign of its recalcitrant impossibility.

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After quoting “La Littérature et le droit à la mort” in Être singulier pluriel, Nancy does not however follow Blanchot’s argument any further, at least not in so many words. He agrees admittedly that death’s “negativity” is necessarily limited, and that “the negative itself, in order to be the negative (to be nihil negativum and not only nihil privativum), must subtract itself from its own operation, and be affirmed for itself, without remainder — or, on the contrary, be affirmed as the absolute remainder, that nothing can capture within a concatenation of procedure or operation (which is the critical, suspended, inoperative point at the heart of the dialectic).” 51 As the dialectic falters or fails, or, more accurately, is interrupted by its auto-immune self-resistance, it gives way, as the passage from Blanchot was used to demonstrate, to what Nancy calls “the ‘with,’” “neither a foundation nor an absence of foundation,” he writes, but — “nothing other than being-with, the incorporeal with of bodily-being [l’être-corps] as such. Before being speech, words, sentences and signification, this is what ‘language’ is: the extension and simultaneity of the ‘with’ in so far as it is the most proper potency [la plus propre puissance] of a body, its property of touching another body (or touching itself) which is nothing other than its bodily de‑finition. It finishes — both comes to an end and completes itself, in the same gesture — where it is-with.” 52 Here, then, despite the courtesy extended by each thinker towards his partner in dialogue, are nevertheless the tell-tale signs of an irreconcilable difference. On the one side, impossibility, on the other, potency; on the one side, separation, on the other, touch; on the one side, dissymmetry, on the other, proximity; on the one side, decaying flesh, on the other, its resurrection; on the one side, something other than negativity, on the other, the negative as its very own remainder. This would not of course be the first time, nor indeed the last, in which the singularity of an idiom found expression in the generality of a thesis, or the generality of a thesis clothe itself in the singularity of an idiom. But as far as Blanchot and Nancy were concerned, a reader might ask, how then to choose — between the one and the other, between two equally dissident versions of “community,” each premised on a rejection of communion, but each mobilising a divergent, incommensurable logic of sharing, each testifying as it did so to the irreducibility of a signature? II THE ABSURDITY OF SACRIFICE Crucially at stake in the exchange about community, as we have already seen, was Blanchot’s and Nancy’s understanding of the implications of Bataille’s experience of politics in the 1930s, and it was here that the most

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revealing of the divergences between the two became manifest. But before exploring his disagreements with Nancy any further, it is noticeable that Blanchot first drew back in order to endorse, with the help of no fewer than four separate quotations, Nancy’s emphatic rejection of all conception of community based on the organic immanence of any “work” or “œuvre.” 53 This admittedly negative reconciliation, reflecting primarily what both rejected, did not however prove longlasting. Only two pages later, as he returned to the second part of the passage from Bataille first quoted in “La Communauté désœuvrée,” Blanchot took the opportunity to clarify a further divergence, one that not only sent him in an opposite direction to Nancy but also led him to question, albeit discreetly, the letter of Bataille’s argument. The necessity of doing so had clearly been explained earlier in the essay, as it was in Blanchot’s reflections from 1962 on how best to write about Bataille, or in that March 1983 letter to Nancy mentioned earlier. “One ought not to lose sight of the fact,” he reminded his readers, “that it is impossible to be faithful to such thinking [as Bataille’s] unless account is taken of his own infidelity to himself, that necessary mutation which obliged him, while always remaining himself, not to cease being other and developing other exigencies that, in response either to historical changes or to the exhaustion of such experiments as refuse to be repeated, disdained all unification.” 54 True enough, Blanchot’s scruples have not always been adequately recognised, and he has often been taken to task for his principled infidelity to aspects of Bataille’s discourse. 55 He maintained, however, that Bataille’s thinking was not reducible to a list of fixed, hypostatised concepts. “Sovereignty” was one such example, deduced by Bataille from his reading of Hegel, and deployed as a key element in his withering critique of 1930s Soviet-style communism. “Bataille,” Nancy observed, now seeking to enlist the writer’s support for his own critique of “immanentism,” “first went through the difficult experience of communism ‘betrayed.’ He later discovered it was not a matter of reversing the betrayal, but that communism, having identified man as its end, i.e., the production of man and man as producer, was bound from the outset to a negation of man’s sovereignty, that is, to a negation of that which, in man, is irreducible to the immanence of ‘man,’ and to a negation of the sovereign excess of finitude.” 56 But while Nancy in 1983 was content to let the argument rest at this point, all the better to diagnose later what he saw as Bataille’s failings, Blanchot was less willing to turn the page. For Nancy, Bataille’s recourse to the concept of sovereignty, notably its appeal to “self-presence” and to the much promised but — on Nancy’s part — much resisted “fusion” between subject and object, was clear evidence of the limitations of at least one version of Bataille’s thinking, and of the paradoxical, not to say self-contradictory status, as he put it, of a “thinking irresistibly attracted to community, and yet governed by the theme of the sovereignty of a subject.” 57 Blanchot for his part was less

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convinced, not because of any residual or overriding attachment to the notion of fusional communion (as Nancy will later claim), but because community in Bataille, in Blanchot’s view, though it may be couched in the heroic or exalted language of sovereignty, was in fact radically incompatible with any thought of communion. “Mortal substitution,” Blanchot insisted, borrowing the expression from Levinas, “is what replaces communion.” 58 And if Bataille’s own words failed to acknowledge as much, as Blanchot conceded, the fault lay not with the logic of Bataille’s thinking or experience, but rather with the unavoidable connotations of such words as “grandeur” or “loftiness,” the perverse implications of which Blanchot had occasion to see firsthand in the late 1950s once they became associated with the providential “sovereignty” of de Gaulle, a figure “in whom all ‘were embodied’ as one,” and which it was therefore imperative to reject (“one might prefer,” Blanchot notes, discreetly but firmly, “to set aside certain of these terms in their connotation”). 59 “Community,” Blanchot insisted, leaving it unclear whether he was now addressing Bataille’s thinking as such or setting forth his revised interpretation of it (or even whether that distinction itself, as far as he was concerned, was little more than an academic nicety), “is not the place of Sovereignty. It is what exposes by dint of exposing itself.” Community, he went on, now paraphrasing or supplementing another fragment from Le Pas au-delà, which already ten years earlier had answered on his behalf, “includes,” he wrote, “the exteriority of being which excludes it.” “An exteriority,” he explained, which thought does not master even by giving it diverse names: death, the relation to the other [la relation à autrui] or else speaking [la parole] provided it is not folded back into ways of speaking and therefore does not allow any relation (whether of identity or alterity) with itself. Community, in so far as it governs for each of us, for my sake and its sake, an outside-of-self (its absence) which is its calling, gives rise to a speaking without sharing [sans partage] but which is necessarily multiple, such that it is incapable of developing into words or more words [en paroles]: always already lost, useless [sans usage] and workless [sans œuvre] and in no way glorying in that very loss. Thus the gift of speech, a gift “purely” without profit [don en “pure” perte] that can in no way guarantee the certainty of ever being welcomed by the other, although the other alone makes if not speech possible, then at least the supplication to speak, which carries with it the risk of being rebuffed or left wandering [égarée] or ignored [non reçue]. 60

The implication was clear enough. Community for Blanchot was nothing substantive nor fusional, nothing intersubjective nor ontological. Insofar as its strange topography of inclusion and exclusion corresponded to anything, it was to a giving of speech grounded not in itself but in the dying of the other or the otherness of dying, prior to whatever might be said by anyone or by any other or even to what or to whom, and there-

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fore bereft of all determination, direction, or address, and premised on the sharing of what necessarily preceded or exceeded all sharing. Community, then, as far as Blanchot was concerned, remained suspended on an unfulfilled promise, inseparable both from a hope and from a fear: its inclusion, in other words, of what always already excluded it. Perhaps most symptomatic of all of the fundamental differences between Blanchot and Nancy in response to Bataille was their differing assessment of the project of Acéphale. Here, too, rival accounts of Bataille’s legacy were in contention. For Nancy, there was little doubt that Acéphale was not only in itself a ludicrous enterprise, but also one bound to culminate in deathly, not to say deadly immanence. This was why, on Nancy’s reading, it marked a crucial turning point or, more accurately, a definitive blind alley in Bataille’s thinking of community, from which the latter would continue to recoil in the years that followed. Blanchot for his part, while acknowledging the continuing importance of the experience of Acéphale for the Bataille he had known personally, in the first instance largely concurred. Already in 1962, while considering the relationship between negation and affirmation in Bataille’s thinking, he had himself made a broadly similar point to Nancy. He knew of course that Bataille’s longstanding fascination with Kojève’s anthropological reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology hinged on the ultimate fate of that negativity which, for Kojève’s Hegel, was the fundamental driving force behind all human labour, culture, and society. But at the end of history, which is to say always already now, that negativity, as Bataille famously insisted, was destined to become workless or unemployed (i.e., “sans emploi”), and mutate into the chance or necessity of inner experience as “the way in which,” Blanchot puts it, “the radical negation that has nothing left to negate is affirmed.” 61 But before that end, negativity had much work to do. If humanity’s first step, according to Kojève’s anthropocentric, teleological scenario, was to constitute itself by negating the immanence of nature (where “every animal,” says Bataille, “is in the world like water within water”) 62 and thus create the human world’s first tools or utensils, so its second step, according to Bataille, was for it to negate in turn, now for the second time, the functional imperatives of that newly instituted cultural order, thus ushering in the realm of the sacred in opposition to its profane counterpart. The sacred in this sense, then, was less an affirmation of excess or expenditure than the negation of a negation. But what then of inner experience? asked Blanchot. Was the affirmation it offered similarly a product of negativity and likewise a negation of a negation? True, Blanchot observed, inner experience “affirms nothing, reveals nothing, communicates nothing, such that one could make do with saying that it is the communication of nothing or the incompletion of the whole grasped in a feeling of plenitude.” But this, he added, would amount to arresting negativity’s toiling movement and “substantialising the nothing.” There was

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however an alternative. Inner experience might be seen instead, or as well, “as a last dialectical reversal, the last rung — but off any ladder! — standing on which man, this head expansive enough to accommodate the universe, can send the whole edifice plunging into darkness and, by abolishing that universal head, receive from ultimate negation a further glimmer of light, a supplementary affirmation, one that would add to the whole the truth of the sacrifice of the whole.” 63 There was, however, a serious drawback in the case of both answers. Blanchot illustrated this by citing the example of Acéphale. “The fact was,” he pointed out, “this act of supreme negation, [ . . . ] which in the eyes of Bataille the experiment of Acéphale no doubt represented for some time, still belongs to the possible. That is what power can do, power which is capable of everything, even abolish itself as power. [ . . . ] But an act of this kind would never make us take the decisive step which returns us — albeit in a sense without us — to the surprise of impossibility by allowing us to belong to the non-power which is not merely the negation of power [ce non-pouvoir qui n’est pas seulement la négation du pouvoir].” “Limit-experience,” he added, “represents for thinking something like a fresh origin. What it gives it is the essential gift, the prodigality of affirmation, an affirmation which, for the first time, is not a product (or the result of a double negation) and which thereby escapes all the movements, oppositions, and reversals of dialectical reason, which having already reached completion, can no longer reserve it a role within its domain.” 64 At this stage, the extent of the agreement and disagreement between Blanchot and Nancy on the subject of Acéphale seems clear. Insofar as Acéphale, absurdity apart, by dint of its logic of headless, double negation, represented an exercise in extreme dialectical power, in theory due to culminate in an act of human sacrifice, then Nancy was entirely right. Not for nothing did he remind his readers in passing that, in his view, whatever others might claim, “the ‘Hegelianism without reserves’ [sic] that Derrida analyses in Bataille is forcibly subject, in the end, to the Hegelian law of a reserve always more powerful than any abandonment of that reserve, i.e., the sublation of the Subject [la relève du Sujet] which reappropriates itself in its own presence — that is its enjoyment and its instant — to the point of sovereignty, to the point of NOTHING, to the point of community.” 65 But this, Blanchot insisted, was not all. Notwithstanding the fact that Acéphale, as he duly agreed, was “absurd,” there was an excess that no longer fell subject to the Hegelian (or Kojèvian) dialectic. Whereas in 1962, as we have seen, Blanchot associated this other, no longer dialectical affirmation with what Bataille called inner experience, in 1983 he now argued in favour of its necessary implication in the activities or, better, non-activities of Acéphale too. For Bataille’s paradoxical pseudoreligion not only negated nature’s immanence in order to impose itself as a cultu-

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ral project or work; it not only further negated its status as an instantiation of culture in order to stage itself as sacred, sacrificial ritual; it also then put both negations at a distance, setting them aside, interrupting and suspending them, even as it interrupted and suspended itself, now bearing silent witness, so to speak, to the death on which (as Nancy agreed) the movement of the dialectic necessarily relied even as its hidden freight — the impossibility of dying — was always already beyond its power and irreducible to all negation as such. “In other words,” Blanchot put it, “community, in doing its own organising and assuming as a project the execution of sacrificial death, may be said to have renounced its renouncing of any work [son renoncement à faire œuvre], be it a work of death or a simulation of death. The impossibility of death in its most naked possibility (the blade for slitting the victim’s throat severing in that same movement the head of the ‘executioner’) suspended [suspendait] till the end of time the illicit action in which the exaltation of the most passive of passivities might have been affirmed.” 66 Elsewhere in Blanchot’s writing, this always supplementary, always inassimilable suspensive moment without moment is often given the name without name of the “neuter,” which, pace Nancy’s later argument to the contrary, advanced apropos Blanchot’s account of May 1968 and alleging, on Blanchot’s part, a “romantico-idealist” conception of the “truth of community in general,” is anything but synonymous with dialectical double negation. 67 This is not to say its philosophical significance was negligible. On the contrary, as Blanchot argues in L’Entretien infini, the neuter is precisely what simultaneously enables and disables all identification of the thing called literature. 68 Which explains, no doubt, why much of the continuing disagreement between Nancy and Blanchot would turn on the question of the relation between literature or writing on the one hand and on the other the insistent demand of a question that once called itself “community,” and which in Nancy, if far less so — for essential reasons — in Blanchot, was still in search of a possible or impossible name, in the belief, perhaps, that one existed or might yet be found. III THE SPACING OF LITERATURE Following its various prewar reverses, Bataille’s quest for community, according to Nancy, found further, albeit provisional expression after the war in two importantly emblematic figures, that of the sovereign artist and the sovereign heterosexual couple. Both, however, in Nancy’s view, fell far short of what they appeared to promise. First of all, this was because each, according to Nancy’s rather stereotypical view, marked a

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retreat from the public exigencies of community into some supposedly more isolated, private realm, which Nancy takes Bataille himself to have quietly acknowledged, insofar as it would explain, admittedly without much in the way of concrete evidence, why he chose to abandon such lengthy manuscripts as “La Souveraineté” or Théorie de la religion (Theory of Religion) and leave them unpublished. But, second, Nancy maintained, it was also because both figures of sovereignty promoted by Bataille were reliant on a concept of sovereignty still rooted in a metaphysics of the Subject, which left them dangerously liable to lapse into a further round of fusional nostalgia. “The historical limit and the theoretical limit,” ran Nancy’s peremptory judgement, “are intricately connected. It is not surprising that at the limit the only response in the end to the obsession with communion [la hantise communielle] — and tragically so — lay in the accursed isolation of lovers and of the artist.” 69 “Bataille’s lovers,” he went on, remembering a notorious passage from L’Érotisme where male and female partners in the heterosexual encounter were described as the sacrificer and the sacrificed victim respectively, “are also, at the limit, a subject and an object — where the subject is always male, and the object always female, in an arguably highly classic rerouting of sexual difference as an appropriation of self by self.” 70 Nancy’s criticism of Bataille’s often seemingly crude, normative phallocentrism, an abiding legacy, among others, of a traditional pornographic imaginary and an uncritical reliance on the anthropocentrism (and androcentrism) of Kojève’s Hegel, is aptly made, and it is hard to disagree. And there is little doubt that Bataille’s old-fashioned sexism helps to explain the unrestrained enthusiasm for his work on the part of at least some of his male readers. But at the same time, Nancy asked, conceding the point to Derrida, 71 was there not something in Bataille’s writing or écriture, as opposed to his thematics, that resisted the tenacious metaphysical assumptions that threatened his discourse? In 1983 Nancy raised the question, only then to leave it hanging, with a view to returning to it in more detail later, which he did however only in quite general terms. 72 Blanchot for his part, however, did not hesitate. Turning his attention to one of Bataille’s most singular pseudonymous or, more accurately, heteronymous literary texts, not mentioned by Nancy (who does however cite Bataille’s subsequent signed preface), and acutely aware of the deep-seated solidarity between the logic of sacrifice and the speculative dialectic of destruction and idealisation, Blanchot went on to insist that “[s]acrifice traverses Madame Edwarda, yet does not find expression in it.” 73 This was to apply to Madame Edwarda an argument similar to the one he had deployed with regard to Acéphale some pages earlier. Just as importantly, though, it was also to prolong Nancy’s question by answering it in the affirmative. Admittedly, Blanchot did not explicitly address Nancy’s strictures, but this is not to say he necessarily endorsed Bataille’s appeal to androcentric stereotype either. Indeed, the evidence of Blan-

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chot’s own fiction is quite the opposite, 74 and his clear if discreet reservations regarding the connotations of the word “sovereignty” in Bataille are themselves adequate proof of a willingness to challenge wherever necessary the terms of the latter’s discourse, to which he had long argued that Bataille’s writing was, in any case, not reducible. At first sight, there is nevertheless much in the three-part structure of Bataille’s 1941 narrative that may be thought to illustrate a dialectic of sacrifice. The story begins with its male narrator-protagonist wandering at dusk through the red-light district of Paris, mindful no doubt that the rue Saint-Denis, like the nearby suburb of the same name (whose inhabitants are still known as Dionysians), owes its name to a decapitated thirdcentury Christian martyr who is memorably depicted on the Portal of the Virgin on the west façade of Notre Dame Cathedral holding his severed head in his hands. Having removed his trousers and grasping not his head but his virile member (nudity, it will be remembered, resembles the state of nature only insofar as it effects its double negation), the narrator puts his trousers back on and proceeds to the nearest brothel, where, filled with ideas of infamy, he encounters the imperious but alluring figure of the eponymous Edwarda who forcibly displays her gaping “bits [guenilles],” boldly asserting, “Do you see, I am GOD . . . ,” and ordering him to kiss her intimate parts in a diabolically literal parody of the Last Supper. 75 The two dimensions of the sacred, the sublime and the abject, the divine and the bestial, join together, then, in a frenzied movement of hyperbolic intensification. Money changes hands, and the pair withdraw upstairs. “Madame Edwarda led the way . . . amidst the clouds,” the story tells the reader, and continues in a similarly ceremonial vein. “The reception room’s tumultuous indifference to her happiness, to the measured gravity of her steps,” Bataille writes, “was regal consecration and garlanded festivity: death itself was at the party too, in that the nudity of the brothel calls for the butcher’s knife.” 76 A lengthy ellipsis follows, which concludes with “the animal image of a coupling” reflected in the multitude of mirrors adorning the walls and ceiling. Edwarda puts on an eye-mask or loup (literally, a wolf mask), once more confirming that the sacred for Bataille is in the form of a negation of the negation of humanity’s animal provenance. But the sacrificial scene staged so far comes to an abrupt end. The pair escape into the dark night beneath “a starry sky, empty and mad,” accentuating the fact that, contrary to appearances, nothing here, pace Nancy, is at all private or in the end reducible to the immanent self-identity or fusional communion of sexed bodies captured in “the infinity of [their] reflections,” as the story put it a moment earlier. Edwarda at this point is of course anything but a compliant sacrificial victim subject to the appropriative designs of her distraught client. She runs off alone, a silent witness to her own absence from herself, and waits beneath the arch of the porte Saint-Denis, this mythic gateway to the

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chthonic underworld. “The change,” notes Bataille, “had taken place as though in a slippage.” Still in the guise of GOD, Edwarda violently harangues the narrator and goes into a deathly trance. What then occurs, intractable and unspeakable, is something resembling an encounter with the inaccessible imminence of another’s dying: The disorder of [Edwarda’s] movements had denuded her down to her bush: her nudity, now, had the absence of meaning and at the same time the excess of meaning of a shroud [d’un vêtement de morte]. The strangest part — and the most anguishing — was the silence in which Madame Edwarda remained enclosed: of her suffering there was no longer any communication possible and I was absorbed into this absence of issue — this night of the heart which was neither less deserted nor less hostile than the empty heavens. The fish-like twitching of her body, the ignoble rage expressed by her evil face, burnt my life to a cinder and shattered it to the point of disgust.

“There is no irony involved,” declares the narrator in a parenthesis, “when I say of Madame Edwarda that she is GOD.” “But that GOD should be a harlot in a whorehouse,” he adds, slyly reversing Paul’s words to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6: 15), “and a madwoman, too, makes no reasonable sense.” “Only that person will understand me,” he goes on, “whose heart is wounded with an incurable wound, such that no-one wanted to be cured of it . . . ; and what man, wounded, would agree to ‘die’ of any other wound?” 77 Bataille’s story might have ended here, at the end of its second phase or movement. But it carries on. The deathly extremity to which Edwarda is exposed proves contagious. “Faced with such impenetrable silence,” says the narrator, “my despair took a jolt; Edwarda’s contorsions wrenched me from myself and threw me into a dark beyond, pitilessly, like a condemned man being delivered to the executioner.” 78 By now, it is plain that sacrifice in Bataille’s story, as these words suggest, is no calculated, magisterial destruction of an object, actual or symbolic, in the name of some superior cause or in return for some idealised gain. It is a “vertiginous slippage,” the narrator calls it, an irremediable exposure to the impossibility of dying, an experience without experience that by dint of its radical inaccessibility is simultaneously shared yet not shared by Bataille’s two protagonists, each of whom, after their scene of congress, is returned to a kind of desperate solitude, the narrator to “indifference,” Edwarda to naked desire. And as to the reader’s surprise the narrative starts up again, this time too it leads not to fusional communion, but to another set of unexpected transformations affecting the story’s odd final threesome, with its serendipitous chauffeur being forcibly seduced in his own taxi by the prostitute Edwarda, its narratorclient now attending in the guise of ministering helpmate to the very one whose favours he had purchased shortly before, not forgetting Edwarda

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herself now outdoing both male companions with a flood of gushing female ejaculate. A male fantasy perhaps, but if what lingers at the end, outlasting any end, is “irony, the long wait for death,” as the narrator finally puts it, then, it seems clear that this is irony without authority, knowledge, or mastery — irony, then, beyond the reach of any dialectic. Bataille’s story, it seemingly follows, far exceeds its bare sacrificial premise. It raises neither mausoleum nor memorial, promotes no transcendent ideal, produces no tangible result. It is admittedly itself a literary work of sorts, albeit one that, by forestalling its own reading and problematising its own framing, constantly undermines its interpretability, leaving commentators with little option than to cite or recite Bataille’s text in their turn: ad nauseam and without end. 79 It was this strangely aporetic logic that Blanchot no doubt had in mind when in 1983 he recalled his initial reaction to the story some forty or so years earlier. “I was,” he writes, “most likely one of the first to read it and to be immediately convinced (overwhelmed and reduced to silence) by the singularity of such a work (only a few pages), beyond all literature, and such that it could but refuse all commentary.” “It was,” he added, “one of the worst periods in the Occupation. That slim volume — the most minimal of books, published under a false name and meant only for a select few — was fated, clandestine that it was, to be swallowed up in the likely ruin of each one of us (author, reader).” 80 So if Blanchot responded with alarm at Bataille’s suggestion he might write a sequel, it was not because he believed Madame Edwarda to be an admirably finished aesthetic object, as some have suggested, but quite the opposite, i.e., that adding a sequel ran the risk of giving it the appearance of one. For what was crucial above all for Blanchot was the extent to which what a few pages later, using the term in a different sense to Levinas, he called the “unqualifiable Saying [le Dire inqualifiable]” of a “narrating voice [voix narrative],” 81 which he addresses elsewhere in relation to the Kafka of Das Schloss or the Duras of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, 82 and on occasion would also call writing, speech, the neuter, the fragmentary, even “literature,” insofar as it was neither transcendent nor immanent, was radically irreducible to the thing or object called literature. Writing in this sense, Blanchot explained in La Communauté inavouable, was itself radically inseparable from what Bataille also called community. This was why what was at stake in Acéphale, once the group was no longer, “demanded,” according to Blanchot, “to be resumed in the paradoxical form of a book,” one that would later turn into L’Expérience intérieure. Here too the justification was anything but aesthetic. “In a certain way,” Blanchot argued, “the instability of the illumination, even before being transmitted, needed to be exposed to others, not so as to reach in them a certain objective reality (which would have immediately denatured it), but so as to be reflected in them by being shared and by allowing itself to be contested (that is, enounced otherwise, not to say de-

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nounced, in accord with the challenge it contained).” 83 There was in Bataille, he observed, “a desperate movement to refute in sovereign manner sovereignty itself (always tainted by the rhetoric spoken or lived by a single person in whom all are ‘embodied’) and by way of impossible community (community with the impossible) to grasp the chance of major communication ‘bound to the suspension of what is nevertheless the basis of communication.’” What remained absolutely crucial for Blanchot — as Madame Edwarda testified and as L’Arrêt de mort would later confirm — was that what Bataille called “the basis of communication,” as Blanchot glossed it, “is not necessarily speech, nor even the silence that is its ground and punctuation, but the exposure to death, no longer of myself, but of another, whose nearest living presence is already unbearable, timeless absence, which no work of mourning ever diminishes.” 84 This, then, was the alternative account of Bataille’s writing that Blanchot bequeathed to Nancy in 1983. It was of course far from surprising that when Nancy responded three years later, as he would continue to do for several years to come, he did so in his own way. His oblique reply to Blanchot came initially in a brief, ambiguous yet symptomatic postscript appended to the reworked version of his 1983 article when it reappeared in his 1986 book. Noting Blanchot’s reluctance to endorse the appeal to what “may be common to those who claim to belong to some whole or some group,” he made the point that what “in principle” was however “common,” in his view, “to the members of a community,” was “a myth or set of myths.” 85 To a degree this was to acknowledge the pertinence of Blanchot’s disquiet. But by proposing a detour through myth, it was also to reaffirm, contrariwise, that which in “community,” according to Nancy, continued to mark its “resistance and insistance,” in other words, its incompatibility with mythic identification. And it was this strong conviction that prompted him to invoke in closing “all those who neither write nor read, and those who have nothing in common” — to which he then added, in what was plainly an implicit rebuff addressed to Blanchot: “For, in reality, nobody is like that.” 86 Which was also to claim, in a covert, dialectical pirouette, that Blanchot’s thinking too, according to Nancy, blinded to itself perhaps, was somehow not to be divorced from its own myth. Nancy’s next move, in the essay that followed, under the title “Le Mythe interrompu [Myth Interrupted],” was in this regard nothing if not surprising. For Nancy in turn now launched into the retelling of a myth. This was not just any myth, he explained, but “the essential scene of all scenes,” the recapitulation of a scene of origins or the Origin, inseparable as such from all scenes in general, the purpose or effect of which was to allow a “community,” whoever or whatever that might be, to identify itself with itself and as itself by way of a myth that would therefore supply an appropriately persuasive founding fiction or fictional foundation. Myth, on this account, following Schelling’s famous distinction, bor-

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rowed or adapted from Coleridge, to which Nancy refers several times, was not allegorical, i.e., dependent on communicating to its audience values or beliefs or knowledge other than itself, but tautegorical, that is, it drew its power from its performative status as myth perpetually restating itself as itself according to an abyssal logic of infinite regress. What this meant, Nancy commented, was that [myth] says nothing other than itself, and is produced in consciousness by the same process as that which, in nature, produces the forces that myth puts on stage. There is as a result no need to interpret it, since it is self-explanatory: what Schelling calls “die sich selbst erklärende Mythologie” itself, by definition, explains or interprets itself. Myth is nature communicating itself to man, both immediately — because it communicates itself — and mediately — because it communicates (i.e., speaks). To sum up, it is the opposite to a dialectic, far more its completion, that is, beyond the element of the dialectic. 87

Myth, then, was irremediably circular: circular in that its role was to impose itself mythically, that is to say, tautologically, as the myth that it already was and was destined to remain, in the past, present, and the future, but circular, too, in that any attempt to analyse myth’s infinite movement of self-explanation or self-interpretation was inevitably caught up within the same spiral, only ever able to repeat what myth already said about itself and therefore condemned to repeat itself infinitely, as readers of Nancy’s own infinitely self‑recapitulating essay may arguably observe at firsthand. The circularity of myth, then, was no accident. It was myth’s most characteristic identifying trait. For like the speculative and specular philosophical Subject, and for the exact same reason, myth for Nancy distinguished itself by its propensity always to absorb its outside as another version of itself, including of course all attempts at demythologising it. It was in any event not enough to contrast the two common senses of the word “myth,” i.e., myth as fiction or fabrication versus myth as founding or originating narrative, and then to claim the first undermined the second (as Nietzsche, say, would argue), since the two dimensions of myth, Nancy insisted, were from the outset inseparable. Any myth was just as much a founding fiction as it was a fictional foundation, and vice versa. “Myth,” he concluded, “is not simple representation, it is representation at work, producing itself — in a self-poeticising mimesis — as an effect: as a founding fiction, not a fictive world [ . . . ], but fictioning as the fashioning of a world, or the becoming-world of fictioning. In other words, the fashioning of a world of the subject, the becoming-world of subjectivity.” 88 The philosophical but, more to the point, political consequences as far as “community” was concerned were dramatic and far-reaching. “The will to myth,” Nancy observed, “is totalitarian in its content, which is always communion. All communions: of man with nature, of man with God, of man with himself, of men among

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themselves. Myth communicates itself necessarily as a myth proper to the community, and it communicates a myth of community: communion, communism, communitarianism, communication, community itself, taken simply and absolutely, absolute community.” 89 Myth, then, always preceding or following itself, always internalising its own borders, according to Nancy’s exposition, was forever bereft of all exteriority. But if that were wholly the case, it would be impossible for Nancy to address myth at all. True, he does suggest at one point that “we do not know what it means to say that these are myths,” though he later concedes, contrariwise, that “myth is above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times founding the intimate being of community.” 90 To say as much already implies of course that the power of myth has its limits. For Nancy’s discourse on myth to take place at all, then, it was necessary for the object of that discourse, i.e., myth, somehow to interrupt itself, and become disjoined or withdrawn from itself. Without such difference or differing, no analysis could begin. But if myth interrupts itself, in the way Nancy describes, with similar consequences for “community,” which henceforth also finds itself in a state of interruption inseparable from its constitution as such, what is it that is being interrupted, and by what, under what conditions, and to what effect? To such crucial questions La Communauté désœuvrée supplies a number of sometimes inconsistent or contradictory answers. On one level, it is suggested, the reasons for myth’s interruption were historical. For if Nancy was right that the modern search for myth, just like the modern determination of “literature,” began with the German Romantics, then it was evident that this not only involved cultural or religious nostalgia on the part of Schlegel and his contemporaries, but also implied a recognition that existing myths had somehow lost their potency and authority. The proliferation of discourses on myth, in other words, was already proof of the precariousness of myth’s survival. The paradox was one that, in Nancy’s view, inevitably affected “modern and postmodern humankind as such,” which was why, he put it, “our scene and our discourse of myth, our thinking about mythology are all part of a myth: to speak of myth has only ever been to speak of its absence. And the word ‘myth’ itself just as much points to the very absence of what it names.” 91 The predicament, obviously enough, could not fail to affect Nancy’s discourse in its turn. At the same time, the reasons for this withdrawal of myth could not be solely historical. If myth could interrupt itself, that possibility had to be inherent in all myth as such. “The interruption of myth,” Nancy confirms, “is no doubt as ancient as its display or designation as ‘myth.’” 92 This raises the question: how then to distinguish between a myth that tautologically always already reasserts itself as founding fiction or fictional foundation and a myth that always already interrupts itself or withdraws? Further imponderable issues follow. There was a myth of myth, Nancy claimed, but no myth of the interruption of myth.

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This meant there was something in myth that necessarily escaped myth, even though Nancy’s very definition of myth, inspired by Schelling, implied the opposite. And if Nancy was right that the two aspects of myth, its status as foundation and as fiction, were versions of the same, 93 what was it that allowed him to decide, now reversing that earlier thesis, that the interruption of myth had to do with a realisation that “myth” as founding narrative, having reached its logical end in genocide, was simply a “myth,” i.e., a fabrication or fiction? 94 One name for the interruption of myth, Nancy suggested, was literature. But literature, he also maintained, from the German Romantics onwards, not only owed its existence to myth, but “has in a sense always been thought — as it no doubt should — as itself myth.” 95 It was not only that there could always be a myth of literature, Nancy argued, it was that myth itself in some sense was already literature’s invention. 96 If earlier in his thinking Nancy had struggled to find ways of articulating the interruption of myth alongside the presence of myth without lapsing into disabling contradiction, much the same turbulence intervened when it came to analysing the relationship of simultaneous opposition and identity between myth and literature. The same undecidability reproduced itself at every turn. For where did the limit pass between a literature that was an interruption of myth and the literature that was a continuation of myth by other means? Nancy suggests the decisive criterion was one of completion. “Literature’s revelation,” he argued, “unlike that of myth, does not reveal a completed reality [une réalité accomplie], nor the reality of a completion [ni la réalité d’un accomplissement].” “It is in so far as it is incompleted [inachevée] and incompleting [inachevante] that literature is literature.” 97 Only four years later, however, apropos of Rimbaud, and with the names of Blanchot and Bataille hovering in the background, Nancy seemingly said the opposite: “No doubt,” he now put it, “poetry always completes itself [s’achève], and it is in its essence to complete itself [s’achever]. Rimbaud, perhaps, says nothing different. The poem, in its ‘taut singularity [singularité resserrée],’ in Blanchot’s phrase, always closes itself [se clôt toujours] and never does anything other than close itself. Always, therefore, it opens onto a silence.” 98 Nancy’s hesitation between completion and incompletion (which is not limited to the relationship between myth and literature: philosophy too, he argues, partakes of the same indecision) 99 is of course revealing, but far from surprising. For what is a myth that does not include its own future, and is in that sense already complete and incomplete, and what is an artwork that does not simultaneously defy and imply its completion on the part of a commentator? And if myth, for Nancy, teeters on the brink of its interruption, it seems that much the same is also true of poetry: “there is no poetry,” Nancy later writes, again invoking the ghost of Rimbaud, “that is not borne upon the extremity of its own interruption, and does not have this movement as

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both law and technique.” 100 Here, too, then, the logic of the supplement returns with imperious force. The undecidable proves inescapable, ironically recalling what Nancy himself had argued earlier apropos of Kant in Le Discours de la syncope — which was also to say that, if it were to fall to philosophy to cut the Gordian knot, it would only be able to do so by recourse to the violence of a fiat. During the course of “Le Mythe interrompu,” numerous proper names recur: those of Schelling and Lévi-Strauss, Schlegel and Kant, Freud and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Bataille, several others too. Over half a dozen times Blanchot’s name is also mentioned. 101 Each of these occurrences is worth visiting anew. More often than not, Nancy cites Blanchot with apparent approval, only then discreetly to distance himself. At one point, for instance, he draws on Blanchot’s summary of Bataille’s thinking of community as detailed in La Communauté inavouable. “If earlier [i.e., in Bataille’s earlier writing] we had, as the principle of community,” Blanchot had argued, “the unfinishedness [inachèvement] or incompletion [incomplétude] of existence, now we have something like the mark [Blanchot is referring to inner experience] of that which raises it up to the point of risking its disappearance in ‘ecstasy,’ its completion [accomplissement] in what precisely limits it, its sovereignty in what makes it absent and null, its continuation into the only communication which is henceforth appropriate [qui convienne] and which goes by way of literature’s inappropriateness [l’inconvenance littéraire] when this inscribes itself in works only to affirm the unworking [désœuvrement] that haunts them, even if they cannot ever reach it.” 102 In order to gloss literature’s status as an interruption of myth, Nancy recalls these lines, or, more accurately, cites a truncated section of Blanchot’s sentence (viz., “the only communication which is henceforth appropriate and which goes by way of literature’s inappropriateness”), which has the misleading effect not only of attributing to Blanchot an argument that in its original context was a description of a key turning point in Bataille’s work, notably his writing of Madame Edwarda, but also of severing that clause from the surrounding discussion, and treating it as a dogmatic standalone claim on the part of its author who, as elsewhere in Nancy’s work on Blanchot, is treated as only ever speaking exclusively in his own cause. It is then an easy matter for Nancy in the paragraph that follows, with the help of a rhetorical question and a double negation, to raise an implicit objection and suggest that hidden in Blanchot’s remark was the very opposite to what it actually said, i.e., that it retained an enduring, negative appeal to literature as myth: “And yet,” asks Nancy, in no uncertain manner, “if the name ‘literature’ is always on the brink of being inappropriate [ne pas convenir] to ‘literature’s inappropriateness [l’inconvenance littéraire]’ as such, is it not because literature has a close relationship to myth?” This is not the only time that Nancy shows scant regard for the detail of text and context. On the following page, still with the idea of making

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good his claim that Blanchot’s account of the literary work was indebted to an unthought reliance on myth, Nancy quotes a sentence from a June 1941 review, republished in Faux Pas two years later, of the novel Hyacinthe by the celebrated Provençal writer Henri Bosco. “There is much to be said,” Blanchot had remarked, “about the genre Bosco has chosen and about his attempt to recreate a myth. In a sense, his effort is above all that of the novelist. Everything must lead to the invention of myth [l’invention mythique]; there is no work of art except when the source of revelatory images opens up.” 103 Here, then, in describing Hyacinthe as “a kind of mythic novel” 104 which drew on the tales of the Knights Templar, Blanchot, as he had with Bataille, utilises a kind of critical free indirect speech, signalled by the preceding sentence, such that the reference to “the invention of myth” is less a case of a literary theorist laying down an aesthetic doctrine of his own than of a reviewer explaining the thinking of an author whose “effort,” like that of others of his generation, was to deploy mythic or mythological motifs as a way of avoiding conventional psychological realism and providing his narrative with something like poetic autonomy — even if the results in this instance proved unconvincing, as Blanchot’s closing sentence pointedly confirms by contrasting Bosco unfavourably with the poetic figure of Hölderlin. But by presenting Blanchot’s comment in isolation from this wider context, Nancy in effect makes it unreadable, unreadable, that is, outside of the prescriptive horizon of his own discourse on the dangerous allure of myth. Two further examples of Nancy’s singular way with Blanchot’s texts are also worth citing. At one stage, in setting out the consequences of what he describes as the interruption of myth, Nancy writes that “the interruption of myth is what reveals the disjointed or withdrawn nature of community. In myth, community was proclaimed: in interrupted myth, community proves to be what Blanchot calls ‘unavowable community.’” Seemingly accepting Blanchot’s expression, which in later texts he will fiercely contest, Nancy comments: “Does the unavowable have a myth? By definition, it does not. The absence of avowal does not produce words or narrative. But if community is inseparable from myth, must there not be, paradoxically, a myth of the unavowable community? This is however impossible. This bears repeating: unavowable community, the withdrawal of communion or of communitarian ecstasy are revealed by the interruption of myth.” 105 Elsewhere, as we saw, Nancy takes many risks with Blanchot’s thinking. But nowhere are these more clearly in evidence than in this attempted gloss on “unavowable community.” For if there is something that does not easily correspond to unavowable community in Blanchot at all, it is the interruption of myth, not least because, for Blanchot, the interruption of myth, insofar as it represents a negation of myth by myth itself, is something internal to myth, which, as Nancy himself argues, forever runs the risk of reversing itself in order to confirm

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the tautegorical power of communion — which cannot therefore do other than continue to haunt all conceptions of “community” as such. La Communauté inavouable did however take precautions against what it arguably foresaw as the dangers lurking in any negative appeal to the “work” or “œuvre” implied a contrario by the concept of worklessness or désœuvrement, and which would subsequently find expression in Nancy’s notion of interrupted myth. For when Blanchot partially transcribed from Le Pas au-delà that passage cited earlier, to the effect that community “gives rise to a speaking without sharing but which is necessarily multiple, such that it is incapable of developing into words or more words: always already lost, useless and workless and in no way glorying in that very loss,” one of the changes Blanchot made to his 1973 text was the addition of the expression “workless [sans œuvre],” — as though to remind Nancy, as well as himself no doubt, that, contrary to appearances, “community,” on Blanchot’s understanding, was not something grounded in any shared language as such, in particular the shared language of myth or mythic belief. And he reinforced the point, as we have seen, by noting that what Bataille called “the basis of communication” was “not necessarily speech, nor even the silence that is its ground and punctuation, but the exposure to death, no longer my own, but of another whose nearest living presence is already unbearable, timeless absence, which no work of mourning ever diminishes.” Strangely enough, Nancy in “Le Mythe interrompu” cites this exact same sentence by Blanchot, while also silently excising, in a gesture it is hard not to see as symptomatic, its closing words, 106 their rigorous insistence on the impossibility of assimilating or overcoming the other’s death, and without offering in return anything in the way of specific comment or analysis, as though the critical importance of Blanchot’s remark somehow eluded him. As far as 1986 was concerned, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Nancy’s response to Blanchot — or, perhaps better, nonresponse — was little short of a determined failure to read, having all the characteristics of an obstinate refusal. “Nobody read [Blanchot’s] text,” he later admitted, with disarming frankness. “Myself I didn’t read it. At first, I didn’t know what to say, and was intimidated simply by the extreme disparity between the imposing figure of ‘Blanchot’ and the still quasi‑apprentice that I was and who, most of all, did not himself really know to what further questions, doubts, or uncertainties the text I wrote at Bailly’s invitation might lead.” 107 Major philosophers, it is true, are no more immune to lacks in confidence, lapses in understanding, or fatal misprisions than other writers, thinkers, or critics, one salient exemplar of whom Nancy may have felt he had before him in Blanchot, which was no doubt what lay behind his barbed postscript to the 1986 version of La Communauté désœuvrée. But arguably less important than the fact that Nancy may have misconstrued Blanchot’s thinking of “community” are the reasons why and how he understood it as he did, with what further

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implications or consequences there are for the question of “community” in Nancy’s own work as well as in that of Blanchot. NOTES 1. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 27; compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 50; The Inoperative Community, 19. Here, and in what follows, I have in the first instance quoted from Nancy’s 1983 essay, to which Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable may be thought to be a response, rather than from the 1986 version of the essay which, without saying so explicitly, is by definition a response to Blanchot’s response to Nancy’s 1983 text. Where the later, revised version differs appreciably from its predecessor, I have indicated as much in an endnote. 2. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 29; compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 54; The Inoperative Community, 20. On the evidence of Une pensée finie, 39–43, A Finite Thinking, 21–24, Nancy after 1990 significantly changed this view. In 2012 in he even managed to strike a wistful, not to say nostalgic tone of his own when recalling how in 1968 in Strasbourg, a hotbed of situationist protest, he “refused to take part in setting up a ‘Critical University,’” on the grounds of it being “a project that was judged still to be hostage to the idea of a ‘project,’ and therefore necessarily linked to the idea of an institution.” See Nancy, Que faire?, 73; “What Is to Be Done?,” translated by Irving Goh, Diacritics 42, no. 2 (2014): 100–117 (p. 104). 3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Phrase (Paris: Bourgois, 2000), 103; Phrase, translated by Leslie Hill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 74. 4. For an overview of Bataille’s various enterprises during the 1930s, see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre (Paris: Gallimard, [1992] 2012), 157–343; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 131–297, and Jean-Michel Besnier, Georges Bataille: la politique de l’impossible (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2014). 5. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, 218–19; The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, translated by Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994), 28–29. 6. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VI, 373. 7. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, 220–26; Visions of Excess, 45–52. 8. See Bataille’s letter to the editors of the postwar eschatological Christian journal Dieu vivant in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VI, 315; The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, translated by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 26–27. In the letter, Bataille conflates two fragments from Geneviève Bianquis’s prewar translation of Friedrich Würzbach’s much contested edition of Nietzsche’s so-called systematic final statement, Will to Power: see La Volonté de puissance, translated by Geneviève Bianquis, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, [1935–1937] 1995), II, 443, 447. “I cannot put it more strongly,” Bataille vowed, before then quoting: “‘We wish to be the heirs of Christian meditation and insight . . . to overcome [dépasser] all Christianity by means of a hyperchristianity [un hyperchristianisme] and not be content with ridding ourselves of it.’” He then concluded: “What Nietzsche asserts here, I assert after him and without change.” Nietzsche originally wrote of the need “to overcome everything Christian with something over‑Christian [alles Christliche durch ein Überchristliches überwinden]” without any mention of the substantivised doctrine of “hyperchristianity” invented by Bianquis. Bataille, though, had he wanted, could have found an earlier, more literal translation of the second, more important fragment that he was quoting in Nietzsche, La Volonté de puissance, translated by Henri Albert (Paris: Le Livre de poche, [1901] 1991), 511. 9. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VII, 396–97; The Absence of Myth, 84 (abridged). I examine relations between Bataille and Klossowski on the topic of religion at greater length in Circulus vitiosus deus: Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Deconstruction of Christianity, forthcoming.

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10. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, 339–71; Visions of Excess, 137–60. 11. See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 301–2; The Infinite Conversation, 203. 12. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 13; La Communauté désœuvrée, 15; The Inoperative Community, 3; translation modified; emphasis in the original. 13. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 13; La Communauté désœuvrée, 16; The Inoperative Community, 3; translation modified. 14. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 16; La Communauté désœuvrée, 23; The Inoperative Community, 6; translation modified. 15. See Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 16–17; La Communauté désœuvrée, 24–26; The Inoperative Community, 7–8. 16. See Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 19–20; La Communauté désœuvrée, 31–34; The Inoperative Community, 9–11. 17. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 23. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 39–40; The Inoperative Community, 14; translation modified. Nancy in 1986 is more emphatic, and italicises his self-paraphrasing explanation. 18. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 24. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 42; The Inoperative Community, 15. Again, the 1986 version of this passage is significantly extended. For Blanchot’s lengthy citation of the passage, see La Communauté inavouable, 23–24; The Unavowable Community, 10–11. 19. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 21; La Communauté désœuvrée, 35; The Inoperative Community, 12; translation modified. 20. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 27. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 49; The Inoperative Community, 18; emphases in the original; translation modified. 21. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 26; La Communauté désœuvrée, 47; The Inoperative Community, 17; translation modified. 22. See for instance Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1927–1937 (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 184. 23. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 14; The Unavowable Community, 5. 24. See Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987), 86; and Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre, 358–63; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 311–15. Drawing up his curriculum vitae in 1958, referring to himself in the third person, Bataille confirmed that “by the end of 1940, he meets Maurice Blanchot with whom in admiration and agreement he forms an immediate bond of friendship,” Œuvres complètes, VII, 462; The Bataille Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 116; translation modified. 25. See Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 39; La Communauté désœuvrée, 78; The Inoperative Community, 31. 26. Blanchot, “Deux lettres à Jean-Luc Nancy” (4 February and 16 March 1983), Lignes 3 (October 2000): 136. Blanchot does not specify what Italian MS he was reading, nor why, and there is no additional information available as to what, if anything, became of the text Blanchot was drafting. 27. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 11; The Unavowable Community, 2–3; translation modified. The gendered language describing the second of these two poles does not exist as such in the original French, but is simply the effect of the translation into English. 28. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 9; The Unavowable Community, 1. 29. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 12; The Unavowable Community, 3; translation modified; emphasis in the original. 30. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 13; The Unavowable Community, 3–4; translation modified; emphasis in the original. For the original text, see Bataille, “À prendre ou à laisser [Take it or leave it],” in Œuvres complètes, XI, 130–31; The Absence of Myth, 96; translation modified. In La Communauté inavouable Blanchot cites the version of Bataille’s text given in Contre toute attente 7 (October 1982): 3, since the relevant volume in Bataille’s Collected Works did not appear until six years later. 31. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 151; The Inoperative Community, 60; translation modified.

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32. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 43; The Unavowable Community, 23. 33. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 17; The Unavowable Community, 6; Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 35; La Communauté désœuvrée, 68; The Inoperative Community, 26–27; emphases in the original; translations modified. 34. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 17; The Unavowable Community, 6–7; translation modified. Blanchot had similarly rejected fusional communion in 1969 in L’Entretien infini, 95; The Infinite Conversation, 66–67. 35. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 203. 36. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VII, 245; emphasis in original. Compare Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 24; La Communauté désœuvrée, 43; The Inoperative Community, 15; and Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 21; The Unavowable Community, 9; translation modified. 37. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986), 239, 240; Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 282, 284. Compare Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 41; La Communauté désœuvrée, 82; The Inoperative Community, 33. 38. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 41. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 82–83; The Inoperative Community, 33; translation modified. 39. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 41. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 82–83; The Inoperative Community, 33; emphases in the original; translation modified. 40. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 84; The Inoperative Community, 34; translation modified. 41. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 21; The Unavowable Community, 9; translation modified. 42. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 250; Being and Time, 294. 43. Jacques Derrida, Apories: mourir — s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité” (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 134; Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 77; translation modified. 44. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 10–11, 13; The Unavowable Community, 2, 4; translation modified. 45. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 115; The Writing of the Disaster, 70. For Levinas’s use of the phrase, see Totalité et infini (Paris: Le Livre de poche, [1961] 1990), 262; Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1991), 235. 46. Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 114–15; Being Singular Plural, 90–91; translation modified; emphases in the original. 47. Compare Blanchot, La Part du feu, 313; The Work of Fire, 323–24; translation modified. Nancy slightly misquotes Blanchot’s original text. The last clause should read: “since contained in it is the condition for all mutual understanding [car en elle est la condition de toute entente]”; emphasis mine. 48. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 325; The Work of Fire, 337; translation modified. 49. Blanchot, La Part du feu, 325; The Work of Fire, 338; translation modified. 50. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 81; The Space of Literature, 83; translation modified. 51. Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 115; Being Singular Plural, 91; translation modified. 52. Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, 116; Being Singular Plural, 92; translation modified. 53. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 23–24; The Unavowable Community, 10–11. 54. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 13–14; The Unavowable Community, 4; translation modified. 55. See for instance Surya, Sainteté de Bataille, 95–96. Surya’s polemic against Blanchot is particularly misleading. Ignoring or purposefully misconstruing the latter’s actual interpretation of Acéphale, Surya in reply to Blanchot (p. 96) imposes on Bataille’s experience of community a schematic, dubiously teleological three-stage scenario that unfolds as follows: stage one, before the war (the sacrificial, conspiratorial violence of Acéphale); stage two, during the war (the disintegration of religious experience and retreat into “substitutive subjectivisation”); and stage three, after the war (the turn to anthropology and sociology). Criticising Blanchot for disregarding this at

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best speculative and unconvincing résumé, Surya goes on to claim Blanchot’s alleged misapprehension to be proof, bizarrely enough, of “an insidious or surreptitious” attempt to rehegelianise Bataille! Later in the same essay, now taking the opposite tack, but without realising the inconsistency of doing so, Surya attacks Blanchot for his appeal to “Judaeo-Christian” piety which, Surya suggests, is “characteristic of Blanchot’s late Levinasianism” (pp. 102–3). In a final attempt to discredit Blanchot, but without ever analysing his position as such, Surya then resorts to veiled innuendo, charging Blanchot with using Bataille in order to exculpate himself from his so-called guilty political past (p. 105). Surya’s grip on the chronology of Bataille’s admittedly often disordered texts is however surprisingly shaky. He claims for instance that in “La Communauté désœuvrée” Nancy, “with one or two exceptions,” quotes exclusively from texts written by Bataille “after the war” (p. 95). In fact, Nancy cites more than a dozen texts written before 1945, and only slightly over half of those he discusses in his article belong to the period after the war. As for La Commuauté inavouable, Surya makes the reverse claim that Blanchot cites texts “indiscriminately both from before and after the war” (p. 95). This too does not hold up to scrutiny. The bulk of the material cited by Blanchot belongs in reality to the period 1939–1945, i.e., during the war and the Occupation, with brief reference to a small number of texts from 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1952, respectively. Surya further alleges that Blanchot treats Bataille’s thinking as not “traversed or upended [traversée, renversée] by history” (p. 97) and is guilty of providing an excessively homogeneous, systematic overview of the writer’s work (pp. 97–98), when in fact, as indicated by the passage from La Communauté inavouable just quoted, the reverse is the case. Here, as elsewhere, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Surya’s broadside has less to do with the facts of the case than with a misplaced desire for posthumous ownership of Bataille’s work. 56. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 32. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 60; The Inoperative Community, 23; translation modified. 57. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 25. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 44–45; The Inoperative Community, 16; emphasis in original; translation modified. 58. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 24; The Unavowable Community, 11. 59. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 45–46, 24–25; The Unavowable Community, 25, 11; translations modified. All the more surprising in this context is Nancy’s own “surprise” (La Communauté désavouée, 46–47; The Disavowed Community, 18) at Blanchot’s reservations regarding the concept of “sovereignty,” which, despite being “nothing,” as Blanchot agreed, still carried with it the baggage of its theocratic past. 60. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 25–26; The Unavowable Community, 12; translation modified. Compare Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà, 180; The Step Not Beyond, 132. 61. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 305; The Infinite Conversation, 205–6; translation modified. On “unemployed negativity [negativité sans emploi],” see Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 369–71; Guilty, translated by Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 111–13. 62. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VII, 292; Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 19. 63. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 309; The Infinite Conversation, 208; translation modified. 64. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 309–10; The Infinite Conversation, 208–9; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 65. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 32. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 62–63; The Inoperative Community, 24; translation modified. For the essay by Derrida to which Nancy refers, the full title of which is “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie génerale: un hegelianisme sans réserve [From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve],” see L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 369–407; Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 317–50. As readers will remember, Derrida’s account of Bataille’s debt to Hegel is more carefully nuanced than Nancy’s expeditious summary.

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66. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 29–30; The Unavowable Community, 14; translation modified. 67. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 76, 84–85; The Disavowed Community, 31, 35. 68. On this question of the essential nonessentiality of “literature,” see my “The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Surrealism, Futurity,” Nottingham French Studies 50, no. 3 (Autumn 2011): 117–27. 69. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 33. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 63; The Inoperative Community, 24; translation modified. In 1986 Nancy adds: “the obsession with communion which history had just proven to lead directly to works of death [aux œuvres de la mort].” 70. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 33. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 63; The Inoperative Community, 24; translation modified. For the reference to L’Érotisme, see Bataille, Œuvres complètes, X, 24; Eroticism, 18. 71. Nancy did so by referring, rather oddly, however, to Bernard Sichère’s article, “L’Écriture souveraine de Georges Bataille,” in Tel Quel 93 (1982): 58–75, which offered a far more orthodox reading of Bataille, largely derivative of the work of Julia Kristeva, and had begun by complaining, implausibly enough, that in reading Bataille Derrida had remained “inside the reassuring enclosure of philosophy” (p. 58). 72. Nancy touches on this question of the relationship between literature and philosophy and écriture (which, he suggests, “has nothing philosophical nor literary about it”) in one of the fragments found at the end of L’Expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 194–96; The Experience of Freedom, translated by Bridget McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 151–53. 73. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 30; The Unavowable Community, 15; translation modified. The literature on sacrifice in Bataille is extensive. For a wide-ranging overview, see Patrick ffrench, After Bataille, 63–106. 74. On the sexual politics of Blanchot’s novel Le Très-Haut, for instance, where relations between the sexes occur only insofar as there is abandonment of the uniformity of the “in common,” see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit, 203–4. It is revealing that many of Bataille’s noisier male admirers are wont to dismiss Blanchot’s fiction by complaining that alongside Bataille’s it is disappointingly lacking in explicitly erotic (or “pornographic”) sexual material. 75. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 20–21. 76. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 21–22. 77. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 26. 78. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 27. 79. On the problematics of readability and framing with regard to Madame Edwarda, see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit, 85–100. 80. Blanchot, Après Coup, 89–90; Vicious Circles, 62–63; translation modified. According to Gilles Philippe in Bataille, Romans et récits (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 1127, the initial 1941 printing did not exceed forty-five copies. 81. Blanchot, Après Coup, 98; Vicious Circles, 68; translation slightly modified. On the differences between Blanchot’s and Levinas’s use of the term “Saying” or “le Dire,” see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 320–22. 82. See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 556–67; The Infinite Conversation, 379–87, 462. 83. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 34; The Unavowable Community, 17; translation modified. 84. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 46; The Unavowable Community, 25; translation modified. 85. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 103–4; The Inoperative Community, 42; translation modified. For the phrase from Blanchot which Nancy cites, see La Communauté inavouable, 9; The Unavowable Community, 1; translation modified. All emphases in the original. 86. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 104–5; The Inoperative Community, 42; translation modified.

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87. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 124–25; The Inoperative Community, 49; emphasis in the original; translation modified. For the passage to which Nancy is referring, where the debt to Coleridge is explicitly mentioned, see Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, 6 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), V, 205–6; Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, translated by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 136 and 187ne. 88. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 143; The Inoperative Community, 56; translation modified. 89. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 144; The Inoperative Community, 57; translation modified. 90. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 114, 122; The Inoperative Community, 48. 91. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 132; The Inoperative Community, 52; translation modified. 92. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 178; The Inoperative Community, 72; translation modified. 93. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 140–41; The Inoperative Community, 55. 94. On the complicity between myth and the Nazi death camps, see Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 158n69; The Inoperative Community, 162n40. 95. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 157; The Inoperative Community, 63; translation modified. 96. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 179; The Inoperative Community, 72. 97. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 159, 162; The Inoperative Community, 63, 65; translation modified. 98. Nancy, Une pensée finie, 329. For the brief quotation from Blanchot, see Le Livre à venir, 243; The Book to Come, 200; translation modified. It should however be noted that Blanchot’s phrase identifies only one moment in a complex process, with priority in the end devolving to what he calls the “disappearance” of the work. 99. See Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 42; The Sense of the World, 22–23. 100. Nancy, Les Muses (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 53–54; The Muses, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 28; translation modified. 101. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 147, 153, 157, 158, 160, 162, 173; The Inoperative Community, 58, 61, 63 (twice), 64, 65, 70. 102. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 38; The Unavowable Community, 20; translation modified. 103. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 222; Faux Pas, 195; translation modified. 104. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 219; Faux Pas, 192. 105. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 147; The Inoperative Community, 58; translation modified. 106. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 153; The Inoperative Community, 61. 107. Nancy, “Reste inavouable,” conversation with Mathilde Girard, Lignes 43 (March 2014): 155–76 (p. 161). Nancy describes his reaction to Blanchot’s book in similar terms in La Communauté désavouée, 18–19; The Disavowed Community, 4.

FOUR Dissenting Opinions

I COMMUNITY REVISITED Nancy’s output in the decade following his extended version of La Communauté désœuvrée in 1990 was remarkably prolific. During that period, he completed an impressive series of major books, including such titles as Une pensée finie (partially translated as A Finite Thinking) (1990), La Comparution (Compearance) (1990), co-authored with Jean-Christophe Bailly, Corpus (1992), Le Sens du monde (1993), Les Muses (The Muses) (1994), Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural) (1996), and Hegel: L’Inquiétude du négatif (Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative) (1997). Other important volumes, single essays as well as essay collections, were also not long in coming, among them L’Intrus (2000), La Pensée dérobée (2001), essays from which are included in A Finite Thinking, Visitation (2001), translated as part of the volume The Ground of the Image, L’“il y a” du rapport sexuel (“The ‘There Is’ of Sexual Relation”) (2001), and La Création du monde ou la mondialisation (The Creation of the World, or, Globalization) (2002). In these texts, though less and less frequently under the explicit heading of “community” (a word or concept that at one stage he appears entirely willing to dismiss), 1 Nancy’s project of an ontology of the common remained one of his most constant preoccupations, and one that continued to manifest itself, among others, during the early to mid-1990s in the ongoing debate with the thought of Bataille, as testified by such essays as “L’Excrit,” “L’Insacrifiable [The Unsacrificeable],” or “La Pensée dérobée [Concealed Thinking],” or, more obliquely, such presentations as “Peinture dans la grotte [Painting in the Grotto]” in which, without however mentioning it by name, Nancy reworked aspects of Ba103

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taille’s Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (Lascaux or the Birth of Art). 2 By comparison, Nancy’s engagement with Blanchot was far more intermittent or episodic. In time, it would become more persistent, but, following the exchange of the mid-1980s, it remained largely tokenistic, as though Nancy was both keenly aware yet deeply suspicious of the apparent proximity between some of his own thinking and that of Blanchot, and that on both grounds, as far as he was concerned, there still remained, so to speak, unfinished business. In the meantime, ambivalence continued to prevail. This probably explains why Nancy, whenever he felt the need or desire to situate himself in relation to Blanchot, usually did so by way of a passing reference or in an epigraph or a footnote quotation, with little or no substantive comment or criticism. 3 To this extent it would be misleading to overstate the prominence of Blanchot’s name in Nancy’s work of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, it probably came as no surprise to readers of Nancy that he should later declare that, despite the evidence of such texts as Le Discours de la syncope or L’Absolu littéraire, he had long been distinctly reticent regarding various aspects of Blanchot’s writing, and that it was much rather Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, not without reservations of their own, according to Nancy, who had taken it upon themselves at the time to be the main proponents of Blanchot’s work. 4 In general terms, this retrospective account is hard to fault. On the other hand, it would not be difficult to show how in several texts of the 1990s Nancy was keen to reply, if only indirectly, to issues raised in his exchange with Blanchot. While the latter, for instance, in L’Entretien infini and La Communauté inavouable, had stressed the extreme difficulty, not to say impossibility of accompanying Bataille’s writing with a critical discourse that might faithfully or adequately reflect it, Nancy for his part, not without significantly caricaturing Blanchot’s view (which he equated with a refusal of all commentary), now argued in return that, since Bataille had committed himself to discourse by dint of his own writing, so his work necessarily not only made itself available for commentary but explicitly required it. 5 The two positions are not of course mutually exclusive. Indeed, in their symmetry, they might even be thought to be rigorously complementary. Both served in any event to highlight the compelling but exacting challenges inseparable from Bataille’s intellectual legacy. This was no doubt why Nancy also felt it essential to return to the discussion of sacrifice in Bataille, which he did in a long piece from 1989 (“L’Insacrifiable”) which, though his name is never mentioned, it is hard not to see as a response to Blanchot’s objections to Nancy’s own interpretation of Acéphale. It was for that reason all the more revealing that, when Nancy went on to argue that sacrifice in modern times had reached a limit with the realisation, of which the Nazi death camps provided grim confirmation, that “‘finitude,’” as he put it, “thought rigorously and thought according to its Ereignis [i.e., what Nancy elsewhere, following Heidegger, glosses as event and appropriation], signifies that

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existence is not sacrificeable,” 6 he should find himself reiterating in his own conceptual language, perhaps without realising, one of the key insights suggested by Blanchot — Heideggerian terminology aside — in L’Écriture du désastre a decade earlier. 7 In a similar fashion, when Nancy in 1986 writes that “love unveils finitude,” and that “finitude is the being of what is infinitely inappropriable, having the consistency of its essence neither in itself nor in a dialectical sublation of self,” 8 it is similarly hard not to be reminded, again notwithstanding significant differences in idiom, of Blanchot’s exploration of the aporetics of love and desire in his discussion of Duras in the second part of La Communauté inavouable. In this regard, it is telling that, when Nancy goes on to name some of love’s manifold splinters or fragments (“from one splinter to the next,” he writes, “love never resembles itself. It always makes itself recognisable while always being unrecognisable, and is just as much to be found in none of its splinters, or else is always in the process of not being in any of them”), 9 he did so by glossing a famous phrase from the poet René Char (that “the poem is the love realised of desire still desire [le poème est l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir]”) which Blanchot once saw as expressive of “the supreme paradox of the poem,” and confirmation that “desire is precisely this relation with impossibility, impossibility made relation, i.e., separation itself, in its absolute, which makes itself attractive and takes body.” 10 And Nancy for his part likewise made his point about love by redeploying some of the same mythological figures as Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable, notably the dual figures of Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos. 11 Publishing a revised version of this 1990 text in 2006, Nancy would go so far as to celebrate with a paean in her name the multiple figures of Aphrodite, without however making room for that third, “chthonic or underworldly” Aphrodite honoured by La Communauté inavouable, the significance of which will become apparent shortly. 12 And it is striking too that when Nancy, in Les Muses, revisits Hegel’s Phenomenology and the Lectures on Aesthetics in order to address the figure of the young woman, heir to the muses, yet defiant of any dialectic — an embodiment of “interiority entirely exposed,” as Nancy calls her — it is once more with a quotation from Blanchot, offered up without ceremony or comment in a footnote, that he chooses (almost) to conclude his exposition. 13 Not for nothing, then, as occasion demanded, in 1996 and again in 2001, did Nancy pay moving tribute to Blanchot, acknowledging, as he put it, how “[w]ith the perpetual risk and extreme fragility accompanying us both, and affirmed as such, Blanchot and I will have been fellow travellers and partners in conversation, and necessarily so.” “Though disorientated at first,” he added, “I was later to find in Blanchot the most familiar and strangest company of all, while also the most secret and most hidden.” 14 Rather than being prompted, however, to explore further Blanchot’s fiction, literary criticism, or fragmentary writing, Nancy

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at the time, to judge from another tribute from March 1998, had begun instead to display a growing interest in the controversy surrounding the writer’s political past, which, he argued, as in the case of Bataille almost a decade and a half earlier, was inseparable from the lingering afterlife of an appeal — even a renewed appeal — to myth. “It is this question of myth,” Nancy repeated, that structures the question of fascism just as much as it does, today, the question of another way of thinking community and history. More precisely: what makes all the difference between these different ways of thinking is the relationship to myth, and to the mythic or mythological idea (this can be verified on a daily basis, and a reading of Blanchot’s texts in historical sequence would verify it too). Which is also the question of how to bear [soutenir] the absence of myth; or, put differently, how the imaginary can henceforth take account of the symbolic (of bonding, or of sense); or again, with still other words: how does what some call “subjectivisation,” the appropriation of an identity (and) of its being-in-common, henceforth work [opère]? 15

That the question received no immediate answer was of course hardly surprising. It was nevertheless clear, as the new millennium began to dawn, that Nancy had become increasingly conscious of the need to reexamine a certain historical past. “More than ever,” he put it in 1996, in a conference paper ostensibly addressing the differences between Bataille and Sartre, but strangely haunted by the absent name of Blanchot, some of whose most distinctive concerns, from the nudity of writing to the invisibility of the night, were discreetly folded into Nancy’s analysis, More than ever, perhaps — if ever one can be allowed to use such an expression — it has become clear that the incessant return of the same dead-ends and the same anxieties (it is enough just to mention a few words, such as “values,” “law,” “war,” “injustice”) is precisely what lays bare, with a nakedness that is itself repeated but such that it is each time ever more naked, each time ever more aggravated, how we are exposed to the impossible, and how that itself gives us our measure: that is, our measure as humans, which is properly without finality and cannot be contained within any pacifying horizon. 16

Soon after republishing these words five years later, only weeks after the attacks on the Twin Towers, which he went on to evoke as a sign or symptom of the “civil war,” 17 as he called it, now occupying the yawning gap in “community,” and violently dividing it from itself, Nancy found himself in the unusual position — some might again think it unacceptably conflicted — of agreeing to preface a revised Italian translation of La Communauté inavouable, thus acting as it were on behalf of its now ninetyfour-year-old author, to whom he accordingly dedicated his slim fiftypage volume, in which he took it upon himself however to express deep reservations about Blanchot’s account of “community.”

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That he did so without rereading or quoting any of the relevant texts by Bataille, Blanchot, or himself, explaining somewhat disingenuously (and unconvincingly) that to do so would involve him in “rewriting history,” only reinforced the ambivalent one-sidedness of the occasion. 18 And while on the one hand he claimed to feel “neither capable nor authorised,” with regard to the mid-1980s or to the time of writing, “to elucidate the secret that Blanchot clearly designates in his title,” as he put it, this did not prevent him from asserting, in his capacity as self-appointed spokesman, that Blanchot’s mention of “the unavowable” pointed unambiguously to a deep-seated, culpable secret. This was the nub of Nancy’s objection in 2001, which, he tells the reader, he had refrained from articulating or specifying for nearly two decades. 19 It was one he went on to restate and amplify ten years later however when, now agreeing to lend his authority to the publication of Blanchot’s 1984 letter on aspects of his political past, he once more took the opportunity of providing Blanchot’s text with a substantial interpretative frame of his own. In doing so, Nancy not only outlined in judicious and informative fashion the circumstances surrounding the writing of Blanchot’s letter, but also, more controversially, elected to widen the debate by placing what he continued to describe as “a serious controversy [un différend: a divide, dispute, disagreement, or differend]” 20 between Blanchot and himself on the subject of “community” within the context of the continuing, but still preliminary and as yet poorly documented debate about the relevance of Blanchot’s contested political activities in the 1930s to his later presentation of “unavowable community.” In 2001, and similarly in 2011, Nancy’s diagnosis of Blanchot’s thinking was in the form of a tensely twofold, even self-contradictory interpretation of what he took to be the unspoken or hidden agenda of La Communauté inavouable. Crucial in Nancy’s eyes was the irreconcilable difference, as he saw it, between his own concept of “désœuvrement” and Blanchot’s appeal to “the unavowable.” “The non avowable secret,” he charged, in a bold and contentious paraphrase of Blanchot’s argument, and a perhaps unintentional inversion of Tönnies’s opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, has no doubt to do with the following (while not consisting in it): whereas my idea was to show how the “work” of community [l’“œuvre” communautaire: i.e., work not as progressive labour, but as final monument or opus] was a condemnation to death of society [la condamnation à mort de la société] and, as a corollary, to establish the need for a community [communauté] refusing to make itself into a work [faire œuvre], thus preserving the essence of infinite communication (communicating to itself an “absent sense [sens absent],” to use Blanchot’s own term, and the passion for this ab-sense [ab‑sens], or the passion in which this ab-sense consists) — so Blanchot, for his part, signified or signalled to me the unavowable. In apposition but also in

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“What is unavowable [inavouable],” Nancy went on, is not unspeakable [indicible]. On the contrary, the unavowable does not cease to speak or to be spoken in the intimate silence of those who might, yet cannot avow. I imagine Blanchot wanted to force [intimer] that silence and what it says upon me: to order my silence and make it penetrate my intimacy [intimité], as intimacy itself — the intimacy of a communication or a community, the intimacy of a kind of intimate work [œuvre] more deeply buried than any worklessness [désœuvrement] — making it possible and necessary while not allowing it to dissolve into it. What Blanchot was asking was that I should not be content with negating communial community [la communauté communielle] but should think beyond that negativity [penser plus avant que cette négativité] in the direction of a secret of the common which is not a common secret. 22

There is much in this summary by Nancy that a reader of La Communauté inavouable is likely to find surprising. First, it is at the very least puzzling that, in his effort to translate what is at stake, in his view, in Blanchot’s use of the adjective “unavowable,” Nancy nowhere in his published texts or interviews, cites, considers, or comments in any detail on Blanchot’s own explanatory gloss, given in the closing pages of his book, in a passage that Nancy mentions only once in La Communauté désavouée and only then to dismiss it by claiming that “the lines which follow elucidate nothing [n’éclairent rien].” 23 It is however clear from the passage, as we shall see, that Blanchot, far from advancing a concept of his own, is exploring, pondering, questioning a formulation inherited or borrowed from others, as the thought of “community” itself warrants. “Unavowable community,” Blanchot asked, does that mean that it is something that cannot be avowed [qu’elle ne s’avoue pas] or that it is such that no avowals reveal it, since, each time there was talk of its way of being [sa manière d’être], the impression was that this was to grasp it only in terms of what it was not [qu’on n’a saisi d’elle que ce qui la fait exister par défaut]? In that case, might it have been better to have said nothing? Might it be better, without unduly emphasising its paradoxical traits, to experience it [la vivre] in that which renders it contemporary with a past it was never possible to experience [vivre] as such? 24

On this evidence, contrary to what is suggested by Nancy, “unavowable community” is no secret or secretive, or unified, or self-identical, or immanent substance, but an injunction inseparable from the questions and questioning to which it responds, which it bears in itself and outside itself, and continues to prompt and to affirm. It is neither before words

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nor beyond words, then, but inheres within speech and speaking as that which perpetually resists or exceeds naming, and, never coinciding with itself, can only ever be envisaged as an unending task and an infinite promise, both a challenge and a hope, in other words, belonging neither to the present nor to presence. And this is why, immediately after, Blanchot goes on to quote Klossowski’s French translation of Wittgenstein’s famous axiom (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”), taking care as he did so to underline the imperative contained in the phrase (“Ce dont on ne peut parler, il faut le taire”) as proof, so to speak, that it is only possible to remain silent — about “community” — by forever speaking to it, in words that can come, if they come at all, only from the future and from the outside. But if Nancy’s deafness to Blanchot’s gloss on the word “unavowable” was strange enough, even more disconcerting was his account of the gap between his own conception of community and the one he attributes to Blanchot. For twice over, in specifying the nature and extent of their disagreement, Nancy has recourse to terms that come to him from no other source than Blanchot himself. Already, on his own admission, the word “désœuvrée” was a quotation from Blanchot, albeit one to which Nancy, understandably, now felt entitled to lay personal claim, not least by drawing attention to its presence in his 1983 title, but which Blanchot, he maintained, was somehow minded to reject. But this was not all. Elsewhere, too, notably in the opening pages of Le Sens du monde, Nancy quotes from part of a fragment in L’Écriture du désastre in which Blanchot had used the expression “absent sense [sens absent],” taking due care, as he (Blanchot) did so, to distinguish it from any “absence of sense [absence de sens],” which would have risked turning it into a mirror image of what it was not (i.e., the pleromatic fullness of sense). 25 In calling on Blanchot’s fragment as one of four epigraphs standing on the threshold of his book, Nancy obviously wished to lend authority to the philosophical project — an ontology of sense — on which he was embarking at the time and, with Blanchot’s blessing, so to speak, alongside that of Gérard Granel, Nietzsche, and Mathieu Bénézet, give it direction, impetus, and legitimacy. Conversely, however, in recycling in La Communauté affrontée this earlier reference to “absent sense,” together with his own related coinage of “absense [ab-sens],” it seemed that Nancy, as in the case of “désœuvrement,” was once again intent on turning Blanchot’s vocabulary against its author, as though to imply that, in thinking unavowable community, Blanchot had not properly understood his own thinking, and that it fell to Nancy to issue an appropriate correction and to reveal what Blanchot should have been thinking all along — a Socratic gesture for which, bizarrely, Nancy himself would criticise Blanchot in 2014, claiming that by using a phrase from Nancy as an epigraph for the second part of La Communauté inavouable Blanchot was seeking “to turn one Nancy against another.” 26

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But there is odder still. Even more astonishing is Nancy’s claim that Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable concludes by rejecting the negativity associated with his, i.e., Blanchot’s concept of “désœuvrement,” as duly reappropriated by Nancy (who, unlike Blanchot, subordinates it to a teleological dialectic or, at the very least, treats it as a negative property or attribute belonging, so to speak, to the work), 27 in favour of some intimate, unspoken, and deeply withdrawn “œuvre” or work. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth, as the book’s closing sentence plainly testifies. Blanchot, it will be remembered, has just evoked the injunction that speaking, not least in order to maintain the condition of the unavowable, should — in any case always already does — go on. “But with what kind of words?” he asks. The question, he replies, is not one for himself as author, but for others, “less that they may answer it than that they may be willing to bear it and perhaps prolong it.” And Blanchot then adds: In that way, it will no doubt become apparent that [this question] also has an exacting political sense and that it does not give us the luxury of standing aside from the present which, in opening new and unknown spaces of freedoms [des espaces de libertés inconnus (sic)], also makes us responsible for new relations [de rapports nouveaux], always under threat, always hoped for, between what we call work [ce que nous appelons œuvre] and what we call unworking [ce que nous appelons désœuvrement]. 28

Reading these lines, Nancy’s first reaction is silently to intervene to correct their wording, a move he justifies only forty pages further on, on the grounds that the adjective “inconnus” (“unknown”) should either be in the feminine (i.e., “inconnues”) so as to agree with the plural noun “libertés” (“freedoms”), or that, conversely, the noun “libertés” should in fact be in the singular. 29 Elsewhere, Nancy, in a similar vein, suggests Blanchot’s grasp of French grammar to be less than perfect, and that the expression “le refus de ne rien exclure [the refusal to exclude anything]” which Blanchot uses apropos of May 1968 in La Communauté inavouable is “a slight lapsus calami,” which should read “le refus de rien exclure.” 30 But in either case, not least following the proven philological principle of lectio difficilior potior, it makes better sense to maintain Blanchot’s text as printed. In preferring “libertés,” i.e., “freedoms” in the plural, to “liberté,” i.e., “freedom” in the abstract singular, the point was surely to emphasise how freedom is in fact never single, never the same, nor even self-identical, but always plural. Similarly, the expression “le refus de ne rien exclure,” idiosyncratic that it is, has the signal advantage of treating “refusal” not as a negative value, but as an affirmative one. Moreover, as students of May 1968 will be aware, Blanchot’s formula is a partial quotation — in all likelihood a partial self-quotation — from the typewritten flyer accompanying copies of the broadsheet Comité when they were dis-

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tributed to potentially interested parties in October 1968. “The key thing about the Movement,” it asserted, “is its demand for radicality, but also its plurality, its claim to exclude nothing [de ne rien exclure] wherever it is a matter of excluding all established power.” 31 More generally, it is hard to see how Blanchot’s closing words can be interpreted as a covert endorsement of that deathly immanence that Nancy in “La Communauté désœuvrée” associates with the concept of an “œuvre” and with community or communion as the embodiment of an “œuvre,” in particular when Blanchot, throughout La Communauté inavouable, specifically and repeatedly rejects the allure of any such final political or literary “œuvre.” It is true that in yoking together the words “œuvre” and “désœuvrement” in his concluding clause, Blanchot forcibly emphasises, at least up to a certain point, their dialectical interdependence. This is only logical. Conceptually as well as etymologically, it is plain that all “désœuvrement” necessarily implies some “œuvre,” in exactly the same way that any “œuvre” implies its “désœuvrement.” Neither term can be released from that reciprocity, which is arguably why, as mentioned earlier, Blanchot, whose commitment to the word “désœuvrement” in the 1950s and 1960s is in any case less than total, often replaces it in later texts with the less explicitly dialectical term “absence d’œuvre.” But this in turn is not all. For if on the one hand Blanchot’s formulation points to a political future in which a dialectic of work and unworking, struggle and transformation, has an indispensable part to play, then, on the other, it similarly makes plain that it is essential that the future of politics not be subordinated to the teleology implicit in that dialectic. There must necessarily be something else, something other, which, like the unavowable, resists naming and responds to that which in the future is necessarily unforeseeable. This is what prompts Blanchot’s circumlocutory mention of “what we call” work and “what we call” unworking. For what finds expression in that verbal detour is not only an explicit invitation to all others who share Blanchot’s commitment, including his unnamed interlocutor(s), of whom Nancy is evidently one, but also an implicit reminder of what Blanchot calls the “neuter,” that always alternative thinking and speaking that traverses all language, all speech, and all politics as a condition of possibility and an enduring promise of alterity, difference, and reinvention. In 2001, however, and in several subsequent texts, abruptly abandoning the interpretation of the unavowable he had adopted in 1986, Nancy took the debate with Blanchot in a very different direction, dominated by what he saw as Blanchot’s lingering attachment to Catholicism and its reliance on sin and confession, and by his construction of what he assumed to be Blanchot’s culpable memory of a compromised political past. Both, of course, are entirely legitimate areas of inquiry which one might fairly judge to be of absolutely crucial importance for any understanding of Blanchot’s work. But as far as La Communauté inavouable was

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concerned, by indirectly privileging his own still powerful if unspoken memories of Catholic catechism, Nancy’s strictures had the unfortunate drawback of obscuring the most immediate intertextual source for Blanchot’s title. For just as the term “désœuvrée” heading Nancy’s 1983 article was a double quotation, an instance of Nancy citing Lacoue-Labarthe/ Nancy citing Blanchot, so too, in a no doubt calculated, even sympathetic gesture, was the word “inavouable,” which, just like the expression “communauté négative,” was in the first instance borrowed from Bataille, who uses the word in a variety of contexts, but most pertinently as far as Blanchot’s 1983 essay was concerned, as its author was obviously aware, in that 1946 text by his late friend, “A prendre ou à laisser,” which Blanchot cites explicitly towards the beginning of his book. 32 In that text, written shortly after the end of the war, and dedicated to René Char, which Alain Coulange in Contre toute attente in 1982 reprinted alongside Bataille’s “Lettre à René Char sur les incompatibilités de l’écrivain,” Bataille had addressed the question of sovereignty in the following terms: “The only part of me that is sovereign,” he asserted, “is that which is ruined. And my visible absence of superiority — my ruined state — is the mark of an insubordination equal to that of the star-studded sky.” “Who can fail to know,” he went on, “that the sovereignty of anyone amongst us, analogous in that regard too to the star-studded sky, can only find expression in powerless silence (willing, inviolate silence is just idle chatter [bavardage]).” And, in words Blanchot obviously remembered, only months after first reading or rereading them, Bataille then added: “the most foolish of vanities: the silence that hides something other than the unavowable [l’inavouable].” 33 As far as Bataille was concerned, then, as Blanchot will have realised, the “unavowable” was anything but the embarrassed symptom of some personal or public transgression. It corresponded much more to a rigorous awareness of the limits of all servile, conceptual language as such. And this was what Bataille had in mind too when in a brief fragment from his 1947 Méthode de méditation (Method of Meditation), later incorporated into L’Expérience intérieure under the capitalised rubric “THE ESSENTIAL IS UNAVOWABLE [L’ESSENTIEL EST INAVOUABLE],” he similarly wrote that: “What is not servile [servile] is unavowable [inavouable]: a reason to laugh, to . . . : the same applies to ecstasy [l’extase]. What is not useful must be hidden (beneath a mask). A criminal about to die was the first to express this commandment, speaking to the crowd: ‘Never avow [N’avouez jamais].’” 34 All this, however, was still not everything. For Blanchot in 1983 was surely also mindful of what was indisputably the single most influential recent commentary on Bataille, one that Nancy had himself quoted in his original 1983 text, Derrida’s famous 1967 article “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale: Un hegelianisme sans réserve.” In that essay, under the heading “The Two Writings,” Derrida had addressed the word “unavowable” at some length, taking it to be emblematic of Bataille’s

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slippery, risky, but nevertheless exacting relationship with the philosophical tradition in general and with the work of Hegel in particular. Interweaving Bataille’s words with his own, Derrida glossed the passage from Méthode de Méditation given earlier in the following terms: But one has to speak [il faut parler]. “The inadequation of all speech . . . at least, must be said,” so as to keep sovereignty, which in a way is also to ruin it, and still to reserve the possibility not of its meaning [sens] but of its nonmeaning [non-sens], and to distinguish it, by way of this impossible “commentary,” from all negativity. One has to find a way of speaking that keeps the silence. The impossible is a necessity: to say in language — the language of servility — that which is not servile. “What is not servile is unavowable [inavouable]. . . . The idea of silence (which is the inaccessible) is disarming! I cannot speak of an absence of meaning except by giving it a meaning it does not have. The silence is broken because I have spoken. Always some lamma sabachtani brings the story to a close, and cries out our total inability to keep silent: I have to give a meaning to what has no meaning: being is given to us in the end as something impossible!” If the word silence, “of all words,” is “the most perverse or most poetic,” it is because by pretending to silence meaning it says nonmeaning, it slides and erases itself, cannot maintain itself, but falls silent itself not as silence but speech. This sliding simultaneously betrays both discourse and nondiscourse. It can become unavoidable, but sovereignty can also exploit it in order to betray, rigorously, the meaning in meaning, the discourse in discourse. 35

In invoking “unavowable” “community,” then, as Derrida’s analysis suggests, Blanchot was plainly not disclosing or disguising or disavowing what Nancy in La Communauté affrontée dismisses, rather hastily, as “a shameful secret.” 36 Following Bataille and Derrida, as Nancy surely should have realised, he was much rather responding in his own way, with the help of an implicit double quotation, to a far-reaching and challenging double bind — that of having to invent, in response to a future that was by definition unforeseen and unforeseeable, an adequate conceptual vocabulary, in the firm knowledge that no such vocabulary existed which did not already bear the alienating freight of more than two thousand years of tradition (and in the realisation that to ignore that legacy was just as bad as mutely to subscribe to it), and with the equally strong conviction that that to which it was necessary to respond — which might provisionally, but inadequately, be called “community,” the “future,” “politics,” or “writing” — was irreducible to all existing conceptuality as such. Just as Bataille, when faced with a similar dilemma, as Derrida demonstrates, devised the strategy of resorting to what might be termed a language of silence, i.e., one in which certain things could not be formulated without being forcibly destroyed in order to speak the silence of that language, and thereby gesture, obliquely, towards an experience

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of the future that could not properly find expression in any existing (or even any future) language, so Blanchot’s appeal to the unavowable was also an attempt to set aside and silence the risks, ambiguities, temptations, and dangers inseparable from the concept of community as such, in order precisely to address, according to the inescapable logic of an aporia, that which remained obstinately irreducible to any such concept. The result, as Derrida suggests elsewhere, far from any mythic belief in community, was much rather a thinking of relation that, in the end, despite appearances to the contrary, was radically incompatible with any existing or future “concept” of “community” at all. 37 It is true that Nancy might justifiably defend his own use of the expression “communauté désœuvrée” on similar grounds. It too was the result of an attempt to elude or neutralise existing concepts of community. But between Blanchot and Nancy there was an important difference. For while the word “unavowable” explicitly drew attention to the abiding impossibility of any self-identical “concept” of “community,” so “worklessness,” as Nancy later conceded, could not do other than appeal implicitly to some “work” that, in memory or in hope, still lay on the horizon. This in turn was also a reminder that no conceptual vocabulary was without risks. Compromise and contamination were unavoidable. Indeed, from the very outset of the debate on community, first in Nancy, then in Blanchot, then again in Nancy, religious communion and political community, in their fundamental incompatibility, yet shared Christian heritage, had like warring twins continued closely to shadow one another. This was why, according to Nancy, it was only by deconstructing the allure of the first that there was a chance of constructing the promise of the second. Blanchot for his part plainly agreed. Indeed, to maintain the term “community” alongside that of the “unavowable” already said as much. And it followed that “community” might never as a result be prevented from being haunted by “communion.” Nancy on several occasions admits as much, and his own ambivalent use of the term “community” often reflects this. For alongside the hope of good community, so to speak, there was always, necessarily, the threat of the bad. The possibility of perversion could not be eliminated. As Nancy puts it in 1993, in one of the numerous series of qualified restatements that litter his pages, in which one alternative is described only to be rejected in favour of another or then another (not this, not that, but rather this . . . ), [e]ither, on the one hand, indeed, community is the sharing of that very spacing according to which there are singularities, and this sharing itself, as such, does not let itself be appropriated. Or it is in itself origin and principle and it is this in so far as it is already a sharing or a spacing. Or else, on the other hand, community is the interiority within which sharing appropriates its negativity for itself, becomes a subject

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that founds and subsumes sharing within itself, thereby endowing it with its own, proper substance. 38

But how then to separate these various models or types and explain their difference, which also meant accounting for their similarity? Nancy in 2001 declared himself well aware of the difficulties, and of the need to make sure conceptually that one kind of community did not degenerate into the other. “On several sides,” he confessed, I could see the dangers coming as a result of the use of the word “community”: its unassailably overblown resonance, bloated with substance and interiority, its inevitably Christian associations (in the shape of spiritual and brotherly communial community) or more broadly religious ones (as in the Jewish community, the community of prayer, the community of believers, or “umma”), its use in defence of so-called “ethnicities,” all this could only put one on one’s guard. It was clear that at the time the emphasis put on a necessary, but always poorly clarified concept at least went hand in hand with a revival of communitarian and sometimes fascistic drives. 39

Nancy’s subsequent response to these difficulties was at least twofold. On the one hand, he acknowledged that it required of him a further effort of thinking. He continued as a result to rework and refine his own concept of “community,” which he did largely, if not entirely, by abandoning the word itself and by renewing his own conceptual terminology so as to develop in more detail an ontology of relation free of any reliance on either subject (or object) or substance. The second strand of Nancy’s strategy was more problematic. For even as he gave himself the task or privilege of re‑treating the concept or thought of “community” in order to take it in a new direction, better able to resist its assimilation to what it opposed, so conversely he now began to align communion and community with what he claimed to be Blanchot’s and his own — diametrically opposed — positions. The evidence for identifying “unavowable community” with pseudoreligious “communion,” as we have seen, is far from immediately apparent. One might even conclude, rather bluntly, that it rests on an obtuse, wilful misunderstanding of Blanchot’s text. Yet it is as though Nancy, in order to safeguard, in his view, the primacy of the thought of “unworked community,” “being-in-common,” “being-with,” or “being-together” “as such,” still considered it somehow necessary, and possible, to exorcise “communion” by displacing responsibility for promoting it or for acquiescing into it onto another — which in the end risked not only perpetrating an injustice by misrepresenting that other, but also having the unfortunate effect of entirely obscuring what Nancy on one occasion, as Blanchot undoubtedly agreed, took to be the “intimate solidarity or even complicity [connivence]” 40 between the two thoughts, between, that is, the “transimmanence” of “community” 41 and the immanence of “communion.”

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In concrete terms, what Nancy’s changed approach required was that he find a way, despite indications to the contrary, of attributing to Blanchot or, perhaps more accurately, projecting onto the silent or absent figure of Blanchot, a lingering fascination with pseudoreligious communion, manifest, according to Nancy, in Blanchot’s unthought, residual Catholicism and in the guilty memory of his prewar extremist politics. Blanchot may have been right, Nancy admitted, to remain suspicious of the negativity of “unworked” community 42 — but if so, he countered, it was for exactly the wrong reasons, insofar as what took precedence in Blanchot, Nancy now alleged, was not unworking or “désœuvrement,” but some supposedly mythic “œuvre” on which unworking was reliant, as Nancy, with the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, at long last vowed to reveal. To this end, he returned to La Communauté inavouable, and in 2014 embarked for the first time on a reassessment of the second part of Blanchot’s book, mainly concerned, though not exclusively, with Duras’s story La Maladie de la mort, in which Nancy now professed to find persuasive evidence of “erotic, Christological, and literary communion,” even as the more explicit task of Blanchot’s commentary, as far as its author was concerned, was to respond to the impossibility of “communion,” and, to that extent, to the unavowability of all “community” “as such.” II THE APORETICS OF RELATION As he began to revise his account of Blanchot’s book to support his controversial new interpretation, Nancy’s first move was to claim that La Communauté inavouable was structured according to a so far little noticed teleology. The point was one he had first made, without developing it in any detail, in La Communauté affrontée in 2001. “In either case,” Nancy wrote, referring to Blanchot’s remarks on what he, Nancy, using a clumsy teleological binary of his own, describes summarily as “a theoretical text” by Bataille and “a story of love and death” by Duras, Blanchot writes in relation and writes his relation to these texts, which, in so doing, he also places in relation with one another. He distinguishes them, it seemed to me, as two texts of which the one was deemed to have failed to go beyond a negative or implicit consideration of “unworking [le désœuvrement],” while the other was thought to have given access to a community that, while not being “worked [œuvrée],” was operated [opérée] in secret (the unavowable) by the sharing of an experience of limits: the experience of love and death, of life itself exposed to its limits. 43

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Confusingly, as though he wanted to maintain the greatest degree of indecision, Nancy does not explain the distinction he makes here between these two similar-sounding and etymologically indistinguishable verbs: “œuvrer” and “opérer.” But, in other respects, his remarks are uncontroversial enough. For it is no doubt true that Blanchot, just like any reader, brought to his interpretation of Bataille and Duras a range of concerns of his own, and that, in placing a text largely about the one alongside a text largely about the other, he could not do other than put them into some kind of dialogue (since Duras, in any case, was also an admirer and friend of Bataille). And it is axiomatic that to write on the topic of desire is inevitably to write according to one’s own desire. But it would be misleading to assume that Nancy’s situation was any different, and if Blanchot may be said to have inscribed himself, so to speak, into his reading of Bataille and Duras, the same plainly also applies to Nancy’s reading of Blanchot. It will be remembered how for Nancy in 1983 “the decisive difficulty” faced by Bataille’s thinking of “community” was reflected in the way in which, as Nancy put it, the writer “was only able in the end to oppose to the ‘immense failure’ of political, religious, and military history a subjective sovereignty of lovers and of the artist — i.e., the exceptional quality of ‘heterogeneous’ lightning flashes purely extracted from the ‘homogeneous’ order of society, and not communicating with it.” 44 Bataille’s abandonment of “community” in favour of what Nancy insisted on calling the “accursed isolation of lovers and of the artist,” 45 the reader is told, was in this respect a damaging and symptomatic retreat. “Lovers in Bataille,” Nancy claimed, “other than themselves, represent the despair of community ‘as such’ and of the political.” 46 The collective, in other words, Nancy implied, appealing as he did so, one might think, to a surprisingly normative view of the hierarchical relationship between the public and the private, was more reliably political than the personal. Not so however for Blanchot — for whom what alone “founds this community,” as he put it, referring to the quite specific, singular situation explored in La Maladie de la mort, was “the strangeness of what might in no way be common,” 47 as witnessed more generally by the logic or alogic of “relation without relation” governing love, friendship, and ethicopolitical action alike. There were admittedly differences between these diverse spheres, and Blanchot was far from wishing to collapse the political into the personal or vice versa. What the two had in common, however, without having it in common, Blanchot wrote, now borrowing the phrase from Régis Debray, was “the arid solitude of anonymous forces,” and it was this, he explained, that justified the comparison with what Bataille called “the true world of lovers,” sensitive as he was to the antagonism between ordinary society and “the insidious loosening of the social bond” presupposed by

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In recalling here Bataille’s suggestion that what the latter calls “the possibility of individual love” arose as a result of “the insidious loosening of the social bond,” 49 Blanchot was not simply aiming to enlist his friend’s thinking just for the sake of it. For Nancy too, in his 1983 article, had similarly quoted Bataille’s phrase, albeit with rather different connotations, as proof, Nancy rather oddly puts it, that for Bataille “lovers are not a society, neither its negative nor its culmination.” 50 And Nancy went on, immediately after, in an aside he would delete three years later, to cite a “Russian proverb,” according to which “lovers’ kisses destroy society.” 51 Upon reading Nancy’s article soon after it appeared, Blanchot was sufficiently intrigued, or dubious about the way this proverb was translated, to ask his friend the exiled poet Vadim Kozovoi, a native Russian speaker, in a series of three letters written between 10 and 27 May 1983, to confirm the saying’s existence, explaining he had found it used by “a philosopher friend of Derrida’s.” 52 Blanchot does not explicitly pursue the matter in La Communauté inavouable. He does however take note of what it appeared to reveal about Nancy’s interpretation of Bataille. For while Nancy uses the quotation from Bataille to suggest that “individual love,” for Bataille at least, embodied a failed relation to society and the political, for Blanchot nothing could be further from the truth. Insofar as any “loosening of the social bond” was premised on the ineliminable fragility of all world, i.e., of all shared assumptions, shared values, and shared meanings, so it followed that, without such “loosening,” no relation with the otherness of any Other, and therefore no relation with the political or ethical sphere, was thinkable at all, except in entirely derivative, that is to say inevitably conservative, conformist, and complacent fashion. Which also meant that between Nancy’s “society” and Blanchot’s “world,” there was, so to speak, a world of difference. That what was shared between lovers on the one hand and on the other what Blanchot described as “the people [le peuple] (not to be translated as Volk)” 53 was exposure to the aporetics of “relation without relation,” as mirrored in this forgetting of “world” — “world” which, most importantly for Blanchot, unlike Nancy, is not constitutive but constituted, i.e., always already ungrounded, fissured, and fragmented — this clearly did not mean what Nancy takes it to mean when he claims “the thesis” of Blanchot’s book “in fact” to be “the community of lovers as the truth of community in general,” 54 not least because there is no “truth” of “community in general” in La Communauté inavouable, nor any evidence that what Bataille once called “the true world of lovers,” as far as Blan-

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chot was concerned, embodied “community” at all, and was anything other than a “forgetting of the world,” a radical outside, as it were, prior to “community,” truth, and worldly possibility as such. Unfortunately, this is far from the only instance where Nancy seems determined to impose on Blanchot’s volume a thesis of his own construction. Similarly uncorroborated by Blanchot’s actual text is the notion that the book’s first chapter heading, “La Communauté négative (Negative Community)” — itself an explicit quotation from Bataille, 55 and, like the second, “La Communauté des amants (The Community of Lovers),” better read as an implicit challenge than as a statement of belief — necessarily implies, as Nancy tortuously puts it, that “one way or another its negativity will be superseded by something it will doubtless not be possible to think of as a positivity but which will nevertheless not escape the negative or will even result [opérera] in a kind of sublation [relève] (in the sense of an Aufhebung),” 56 a contention that in its abiding indecision is all the more violently peremptory in that the dialectical operation towards which it explicitly gestures will later turn out, on Nancy’s own admission, not to be a proper dialectic at all, but a “Romantico-Idealist” phantom, more nearly reminiscent of the negative theology of Nicolas de Cusa. 57 Nancy’s revisionist reimagining of La Communauté inavouable falls foul of several other aspects of Blanchot’s text. For rather than proceeding from the negative to the positive, Blanchot’s book as a whole, rightly or wrongly, begins and ends in much the same place, i.e., with that same quotation from Bataille naming “negative community” and “the community of those who have no community,” which the writer transcribes as an epigraph to his analysis of Bataille, then reproduces on two further occasions in the book, before citing it one final time apropos of Duras some ten pages before the end 58 — all of which rather suggests dogged persistence, not to say a fondness for endless recapitulation, distinctly at odds with the botched teleology claimed by Nancy (who later, in revealing fashion, is forced to admit his “embarrassment” at being unable to locate the exact source of the quotation from Bataille, dimly implying that it was apocryphal, or that Blanchot may even have made it up). 59 And it takes a careless or wilfully distracted, not to say partisan reader to ignore how throughout the second part of his book Blanchot emphasises repeatedly the extent to which “community” in Duras, be it a “community of lovers,” is radically incompatible with pseudoreligious communion or with monumental finality. For as Duras’s two protagonists live out “the failure that is the truth of what their perfect union would be, the lie of this union that is always achieved by not being achieved,” Blanchot writes, they thereby find themselves “side by side, and that contiguity which passes through every kind of empty intimacy is what preserves them from going through the motions of ‘fusional or communial togetherness.’” In such circumstances, the only sovereignty to be affirmed, he adds, is the sovereignty of death, “of death on the prowl, which allows

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itself to be evoked but not shared, the death from which no-one dies, death without power, without effect, without final work [œuvre] that, in the derision it offers, keeps the attraction of ‘inexpressible life, the only life with which in the end you accept to be united’ (René Char).” 60 As for the opposition, Nancy in 2001 claimed to exist between “unworking [le désœuvrement]” and “the unavowable [l’inavouable]” which allegedly programmes the dialectical passage from Bataille to Duras while also serving as shorthand for the irreconcilable philosophical and political differences between Blanchot and himself, here too Nancy’s remarks bespeak extraordinary confusion. For the two terms, as their citational origins testify, and their grammatical status emphasises — Latinate abstract substantive here, impersonal adjectival noun there — are anything but properly symmetrical. While the first, transposed by Nancy (overhastily, he will later concede) from Blanchot’s discourse on the artwork — or, rather, on the absence of the artwork — to the sociopolitical sphere, describes a possibility of community that challenges, exceeds, and interrupts the finality of any work, such that the work remains haunted by what cannot ever be reached, so the second, more properly belonging (without belonging) to the problematic of writing, is a name without name for that which is as yet nameless, and is irreducible to the horizon of possibility, which it can but set aside, neither negating it nor affirming it, since it is that by which the alterity of the other can only be addressed. This is of course why “the unavowable,” for Blanchot, is closely linked with the neuter, the impossible, and the future, and in that sense with the literary, precisely insofar as the literary too, or writing, refuses to correspond to any rigorously identifiable, self-present entity. Importantly, though, the book that Blanchot signs with the word “unavowable,” true to the term’s abyssal silence, is anything but synonymous with itself. The effects are multiple, and make their demands felt wherever the limits of the possible are at stake, beginning with Blanchot’s account of Bataille, for it is there, in respect of Acéphale, that, now reversing the apparent hierarchy of his book’s title, Blanchot first has occasion to refer, untranslatably, to “l’inavouable communauté,” as though to make it clear that it was not community that was unavowable, but that it was the unavowable which constituted or, more importantly, deconstituted all possible community. And just as the unavowable permeates the whole of Blanchot’s book, so too its ghostly double “désœuvrement,” far from being reserved for Bataille or for Nancy’s thought of community, similarly makes an emphatic return towards the beginning of the Duras essay when Blanchot evokes the singularity of “the people,” irreducible to the State or to society in person: “[i]nert, motionless, less a gathering than the always imminent dispersion of a presence momentarily occupying the whole space, yet being without place (utopia), a kind of messianism announcing nothing but its own autonomy and its unworking [désœuvrement] (on condition it be left to itself, otherwise it changes

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immediately and turns into a system of force, always about to unleash itself).” 61 If, in the end, the relation without relation between “désœuvrement” and “the unavowable” is fundamentally dissymmetrical, it is because the thinking that traverses both the first and the second part of Blanchot’s book, and is carefully varied as it does so, is itself, as suggested earlier, a thinking of dissymmetry, i.e., of the unavowable — unthematisable — relation between the Same and the Other (Autrui) that, for Blanchot, is irreducible to any dialectic or to any ontology that would forcibly be an ontology of the Same. The terms of the argument, insofar as they are terms, are, as has often been pointed out, deeply indebted to the work of Levinas, which is not to say they are entirely reducible to Levinas’s thinking. It is however notable that, throughout almost all of his writings on Blanchot, Nancy consistently overlooks this crucial reference, reserving any further elaboration of Blanchot’s recasting of Levinas for a later date. In the meantime, from one forced reading to another, one calculated omission to another, and one precipitate assertion to another, it is as though what counted most of all for Nancy was once more the conviction that in the end he, Nancy, knew better than Blanchot what Blanchot himself thought — even if this meant failing to read much of what Blanchot had actually written. That there are differences of emphasis between the two parts of Blanchot’s book is nevertheless undeniable. First, though it is hard to accept Nancy’s 2001 description of the texts by Bataille dealt with by Blanchot as being solely, or purely, or even at all “theoretical,” or even that La Maladie de la mort was principally “a story of love and death,” it is no doubt true that in the second part of the book, admittedly alongside developments more plausibly belonging to the political or philosophical sphere, Blanchot turned his attention to what would customarily be categorised as a literary narrative, even though Duras’s La Maladie de la mort was an atypical récit — but, then again, all récits for Blanchot were by definition atypical — in that the chief narrative voice was not in the third person, but in the second (which is why, to Nancy’s apparent bemusement, Blanchot calls it “a declarative text, and not a narrative, even if it has the appearance of one”). 62 Then, there was the question of sexual difference. Blanchot had by this time read Nancy’s remarks concerning the problematic phallocentrism of Bataille’s writing on sacrifice and eroticism, which he had tried to deflect by evoking the fictional figure of Madame Edwarda, but which evidently called for more detailed consideration. “To accompany the reading,” as Blanchot put it, of an already controversial, sexually uncompromising story written by a woman, dealing with a situation characterised by the irreducibly asymmetrical sexual preferences of a woman and a man, was one way, in principle at least, of forestalling the justifiable complaint (which Derrida, among others, would later make

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explicit) that “community,” however configured, was commanded from the outset by normative phallic homosociality. Blanchot’s decision to write on La Maladie de la mort, which he began to do by March or April 1983, if not earlier, to judge from a prepublication extract (“La Maladie de la mort (éthique et amour) [The Malady of Death (Ethics and Love)]”) given shortly after to the journal Le Nouveau Commerce, 63 was overdetermined in other ways too. For this was not the first time Blanchot had felt a need to write on Duras. He had done so on three or four previous occasions: in August 1943 in an early review that dealt in part with Duras’s début novel, Les Impudents; in March 1956 in an essay devoted to her story Le Square (later made into a stage play) which Blanchot discussed alongside the work of Malraux, Kafka, and Henry James; in October 1964 in a footnote glossing the novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) in the course of an analysis of what Blanchot calls “the narrative voice” in Kafka, Thomas Mann, and others; then, finally, at somewhat greater length in spring 1970, shortly after the events of May 1968, in an article dealing with Duras’s book and film (which she directed herself) Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy, She Said). 64 Across all these essays and articles, written at different times and on the subject of diverse texts by Duras (as indeed likewise in response to Bataille), a remarkably insistent set of concerns on Blanchot’s part made themselves felt: the question of sexual difference (“Is there an art of the novel specific to women?,” Blanchot had wondered, in still forcibly conventional mode, in 1943); the question of relation and “community” (the doubly dissymmetrical male and female protagonists (“personnes”) in Le Square, the one a modest maid, the other an itinerant pedlar, observes Blanchot, “are brought into relation with one another [mises en rapport] because they have nothing in common [rien de commun] except the fact of being, for very different reasons, separated from the common world [du monde commun] in which they are nevertheless living”); and what Blanchot in 1964 calls “the infinite emptiness of desire,” which he described six years later, now referring to the use of Bach’s Art of the Fugue at the end of the film Détruire, dit-elle, “more mysteriously,” as “destruction as music.” But “of this word that destroys and destroys itself,” he asked, reflecting on Duras’s title, “what is it that might be said?” “We do not know,” he answered, in terms that were not without anticipating his conclusion in 1983: “We know only that it is the responsibility of each one of us to bear it, with henceforth at our side the innocent young female companion [the figure of Alissa in Détruire, dit-elle], the one who gives and receives death, so to speak, forever and ever.” 65 Duras, moreover, was not only a much admired author, who much admired Blanchot in return. 66 She was also a like-minded political activist. In this sense, addressing her work in 1983 also gave Blanchot the opportunity of progressing beyond the challenges or dilemmas of “community” reflected in his earlier discussion of the pre- and postwar think-

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ing of Bataille. For in 1958, alongside her former partner Dionys Mascolo and her ex-husband Robert Antelme, together with Blanchot and various others, Duras had been closely involved in the protest movement against the return of General de Gaulle as France’s providential saviour, “brought to power, on this occasion,” Blanchot later put it, “not by the Resistance, but by mercenaries,” 67 and in 1960 was one of the 121 signatories of the notorious (or celebrated) “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie (Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War),” launched and coordinated by Mascolo, endorsed by many others, but given its title and other distinctive phrasings by Blanchot. Collaboration between Duras and Blanchot, together with Mascolo, Antelme, and others, did not end there. In May 1968 all were members of the Comité d’action Étudiants-Écrivains, 68 and it was no doubt in memory of that shared experience that Duras in 1970 would dedicate her narrative Abahn Sabana David to Antelme and to Blanchot (to whom she had sent draft versions of the text), while Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable, in the margins of La Maladie de la mort, would recall that collective historical moment, and continue to ponder the legacy of “the ‘communitarian’ exigency [l’exigence ‘communautaire’]” which, he said, still haunted “communities,” without — for good reason — ever embodying itself as such. There were other contingent, but no less pressing circumstances. While writing what later became La Maladie de la mort between midAugust and mid-October 1982, in the process giving her chosen title a meaning that was anything but mythic or metaphysical, Duras, as she later revealed to the novelist and critic Marianne Alphant, was in the grip of a self-destructive bout of alcoholism which saw her consume on average six litres of red wine a day. 69 Antelme’s life, too, albeit in very different fashion, was itself increasingly precarious. As Mascolo reported four years later, Antelme in the summer of 1983 suffered a stroke, significantly affecting his short-term memory (and his ability to remember the lived present), but leaving his long-term memory intact. 70 In the months that followed, Blanchot would regularly voice his concern regarding Antelme’s health to his correspondent Vadim Kozovoi. “In the six months since Robert has been so ill,” he told him shortly before the end of December 1983, “each of our words has had to be snatched from anxiety and sorrow.” 71 In such circumstances, the task of recalling a shared political past, as far as Blanchot was concerned, was not simply a matter of archival interest. It corresponded to a still urgent if forcibly inaccessible sign of something resembling “community” — or, better, expressing the demand of community — between Blanchot and his erstwhile political friends. Antelme’s memory loss also emphasised how far remembering, as Blanchot had frequently stressed, was only ever a function of forgetting, and that it was, paradoxically, the very impossibility of remembering that therefore always conditioned its possibility. It was, in other

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words, only because the past was inaccessible to any kind of present that it was possible to remember it at all — and remember it as an experience or event irreducible to all presence. For Blanchot in the early 1980s the conundrum took on particular significance. For not only had he reflected in detail in L’Écriture du désastre on the legacy of the Shoah and the intractable challenge to memory and knowledge it presented, but also his own political past had increasingly been called into question in at times hostile, opportunistic fashion, making it doubly essential for him to recall a certain past, an obligation that found expression in a sequence of writings of varying length, responding to different occasions or contexts, the most important of which was to be La Communauté inavouable itself. But, notwithstanding this concern with the past, Blanchot refused to turn aside from the present. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the 1983 book was its timely contemporaneity. Admittedly, Blanchot had for many years been a literary journalist and book reviewer, whose responsibility it was, in a matter of weeks or even days, to produce column inches of thought-provoking discussion apropos of books that had only just appeared and which he must barely have had time to read at all. It is nevertheless still striking how many of the texts addressed by Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable, or simply mentioned by him in footnotes, came out in the closing months of 1982 or even, more often, in the early part of 1983. This was already the case, as we have seen, with Bataille’s “À prendre ou à laisser,” reprinted, as though for the first time, in Contre toute attente in October 1982. But it also applied to Derrida’s D’un ton apocalyptique (February 1983) and Nancy’s “La Communauté désœuvrée” (likewise February 1983), and was equally true of several other publications Blanchot had occasion to cite, perhaps having received advance or courtesy copies from the authors involved or their publishers. La Maladie de la mort, for instance, which he had read in manuscript a month earlier, appeared in bookshops at the beginning of January 1983, while Eugène Enriquez’s De la horde à l’État: essai de psychanalyse du lien social, referenced in both the first and the second parts of the book, did so early in February, 72 as too did the French translation of the three-handed volume of correspondence between Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva (from whom Blanchot borrowed the verses on which the prepublication extract in Le Nouveau Commerce closes). If there was indeed something in the air in the early 1980s, having to do, among others, with the distress of politics, as Nancy was no doubt right to suggest, 73 then it is plain that Blanchot too was acutely aware of political developments both in France and elsewhere, as his letters at the time to Vadim Kozovoi or to Pierre Madaule confirm, 74 and similarly determined, despite advancing years, to intervene publicly, in some appropriately discreet way. But of all the texts to appear early that year, in January to be precise, perhaps the most pertinent, as far as Blanchot’s thinking of “community” was concerned, was Sarah Kofman’s slim volume Comment s’en sortir?, which, as Blanchot

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was obviously aware, concludes with a lengthy extract from La Folie du jour, followed by a particularly harrowing personal memory from 1943. 75 Though the book is cited only in a footnote towards the end of the essay on Duras, its relevance is signalled from the outset when Blanchot first describes La Maladie de la mort, silently remembering Kofman’s title, as “sufficient in itself, which is to say perfect [parfait], which is to say without exit [sans issue: i.e., an impasse or aporia].” 76 Nancy in La Communauté désavouée duly notes Blanchot’s phrase. “We are thereby warned,” he writes, “that a perfection [une perfection] (a completed work [une œuvre accomplie]) is about to present itself as perfectly aporetical [parfaitement aporétique]: reaching no end, never resolving itself — and yet such that Blanchot found himself ‘brought back’ to the thought of community.” 77 There is much here that is both inconsistent and symptomatic. Between perfection and aporia in Blanchot’s phrase there is, if not a contradiction, then at least a provocative contrast, even of course a redoubled aporia, resulting from the expectation that what is perfect cannot be aporetic insofar as what is deemed aporetic, according to philosophical prejudice, is merely the product of an incomplete or deficient, that is, imperfect analysis. But not so for Blanchot. For the aporetic collision between what is perfect and what is an — aporetic — impasse is much rather the distinctive signature, so to speak, of “désœuvrement,” that thought, it will be remembered, according to which there is no completion that is not necessarily an incompletion, and no incompletion that does not defy presence, and therefore no completion or incompletion, no work or absence of work, in other words, that ever presents itself “as such.” What this leaves, as Blanchot puts it, are texts necessarily sufficient to themselves, but which are neither complete nor incomplete or, more precisely, resist by their very possibility or impossibility any attempt to impose upon them the criterion of completion or incompletion. “[T]he work,” he once noted, “i.e., the artwork or literary work, is neither complete [achevée] nor incomplete [inachevée]: it is.” 78 Each “work” or “unwork,” as it were, at one and the same time requires and excludes its reader, who can neither add anything nor substract anything in order to make a “work” properly coincide with itself. This is surely what Blanchot had in mind, many years earlier, when he coined or refashioned the phrase “Noli me legere [Read me not].” For what it implied was that all literary texts were irreducibly aporetic, and that aporia was the abiding proof of that irreducibility. All the more revealing therefore is Nancy’s paraphrase, which three or even four times over emphasises completion (“a perfection (a completed work),” he announces, “is about to present itself as perfectly aporetical [my emphasis]),” and then, in a sideways move, dismisses the impasse to which Blanchot’s remark bears witness by immediately evoking a quite different passage (though, in fact, just as much an impossibility of passage) which is that of Blanchot’s “thought” — not

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of “community,” as Nancy mistakenly has it — but of “the forgetting, not of the communities that subsist in our world (since, if anything, they are ever more numerous), but of the ‘communitarian’ exigency that haunts them perhaps, but is almost certainly renounced in the process” 79 — in which the aporetics of relation adumbrated by Duras, Blanchot insists, are not surmounted, or overcome, or subordinated to the possibility of “community,” but reiterated and reaffirmed in all their fragile necessity and necessary fragility as a sign of the impossibility that founds (and unfounds) “community.” Later in the same chapter, Nancy acknowledges Blanchot’s laconic footnote referencing Kofman, but seems strangely indifferent to its implications. “It would be interesting to pinpoint,” he explained, with airy disingenuity, “what it was that caught [Blanchot’s] attention in [Kofman’s] book, but here is not the place to do so.” 80 It is plain however that the question of navigating aporia in philosophy and thinking in general — the explicit topic of Kofman’s study — was a crucial one for Blanchot’s understanding of “community.” The fact, too, that Kofman’s book was in the form of a commentary on Plato (alongside La Folie du jour) is also significant, for it was arguably this that prompted Blanchot to reread or at least recall Plato’s Symposium, to which he refers several times over in his commentary on La Maladie de la mort 81 — not least because Plato’s dialogue also deals with the nature of love, with sexual difference, including some of the varieties of hetero- and homosexual desire, and with the rival claims of love and ethics, all of which it addressed through the medium of Greek myth. Kofman, moreover, had concluded her reading of Plato by comparing and contrasting the opening lines of La Folie du jour (“I am neither learned nor ignorant [ni savant ni ignorant]”) with Diotima’s words in the Symposium, as reported by Socrates, which Kofman translates using the very same phrase. “Love,” too, she writes, “is neither learned nor ignorant [ni savant ni ignorant], but a philosopher, forced to invent all kinds of ruses, being fertile in expedients like a sorcerer, magician, or sophist.” 82 And in a similar manner, Kofman went on, whereas Plato’s Socrates sought to distinguish between a good philosophical aporia (or “mobilising aporia,” as she calls it) which stimulates thinking to search for a possible passage from darkness to light, and a bad, sophistical or “blocking” aporia which confines thought within unrelieved obscurity, so Blanchot’s story, as its title indicates, by dramatising how exposure to the light blinds just as much as it illuminates and belongs just as much to unreason or “madness” as it does to reason or “the day,” challenged the reliability of that opposition, thereby breaking, she concluded, “with all ‘Platonism.’” 83 Which was also to say that, by dint of the neutrality of its narrating voice, Blanchot’s narrative — a narrative that announced the paradoxical end of all narrative — not only problematised its own borders (in another instance, one might say, of partes extra partes), it also raised the far-reaching question of philosophy’s own rela-

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tionship with its margins or outside or its other, and whether the first is in reality only ever possible, as Derrida would constantly argue, insofar as it exploits or silences the second. As Socrates’s famous description of himself as a midwife made clear, and as Kofman also knew from La Folie du jour (and from Derrida’s 1979 essay “La Loi du genre [The Law of Genre],” the title of which might equally well be rendered into English as “The Law of Gender,” which she acknowledges in a footnote), 84 the question of aporia was anything but a merely logical one. It had significant implications for sexual identities too. And to the extent that sexual relations in turn, as La Maladie de la mort endeavoured to explore, raised important issues of logic, so the reverse was also surely true. Not for nothing, then, did Duras describe what occurs between her two dissymmetrical protagonists — “not separated, not divided: but inaccessible and, in the inaccessible, in infinite relation,” Blanchot puts it 85 — as corresponding to “a sudden rift in the logic of the universe”; 86 and not for nothing did Blanchot, in lines duly quoted by Kofman, also distinguish between those whose wish it was to die and escape life and those others, he added, “almost always women,” “who have never told life to be quiet, or death to go away,” 87 a passage that prompted Derrida, to the surprise of some, to argue that Blanchot’s narrator “himself” was not necessarily wholly “male”; 88 nor was it indifferent that Plato describes a “bad” aporia as meagre and sterile, resulting in nothing, and a “good” one as generative of “works” that would overcome death — since “to be a philosopher,” for Socrates, Kofman reminds the reader, “is nothing less than to conquer immortality” 89 — with the help of fine offspring or that superior creation of human fecundity: timeless or eternal works of the mind. An enduring set of problems nevertheless remained, as Kofman’s analysis made clear, and as Blanchot’s discreet reference to Kofman’s essay served to highlight, which was the question of aporia itself: in other words, how to distinguish one kind of aporia from another without lurching abyssally into further aporia. How might any decision properly be reached, and how far might an unproductive, so-called sterile aporia, being more truly aporetic, as it were, than its fertile rival, prove a more compelling stimulus to thought than one glorying in the hope, belief, or even the fantasy of having passed beyond aporia and already achieved its overcoming? Such questions may seem idle. They are however anything but alien to the issue of community. Indeed, quite the reverse. It is in any event striking that what Nancy identifies as the nub of his disagreement with Blanchot on the topic of inner experience in Bataille turns on a question of generation, legacy, and inheritance. Bataille, wrote Blanchot, always maintained that Inner Experience could not take place if it were limited to a single individual who would supposedly be adequate to

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Reading these words, Nancy responded by claiming that “the transmission of the intransmissible — one can call it the work [l’ouvrage: a book or piece of work] of worklessness [du désœuvrement] — constitutes the fundamental burden of what Blanchot has to say and no doubt the ultimate point of the ‘unavowable’ in so far as it is avowed as such.” He then adds: If I describe this movement as “subtle [subtil]” [as Nancy had done in his previous paragraph], it is in two senses: in the first instance, it is a matter of sharpening up “communication” (and therefore community) according to Bataille by turning the wound [déchirure: a tear or rip in fabric: Bataille in L’Expérience intérieure describes “communication” as one such “déchirure”], without however closing it, into a passageway, a means of access, however slender and fragile (in a word, it is the fragility providing access); secondly, one can observe a mobilisation of the dialectic: the incommunicable communicates itself [l’incommunicable se communique] and a tragedy is overcome. Whereas Bataille “turns his claws into himself [se retourne les ongles],” Blanchot holds his book out for us to read. 91

Much here could be said about Nancy’s discursive strategy. It consists primarily in a remarkable gesture of substitution and translation. Gone is the nuanced, aporetic rigour of Blanchot’s summary (“the transmission of the intransmissible”), the very formulation of which bore witness to the exacting recalcitrance and recalcitrant exigencies of Bataille’s writing — which is brutally supplanted however, and without explanation, by Nancy’s unidentified (and arguably unidentifiable) “passageway.” The effect of this rewriting of Blanchot’s analysis is far from negligible. It is to privilege, without pausing to consider even its possibility (or impossibility), the supposed result or outcome of the “operation,” i.e., what Nancy calls “a means of access,” the goal or purpose of which, even on Nancy’s own account, is largely imponderable. This is no doubt what prompts Nancy’s second move. For no sooner does he impose onto Blanchot’s aporia a logic of passage than he redetermines it as corresponding to a kind of dialectical fait accompli. Admittedly, to do so, he has to disregard

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the actual letter of Blanchot’s text, which, contrary to what Nancy’s paraphrase implies, does not say that “the incommunicable communicates itself,” but that “only the transmission of the intransmissible is worthwhile,” which clearly suggests that it is only ever a challenge or a demand that is irreducible as such to the realm of the actual or even the possible. But having reframed Blanchot’s discourse in this way, Nancy is then able, despite objections to the contrary, to turn the account of the aporetics of inner experience outlined in La Communauté inavouable into an operation of thought that not only has its teleological end in itself, but all of a sudden, in Hegel’s honour, notwithstanding Nancy’s later claim that “Blanchot suspends the dialectic upon itself,” is miraculously endowed with the mediating power required to overcome “tragedy,” a polemical move which then allows Nancy, solely on dogmatic grounds, to contrast Bataille’s “tragic” interpretation of Hegel with Blanchot’s “Romantico-Idealist” reading. “Whereas for Hegel,” Nancy later charges, “the passage from the one to the other produces a third term, and for Bataille the impossibility of passage opens like the night into which one has to go, Blanchot desires the passage itself to pass and take place only in its effacement.” 92 As he proceeds in this fashion, Nancy also proposes rewriting Blanchot’s “transmission of the intransmissible” as a statement about what he calls “the ‘unavowable’ in so far as it is avowed as such.” The benefits of the move are far from clear. The risks, however, are considerable. For Blanchot insists that, insofar as inner experience has as its solitary characteristic “the impossibility of Saying” which it is however essential to breach, so the only content of inner experience, he argues, is “to be intransmissible,” with the crucially paradoxical, not to say aporetic proviso that for it to be found to be intransmissible an attempt must be made to transmit it, without either prong of this dilemma taking precedence over the other, and without the relation between them leading to a dialectic of work (as Nancy persists in claiming), which is why Blanchot affirms it as what it is, i.e., as an aporia. “To avow the unavowable as such,” as Nancy transcribes it, on the other hand, is to perform a quite different operation, not least because what is involved is inevitably a kind of subjective, confessional, not to say inherently Christian act, which, very differently from the transmission of the intransmissible in Blanchot, is no longer premised on the impossibility of possibility, but rather, as Nancy describes it, on a kind of shameful reluctance to divulge an embarrassing or guilty secret, culminating, according to Nancy, in an inhibited yet unrepentant endorsement of some occluded, mythic, politically regressive “work.” Bringing the discussion to a close at this point is a revealing final remark touching on the gap or difference, as Nancy sees it, between Bataille and Blanchot. Generally, throughout La Communauté désavouée, Nancy maintains a stance of appropriately respectful formality towards his late subject, with whom he disagrees, in principle legitimately

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enough, albeit in ways few properly attentive readers are likely to find convincing. At times, however, this mask slips, allowing him to give vent to an unexpected degree of polemical affect, and revealing an extraordinary willingess to resort to stereotype and caricature in order to reach his philosophical ends. Such, in any event, seems to be the intent behind the barbed comment aiming to contrast the lacerating self-exposure routinely ascribed to Bataille’s writing with the alleged bookishness of Blanchot’s commentary. Not only does the comment make short work of Blanchot’s carefully nuanced description of the relationship of continuity and discontinuity between the failed communal enterprise of Acéphale and the publication of L’Expérience intérieure five years later. 93 Just as importantly, it fails to draw the necessary consequences from the fact that Bataille was not only an archivist and librarian by training and by profession, but also, like Blanchot, the author of a book, indeed of several books (the phrase by Bataille that Nancy cites is itself a response to the unreconciled pain of “writing”). Moreover, it disregards the extent to which Blanchot, who was among the first to write in affirmative manner about Bataille’s 1943 volume, spent the virtual entirety of his writing life explaining why it was essential to divorce “writing” from the teleological allure of any “book.” For any knowledgeable reader, then, the facile assertion that “[w]hereas Bataille ‘turns his claws into himself,’ Blanchot holds his book out for us to read” is the height of triviality, proof of nothing other than of the intemperate mood of its proponent. This is not the only place where Nancy voices unwarranted philosophical irritation. Readers will remember the celebrated saw, attributed by Bataille to Blanchot in L’Expérience intérieure, but which others have traced back to Bataille himself or any number of competing third parties, according to which “the foundation of all ‘spiritual’ life,” among others, “can but affirm of inner experience that it is authority (but that all authority must be expiated).” 94 Reviewing in La Communauté désavouée his surprise in 1983 that “a figure as prestigious as Blanchot should reply to an article by someone who was only a young philosopher without authority (and thirty-three years younger than Blanchot, on the other side of a generation gap that in particular contained the whole of the 1920s and 1930s),” Nancy, born in 1940, then quipped, as though in an aside: “— but we know, authority is experience.” 95 This was of course not simply to make a clumsy, knowing joke at Blanchot’s expense, but, in reversing the latter’s alleged remark to Bataille, to challenge its pertinence at the very moment when Nancy, writing in 2014, was himself within three years of the seventy-six-year-old author of La Communauté inavouable, as though, with advancing years, Nancy felt it was now his turn to assume authority. Some may find the criticism ungenerous. It must be said however that Nancy himself also proves at times to be a surprisingly ungenerous reader, reproaching Blanchot for a lack of modesty in pointing out that Bataille, “particularly before the war,” as the writer puts it, “felt

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abandoned by his friends,” 96 which readers familiar with the history of Acéphale and the Collège de sociologie know to be only too accurate a summary 97 — the inference being, according to Nancy, that Blanchot was of the opinion that it was only when he and Bataille met in 1940 that the latter knew true friendship, a contention most observers, not to mention Blanchot himself, would rightly deem absurd. At one stage Nancy goes on to criticise Blanchot, as already mentioned, for wanting to “turn one Nancy against another,” and for insinuating “that Nancy did not properly understand himself by not properly understanding Bataille, and that Blanchot, on the other hand, understood both Bataille and Nancy better than they understood themselves.” 98 If so, this would be damning enough. But what is arguably more damning is how the allegation much better describes Nancy’s own approach to Blanchot than the opposite. When for instance in La Communauté inavouable Blanchot points out in a footnote that all quotations from La Maladie de la mort, according to standard French critical practice, are given in italics, explaining that his purpose in adopting the convention was “to highlight the quality of a [narrating] voice whose origin eludes us [nous échappe],” Nancy in a footnote of his own, and once more with the help of Schelling, retorts that what Blanchot really meant by this was that here was evidence of “life’s tautegory, i.e., its myth, how it says itself to itself as an origin that is elusive [qui s’échappe] but says itself in its elusiveness [échappée],” implying not only that Blanchot did not know what he was saying, but that what he really meant was in fact the very opposite of what he wrote. 99 Elsewhere, too, Nancy has little hesitation in ventriloquising Blanchot, attributing to him, by projection, a series of offensive, yet in reality quite ludicrous taunts supposedly addressed to Nancy himself, along the lines that “you, [Nancy] you’re not a writer, just a philosopher,” or that “Bataille was desperate as a writer and as a philosopher,” or that “Duras and me, the one by way of the other, and the one in the other, we are writing the unavowable” 100 — none of which, for good reason, was ever said by Blanchot, merely put in his mouth, a decade or so after his death, for motives that one can but guess, by his belated commentator. But of all Nancy’s ill-advised remarks the most egregious occurs in the final chapter of his 2014 book, as he begins to deliver his final summation, so to speak, which he does, not in the dialectical terms of the Socratic midwife, but the hectoring tones of the street-corner evangelist. “We have to lend Blanchot a hand in making his avowal [son aveu: disclosure, confession, admission of guilt],” charges Nancy, now holding forth in self‑aggrandising, inquisitorial fashion. “By definition, what is avowed or unavowable,” he asserts, “is an error [faute: fault, failing, infringement, transgression]. Blanchot’s error is his political error before the war.” 101 True, Nancy’s uncompromising verdict is hardly unexpected, having been carefully prepared by him from the outset. It is nevertheless surpris-

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ing that, in the course of his whole 165-page book, he offers no historical evidence whatsoever in support of this conclusion, relying instead, in what can only be described as profoundly unphilosophical fashion, on unspecified and unsubstantiated rumour. And no explanation is given why Christian notions of culpability may be thought to be adequate or even relevant when it comes to understanding given political choices or decisions. Not even once does Nancy cite a supposedly incriminating text signed by Blanchot during the period in question. Nor does he properly examine, other than in the most summary terms, how or why Blanchot’s thinking may have changed since the 1930s. Nor does he explore the relationship between “literature” and “the political” in Blanchot, or even the question of the adequacy of those concepts themselves, save to make in passing, in another inconclusive footnote, the quite bizarre allegation that what he misleadingly calls Blanchot’s “refusal of narrative” is linked to the origins of fascism in late nineteenth-century French literary culture. 102 It is of course sometimes assumed that, when Blanchot’s narrator concludes La Folie du jour with the famous words “No, no narrative, never again [Non, pas de récit, plus jamais],” 103 he is speaking for the story’s author, and that this must mean that Blanchot too, as a writer, is henceforth announcing his renunciation of all narrative. But since self-evidently the narrator’s words are uttered as part of a narrative, i.e., La Folie du jour itself, they cannot possibly mean any such thing, but the exact opposite — which is Blanchot’s point, that is, that borders only exist in so far as they are crossed, which is also to say that crossing them does not efface them, but suspends and reinscribes them. But not the least surprising part of Nancy’s allegation is that he supports it by referring to Uri Eisenzweig’s Naissance littéraire du fascisme, 104 a book based on three case studies exploring hitherto neglected aspects of the Dreyfus Affair. In the first, and probably most important of these, Eisenzweig suggests how the lack of any all-embracing narrative dynamic in Maurice Barrès’s influential fin-de-siècle nationalist, antisemitic novel-pamphlet Les Déracinés (1897) reflected an ideological commitment to identitarian rootedness over history, and a rejection of narrative progression as an alien influence imported from elsewhere, i.e., by the Jews. Eisenzweig then goes on explore the reverse case of Bernard Lazare, the pioneering Dreyfusard campaigner, and the narrative function of antisemitic discourse in Octave Mirbeau’s famous (and much-filmed) Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid). Eisenzweig’s study is not without interest, though the alleged connection between fascism and a “rejection of narrative as a privileged form of truth,” as the book’s blurb has it, remains at the very least unproven. It is however hard, if not impossible, for any number of reasons, to see how Eisenzweig’s argument is at all relevant, as Nancy claims, to the novels and récits of Blanchot. True, in his footnote, Nancy makes the

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additional suggestion that “the motif of the refusal of narrative, with all the displacements, variations, and wanderings it implies, can also be related to Blanchot’s invention [in La Communauté inavouable] of a Jewish people ‘forgetting to leave.’” This too entirely misses the point. For if Blanchot describes “humankind [le peuple des hommes]” as “a kind of bastardised substitute for the people of God,” “roughly similar to what the gathering of the children of Israel in preparation for Exodus might have been if at the same time they had assembled while forgetting to leave,” it is not to appeal to that “fantasmatic kind of pre‑Judaic, ultra-originary Christianity” which Nancy rashly projects on to Blanchot’s words, 105 but because, if one accepts with Franz Rosenzweig that it was only in and through exile (in Egypt, then Babylon) that the Jewish people was constituted as a people, 106 so, for Blanchot, “humankind,” just like the people of God, whether it goes or stays, and radically prior to assumptions regarding national identity, has always already been uprooted and sent into exile, is therefore always already dispersed and cast adrift through time and space and, as in the narrative of La Folie du jour, radically exposed to an outside that may interrupt history, but is just as surely inseparable from it. One could go on to cite many further examples of the fierce intellectual rivalry apparent in this extraordinary polemic directed at Blanchot. Perhaps more important, however, than the content of Nancy’s various would-be cutting remarks is what they reveal about the affective charge underpinning his own thinking. At one point, for instance, Nancy abruptly dismisses Blanchot’s fiction on perversely contrarian and almost comically eccentric grounds that few readers will find pertinent, but which are nevertheless deeply revealing. “I don’t like Blanchot’s récits,” he told Esprit in 2014, “not in the sense that they are not to my taste, but because they constantly display a refusal of narrative — which is Blanchot’s big thing — and because narrative involves something contingent, accidental, or transformative, whereas Blanchot’s non‑narrative thinks it can show full presence.” 107 Listening to such wilfully provocative remarks, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Nancy’s response to Blanchot is traversed throughout by a singularly persistent desire not to read what Blanchot writes, but to substitute for it an alternative text of his own imagining or devising, all the better to claim for himself something resembling the real or true or veridical concept of community, on the questionable grounds that Blanchot makes it “impossible to grasp a thinking (a concept or idea) of community and as a consequence to reach any conclusion” 108 — with which one may, of course, agree, with diametrically opposed consequences. Nowhere is Nancy’s impatience more clearly in evidence than when he returns to that moment late in the second part of La Communauté inavouable when, Nancy suggests, “[t]hree female figures are suddenly brought together: on the one hand, the mythic ‘chthonic Aphrodite,’”

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who, Nancy tells the reader, supposedly “provides the true identity of the woman in [Duras’s] récit, on the other, the philosopher Sarah Kofman [ . . . ], and, finally, Marina Tsvetaeva.” “Together with the two women — the philosopher and the poet — and taking over from other mythic and literary figures named earlier,” Nancy adds, “including Eve, Lilith (taken from Duras), Albertine, Isolde, Alcestis, and Diotima, Aphrodite confers mythic presence on this woman made ‘as though by God himself’ and whose beautiful naked body was compared [earlier] to the ‘invisible evidentiality’ of the face in Levinas.” 109 In the space of three pages, Nancy runs together a dizzying list of women’s names, all of which do indeed feature in Blanchot’s slim volume, only for Nancy to endow each of them, gathered up under the banner of Aphrodite, with something of the same shared mythic status, as though Blanchot’s women, as far as Nancy was concerned, were all by definition mythic women or women of myth. But this is anything but self-evident, and Blanchot’s presentation of each of the women mentioned in his text is much more carefully nuanced and differentiated than Nancy’s description allows. This was already the case, as we have seen, with Blanchot’s use of Kofman’s Comment s’en sortir?, which he deploys obliquely or implicitly in his text as a way of discreetly questioning that philosophical, metaphysical overcoming of the aporetics of relation exemplified, among others, by Plato’s Symposium. And it was as a logical extension of that debate that Blanchot cited the threefold figure of Aphrodite: i.e., “celestial Aphrodite or Aphrodite Urania, who is satisfied only by the love of souls (or of boys),” “terrestrial or common Aphrodite or Aphrodite Pandemos, who desires bodies, too, and even women so that, through them, there may be offspring [afin que, par elles, il soit engendré],” and, most importantly and secretly of all, the third, the least mentioned, the most feared and, because of that, the most loved, who is hidden behind the two others from whom she is inseparable: chthonic or underworldly Aphrodite who belongs to death, into which she leads all those she chooses or who allow themselves be chosen, merging together, as one can see here [in La Maladie de la mort], the sea from which she is born (and never ceases being born), the night pointing to perpetual sleep, and the silent injunction addressed to the ‘community of lovers,’ so that, responding to the demand of the impossible, each for the other, they may be exposed to the dispersion of death. 110

Blanchot then notes that Kofman too, at the end of her reading of Plato, had done exactly the same, similarly emphasising, in addition to “the only two Aphrodites known to Pausanias,” “the third Aphrodite, the Underworldly, who forms a unity with death,” but nevertheless — or, perhaps more accurately, for that very reason — remains “occulted by all the protagonists in the Symposium, except (indirectly) by Socrates.” 111

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There was, in other words, nothing mythic or mythopoeic in Blanchot’s invocation of chthonic Aphrodite in La Communauté inavouable. For if it was Pausanias, as Kofman points out, who insisted in the Symposium that there were two figures of Aphrodite, and two figures of love, the one celestial or spiritual (and limited to homosexual men) and the other common or physical (and practised by heterosexual men and women alike), it was with the clear implication that there could not then be a third variety beyond, between, or before the two others. On this point Pausanias’s words leave no room for doubt. “As we all know,” Plato has him declare, “Love and Aphrodite are inseparable. Now, if Aphrodite were uniform, so would Love be; but she is twofold and so, inevitably, Love is twofold too. The duality of Aphrodite is undeniable: one Aphrodite — the one we call Celestial — is older and has no mother, though her father is Uranus; the other, the younger one, is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and is called Common.” 112 What, then, one may ask, was it that was at stake for Kofman and for Blanchot in their joint recovery of this third, more original or primordial Aphrodite who, while being neither Celestial nor Common, is nevertheless inseparable from her two sisterly doubles, even as she is almost entirely excluded, if not by Plato’s text, in any event by Platonism? For Kofman, it was because chthonic or underworldly Aphrodite was the only one in fact adequately to bear witness to the demon-like, in‑between status of the infinitely finite beings that are humans, whose fate it is, prior to all amorous spiritual elevation and all desirous sexual intercourse, prior therefore to both figures of Love invoked by Pausanias, and prior to all creation or procreation, always to experience — without experiencing it as such — the impossibility of the possibility of dying, without which there would be no giving of infinite finitude. And so it is for Blanchot too when he goes on not only to speak of the various motifs in La Maladie de la mort that reprise, probably inadvertently on Duras’s part, but perhaps in accord with some deeper necessity, various of Aphrodite’s most elemental attributes (the sea crashing in the distance, its unfathomable depths and surging foam mirrored in the billowing sheets of the bedroom at night, the insuperable vulnerability of a sexual partner offering herself as an object only insofar as she is not an object, the exacting impasse of a singular, unmediated relation without relation), but also to address the eventless event of dying itself, “a dying, by definition,” Blanchot puts it, “without glory, without consolation, without remedy, which no other disappearance can equal, except perhaps that which is inscribed in writing, when the work which is its distraction is from the outset a renouncing of any work, indicating only the space in which there resonates, for one and all and therefore no-one, the speaking, always still to come, of worklessness.” 113 But this is not all. Blanchot immediately adds, in a manner some have again thought arbitrary, two teasing lines from Tsvetaeva’s 1923 poem,

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“Eurydice to Orpheus,” as transcribed by the poet in a letter to Pasternak dated 25 May 1926, in which she writes, in Lily Denis’s French version quoted by Blanchot, that “ . . . through the snakebite of immortality / Women’s passion has its end [Par le venin de l’immortalité / S’achève la passion des femmes].” 114 But here, too, as in the case of chthonic Aphrodite, the abruptness of the reference is deceptive. For it will be remembered how Phaedrus in the Symposium draws a sharp contrast between, on the one hand, Alcestis, who, in recognition of her loving devotion to her ailing husband, Admetus, to the point of being willing to take his place in death, was then allowed by the gods to return from Hades, and, on the other, Orpheus, this mere cithara player, who, unlike Alcestis, had not “properly” died, but, penetrating to the underworld only by a ruse and by dint of his poetic artistry, had been given the chance of bringing Eurydice back, but only as an insubstantial shadow whom he promptly forfeited, only then, by way of punishment, to be torn to pieces by the vengeful Bacchic women. 115 Revisiting the Symposium in La Communauté inavouable, Blanchot agreed with Phaedrus, as he put it, that “love — stronger than death.” He did so, however, for very different reasons. For this is “[l]ove,” he explained, “which does not abolish death, but passes the limit that death represents and, in so doing, deprives it of any power with regard to helping others (the infinite movement that carries one towards the other and, in reaching out, leaves no time for returning to care for the ‘self’). Not in order to glorify death by glorifying love, but perhaps on the contrary in order to give life a transcendence without glory that places it, interminably [sans terme], in the service of the other.” 116 Blanchot had of course long made Orpheus an emblematic figure of the poet or writer. But this was anything other than to portray him, as had Plato’s Phaedrus, as a lovesick coward unwilling properly to sacrifice himself for his beloved, and rewarded as a result, not with her living presence, but merely her ghostly semblance. Nor was it to present him in heroic guise as a successful artist able to convert his grief for his loved one into an immortal lament, 117 nor was it to celebrate in him the figure of the poet as anguished, solipsistic genius. 118 For Blanchot, the lessons of the story of Orpheus were quite different, as he not only implies in his gloss on the words of Phaedrus, but also set out far more explicitly in his retelling of the Orpheus story in L’Espace littéraire or Le Livre à venir. For although the poet descends into the underworld with the express purpose of bringing Eurydice back to life, back to the light, and back to the day, Blanchot argues, it is immediately apparent that she is anything but a finite object to be grasped. On the contrary, insofar as she now belongs to death, she is by definition inaccessible, and may only be approached indirectly and on condition that Orpheus forget the artwork it is his task to produce. “The Greek myth,” observes Blanchot, “says this: it is not possible to produce an artwork except if the boundless experience of the

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abyss — an experience the Greeks acknowledge as necessary for the work and one in which the work is tested by its very boundlessness — is not pursued for itself. The abyss does not disclose itself directly, it reveals itself only by concealing itself in the work. Such is its all-important, inexorable verdict.” 119 But at the same time, and not surprisingly, since it is a feature of myth — and a consequence of its inherent plasticity — always to be ambivalent, always to contain multiple truths, and always to accommodate divergent interpretations, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice also says the opposite. 120 “[T]he myth,” Blanchot now explains, “does not however show any less that Orpheus’s fate is also not to submit to this ultimate law — and, admittedly, by turning to gaze upon Eurydice, Orpheus ruins the work, the work immediately unravels, and Eurydice turns aside into the shadows; the essence of night, beneath his gaze, reveals itself as the inessential. So he betrays the work, and Eurydice, and the night.” As with Hölderlin’s Oedipus, then, Orpheus’s betrayal is also a form of fidelity, and vice versa. Indeed, “not to turn towards Eurydice,” adds Blanchot, would be no less of a betrayal, no less of an infidelity to the boundless, uncalculating force of his impulse, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and her everyday attractiveness, but wants her in her nocturnal darkness, in her remoteness, with her unavailable body and inaccessible face, wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of an ordinary life, but as the strangeness of what excludes all intimacy, not in order to give her life, but to have living in her the plenitude of her dying. 121

There is much here, of course, that anticipates or is reminiscent of Blanchot’s response to La Maladie de la mort, which perhaps explains why, on receipt of the story in December 1982, after many years of turning aside, Blanchot was prompted to renew his acquaintance with Duras’s writing. 122 But here as there, the same double bind applied. Eurydice, like Duras’s young woman, is accessible only insofar as she is inaccessible, while Orpheus, like Duras’s male protagonist, is allowed admission to the place he seeks only insofar as he is refused it. And the work, if it proves possible in the end, can only be so because of its impossibility. “The work, by inspiration,” Blanchot comments, is no less compromised than Orpheus is threatened. It reaches, in that instant, its point of extreme uncertainty. This is why it resists what inspires it so frequently and so forcefully. And this is why, also, it protects itself by telling Orpheus: You will only keep me if you keep from looking at her. But that forbidden movement is precisely what Orpheus must accomplish in order to bear the work beyond what guarantees it, which he cannot accomplish except by forgetting the work, in the distraction of a desire that comes to him from the night, and which is bound to the night as it is to its origin. In Orpheus’s gaze, the work is

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The work, then, is that which, being always already outside itself, is without foundation, without power or possibility, having its origin only ever in an absence of origin. And if death was necessarily final, as Orpheus’s double loss of Eurydice seemed to confirm, it had the paradoxical effect of rendering his beloved not only mortal, in so far as she had indeed died, but immortal too, in so far as she could die no longer. For the Greeks, Christians, and many others, these were grounds for ascribing immortality to the dead, or at least to their souls or to their memory. For Blanchot, however, it suggested something more nearly resembling the opposite. Immortality, he argued, even before it turned into a belief in everlasting spiritual transcendence, was also a name for the radical unavailability of death and dying to experience. Death, in this sense, not only supplied proof of human finitude, it also testified to the infinite alterity of the experience without experience of dying and, by that token, of the inaccessible singularity of experience in general. Here too, then, in Blanchot’s reprise of the Orpheus story, as in the evocation of the figure of chthonic Aphrodite, there is evidence of a remarkable deconstructive displacement of what may present itself in the first instance as a founding myth of origins, but then, on closer scrutiny, provides more ample testimony of the radical impossibility of all such mythic foundation. And this also explains Blanchot’s seemingly abrupt turn to Tsvetaeva’s 1923 poem. For what is striking in the two lines Blanchot quotes is that what is said to put an end to Eurydice’s passion, either fulfilling or exhausting it, i.e., the venom of a snakebite, does so not through the reality of sudden death, but by the gift of immortality. This was to substitute for what Ovid famously called Orpheus’s shock at his wife’s double death (“stupuit gemina nece coniugis Orpheus”) 124 — this unique event uniquely repeated — what Blanchot, recasting the phrase, described in L’Espace littéraire as the irreducible duplicity of all dying, the realisation, as he therefore noted, “that death, so to speak, is double: there is the death that circulates in such words as possibility or freedom, which has as its extreme horizon the freedom to die and the power to risk death — and the other, which is ungraspable, out of my reach, bound to me by no relation of any kind, which never comes, and towards which I cannot go.” 125 Death, then, for Blanchot, as his reading of Rilke and dissident account of Heidegger had already shown him in L’Espace littéraire, 126 and as Duras’s story now reminded him, was a twofold encounter with both finality and infinity, and what spoke in that doubleness, beyond the realm of any proprietorial self or existence, was the inaccessible otherness

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of the other, with whom the only relation, as Orpheus realises, causing him to turn aside from the lure of the work, is an aporetic relation without relation: a relation, that is, that can but reach towards the other, who yet remains forever intangible. Tsvetaeva’s words, therefore, spoken by Eurydice in a poem addressed to Orpheus and rewritten by Blanchot into the margins of Duras’s story, significantly transform the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as conventionally understood and, by that token, its relevance for an understanding of La Maladie de la mort. Brief though it is, Blanchot’s invocation of Tsvetaeva was overdetermined in other ways too. For the lines reproduced in La Communauté inavouable were first cited by the poet herself in a typically effusive letter to Pasternak in May 1926, in which, reversing the canonically androcentric implications of the Greek fable, she made Eurydice responsible for making Orpheus look back, either as a result, she writes, of “the blindness of Eurydice’s love or her impatience,” or perhaps, she wondered, because Eurydice had herself issued “an order to look back and lose her as a result.” 127 The proximity between the two lovers, then, even their intimacy, according to Tsvetaeva, making it simultaneously both possible and impossible, was already a site of interruption, distance, and dissymmetry. Ironically, and yet fittingly, much the same state of affairs also came to characterise the three-handed correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak in which Tsvetaeva became involved during the fateful summer of 1926. For despite the warmth of relations between the three, whose letters were however only ever exchanged bilaterally, with a few being forwarded circuitously from one correspondent to another, much mutual misunderstanding ensued, exacerbated by the linguistic and geographical distances between the trio — Rilke living at the time in the Château de Muzot in the Valais in Switzerland, writing in German with diminishing proficiency in Russian, Tsvetaeva in exile with her husband and young family in the Vendée on France’s Atlantic coast, writing largely in Russian, as too did Pasternak who was still eking out an existence in Moscow, though his parents and two sisters were now resident in Germany. Each of the three correspondents led beleaguered lives in other ways too. Rilke, the poet of Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), and admired as such by both Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, was slowly dying of leukaemia and would not survive the year; Tsvetaeva’s life in exile remained financially precarious and would eventually force her to return to Russia, where she committed suicide in 1941, while Pasternak in 1926 was already experiencing the increasing pressure exerted on his poetic and other work by the Soviet authorities who would prevent him from accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Poets, too, then, though they enjoyed no common language or geography, no common identity or ontological rootedness, were nevertheless bound to their writing and therefore to each other by something resem-

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bling a shared awareness of the exacting demands not of the work, but of the worklessness that preceded, exceeded, and survived the work as its never present, ghostly, contestatory double, to which, despite illness, suffering, or adversity, they each in their singularity were constrained. The essential solitude of writing was impossible to overcome, but it was in any case inseparable from the relation without relation with the other or with otherness that made it what it was, while also denying it any possible foundation. And though such a relation necessarily refused the name of community, it remained synonymous with the impossibility of its possibility, meaning that writing, speech, thinking, or talking, being never identical with itself, was therefore always in the form of an unending question as to its possible or impossible boundaries, its possible or impossible existence “as such.” III THE INDIRECTION OF WRITING But if Nancy’s decision to impose a dialectical teleological frame on Blanchot’s book seems questionable and arbitrary, so too are several of the other interpretative gestures he makes, which similarly culminate in a series of extraordinary misprisions. At one stage in his 2014 return to Blanchot, Nancy sums up his argument by describing the latter’s interpretation of La Maladie de la mort as a kind of strangely complicit reappropriation of Duras’s text, claiming that “[u]ltimately [en définitive], the sexual scene [in the story], as imagined by Duras then reworked by Blanchot, is a scene subject in advance to the conditions of myth: of all-encompassing female sexual pleasure and all-encompassing male impotence (or an all-encompassing homosexuality incapable of satisfying a woman).” 128 This summary verdict, however, begs many questions. First of all, as seen earlier, it is no doubt axiomatic that any critic or commentator brings to the text they have elected to gloss or analyse a set of expectations and assumptions, prejudices or parti pris of their own, with the result that any interpretation might fairly be described as a reworking of the original text. Blanchot for his part plainly acknowledges as much by making no secret of his past personal and political proximity to Duras, and it is at the very least surprising that Nancy should himself be surprised that Blanchot should draw a connection, implicit though it is, between Duras’s La Maladie de la mort and the events of May 1968, which Blanchot had of course spent in the active company of Duras, Mascolo, Antelme, and others. Here, as elsewhere, Nancy credits his reader with little understanding. True enough, the second part of La Communauté

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inavouable opens with a half-page preamble explaining that Blanchot is inserting “pages written with no other thought than that of accompanying the reading of a story [ . . . ] by Marguerite Duras,” which is then followed by a paragraph that begins: “May 68 showed . . . ” “The ordinary reader,” claims Nancy, “cannot know that these are not immediately the pages just announced.” But an attentive contemporary audience will have quickly realised that Blanchot’s retrospective evocation of May 1968, written only fifteen years after the events themselves, had in fact everything to do with the question of the presence or absence of “community,” which is precisely the main topic of his discussion of La Maladie de la mort. Nancy is admittedly correct to point out that Duras’s name is not mentioned at all in the course of Blanchot’s description of the événements, and does not recur for another six pages — which, on Blanchot’s part, is merely a way of indicating that Duras’s involvement in May (“this fraternally anonymous and impersonal movement,” he calls it), not unlike that of Blanchot himself, was beyond the power or prestige of any imposing authorial name. 129 In any event it was far from indifferent, as Nancy omits to mention, that Blanchot should remember May in the margins of a story written by a woman, in particular by one who, like many early 1970s feminists, had more than once strongly criticised the male-dominated language and at times misogynistic behaviour of some of the protagonists of May. Moreover, in the early 1980s, all this was far from rarefied knowledge, especially in the wake of Mitterrand’s recent election to the presidency, which had prompted renewed, often critical interest in the precise legacy of the May events, not least because of the growing presence of several wellknown former soixante-huitards in influential roles in the mainstream press or even in the new administration itself. 130 And as for those who were too young to have witnessed the events themselves, it was enough for them to read the newly relaunched leftist newspaper Libération, which, in its 28 January 1984 issue, barely a month after La Communauté inavouable appeared in bookshops, published a whole-page spread attributing to Blanchot for the very first time, on the authority of Dionys Mascolo, a selection of some of the most incisive statements issued by the Comité d’action Étudiants-Écrivains in their mimeographed broadsheet Comité in October 1968. 131 But Blanchot’s principal concern in presenting La Maladie de la mort was not simply to contextualise his reading of the story by invoking this shared experience of May. Unlike Nancy, who, as we have just seen, lays claim to some “ultimate” understanding of the relationship between Duras’s narrative and Blanchot’s commentary, the writer himself took great pains to resist or at least to complicate the notion that Duras’s story was reducible to anything remotely “definitive.” In the course of La Communauté inavouable, he does this by proposing not one, not two, but as many as three distinct, if closely related, alternative interpretations of Duras’s

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text. 132 On a first reading, he suggests, La Maladie de la mort is a relatively straightforward story of male dominance. Insofar as Duras’s male protagonist, who has only ever known other men, chooses to pay a woman (who is not a prostitute) to spend the night (or several nights) with him, what the story may be thought to demonstrate is simply the extent of unrivalled male sexual and economic power in a “market-driven society” in which, Blanchot writes, “there is commerce between people but never true ‘community [une “communauté” véritable],’ never a way of knowing that is more than an exchange of ‘good’ technical procedures, be they of the most extreme kind imaginable.” But what Duras’s story also shows, Blanchot goes on, is how men too are the unwitting victims of their own privilege, and remain trapped, so to speak, within “power relations in which it is whoever pays or is in control who is dominated, frustrated by their own power, which measures only their impotence.” 133 And it is worth noting, adds Blanchot, that, as far as Duras’s protagonist is concerned, as Nancy in his summary conspires to overlook, impotence here is not synonymous with an inability to perform sexually. On the contrary, Blanchot reminds the reader, Duras’s protagonist “does everything that needs to be done.” The woman he has hired says as much, Blanchot explains, “with unanswerable conciseness,” by proferring the words (to which I shall return): “Cela est fait,” i.e., that’s it, it’s done, it’s over, we’re finished. But as intercourse takes place, as Duras’s text plainly confirms, 134 the responses of the two lovers, if that is how they can properly be described, are rather different in that, unlike his female partner, the male protagonist represses or suppresses all feeling, and this, notes Blanchot, at least according to this initial or preliminary reading of the story, is what is at stake in Duras’s title: “Lack of feeling, lack of love,” he concludes, “this, then, is what may be said to signify death, this mortal sickness with which the one is unjustly stricken while the other is apparently unaffected, in spite of being its messenger and, as such, not relieved of all responsibility.” 135 But if the male protagonist is characterised by deathly power, quite the opposite is the case with the woman in the story. For insofar as she is “the very first” for the male protagonist, and thus “the very first for all,” says Blanchot, she is endowed with a status “in the imagination [dans l’imaginaire]” which, giving her a transcendent quality, “makes her more real than she could ever be in reality.” Her vulnerability, in other words, may imply weakness or fragility, but what speaks in her very absence of power is a radical otherness, as witnessed by her face, writes Blanchot, implicitly citing Levinas’s description of the transcendence or transdescendence of the Other, and by the realisation that, even when exposed to danger, Blanchot adds, now remembering the figure of Madame Edwarda in Bataille’s story, “she cannot be killed, preserved as she is by the prohibition that makes her untouchable in her constant nakedness, both

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the closest and the most distant, that is, in the intimacy of the inaccessible outside.” 136 This first reading clearly has much to recommend it, not least, as Blanchot points out, its ability to account for various otherwise puzzling, not to say forbidding aspects of Duras’s dense and sometimes violent story. Indeed many are the readers or critics who have been prompted to abandon La Maladie de la mort at precisely this point, pausing merely to ask whether the story should be seen as an indictment of male homosociality in general or of male homosexuality in particular, or both, and to consider how far Duras’s text might therefore be aligned — or not — with one or other strand of contemporary feminist thinking. But as far as Blanchot was concerned, it was precisely the explanatory power of this first reading, committed as it was to reducing the irreducible, that was its most problematic feature, and it was this that prompted him to propose a second interpretation. Here, pursuing the remark made earlier about Duras’s young woman being a messenger of death’s sickness, Blanchot abruptly shifted emphasis, now arguing that since “‘the malady of death’ is no longer the sole responsibility of the one — the man — who knows nothing of the feminine or, even knowing it, does not know it,” it follows that “the malady is also (or primarily) instigated in the woman who is there and who decrees it by her very existence.” 137 In this perspective, the relation between the two partners is no longer configured in quasi-Hegelian terms, as a belated variation, so to speak, on that notorious logic of the master and the slave by which the master becomes the slave of his own power and the slave his indispensable master (or mistress). It is instead recast so as to reaffirm its inescapable dissymmetry. For while Duras’s young woman is asleep for the bulk of the time she spends with the man, in a state of relative passivity (“a passivity which is receptiveness, offering and surrender,” says Blanchot), so it is her partner, on the other hand, who “is rather the refusal to sleep, who is restless impatience, who is the insomniac who in the grave would keep his eyes wide open, waiting for the wakening denied him.” On that reading, then, it is the woman’s employer, not herself, who, in his ceaseless, unsatisfied search for love, displays more faith, even hope, than the frail object of his desires. In which case, observes Blanchot, “if Pascal’s words are true, it might be argued that, of the two protagonists, it is the male lover who in his attempt to love, in his relentless quest, is the more worthy of — and closer to — the absolute that he finds by not finding it.” 138 Crucial here is Blanchot’s claim, based again on the thinking of Levinas, that the relation between the pair is no longer mediated by their contract, or rather that the contract itself is set aside or neutralised by a relation without relation that suspends all homogeneity, all sameness, all shared space, and all convergent desires, such as to present a radical challenge to any ontology grounded in that which is supposedly “in

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common” — which means, of course, any ontology whatsoever. What, then, asks Blanchot, is the lesson of Duras’s story, insofar as it has one, for its reader? “That it is necessary,” he replies, now deploying a vocabulary more closely associated with Bataille, for there to emerge within the homogeneity required by understanding (the affirmation of the Same) the heterogeneous, that absolute Other with whom or with which all relation means: no relation, the impossibility that the will, perhaps even desire, should cross the uncrossable, in the sudden (i.e., extratemporal) clandestine encounter which is abolished with a devastating feeling never certain to be experienced on the part of whoever this impetus destines for the other by depriving them perhaps of any “self.” A devastating feeling, then, but one that in truth is beyond all feeling, knowing nothing of pathos, overflowing consciousness, breaking with all care for oneself and demanding without justification that which eludes every demand, because in the demand I make there is not only what lies beyond what might satisfy it, but also that which lies beyond what is demanded. Which is also to say: an intensification and excess of life that cannot be contained within itself and, in that way, interrupts the claim always to persevere in being, is an exposure to the strangeness of interminable dying or endless “error.” 139

Between Blanchot’s first reading and his second reading, then, much changes, to the extent that the two accounts may be thought to be incompatible. But if so, this would only serve to emphasise how far Duras’s story, perhaps like all stories, is traversed and riven by an ineliminable alterity, a doubleness that, separating the text from itself, is proof of its radical non-coincidence with itself, to which arguably the most telling testimony is that provided by Duras’s title. For death, insists Blanchot, as we have seen, is itself always already double, always at odds with itself, in other words, never one but always other, and it is this double status of death that conjoins and disjoins the two readings of La Maladie de la mort rehearsed so far. “Where might the feeling of love come from?” Blanchot asks, loosely quoting a passage from Duras’s conclusion. His answer also comes by way of paraphrase: “from everything . . . the approach of death.” 140 “Here again,” he explains, “is death’s duplicity” — its status as possibility and impossibility, obstacle and allure, term and termlessness, as reflected in this instance in “the duplicity of the malady of death which may be thought to refer now to love’s failure, now to love’s pure movement, but in either case calling up the abyss, that impenetrable dark uncovered by the dizzying void of [the woman’s] ‘parted legs’ (and how to avoid thinking once more of Madame Edwarda?).” 141 Two readings, then, each claiming undivided attention, making choice between them impossible. Neither, however, is presented as definitive, not least because there is a third reading at least, which Blanchot then goes on to unfold. “In a certain sense,” he concedes, having just resorted

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once more to quoting Bataille, “it must be obvious that I am no longer speaking exactly, as one ought to do, of Marguerite Duras’s text.” 142 This is, of course, not unusual. It is the inevitable burden of any reading, its inescapable condition of possibility and impossibility. To comment on any text is always to betray it, even if a text such as La Maladie de la mort demands the opposite. But in order to “betray it less,” Blanchot puts it, it is necessary not to go back, but to go further, to trace another oblique pathway through the tangled undergrowth of Duras’s writing. Blanchot’s reading, then, shifts emphasis once more. Earlier, the story’s female protagonist was characterised — and is still characterised — by her compliance, her apparent willingness to enter into a contract with the male protagonist and observe its provisions. Compliance here, however, Blanchot argues, is not simple. For it is also a gesture of refusal, one that expresses itself in the woman’s reluctance to credit her employer with a name, to acknowledge his tears, or to accept his Oedipal self-justification putting her in the position of some idealised maternal substitute. The young woman’s concessions, in other words, speak not of weakness nor of strength, but of a more radically affirmative distance or exteriority. “She is receptive to everything he offers,” observes Blanchot, “without ceasing to lock him in his closure as a man who has relations only with other men, which she tends to refer to as his ‘malady,’ or as one of the forms of this malady which in itself is infinitely more vast.” 143 As Blanchot continues to turn Duras’s story this way and that, in the interminable endeavour, as he puts it, to “extort from it its secret,” 144 it is evident that his purpose is not to find in the story evidence or proof of any existing, avowable, i.e., normative concept or theme of “community.” 145 At best, it is to explore, without pause or finality, how “the strangeness of what cannot in any way be common is what founds this community [cette communauté], forever provisional and always already deserted.” 146 Not any and every community, then, but merely this community. For it is a “community” that exists only insofar as it withdraws from all existence, appearing only to disappear, without the second of these terms simply negating and thus preserving what may have preceded, at least in the case of Duras’s female protagonist. “For, then, one day,” reports Blanchot, the young woman is no longer there. Her disappearance comes as no surprise, being merely the exhaustion of an appearing given only in her sleep. She is no longer there, but so discreetly, so absolutely, that her absence abolishes her absence, such that to go looking for her serves no purpose, in the same way that recognising her would be impossible, and to find her again, even with the sole thought that she existed only in the imagination, can do nothing to interrupt the solitude in which her parting words continue to murmur indefinitely: malady of death. 147

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Community, then, if it may be deemed to exist at all, is little more than a fragile trace, at best a memory or a promise, at worst a nightmare or a threat, but in neither case ever to be grasped as a stable or reliable presence. This explains why just as important as what Blanchot says in response to La Maladie de la mort is what he advisedly does not say. By the early 1980s, in part as a result of her career as a filmmaker during most of the preceding decade, Duras had come to enjoy a significant level of public notoriety. This was helped, in the aftermath of May, by the growing interest in various intellectual quarters in the relationship between women’s writing, female desire, and radical politics, with Duras often being cast as a central if sometimes disputed figure in that debate, not least for instance by the influential figure of Hélène Cixous who, in a footnote to her essay “Le Rire de la Méduse [The Laugh of the Medusa]” in 1975, famously named Duras, alongside Colette and Jean Genet, as leading exponents of what she sought to theorise at the time under the heading of écriture féminine. 148 As a result, throughout that decade, Duras became an increasingly visible presence in the media. Each and every film or text that appeared was immediately accompanied by interviews in the left-wing press where Duras was invited to explain herself and explain her work to audiences. 149 After some initial hesitation, Duras quickly began to exploit the opportunity to deliver herself of a range of seemingly impromptu, often provocative and frequently self-promoting comments. Most controversial of all perhaps, in the wake of La Maladie de la mort, were her remarks on the topic of male homosexuality. For if Duras on the one hand had been minded in 1980 to declare to the gay magazine Le Gai Pied (not without irritating at least some of its readership) that the “semiclandestine status in which I still find myself [i.e., as a marginalised female author] is naturally very much like that of gay men” and that male homosexuality, insofar as it was “in itself a refusal,” was therefore on a par with female sexuality, 150 so, on the other, by 1986, even as she continued to share her life with a gay man, Yann Andréa, 151 she had reverted to a discourse that, by associating male homosexuality with death, particularly against the backdrop of the growing and still poorly understood AIDS epidemic, had all the appearance of mainstream reactionary homophobia. Commenting for instance on her 1986 novel Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, which presents itself as a reworked and extended version of La Maladie de la mort, Duras declared to one journalist that “death is in homosexuality, since [male] homosexuals, in general, do not perpetuate themselves in their children, because they don’t have any [sic].” And despite her admiration for Blanchot, this also led her to rebuke him, together with Peter Handke (who had translated La Maladie de la mort into German and in 1985 made it into a film which Duras hated), for allegedly failing to notice the theme of homosexuality in the 1982 story. 152

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By 1983, by dint of the media coverage of which she had become the object, Duras the writer had become in the eyes of many her own most loquacious and authoritative critic, with the result that the vast majority of commentators writing at the time thought it enough in order to explain or explain away the difficulties of Duras’s writing to quote this or that self-justifying statement made by the writer to the press. In this context, Blanchot’s decision in La Communauté inavouable entirely to ignore Duras’s often overbearing public persona and to acknowledge her authorial or autobiographical implication in “the ‘scenario’” of La Maladie de la mort not insofar as she may have lived it, as assumed by the majority of critics, which was in any case a moot point given the undecidable blurring of actuality and fantasy, but only as “she imagined it” 153 was neither negligent nor accidental, as some critics have assumed. It much rather represented a principled refusal of the notion that writing be reducible to any subjective expression of opinion. This had long been Blanchot’s position, even in those essays in L’Espace littéraire or in Le Livre à venir where he had occasion to draw on writers’ letters or diaries, but where what was at issue was not any subjective state of mind, but “that essentially risky experience,” as he put it, using the word in a radically nonpsychological sense, “in which art, the work, truth, and the essence of language are called into question and enter into risk.” 154 As for the controversy about Duras’s alleged treatment of male homosexuality in La Maladie de la mort, which he had not mentioned at all in the extract published in the Spring 1983 issue of Le Nouveau Commerce, Blanchot responded in somewhat dismissive terms in a brief parenthesis when La Communauté inavouable appeared later that year. In that interjection, Blanchot neither agreed nor disagreed that Duras’s story was in some sense about male homosexuality. On the one hand, he correctly recalled, homosexuality is never named or identified as such in the text. But then, even if it was indeed somehow implied, he added, seeming in part to contradict himself, homosexuality “is not ‘the malady of death,’ it only makes it apparent, in rather contrived fashion, since it is difficult to resist the view that all shades of feeling, from desire to love, are possible between people whether of the same or the opposite sex.” 155 This was of course to sidestep the question whether male homosexuality was specifically addressed or not in Duras’s text by contending that in any case the issues raised by human sexuality with respect to the question of “community” lay elsewhere, i.e., that they had nothing to do with sexual orientation, preferences, or object choices in themselves, but everything to do with the relation without relation between one existence and another, a point Nancy signally fails to grasp by conflating under a single catch-all heading the repressive homosociality described by Enriquez (after Freud), the topic of homosexual paideia in Plato’s Symposium, the theme of male and female homosexuality in Proust, and the treatment of sexual difference in Duras, all issues that are explicitly addressed by Blanchot’s

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text, but which are then used by Nancy, in the name of something he oddly calls political correctness, to posit an unavowed, closeted homosexuality on Blanchot’s part, expressing itself in the latter’s friendship with Bataille, and allegedly putting him, with regard to his friend, in the position of being “a bit like a woman,” a diagnosis he supported, now in doubly essentialist vein, by claiming that “no doubt only a woman was capable of discerning in Blanchot a female impulse towards Bataille.” 156 Later in the book, in a similar fashion, now considering why Blanchot at one point refers to “the strangeness of that antisocial society or association, formed by friends and couples, always on the brink of dissolution,” Nancy, improbably enough, takes Blanchot’s surely uncontroversial observation (i.e., that friendships and sexual relationships, which are by definition typically exclusive, do not always last, and are in that sense always fragile) as further support for “the hypothesis of Blanchot feminising himself for Bataille,” as though the only way to dramatise Blanchot’s alleged subservience to Bataille was to cast him in the stereotypical role of submissive female, and as though the only relationships then worth mentioning were homosexual ones between men which it was appropriate to describe in traditionally hierarchical heterosexist terms. 157 It was true, of course, as far as Blanchot was concerned, that writing, in Duras, as always already elsewhere, had its secrets, but these were not secrets, he insisted, that could be determined or appropriated as such by appealing to some mythic or dogmatic interpretative key. Something, in other words, implicit in all writing, necessarily eluded the grasp of any reader, even more so a critic or philosopher charged with the task of subordinating a text to some systematic or repeatable truth. This no doubt explains Blanchot’s own often allusive and elusive writing strategy in La Communauté inavouable as a whole, which is marked and remarked throughout not only by its sometimes tortuous (and often untranslatable) syntax, but also by a persistent recourse to conditional verbs or conditional adverbial modifiers, and a fondness for semidetached present participles, compressed noun phrases, undecidable alternatives, and neutralising qualifications. Elsewhere, as his political interventions demonstrate, Blanchot is capable of being fiercely, even violently direct, and, in his essays on literary or other topics, able to sustain for long pages with lucid clarity and careful nuance a sophisticated critical or philosophical argument. In La Communauté inavouable, however, partly in order to keep faith with his title, borrowed, it will be remembered, from Bataille and Derrida, which placed him under a stringent obligation to forestall as much as possible all thematicism or theoreticism, he adopts a singularly oblique idiom, somewhat akin to what Edward Said, following Adorno, describes as “late style”: a style characterised, that is, by indirection, untimeliness, intransigence, and a resistance to assimilation. 158 When, more than a third of the way through his 2014 volume, Nancy finally turned his attention to the second part of La Communauté inavou-

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able, it was not surprising that it was these signature characteristics of Blanchot’s writing that he opted to emphasise. From the outset, he had given himself the dual task of properly reading Blanchot’s book for what he claimed to be the first time and of explaining why, in his view, the book had until now proven recalcitrant to analysis. 159 An initial answer was not long in coming. In the first instance, Nancy argued, it was the impenetrable intricacy of Blanchot’s relationship with Bataille that was “perhaps the main reason for the often uneasy fascination exerted by [Blanchot’s] text — without the possibility this unease might already have exerted itself upon Blanchot himself being ruled out.” 160 Then there was the complexity of Blanchot’s prose that, in Nancy’s view, made “complete analysis of the text both necessary and impossible” — but “necessary,” Nancy explained, “in that one would have to examine the use of every word, of every expression, and of each and every detail in a densely woven composition that departed just as much from standard conventions of argument.” 161 The “subtle movement” of Blanchot’s writing, its tendency to “dissimulation,” as Nancy also calls it, 162 was, in other words, a case of both extreme finesse and wilful obfuscation. In Nancy’s eyes, it was not just the intelligibility of Blanchot’s argument as a whole that was compromised, but the clarity of individual moments in the text. I have already noted Nancy’s readiness to take issue with Blanchot’s grammar and his efforts to correct it. In turning to the second part of La Communauté inavouable, he similarly stumbles over the writer’s use of language. When Blanchot, for instance, writing in Autumn 1983, describes La Maladie de la mort, published at the very beginning of the calendar year, as “an almost recent narrative,” Nancy complains that in a footnote, when referencing Duras’s publisher, Blanchot fails to provide a publication date, as academic practice would require, notwithstanding the fact that any book reviewer, which Blanchot no doubt considered himself to be, would routinely think such information superfluous. Nancy moreover finds the expression “almost recent” “surprising,” not to say “bizarre,” when it is plainly Blanchot’s intention first of all to remind the reader that Duras’s book was not quite as recent as it once was, i.e., when the the prepublication extract of Blanchot’s essay first appeared in Le Nouveau Commerce earlier in the year, but then, more pertinently, to inscribe Duras’s story within the history of its writing only insofar as history itself, being no more than the writing of another story, was not given final power over it. As Blanchot put it some months earlier, commenting on his own early stories in Après Coup, “history does not hold the key to meaning, any more than meaning, being always ambiguous — plural — is reducible to its historical realisation, be it even the most tragic or most weighty.” 163 Several other examples can be cited where Nancy diagnoses obscurity on Blanchot’s part when there is more plausibly none. He cavils for instance at Blanchot’s use of the terms “resuming” or “returning to,” when

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Blanchot at the beginning of La Communauté inavouable speaks of “resuming a never interrupted thinking,” or at the start of the essay on Duras describes La Maladie de la mort as “returning me to the thinking, pursued elsewhere, which is a questioning of our world,” concluding that there is something here, in Nancy’s words, “that may be thought to be touching on a discreet admission,” 164 when it is evident that Blanchot for his part sees difference perhaps, but no contradiction between his 1983 book and his previous writing as critic, novelist, or even 1960s political activist. And in a similar vein, when Blanchot, in glossing La Maladie de la mort, characterises May 1968 as occurring with “the suddenness of a happy encounter,” so, for Nancy, now in the guise of snooping private detective, this can but imply “that in this weave of texts is stored a secretive actual experience known to certain individuals who perhaps can recognise themselves in it.” 165 And finally, in endeavouring to contextualise Blanchot’s essay, laboriously drawing attention to what, with scant justification, he calls its two different versions (i.e., the prepublication extract from April and the complete text from December), Nancy makes the unconvincing claim that Blanchot “returned to his [original] text and in some way re-addressed or redirected it” — albeit, as Nancy concedes, “practically without changing anything” — in order to incorporate (according to Nancy) an opening rejoinder dismissing the contemporary proliferation and failure of “communities” which is supposedly directed specifically at Nancy and the “communal life” the latter shared at the time with Lacoue-Labarthe, their wives, and offspring, to whom the initial February 1983 version of “La Communauté désœuvrée” was indeed dedicated. The possibility that this is what Blanchot had in mind is of course one that cannot be discounted, as Nancy rightly points out, though equally, in the absence of any compelling evidence, it is one that cannot be confirmed either. For Nancy, on the other hand, to raise it as something he, Nancy, could not exclude — this, as he well knew, was tantamount to declaring it, in his view, by self-fulfilling innuendo, to be exactly the case. 166 In overplaying, as he does, the problems of understanding confronting Blanchot’s reader, it is hard to avoid the impression that Nancy protests too much, and that he does so to legitimate in advance his revisionist reading of Blanchot’s book on the far from convincing grounds that the latter’s purpose in writing it, according to Nancy, referring to himself, was “to remind (me) that worklessness forcibly proceeded from the work.” 167 And just as Nancy disregards the majority of the multiple contexts which, as we have seen, Blanchot’s book inscribes, and into which it is itself inscribed, in order to privilege above all its supposed status as a mystified and mystificatory ad hominem riposte to his own thinking of “community,” so too Nancy frames his discussion of Blanchot’s response to La Maladie de la mort in extraordinarily reductive fashion. He begins by dismissing out of hand the evidence of Duras’s text, asserting in a paren-

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thesis his desire to “cut matters short and even avoid any considerations that may be more strictly relevant for a commentary proper — or recitation — of Duras’s récit” on the tenuous grounds that “the complexity of registers, of moments and perspectives is already great, and besides deliberately worked out so as to lead the reader astray in a way that is presumably part of what is essentially at stake.” 168 The gesture may be forgiveable on a personal level, given the challenging nature of the tasks involved. But many will rightly think it intellectually indefensible, and it is no surprise that it brings with it a number of predictable missteps — which serve only to lead Nancy’s reader astray. In the course of La Communauté désavouée, then, good to his word, Nancy quotes from Duras’s story on four occasions only, and in almost every instance (with one exception) cites truncated fragments of text taken from those passages in La Communauté inavouable where Blanchot himself draws on Duras’s text for purposes of analysis or comment. 169 The effect, plainly calculated as such by Nancy, is to attribute directly to Blanchot aspects, motifs, and even phrasings taken from the text the latter is reading, as though there were no difference between a text read and one written, between the words of another and one’s own. Any work for Nancy, it seems, is not only inertly self-identical; it is also merely expressive of the views of its reader, and no longer embodies the space of an encounter between a reader and a text. The citational obliqueness, multiple voicing, or dialogic stratification that is characteristic of all literature in general, and which some, like Blanchot, consider to be literature’s very condition of possibility, is accordingly rendered null and void. A number of strangely perverse misprisions on Nancy’s part then ensue. Often it is impatience that claims the upper hand. At one stage, for instance, displaying little sympathy for Blanchot’s scruples as a reader, Nancy expresses his irritation at the way La Communauté inavouable carefully considers one possibility, then another, in the effort to grasp the ambiguity inherent in the way La Maladie de la mort presents its male protagonist: is it “simply,” Blanchot wonders, as the story seems to suggest, that he has has avoided love in order to retain his independence, or are matters more “complex,” and is there in spite of all, as the story also suggests, a kind of wary, unspoken fascination on his part with the opposite sex? Nancy, however, ignores Blanchot’s questioning and is moved to complain instead how Blanchot’s reading, as he puts it, by “reciting Duras’s récit,” supposedly “espouses its ‘affirmations [ . . . ] hard to reconcile with any simple doctrine’” — as though the task of a narrative or its commentary were to supply such a doctrine. Having allegedly modelled itself on the text it is exploring, Blanchot’s interpretation, Nancy charges, merits being seen as neither “simple” nor “complex,” but, insofar as it fails to produce any “concept” or “idea” of “community,” merely as inadequate, abortive or half-baked, and falling seriously short of any proper philosophical conclusion. Whence Nancy’s dismissive

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summation, in which there is evidently more truth than he perhaps realises: “unavowable community does not reach any conclusion, any more than a conclusion should be reached by the text which expounds it by exposing itself to it, and does so only by exposing itself to and as the story of a woman to whom, by whom, and as who the man who signs: ‘Maurice Blanchot’ is also exposed.” 170 Readers of La Communauté inavouable may agree, at least up to a point. But if so, was it not, as Blanchot had explained more than thirty years earlier, because there could forcibly be “no end where finitude reigns,” 171 and because in any case it was surely the inevitable fate, and incalculable chance, of writing in the absent name of “community” always to find oneself exposed, without finality or possible conclusion, to the strangeness and alterity of sexual difference, both in the other and in oneself? Blanchot’s treatment of sexual difference in Duras’s story attracts further interested comment from Nancy. The rare example where Nancy cites a fragment of La Maladie de la mort not already found in La Communauté inavouable is when he refers to an early moment in Duras’s text where it is said of — and to — the story’s male protagonist (who is addressed throughout as “you”) that “one other evening you distractedly [par distraction: having his thoughts elsewhere] pleasure her [vous lui donnez de la jouissance] and she cries out.” 172 Taking issue in a footnote with Blanchot’s observation that Duras’s male protagonist “has sex [s’unit] with a woman he meets by chance to whom he gives pleasure he does not share [une jouissance qu’il ne partage pas],” Nancy remarks that “Blanchot, without making it clear, is not referring here to the one-off ‘distracted’ pleasure [la jouissance occasionnelle et ‘distraite’] that Duras mentions first, but to the quite deliberate and carefully described pleasure the man’s caress gives to the woman at least three nights before the last (if not the last three nights).” 173 The force of Nancy’s objection is however far from clear. First of all, it is based on a misleading paraphrase of the text of La Maladie de la mort, where it is plainly the male protagonist who is “distracted,” not his partner’s sexual pleasure. Second, though there is in Duras’s presentation a clear difference in intent on the man’s part and intensity on the woman’s between the latter’s two moments of explicit sexual pleasure at the masturbatory hand of her lover, there is no evidence that in either case the pleasure taken by the one or given by the other (or vice versa) is properly shared (or not), not least because of the impossibility of deciding in what sense sexual pleasure might ever be experienced in common, even assuming that it might ever be identified with confidence, insofar as, being equally synonymous with its detours, its deferral, and its dissipation, it “is essentially that which escapes [all naming]” 174 — which is precisely Blanchot’s point. And this is why, in the main clause of the sentence from La Communauté inavouable picked out by Nancy, but which the latter does not go on to quote until much later, the crucial emphasis for Blanchot falls not on

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the fact that Duras’s male protagonist “gives pleasure that he does not share,” but on the way in which, in La Maladie de la mort, as Blanchot puts it, taking the opportunity to set aside his earlier reference to Bataille’s “true world of lovers,” “Duras sensed the need to reach beyond the magic circle of attraction informing, in far too self-satisfied a fashion, the romantic embrace of lovers, even were they to be borne blindly by the need to lose themselves more than by any concern with finding each other.” 175 Nancy does not, however, quote this second part of Blanchot’s sentence until later, and only then partially, in order to put it on a par, somewhat surprisingly, with Blanchot’s principled reluctance fully to endorse the concept of “community.” “What had been announced as a premiss,” charges Nancy, “finds here its conclusion: it is right [for Blanchot] that one should evade community, escape ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time,’ as well as ‘the magic circle of attraction informing [ . . . ] the romantic embrace of lovers.’” 176 Nancy’s interpolation, recalling, as he explains in a footnote, a famous phrase from the 1950s often attributed to Sartre, according to which “communism” or “Marxism” was deemed to be “the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” is both strange and revealing. Blanchot himself, no doubt unimpressed by its dogmatic confidence in the teleology of history, had refrained from using the phrase himself, perhaps advisedly, in La Communauté inavouable. Nancy, on the other hand, as he reminds readers of La Communauté désavouée in a footnote, had invoked it from the very outset in 1983 in “La Communauté désœuvrée” as a kind of preliminary validation of the notion that “the word ’communism,’” as he put it at the time, “is emblematic of the desire to find or refind a place for community.” 177 But by aligning Blanchot’s rejection of the immersive fantasy of romantic love with reticence with regard to community and implicit scepticism concerning the teleology of history, Nancy implicitly — perhaps inadvertently and despite everything he says elsewhere to the contrary — accredits the idea that faith in “community” and in the teleology of history are little different, in fact, from self-satisfied romantic love — which Blanchot, according to Nancy, is wrong to dismiss. Which would then suggest that Nancy somehow now wishes to endorse it. Returning later to Blanchot’s assertion that sexual pleasure “is essentially that which escapes,” Nancy comments that “the escaping of pleasure is pleasure itself: not its culmination, nor its satisfaction — nor its opposite — but desire renewed. Is there not pleasure in being together, prior to or at a distance from the sex and/or love which present it in hyperbolic form? Was it not that pleasure which was at stake in May 68? And could one not say [La Communauté inavouable] is itself secretly a way of renewing that pleasure and desire for it?” 178 It is indeed hard to disagree, and there is nothing in Blanchot’s book that might provide grounds for doing so. Without transition, however, and with an abruptness suggesting the involvement of something no longer purely philo-

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sophical, Nancy immediately changes tack in order to argue, by way of another contentious paraphrase and partial quotation, that “one has to think, in spite of everything [sic], that [Blanchot’s book] gets carried away by its distrust of the common and community — a distrust of the vulgar, the gregarious, and the normative prompted by the fear of ‘what may be common [Blanchot’s emphasis] to those who would claim to belong to a whole, a group, a council, or a collective.’” And Nancy adds, “[Blanchot’s] italics are explicit: what is common is forcibly suspect. We come back to aristocratic distinction at the same time as to the separate status of the writer (as ‘author’ or ‘intellectual’).” 179 Readers may recall that Blanchot began La Communauté inavouable by invoking his longstanding meditation, among others, “on the deficiency in language that words such as communism or community appear to comprise, if we sense that they bear something quite different to what may be common [Blanchot’s italics] to those who would claim to belong to a whole, a group, a council, or a collective, even in claiming not to have any part in them in whatever shape or form.” 180 The italics used for “common,” as Nancy correctly points out, are indeed Blanchot’s — but not because of any aristocratic contempt for the politically organised man or woman in the street, but because, like the words “communism” or “community” earlier in the sentence, following standard French typographical custom, the word is a quotation, in this case a quotation from . . . the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, notably from 1983’s “La Communauté désœuvrée,” to which Blanchot makes reference in the accompanying footnote. Of fear, in other words, there is no trace — other than in Nancy’s revealing commentary. Crucial to Nancy’s strategy with regard to Blanchot’s reading of Duras, and implicit in his misdirected rebuke quoted earlier regarding the solitude of the female protagonist’s sexual pleasure, is his need or desire to attribute directly to Blanchot observations that derive from the latter’s probing of La Maladie de la mort, as though they somehow represented Blanchot’s own prescriptive or dogmatic conception of sexual relations rather than simply embodying the latter’s findings as a reader of Duras. That Blanchot, for instance, should note in parenthesis that, according to what La Maladie de la mort suggests, as far as Duras’s male protagonist is concerned, “the female body” is “where existence itself lies,” 181 or that he should similarly record, correctly enough, that the sexual pleasure attributed to Duras’s female protagonist is not “shared” by her male partner, all this, for Nancy, is evidence of a totalising edict, which he in turn attributes to La Communauté inavouable, according to which “manifestly for Blanchot sexual pleasure is something that cannot be shared [ne se partage pas],” to which Nancy, extrapolating wildly, then adds that, as far as Blanchot is concerned, “there is a something in men that remains alien to it,” an assertion he again rather inconsequentially calls into doubt by declaring in a throw-away footnote in 2017’s Sexistence that sexual pleasure, after all, is “itself perhaps unshareable [impartageable].” 182

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If there is dissymmetry between Duras’s two lovers for Nancy, it is not the double dissymmetry of relation without relation, plotted by the shifting inaccessibility of death and dying described by Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable, but what Nancy calls “the radical dissymmetry between male and female,” which in reality more closely resembles a hierarchically static, binary opposition. This, in any event, once more based on little else than Blanchot’s incidental observation that Duras’s male protagonist, on the evidence of La Maladie de la mort, does not share the sexual pleasure enjoyed by his partner, is the expeditious, forced construction of sexual difference Nancy is intent on imposing, whose “essential, not to say exclusive trait,” he maintains, “is provided by sexual pleasure: the woman climaxes — in Duras one moves imperceptibly [insensiblement] from an orgasm by surprise to another that is experienced, described, and viewed at length — whereas the man does not reach orgasm (‘a woman he meets by chance to whom he gives pleasure that he does not share’). It is as though the man ‘took’ the woman [‘prenait’ la femme: Nancy is quoting Blanchot quoting Duras] solely by penetrating her (or caressing her) but not in reaching orgasm, at least in the simply physical sense of the term (but is it possible to refer to a ‘simply physical’ sense?)” 183 There is much here that remains obscure. If Nancy had earlier berated Blanchot for allegedly confusing the first scene of sexual pleasure with the second, so here, while still assuming, erroneously, that in the first episode it is the woman who is distracted (or “surprised”) by her own pleasure, he now asserts the difference between the two scenes to be imperceptible. And he also implies, somewhat bizarrely, unlike Duras who uses the word indifferently, that “taking” physical possession of a woman (an expression Blanchot does not himself endorse) does not occur as a result of penetration, but only when the male partner climaxes. If Nancy’s account of the first two moments of explicit sexual enjoyment in La Maladie de la mort is precipitate, not to say narrowly dogmatic, all the more so is his response to the third and final, if still haphazard episode of sexual congress enacted by Duras’s two lovers. It is a scene to which I have already referred. Here it is in more detail: You ask how the feeling of love might suddenly appear. She replies: Perhaps from a sudden rift [une faille soudaine] in the logic of the universe. She says: From an error, for instance. She says: Never by act of will [d’un vouloir]. You ask: Might the feeling of love come from other things too? You beg her to say. She says: From anything, the flight of a night bird, a sleep, a dream of sleep, the approach of death, a word, a crime, oneself, itself, suddenly without knowing how. She says: Look. She opens her legs and in the hollow between her parted legs you can finally see the darkness of night [la nuit noire]. You say: It was there, the darkness of night, that’s where it is.

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Chapter 4 She says: Come [Viens]. You come [Vous venez]. Having entered her, you go on weeping. She says: Stop crying. She says: Take me, that it may be done [Prenez-moi pour que cela ait été fait]. You do so, you take her. It is done [Cela est fait]. She goes back to sleep. 184

As seasoned readers of Duras will be aware, the expression “Cela est fait” or, more often, “C’est fait,” meaning “It is done,” together with diverse inflections of tense or mood, is an unusually resilient leitmotif in an extensive array of texts by the author. These comprise novels, stories, plays, film scripts, and other works, and include such titles as La Vie tranquille (1944), Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952), Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953), Des journées entières dans les arbres (1954), Le Square (1955), Moderato cantabile (1958), Dix-heures et demie du soir en été (1960), L’Homme assis dans le couloir (1962 version), L’Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas (1962), Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Le Vice-consul (1966), L’Amante anglaise (1967), Détruire, dit-elle (1969), L’Amour (1971), Nathalie Granger (1973), and L’Été 80 (1980), not to mention La Maladie de la mort (1982), and subsequent publications such as L’Amant (1984), Emily L. (1987), La Pluie d’été (1990), L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991), and Yann Andréa Steiner (1992). 185 As it forces its way so insistently across such large swathes of Duras’s writing, this talismanic phrase, not least by sheer accretion, manifestly takes on the testamentary status of a paraph or personal signature. Blanchot, it was noted earlier, was already by 1983 a long-serving reader of Duras’s work. As such, he is unlikely to have failed to notice the frequency with which the writer deployed the phrase in her earlier fiction, and of the dramatic or even melodramatic uses to which it had been put. He had moreover reviewed three of the texts listed above, and continued to correspond with the author, and even offer literary advice on work in progress. 186 There is therefore little doubt that, in reading the ending of La Maladie de la mort, he will have been reminded, for instance, of the culminating scene in 1958’s Moderato cantabile, a novel which, not unlike the 1982 text, also consists of a series of chance encounters between a dissymmetrical couple, in this case between a dissatisfied housewife, Anne, and a man, a worker called Chauvin, in which the pair rehearse or repeat after the event, in transferential fashion, an earlier, unexplained crime passionnel involving unidentified, ostensibly heterosexual strangers. Repeating, as it were, the murder they dimly witnessed at the beginning of the novel, their own liaison ends on the following exchange: “I wish you were dead [Je voudrais que vous soyez morte],” said Chauvin. “It’s done [C’est fait],” said Anne Desbaresdes. 187

Reading Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein in 1964, another novel structured around the reenactment of an inaccessible past event, in this case

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the sudden abandonment of the eponymous protagonist by her fiancé during the ball celebrating their engagement, Blanchot will similarly have been struck by Duras’s use of the same expression in a crucial scene in which Lol, taking command of the story, finally allows the story’s male narrator to gain access to her traumatic memory of that night in the dance hall at T. Beach which it is her abiding desire to restage by casting new actors in the roles played by others long ago. “I have chosen you,” Lol accordingly tells the narrator, whom everything — gender, temperament, profession, language — sets apart from her, but who goes on: She comes nearer, looks on, we have never been so close before. She is white with unadorned whiteness. She kisses me on the lips. I give her nothing. I was too frightened, I am still unable to do anything. She finds this impossibility as expected. I am in the night of T. Beach. It is done [C’est fait]. There, nothing is given to Lol V. Stein. She takes. I still feel like running away. 188

Duras’s “It is done” was, however, much more than a trademark authorial thumbprint. It was a tell-tale symptom of the strange temporality of all Duras’s narratives. For one of the distinctive features of almost all her texts, including La Maladie de la mort, this “narrative without anecdote [sans anecdote],” as Blanchot calls it, in another phrase that Nancy, obtusely enough, deems to be wilfully obscure, 189 is that they almost all follow a logic of belatedness, not to say Nachträglichkeit, or even what in French, as readers of Blanchot will recall, is known as “l’après-coup.” In Moderato cantabile and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, for instance, and similarly, though less obviously, in La Maladie de la mort, the determining events — now an anonymous crime passionnel, now a traumatic experience of loss, now an unexplained desire, conscious or unconscious, to shun the bodies of women, now a decision to hire a woman for sexual intercourse, a woman who for reasons unknown accepts the contract offered — all this, by the time the story proper begins, has always already happened, with the result that what then ensues is but a repeating, reenacting, revisiting or recapitulating of what was previously said to have occurred and which, despite its absence and conjectural uncertainty, continues to exert an obsessive pressure on the present. This, then, is what is at stake in Duras’s repeated use of the expression “It is done,” testifying above all else to the realisation that what “is done” in writing is not something other than writing, since what has “in fact” been done has always already happened before, but only writing itself, writing, that is, as a mode of perpetual — always differentiated — repetition. As Duras’s protagonist Emily L. in the novel of that name later confirms: “How one manages to do it,” she says, “I don’t know either, or why. You know, nobody knows why. You get started. And then it happens, you write, you carry on. And then, yes, it’s done [c’est fait].” 190 At the same time, as Duras herself knew, and as Blanchot was only too

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aware, having already argued apropos of Bataille that “nonacting is one of the distinguishing features of worklessness,” 191 what was “done” by writing was nothing of the order of work or a work, but much rather an affirmative suspension of all doing, which was also to say that La Maladie de la mort, for Blanchot, as its title had obscurely intimated, was nothing short of an object lesson on the radicality of writing itself. What is done, then, without being done, so to speak, in almost all Duras’s narratives, is something — an action, an experience, an event — that is by its nature finite, but which, as it dies away, surviving itself as a residual trace or valedictory signature, like those many evening sunsets to which Duras’s texts are inordinately attached, becomes possessed of an apocalyptic intensity or paroxysmic afterglow bearing witness to what it once was only insofar as it is no longer. 192 Such, for instance, is the crossing of heterosexual desire with the possibility or impossibility of dying in Moderato cantabile, and such is Lol V. Stein’s last-ditch reappropriation of her own traumatic alienation, as dictated by the logic, or desire, of that alienation itself, and such too is the final sexual encounter announced or enacted in the closing pages of La Maladie de la mort. For what occurs without occurring at that point in Duras’s 1982 text, as evening sun gives way to night, mirroring that faultline in the logic of the universe which alone makes the feeling of love possible, is a singular, unqualifiable interruption in the libidinal economy, revealing sexual difference to be at its most intense when it is at its most stark. In such a pass, extremes attract and repel, and in what is both a repetitive ritual and a singular event, first experience and last experience, prompted in equal measure by money and desire, pleasure and its absence, possibility and impossibility, Duras’s two dissymmetrical, differently gendered, equally sexed bodies meet — and trace or inscribe for a furtive moment a relation that is absolutely without relation. And this is why, no sooner “is it done,” as Duras’s prose has it, than nothing is done, and there is little else for Duras’s text to say, except, that is, to dramatise its own abandonment and effacement. As dawn breaks, then, the woman is gone. “She will never return [Elle ne reviendra jamais],” Blanchot tells the reader, substituting, perhaps inadvertently, a future tense for Duras’s conditional (“reviendrait”). 193 Either way, what remains of the woman’s intercourse with her partner is but a hypothetical memory which may or may not have even taken place at all, of which all that can therefore be said, as in the case of May 1968, is: did it happen, did it not happen? It is most likely this that, for Duras, confers on the story’s end its quasimiraculous, not to say apocalyptic truth. For as La Communauté inavouable is quick to point out, lurking in Duras’s final pronouncement is an explicit reference to Revelation 21:6, in which John, hearing “a great voice” instructing him to write, is told by the figure of Christ: “Facta sunt!” as the Latin Vulgate has it, i.e., in the Authorised Version: “It is done,” or as French Bible translations usually render it:

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“C’en est fait” or “C’est fait.” These words in turn echo John 19:30, recording Christ’s last words on the cross, a reference that Blanchot again spells out by immediately glossing Duras’s ending (“Cela est fait”) with the phrase, resonant with the consummatum est of the Latin Vulgate Gospel: “After which, everything having been consummated [tout ayant été consommé], she is no longer there.” 194 Is this to say, as claimed by Nancy, who overlooks the quotation from Revelation, that the implausible sexual encounter between a male and a female body in La Maladie de la mort is being equated with what is held by the faithful to occur in Catholic communion? Believers would surely find even the suggestion of it entirely shocking. Admittedly, Blanchot does preface his biblical paraphrase by observing, enigmatically, that between Duras’s lovers there was evidence of a surprising relation which revokes everything that might be said about it and demonstrates the indefinable power of the feminine over whatever or whoever wants or believes itself to have nothing to do with it. Not Goethe’s “eternal feminine,” then, that pale copy of Dante’s terrestrial and celestial Beatrice. The fact remains that, without there being any trace of profanation, her separate existence [son existence à part] has something sacred about it [a quelque chose de sacré], particularly when at the end she offers her body, just as the eucharistic body was offered in an absolute, immemorial gift [comme le corps eucharistique fut offert par un don absolu, immémorial]. 195

Reading these words, Nancy pounces on what he takes to be their incontrovertible, unambiguous meaning. Noting the use of the conjunction “comme,” i.e., “just as” or “like,” he rightly observes that Blanchot is drawing a comparison. But “this comparison,” he argues, is spun out in what follows such as to give it the status of an assimilation or identification. If Blanchot avoids making formal identifications using mythic names, it is to distance himself from what bears the danger of idolatry, and there is no doubt he is also keen to keep a definite name like “Jesus Christ” at a distance. But at the same time, he carries out an even more audacious kind of incorporation, for the offering of the “eucharistic body” is not an image here, neither a representation nor a symbol: this body “was offered [fut offert]” — Blanchot uses the indicative, it is a reality [c’est une réalité]. No doubt not the reality that Christians (and, more precisely, Catholics) recognise in the story of the Last Supper (which is nothing other than the reprise or sublation of the Passover Seder already mentioned twice in the text), but the “immemorial” real which we know [nous savons] to be that of the “rapture that overflows and shatters the very possibility of recollection [le transport qui déborde et ébranle toute possibilité de se souvenir].” Not lived experience, then (Erlebnis, psychology, sociology . . . ), but experience that the same text gives us licence to call “mystical” — the term is discussed in relation to Bataille and by Bataille himself, and also appears in the expression “mystical body” which theology uses to refer to the gather-

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In the course of this analysis, on which much of the argument of La Communauté désavouée turns, Nancy makes at least three explicit references to Blanchot’s text. In the first, he suggests that Blanchot’s use of the preterite indicative “fut” (i.e., “was”) is proof that the offering of the “eucharistic body” mentioned in Blanchot’s comparison was “a reality.” Nancy does not explain what he means by the remark, other than to imply that Blanchot had retained a strong attachment to the Real Presence of Christ. The evidence he adduces to support this reading, however, is at the very least surprising. In modern French, as students of the language are routinely informed, the preterite or passé simple (which only exists in the indicative) is relatively limited in its usage, being largely restricted to predominantly literary or historical narratives. This is why it is so common in nineteenth-century novels, and why Roland Barthes in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero) was able to suggest in 1953 for instance that the passé simple, this “cornerstone of Narrative,” as he called it, this “ideal instrument for constructing universes,” had little actual temporal content at all, and principally served to convey a timeless fictional or fictitious, or even on occasion mythic narrative order — in which case to equate its use with something corresponding to “reality” seems hasty, not to say entirely dubious. 197 Moreover, readers of Blanchot do not have to look far to find the passé simple being used as a conventional marker of literary fictionality. For was it not the invented character of Madame Edwarda in Bataille’s story who was described by Blanchot in Après coup, in manifestly similar terms, as a woman “who, for a night, and henceforth for all time, was [fut] ‘Madame Edwarda’”? (Had Blanchot wanted to refer to the “real” woman who might be thought to have inspired Bataille’s narrative — Colette Peignot, say — he would have most likely said so, still in the indicative, by using the passé composé, i.e., “celle qui a été . . . ”) Nancy’s second reference to La Communauté inavouable is scarcely any less misleading. It is in the form of a quotation that Nancy cites in order to explain what, in his view, Blanchot means when he describes the eucharistic body as “an absolute, immemorial gift.” To do this, Nancy turns to a passage found in the first part of Blanchot’s book addressing the status of “inner experience” in Bataille, notably its character as “ecstacy [extase],” a word, Blanchot suggests, that “can only be written while putting it, as a precaution, in quotation marks, because nobody can know what it is, or even if it ever took place at all.” Blanchot then adds: Its decisive feature is that whoever experiences it is no longer there when they experience it, and is therefore no longer there to experience it. The same person (who is however no longer the same) may believe

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they are retrieving it from the past as they would a recollection [un souvenir]: I remember, I recall, I am speaking or writing in the rapture that overflows and shatters the very possibility of recollection. All the mystics, the most rigorous and sober amongst them (beginning with Saint John of the Cross), always knew that recollection [le souvenir], considered as something personal, could not be other than unreliable and, while belonging to memory [la mémoire], was ranked among what insisted on eluding it [ce qui exigeait de se dérober à elle]: an extratemporal memory, say, or the memory of a past that may be said never to have been lived in the present (and therefore irreducible to all Erlebnis). 198

Readers will have no doubt recognised the phrase that Nancy quotes in the passage from La Communauté désavouée reproduced here. But they will have also noticed that in reprising Blanchot’s remark Nancy radically alters its sense, to the point of making it mean the opposite to what it clearly states. In accepting, with reservations, the word “ecstacy [extase],” which, incidentally, as shown earlier, marked a key emphasis in Nancy’s 1983 account of Bataille, Blanchot’s point is that there is essential incompatibility between inner experience in Bataille and the “rapture that overflows and shatters,” insofar as the latter is but an illusion that, far from properly translating inner experience — which is an impossibility — simply mystifies it, which is why such false memories are rejected by a rigorous mystic like Saint John of the Cross (whose writings Blanchot knew well and, in the mid-1930s, had even translated). 199 And this is also why, whatever Nancy believes that “we know,” the misleading presence of “rapture,” as described by Blanchot, has nothing to do with the “absolute, immemorial gift” of which he speaks, and even less to do with “the ‘immemorial’ real,” which is an expression entirely of Nancy’s own confection, as is his extravagant paraphrase of Blanchot’s allusion to “the eucharistic body,” which Nancy bizarrely traduces into “a declaration assuming the truth of the Eucharist, with Blanchot affirming in the indicative that it ‘was given to us [nous fut donnée: sic].’” 200 In his third interpretative move, running together a number of elements found at different moments in La Communauté inavouable (notably, the use of the term Erlebnis, i.e., “lived experience,” as opposed to Erfahrung, implying the acquisition of knowledge, in order to remove the ambiguity of the French word “expérience” which can mean both, together with the suggestion, with which he would ordinarily concur, that “community” was nothing “psychological” or “sociological”), 201 Nancy again silently appropriates Blanchot’s text in order to recast it according to his own lights. The manoeuvre begs many questions. For how far is it the case, one has to ask, that Blanchot’s use of the term “rapture,” in the critical manner we have just seen, somehow makes it legitimate, as Nancy claims, to describe Blanchot’s reading of inner experience in Bataille as “mystical,” then, in an extravagant rider, to conclude that Blanchot’s interpretation implies a belief in the Christian doctrine of the transsub-

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stantiation? Admittedly, it is true that many readers or critics of Bataille have frequently had recourse to the term “mysticism,” or “the new mystical theology,” as Bataille himself calls it, in order to explain what was at stake in “inner experience.” 202 It is important to stress however the extent to which Blanchot was adamant in being opposed to such a move. Indeed, taking the opportunity to put some distance between his own understanding of Bataille and that proposed by Nancy in 1983, he makes it abundantly clear from the outset that, in his view, “Bataille, whose name, for so many of his distant readers, signifies the mystique of ecstacy [mystique de l’extase] or the secular quest for ecstatic experience, excludes [Blanchot’s pointed emphasis] (setting aside a few ambiguous statements) ‘fusional fulfillment [accomplissement fusionnel] in some collective hypostasis’ (Jean-Luc Nancy). It is something he finds deeply repellent.” 203 Moreover, if the phrase “mystical body [corps mystique],” referring to the Catholic congregation, does indeed occur in Blanchot’s book, it is only in the form of another quotation — once more from Nancy himself. 204 The latter began, it will be remembered, by claiming that Blanchot’s otherwise potentially shocking comparison between the offer of sexual intercourse and the Eucharist soon acquired the status of an assimilation or identification. One could easily object, however, that Nancy’s words much better describe his own method of proceeding. For it is on the evidence of a solitary comparison with the Eucharist that he feels entitled to assimilate Blanchot’s analysis of Duras to an enduring commitment to the Catholic Church, and on the improbable grounds that Blanchot nowhere utters the name Jesus Christ, no doubt advisedly, that Nancy feels able to identify in the writer’s comments on the concluding pages of La Maladie de la mort as those of a still fervent, if lapsed Catholic — in which case Nancy’s own assimilation and identification of the gendered, sexed body of Duras’s female protagonist with the “mystical body” of Christ would seem to owe less to philosophical scruple than to unchecked free association. If so, and in particular given the paucity of proof supplied, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that what is in evidence here is less a case of patient interpretation on Nancy’s part than an exercise in wilful projection. And there is more. Having acknowledged, apropos of Bataille, Blanchot’s explicit endorsement of his, Nancy’s, argument in 1983 that religious or pseudoreligious communion, by dint of its totalising immanence, was a wholly unacceptable model for the thinking of “community,” Nancy, now loosely paraphrasing Blanchot, goes on to claim that, in the second part of La Communauté inavouable, with the Eucharist and the Last Supper we are brought back to communion, but by virtue, one might put it, of a different theology or a different spirituality: that of a mystical body [corps mystique] which is

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not a superior individuality but a plurality in the mysterious unity of a body that is essentially offered and opened, and dispersed. One could say: Jesus Christ as woman, which also implies the woman in Jesus Christ — woman remaining woman in this transcendent, saintly, and “solemn” assumption [assomption]. A woman transubstantiated, one is allowed to say, referring to the Catholic theology of the Eucharist: this sensuous body [corps sensible] that is offered possesses the mystical reality, the superessential femininity of a subject absent to itself and to the other in its gift, as its gift — its communication. 205

There is little here that is at all convincing. And Nancy’s Marian fantasy (“assomption,” says the French dictionary: “miraculous ascent to Heaven of the Holy Virgin by the intervention of the angels”) does not stop here. Prolonging his reading of Blanchot’s text in his 2014 interview with Esprit, he went on to claim, quite unconvincingly, that “the whole point of La Communauté inavouable was the woman who disappears. It’s the woman who bears everything for Blanchot, including sexual pleasure, which the man does not know. But Blanchot, in the book, puts himself in the position of the woman.” 206 But as with so many aspects of Nancy’s reading, it is hard to see how this is at all the case. As noted earlier, Blanchot began his account of La Maladie de la mort by drawing attention to his own previous and continuing role as a reader of Duras’s work, and by discreetly evoking his friendship with the writer based on their shared experience of May 1968, as evidenced by the “opening that allowed everyone, irrespective of class, age, gender, or educational background, to associate with any other, as if they were someone already loved, precisely because they were the unknown-familiar.” 207 This was to acknowledge the existence of a relationship, born of desire, but beyond social or gender hierarchy, between a reader and a writer and, to that extent, to position Blanchot, implicitly but unambiguously, as a singular, male reader facing a singular, female-authored text (in exactly the same way, as noted earlier, that Blanchot as reader felt himself to be addressed as the male companion of Duras’s youthful female protagonist Alissa in Détruire, dit-elle). This was more than circumstantial formality. On the contrary, it was a calculated response to the performative or theatrical logic of Duras’s story (not for nothing had she herself suggested in 1982 how the story might be put on stage), which Nancy nowhere addresses, but according to which there was forcibly no neutral place available in the text for any male reader, who was inevitably cast therefore in the role of Duras’s anonymous second-person protagonist grappling with the strange otherness of an unnamed female body and, both as reader and as implicit performer, with its singular writing. The contract between male protagonist and female other described in the story was thus inevitably also a contract of reading between audience and text. (That Nancy, without admitting as much, was sensitive to this is suggested by his own clumsy insinuation that

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between Blanchot and Duras in the past there may well have been a personal liaison, and by his equally clumsy attempts also to assign to Blanchot, in his dealings with Bataille, the role of feminised homosexual lover.) In analysing the end of the story, however, not least for his own prescriptive purposes, Nancy seems intent at all costs to reject the relation without relation that binds (and unbinds) reader and text in this way in order to assert the primordial status of the transubstantiated, virginal female body. For his part, in summarising the encounter between sexed bodies that occurs in the conclusion of Duras’s story, Blanchot had, rather differently, sought to withdraw Duras’s female protagonist from that ascensional dialectic according to which the sacred, as so often in Bataille, is constituted as a negation of the profane and, insofar as the profane is itself a negation of nature, as the negation of a negation. This is why, Blanchot writes, “without there being any trace of profanation, her separate existence has something sacred about it.” In putting it thus, Blanchot was well aware that the term “sacred [sacré],” by dint of its etymology and usage, already meant separate, set aside, or inviolate. In this regard, his remark was entirely pleonastic. Duras’s woman, it says, has separate existence — because there is something separate about her existence, i.e., because she is inaccessible to the other sex or to another body, with which or with whom the only relation is a relation of nonrelation, a relation, that is, without mediation or reciprocity, resistant to all contractual exchange, and offering what can only be called a gift. In turn, the absence of any trace of profanation means that the woman’s body, as Blanchot had explained earlier, cannot be negated or, better, is irreducible to all efforts at its negation. Nancy’s reply to this argument is at the very least curious. He begins by recognising, oddly enough, with (or, more accurately, without) Blanchot, that what is at issue here, in this encounter between two sexed bodies, is neither rape nor sacrifice (“no more than one witnesses a rape,” he writes, “is this a case of sacrifice”). But then, without explaining or developing this reference to rape, he immediately jettisons his own argument in order to claim that what occurs in La Maladie de la mort is, is after all . . . a sacrifice: “This ‘sacred’ [of Blanchot’s],” maintains Nancy, “the excess of which does not however demand its transgression and access to which occurs through abandonment (a consent into which even the idea of there being a victim disappears) is a sacred in which sacrifice is overcome or sublated into a gift of self.” 208 This simultaneous relinquishing and reasserting of the logic of sacrifice is no random move. The underlying purpose is to subordinate the woman’s gift to a sacrificial dialectic and to overwrite Blanchot’s thinking of relation without relation between the sexes with a spiritualised, desexualised Christological conception of the self-affecting, self-erecting — female — body. In doing this, Nancy’s motivation is plainly polemical. At the same time, it cannot do other than

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provide a revealing clue as to what is persistently unthought, even repressed, in Nancy’s own thinking. For there are at least two blatant omissions in Nancy’s revisionist reading of Blanchot (and Duras). First, there is the seemingly obvious, incontrovertible fact that what Nancy wishes to view as a barely transposed act of holy communion is a scene of explicit sexual intercourse between two dissimilar, differentiated bodies. This, many may agree, is little short of a quite scandalous overturning, not to say deconstruction of transcendent communion, which Blanchot, following Duras, transforms into an earthly act of tenderness between dissymmetrical bodies, not unlike the encounter between a prostitute and an anonymous taxi driver evoked by Bataille in Madame Edwarda. But Nancy nowhere acknowledges or even notices this. When he complains in his interview with Esprit that “the man,” for Blanchot, allegedly “does not know sexual pleasure,” it is plain that the only sexual encounter Nancy has in mind, and prescriptively so, is the first (or second) scene in La Maladie de la mort in which the man pleasures his female partner by masturbating her, which is why, according to Duras — not Blanchot — he does not share her sexual enjoyment (though one may disagree: everything hinges on what is meant by “sharing”). Of the final act of intercourse between the two there is, in other words, no mention at all. This is however not all. For what is also signally absent from Nancy’s presentation is any recognition that what happens at the end of La Communauté inavouable is that Blanchot is quoting: not only quoting a literary text authored by a woman, and moreover quoting a text that is itself knowingly quoting itself, even as it is at the same time quoting the Book of Revelation or the Gospel of John, but, in addition, also quoting, silently, in its imminence or its absence, Duras’s “Come. You come [Viens. Vous venez]” which announces the end of La Maladie de la mort, and which, in turn, whether on purpose or by happenstance, is a quotation of Blanchot’s “Come, come, come [viens, viens, venez],” which Derrida, it will be remembered, alongside a reference to Duras’s revised version of L’Homme assis dans le couloir, had similarly quoted in 1983, using words which themselves were quoted again in the first part of La Communauté inavouable. 209 Such vertiginous proliferation of quoted words and mimicked voices may seem unintentional, accidental even. It is however rigorously unavoidable, coterminous with all literature as such. The fact is, Blanchot’s ending insists, all writing is quotation, such that there can never be any end to quotation, and never any beginning. Every writing — partes extra partes — necessarily exceeds its own boundaries and, being perpetually other than it is, always says more than it is capable of saying. And this is what Blanchot’s commentary on Duras, or his accompanying of Duras’s text, is both intended and driven to demonstrate. Texts, like bodies, in their singularity, their difference, their dissymmetry, their unrelenting

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finitude and ungraspable infinity, are never alone, but always in relation without relation with each other, with all others, and with themselves, according to a dispersive movement that, eluding mediation, authority, origin, or closure, is always oblique and always indirect. And therein, for Blanchot, unlike Nancy, lay the possibility not only of literature, but of “unavowable” “community” too. NOTES 1. See Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 12; The Sense of the World, 3. “Those who give in to the demand for sense (which by itself already seems to make sense and to reassure . . . ),” observes Nancy, “demand of the world that it signify as a place of residence, shelter, habitation, safety, intimacy, community [sic], or subjectivity . . . : the signifier of a proper and present signified, the signifier of the proper and present as such” (translation modified). Only a few pages later, however, the word is seemingly rehabilitated: “I would like, here,” says Nancy, “to open up an exploration of the space which is common to us all, which constitutes our community [sic]” (20; 9). 2. See Nancy, Une pensée finie, 55–64, 65–106; Les Muses, 117–32; La Pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 27–43; A Finite Thinking, 31–47, 51–77; The Muses, 69–79. 3. This was already the case in L’Expérience de la liberté, 98, 185, The Experience of Freedom, 192n4, 204n4, where Blanchot’s name recurs with regard to the impersonal, then by way of the term désœuvrement, which Nancy at the time continued to maintain. In Une pensée finie, Blanchot’s name occurs in several places (pp. 48n1, 56, 63, 64, 151, 215, 329), almost invariably in passing, without sustained discussion or analysis, and likewise in Le Sens du monde, 10, 71, 134n1, 195; The Sense of the World, 1, 43, 188n89, 128; or in Les Muses, 97n1, 156n1; The Muses, 116n11, 118n19. 4. See Jérôme Lèbre, “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy sur La Communauté désavouée,” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 4 (Winter 2015/16): 91–104 (p. 92). 5. See Nancy, Une pensée finie, 56. 6. Nancy, Une pensée finie, 101; A Finite Thinking, 101; translation modified. 7. See my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 339–68. 8. Nancy, Une pensée finie, 249; The Inoperative Community, 98; translation modified. 9. Nancy, Une pensée finie, 256; The Inoperative Community, 102; translation modified. 10. See Nancy, Une pensée finie, 233; The Inoperative Community, 87. Compare Blanchot, La Part du feu, 109; The Work of Fire, 104; L’Entretien infini, 67–68; The Infinite Conversation, 47; translations modified. Blanchot quotes Char’s phrase also in L’Espace littéraire, 196; The Space of Literature, 187. 11. See Nancy, Une pensée finie, 255; The Inoperative Community, 101. 12. See Nancy, La Naissance des seins, suivi de Péan pour Aphrodite (Paris: Galilée, 2006); Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, translated by Anne O’Byrne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 70–81. On this “third” figure of Aphrodite, see Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 77; The Unavowable Community, 46. 13. Nancy, Les Muses, 95, 97; The Muses, 54, 116n11. 14. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Compagnie de Blanchot,” revised version, Revue des sciences humaines 253 (1999): 241–43; Multiple Arts: The Muses II, edited by Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 82–84. 15. Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Propos de Blanchot,” L’Œil-de-bœuf 14–15 (May 1998): 55–58 (pp. 57–58); Multiple Arts, 87; translation modified. 16. Nancy, La Pensée dérobée, 27; A Finite Thinking, 31; translation modified. 17. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 11; “The Confronted Community,” 23. 18. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 35; “The Confronted Community,” 29. 19. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 38; “The Confronted Community,” 30.

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20. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 17. 21. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 39; “The Confronted Community,” 30–31; translation modified; emphasis in the original. 22. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 40–41; “The Confronted Community,” 31; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 23. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 125; The Disavowed Community, 57; translation modified. 24. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 92; The Unavowable Community, 56; translation modified. 25. See Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 10; The Sense of the World, 1. Nancy’s quotation is slightly inaccurate. For the original text, see Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 71; The Writing of the Disaster, 41 (where the phrase is translated as “absent meaning”). 26. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 62; The Disavowed Community, 24; translation modified. 27. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 27; The Disavowed Community, 8. “Worklessness,” writes Nancy, “is that by which the work does not belong to the order of the complete or the incomplete: it lacks nothing while being nothing complete.” Later too, still thinking of it as a vestige of Romantic idealism, forgetting that Blanchot’s main purpose was to reply to Nancy’s original notion of “communauté désœuvrée,” Nancy doggedly insists on misconstruing “désœuvrement” in Blanchot as “an approach to the worklessness of the work” (101; 44). 28. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 92–93; The Unavowable Community, 56; translation modified. 29. See Nancy La Communauté désavouée, 118, 155n2; The Disavowed Community, 53, 106n27. 30. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 53; The Unavowable Community, 31; Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 36n1; The Disavowed Community, 93n14. 31. Maurice Blanchot and Johannes Hübner, Correspondance: 1963–1973, edited by Eric Hoppenot and Philippe Mesnard (Paris: Kimé, 2014), 84–85. 32. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 13; The Unavowable Community, 3–4. 33. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, XI, 130; The Absence of Myth, 96; translation modified. Quite inexplicably, Michael Richardson’s translation of this passage substitutes “shame” for “the unavowable,” which not only destroys Bataille’s meaning, but also makes Blanchot’s subsequent recourse to the term entirely unintelligible. Suffice it to say that a reader of the French text has no such excuse. 34. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 196; Inner Experience, 171; translation modified; emphasis in the original. 35. Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, 385–86; Writing and Difference, 331–32; translation modified. Unfortunately, Alan Bass in his translation of this passage renders Bataille’s “unavowable,” as quoted by Derrida, as “unspeakable,” which again entirely obscures Blanchot’s point for anglophone readers. 36. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 47; “The Confronted Community,” 33. 37. See Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 330–31; The Politics of Friendship, 297. 38. Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 168; The Sense of the World, 107; translation modified. 39. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 42–43; “The Confronted Community,” 31–32; translation modified. 40. Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 169; The Sense of the World, 107; translation modified. 41. On “transimmanence” in Nancy (which is in reality not far removed from what Blanchot calls “the neuter”), see Le Sens du monde, 91; The Sense of the World, 55. 42. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 119; The Disavowed Community, 53. 43. Nancy, La Communauté affrontée, 45–46; “The Confronted Community,” 32; translation modified. 44. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 33; emphasis in the original. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 63; The Inoperative Community, 24.

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45. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 44. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 90; The Inoperative Community, 36; translation modified. In Nancy’s revised 1986 text, the sentence is slightly rewritten. 46. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 30. Compare La Communauté désœuvrée, 56; The Inoperative Community, 21; translation modified. 47. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 89; The Unavowable Community, 54; emphasis mine; translation modified. 48. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 58; The Unavowable Community, 33–34; translation modified. 49. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, VIII, 496. 50. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 44; La Communauté désœuvrée, 92; The Inoperative Community, 37; translation modified. 51. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 44–45. 52. Blanchot, Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï, edited by Denis Aucouturier (Houilles: éditions Manucius, 2009), 103–4. 53. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 57; The Unavowable Community, 33; translation modified. 54. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 84; The Disavowed Community, 35. 55. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 483. The phrase “negative community” is used by Bataille in a notebook entry dated January 1952 reproduced in the editorial matter for the 1973 edition of L’Expérience intérieure, Le Coupable, and other related texts, and reads as follows: “[I ought] in particular to look again at the absence of community and emphasise the idea of negative community [communauté négative]: the community of those who have no community [la communauté de ceux qui n’ont pas de communauté].” 56. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 41; The Disavowed Community, 15; translation modified. 57. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 40, 84; The Disavowed Community, 15, 35. 58. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 9, 45, 46, 83; The Unavowable Community, 1, 24, 25, 50. 59. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 41n1, The Disavowed Community, 94n20. For the quotation from Bataille, see Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 483. 60. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 82–83; The Unavowable Community, 49–50; translation modified; emphasis in the original. For Blanchot’s closing quotation, taken from the poem “Commune présence” in Moulin premier, first published in 1936, see René Char, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, [1983] 1995), 81. 61. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 57; The Unavowable Community, 33; translation modified. 62. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 59; The Unavowable Community, 35. 63. Blanchot, “La Maladie de la mort (éthique et amour),” Le Nouveau Commerce 55 (Spring 1983): 29–46. The matter contained in the article, with only superficial changes, reappears in La Communauté inavouable, 58–77; The Unavowable Community, 34–46. 64. See Blanchot, “Romancières d’aujourd’hui [Women Novelists of Today],” Journal des débats, 25 August 1943, in Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, edited by Christophe Bident (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 443–48, A World in Ruins, translated by Michael Holland (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 186–92; “La Douleur du dialogue [The Pain of Dialogue],” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française 39 (March 1956): 492–503, in Le Livre à venir, 185–94, The Book to Come, 150–58; “La Voix narrative [The Narrative Voice],” La Nouvelle Revue française 142 (October 1964): 674–85, in L’Entretien infini, 556–67, The Infinite Conversation, 379–87; “Détruire [Destroy],” L’Ephémère 13 (Spring 1970): 22–26, in L’Amitié, 132–36, Friendship, 113–16. 65. Blanchot, Chroniques littéraires, 443; A World in Ruins, 186; Le Livre à venir, 192; The Book to Come, 156; L’Entretien infini, 567n1, The Infinite Conversation, 462n4; L’Amitié, 135–36, Friendship, 116; emphasis in the original; translations sometimes modified. On Duras’s film version of Détruire dit-elle and its use of the music of Bach, see my Marguerite Duras, Apocalyptic Desires, 89–93.

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66. On the writer’s high regard for Blanchot, see the interview with Antoine Livio (October 1964) collected in Marguerite Duras, Le Dernier des métiers: entretiens 1962–1991, edited by Sophie Bogaert (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 39, where she is reported as saying: “I know Maurice Blanchot very well, and consider him to be the leading French writer.” Numerous other similarly strong endorsements on Duras’s part could also be cited. On relations between the two writers, see Jean Vallier, C’était Marguerite Duras, 1914–1996 (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2014). Nancy evokes these bonds of friendship in La Communauté désavouée, 54; The Disavowed Community, 21. He concludes with an archly knowing wink, but without any reliable evidence, that “just as there was Laure [Bataille’s lover Colette Peignot] for Bataille, so there will be Marguerite [i.e., Duras] for Blanchot”; translation modified. 67. Blanchot, L’Amitié, 131n1; Friendship, 297n1; translation modified. The text to which the footnote is appended, “Le Refus (Refusal),” was first published in October 1958, the footnote itself in 1971. The position of “Le Refus” within L’Amitié is not insignificant. It immediately followed a tribute to Antelme (“Guerre et littérature [War and Literature]”) and immediately preceded the essay “Détruire” devoted to Duras. 68. For an informative and well-documented account of the activities of the Comité d’action Étudiants-Écrivains, which at times, however, offers a rather unconvincing analysis of Blanchot’s thinking (which it dubs a kind of “Revolutionary Romanticism”), see Jean-François Hamel, Nous sommes tous la pègre: les années 68 de Blanchot (Paris: Minuit, 2018). 69. See Marguerite Duras, Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 2011–2014), III, 1811; and Vallier, C’était Marguerite Duras, 1379–84. After completing La Maladie de la mort in October, Duras was immediately hospitalised for treatment for alcoholism at the Hôpital américain in Neuilly where she remained until mid-November. News of her condition was transmitted confidentially and amidst some secrecy by her gay partner Yann Andréa to Dionys Mascolo and the latter’s (and Duras’s) son, Jean Mascolo, and to Robert and Monique Antelme. It would be surprising if Blanchot, discreetly, had not also been kept abreast of developments. Indeed, in a letter to Vadim Kozovoi, dated 1 December 1982, in Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï, 92, he notes that “Marguerite Duras, in choosing the title for her most recent book, expressed what I was up against very well: ‘The malady of death,’ and she herself is only clinging on to life.” 70. Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire (Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1987), 8. Compare Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible, 559; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, 2018. Antelme died in October 1990. 71. Blanchot, Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï, 111. 72. See Eugène Enriquez, De la horde à l’État, essai de psychanalyse du lien social (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Blanchot mentions the book (sentences from which he also quotes or silently paraphrases) in La Communauté inavouable, 32n1, 69–70n1; The Unavowable Community, 58n7, 59n12. 73. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 23–24; The Disavowed Community, 6–7. 74. See Blanchot, Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï, and Maurice Blanchot-Pierre Madaule, Correspondance 1953–2002, edited by Pierre Madaule (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). At various points in his correspondence, Blanchot expresses his disquiet at the repression of artists and intellectuals in the Soviet Union, the fate of Solidarność and the imposition of martial law in Poland, Derrida’s arrest in Prague for supposed drug dealing in December 1981, events in Lebanon, in particular the implications for the Palestinians and the State of Israel in the light of Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s “folly” (as Blanchot called it) in promoting the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, the aftermath of the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982, antisemitic terror attacks in Paris earlier that year, the ailing health of Andrei Sakharov, the distinguished Soviet dissident, the chances of glasnost and perestroika, the First Gulf War, and in 1993 the suicide of Mitterrrand’s former prime minister and confidant Pierre Bérégovoy.

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75. See Sarah Kofman, Comment s’en sortir? (Paris: Galilée, 1983), 98–100; the essay is reproduced as “Beyond Aporia?,” translated by David Macey, in Post-structuralist Classics, edited by Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1988), 7–44. For a detailed account of Kofman’s relationship with Blanchot’s work, on which she draws in several other texts, notably in Paroles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), Smothered Words, translated by Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), which Kofman dedicated to Antelme and to Blanchot, see Penser en commun?, edited by Ullern and Gisel, 195–273. The volume also includes the text of three short letters from Blanchot to Kofman dated 1987, 1990, and 1994, respectively. 76. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 51; The Unavowable Community, 29. For the explicit reference to Kofman, see La Communauté inavouable, 77n1; The Unavowable Community, 60n14. 77. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 63; The Disavowed Community, 25; translation modified. 78. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 12; The Space of Literature, 22. Whether this means the artwork is an ontological entity is something Blanchot would later query. 79. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 51; The Unavowable Community, 29; translation modified. 80. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 100n1; The Disavowed Community, 102n33; translation modified. Nancy of course knew Kofman’s work well, as is apparent from the discussions recorded in Penser en commun?, and takes due note of Kofman’s use of Blanchot in Comment s’en sortir?, all of which makes it all the more curious that he should be unwilling to investigate matters further. 81. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 68, 74–77; The Unavowable Community, 40, 44–46. 82. Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, 61; Post-structuralist Classics, 26; translation modified. The reference to the Symposium is to 203e–204b. 83. Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, 98; Post-structuralist Classics, 41. 84. See Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, 98n22; Post-structuralist Classics, 44n23. The reference to Derrida is to Parages (Paris: Galilée, [1986] 2003), 233–66; Parages, edited by John P. Leavey, translated by Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 217–49. 85. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 72; The Unavowable Community, 43; translation modified. 86. Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1268; The Malady of Death, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 50; translation modified. Blanchot comments on the phrase in La Communauté inavouable, 68; The Unavowable Community, 41. There are moreover suggestive echoes of La Folie du jour in La Maladie de la mort (and vice versa), as when the figure of the law, in Blanchot’s story, in a provocative transgression of “her” constitutive untouchability, has the male narrator, nevertheless “touch her knee: a bizarre impression.” See Blanchot, La Folie du jour (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 27; “The Madness of the Day,” translated by Lydia Davis, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, edited by George Quasha (New York: Station Hill Press, 1998), 198; translation modified. 87. Blanchot, La Folie du jour, 11–12; “The Madness of the Day,” 192; translation modified. 88. See Derrida, Parages, 258–60; Parages, 241–43. 89. Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, 68; Post-structuralist Classics, 29; translation modified. 90. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 35; The Unavowable Community, 17–18; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 91. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 49–50; The Disavowed Community, 19; translation modified. Nancy explains the quotation from Bataille in a footnote. Taken from “L’Impossible” in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, 114, the sentence as a whole reads: “Writing? turning one’s claws into oneself, hoping, totally in vain, for the moment of deliverance.”

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92. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 85; The Disavowed Community, 36. 93. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 34; The Unavowable Community, 17. 94. Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 120; Inner Experience, 104; translation modified. 95. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 19; The Disavowed Community, 4; translation modified. 96. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 47; The Unavowable Community, 25; translation slightly modified. For Nancy’s blunt riposte, see La Communauté désavouée, 53; The Disavowed Community, 21. 97. See Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre, 314–21; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 271–77. 98. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 62; The Disavowed Community, 24; translation modified. 99. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 60n1; The Unavowable Community, 59n11; translation slightly modified. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 75n3; The Disavowed Community, 99n17; translation modified. 100. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 62n1; The Disavowed Community, 97n2; translation modified. 101. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 125; The Disavowed Community, 57; translation modified. 102. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 91n2; The Disavowed Community, 101n29. 103. Blanchot, La Folie du jour, 30; “The Madness of the Day,” 199; translation modified. 104. See Uri Eisenzweig, Naissance littéraire du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 2013). 105. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 57; The Unavowable Community, 33; and Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 87; The Disavowed Community, 37; translations modified. 106. See Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 333; The Star of Redemption, translated by Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 319. 107. Nancy, “Quand le sens ne fait plus monde,” interview by Michaël Foessel, Olivier Mongin, and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Esprit 403, no. 3-4 (March/April 2014): 27–46 (p. 39). 108. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 91; The Disavowed Community, 39; translation modified. 109. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 100, 102; The Disavowed Community, 44, 44–45; translation modified. Nancy mentions in a footnote, in a rare quotation from the text, that Duras in La Maladie de la mort writes of her female protagonist, in words reproduced by Blanchot, that “her body would have been tall and slender, made all in one go, in a single cast, as though by God himself, with the indelible perfection of accident become person”; see Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1259; The Malady of Death, 15–16; translation modified. Nancy in his roll-call mistakenly claims the name Lilith to have been mentioned by Duras, when in fact it appears only in a plainly marked interpolation by Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable, 62; The Unavowable Community, 37. 110. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 76–77; The Unavowable Community, 45–46; translation modified. 111. Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, 94; Post-structuralist Classics, 40; translation modified. Strangely, Kofman does not explain her remark about Socrates’s insight into the Aphrodite who is otherwise than spiritual or physical — perhaps because, knowing he is about to die, he may be thought to have achieved greater wisdom than Pausanias. 112. Plato, Symposium, translated by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 180d (p. 13). 113. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 77; The Unavowable Community, 46; translation modified. “The renouncing of any work,” insists Blanchot — once more rebutting in advance, as it were, Nancy’s assertion that Blanchot’s thinking is secretly a thinking of the transcendent secrecy or secret transcendence of the work.

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114. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 77; The Unavowable Community, 46; translation modified. Among the many further, supplementary contexts of Blanchot’s response to Duras, it is worth recalling here, as we have already seen, that between 1976 and 1998 Blanchot was in regular correspondence with the Russian poet Vadim Kozovoi (1937–1999), who happened to be married to Irina Yemelianova, the daughter of Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, Pasternak’s mistress during the last thirteen years of his life, whose memoir of that period, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, translated by Max Hayward (New York: Doubleday, 1978), Blanchot read with interest when it came out in French translation later that same year (Otage de l’éternité: Mes années avec Pasternak, translated by Anne and Stéphane Tatischeff [Paris: Fayard, 1978]). Many years earlier, he told Irina in a letter, he had been aware of Pasternak’s attendance, under pressure from Stalin, at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in Paris in June 1935. It was probably at Kozovoi’s (or Irina’s) suggestion that Blanchot renewed his interest in the poet, “this great writer who died twenty years ago,” as he describes him in a letter to Kozovoi from 22 May 1980, and whose early book of poems, My Sister, Life (1922), he reports in a letter dated 29 October 1982 as having just received in Hélène Henry’s recent French edition, published only weeks before (Ma sœur la vie [Paris: Gallimard, 1982]). In a further letter, dated 18 March 1983, Blanchot notes that he has also finished reading, again most likely at Kozovoi’s suggestion, the recently published translation of the correspondence between Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva, which is almost certainly where he first encountered the lines quoted here, which feature in a letter from Tsvetaeva to Pasternak from 25 May 1926. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaïeva, Correspondance à trois: été 1926, edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky, translated by Lily Denis, Philippe Jaccottet, and Ève Malleret (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 141; Letters, Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke, translated by Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), 121, where the passage given by Blanchot is translated: “In deathlessness by an adder’s sting / A woman’s passion ends!” Eurydice, it will be remembered, according to both Virgil (Georgics, IV, ll. 457–59) and Ovid (Metamorphoses, X, 23–24), died as a result of stepping on a snake (a viper or adder, adds Ovid). 115. Plato, Symposium, 179b–e (pp. 11–12). 116. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 75; The Unavowable Community, 45; translation modified. 117. Blanchot explains this with the help of a line from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus in L’Espace littéraire, 254; The Space of Literature, 242. “Be always dead in Eurydice [Sei immer tot in Eurydike],” it says. And Blanchot comments, “Yes, such is the invitation, such the order — but at the heart of that order, ‘always dead’ is echoed by ‘always alive,’ and alive here no longer means life, but, under the auspices of a reassuring ambiguity, the loss of the power to die, the loss of death as power and possibility, the essential sacrifice.” 118. See for instance in Le Livre à venir, 304; The Book to Come, 250, Blanchot’s evocation of the writer in April 1958, now descending, not into the underworld, but into the street of political contestation. 119. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 180; The Space of Literature, 171–72; translation modified 120. On this capacity of “myths” to support at one and the same time different or even contradictory kinds of belief or understanding, see Paul Veyne’s (perhaps not coincidentally) exactly contemporary essay Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? (Paris: Seuil, 1983); Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, translated by Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 121. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 180; The Space of Literature, 172; translation modified. 122. Blanchot begins his Spring 1983 article, “La Maladie de l’amour (éthique et amour),” in Le Nouveau Commerce by noting that “[i]t is a long time since I last read a book by Marguerite Duras: perhaps the ability to read was denied me, or perhaps I wanted to remain with books of hers that I loved so perfectly that I lacked the power

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to go beyond them. For other reasons too: there is never any shortage of reasons.” When the substance of the review was incorporated into La Communauté inavouable later the same year, this opening sentence was understandably omitted. 123. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 182–83; The Space of Literature, 174; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 124. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, l, 64. 125. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 104; The Space of Literature, 104; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 126. See Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 159–61; The Space of Literature, 153–55. 127. Rilke, Pasternak, Tsvetaïeva, Correspondance à trois, 141; Letters, Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke, 121. There is some divergence here between the French translation read by Blanchot and its subsequent English counterpart. The version followed here is based on Lily Denis’s French text. 128. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 148; The Disavowed Community, 69; translation modified. 129. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 51–52, 58; The Unavowable Community, 29, 34; Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 73; The Disavowed Community, 30. 130. For a detailed overview of the political evolution of some of the protagonists of May 1968 during the twenty years following the événements, see Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Génération, 2 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1987–88). 131. See “Mots de désordre,” Libération, 28 January 1984, 23. Michael Holland translates Libération’s selection in The Blanchot Reader, 200–205. For a more complete reprinting of Blanchot’s unsigned contributions to Comité, see Lignes 33 (March 1998); Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–1993, 79–113. 132. I have argued this at greater length elsewhere, in my Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010), 213–32. 133. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 61; The Unavowable Community, 35–36; translation modified. 134. See Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1269; The Malady of Death, 51. 135. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 61–62; The Unavowable Community, 36; translation modified. 136. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 63; The Unavowable Community, 37; translation modified. 137. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 65; The Unavowable Community, 38–39; translation modified. 138. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 68–69; The Unavowable Community, 41; translation modified. 139. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 69; The Unavowable Community, 41; translation modified. On “homogeneity“ and the “heterogeneous” in the work of Bataille, see for instance Œuvres complètes, II, 167–202. 140. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 69; The Unavowable Community, 41; translation modified. Compare Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1268; The Malady of Death, 49–50. 141. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 69–70; The Unavowable Community, 41; translation modified. 142. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 83; The Unavowable Community, 50; translation modified. 143. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 84; The Unavowable Community, 51; translation modified. 144. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 81; The Unavowable Community, 49; translation modified. 145. On Blanchot’s use of the word “avowable,” confirming what I argued earlier regarding the “unavowable,” see La Communauté inavouable, 70n1; The Unavowable Community, 59n12, where one reads that “woman [la femme] knows that the group, as a repetition of the Same or the Similar, is in reality anathema to real love [l’amour véritable] that is sustained only by differences. The ordinary human group, which

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avows itself [s’avoue: i.e., identifies itself thematically] and is par excellence a civilising force, ‘more or less tends to let that which is homogeneous, repetitive, and continuous prevail over the heterogeneous, the new, and the acceptance of division.’ Woman is then the ‘intruder’ who upsets the tranquil continuity of the social bond and refuses to acknowledge the prohibition. Woman is then inseparable from the unavowable.” This clear association of “woman” with sexual difference is not unproblematic, advanced though it is as an afterthought, under the precautionary rubric of what Blanchot concedes is “a somewhat caricatured version of Freud,” and with the help of a passage silently half-quoted, half-paraphrased from Enriquez’s orthodox sociopsychoanalytic study De la horde à l’État (pp. 120–21). On the other hand, implicit in Blanchot’s footnote is a robust questioning of that deeply ingrained French Republicanism for which gender and other differences are deliberately effaced in the name of an abstract androcentric universalism to which Blanchot refuses to subscribe. And what his remark also serves to emphasise, both in and against itself, is how far his own discourse is selfevidently (even self-consciously) gendered, proof, if any were needed, of the extent to which any commentator dealing with the relationship between sexual differences and “community” is always already implicated personally in that debate. 146. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 89; The Unavowable Community, 54; translation modified; emphasis mine. In La Communauté désavouée, 107; The Disavowed Community, 47, Nancy makes much of Blanchot’s use of the word “fonder [to found]” in this passage. He fails however to notice the force of Blanchot’s deictic (“this community”), while Philip Armstrong in his English version similarly obscures Blanchot’s words by translating them as “the” — not this — “community.” In any case, as Nancy knows, and concedes as much some pages earlier (pp. 80–81; 33–34), only what is without foundation can be founded, which also means that no foundation can ever escape the threat or promise of its inevitable failure, which is even more the case when, as here, there exists no recognised or recognisable legislating body to authorise, validate, or even enact that provisional “foundation.” 147. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 70–71; The Unavowable Community, 42; translation modified; emphasis mine. 148. See Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la Méduse,” L’Arc 61 (1975): 39–54 (p. 42); “The Laugh of the Medusa,” translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93 (pp. 878–79). 149. For a comprehensive listing of Duras’s numerous media and press interviews, see Robert Harvey, Bernard Alazet, and Hélène Volat, Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras: bibliographie des œuvres et de la critique 1940–2006 (Paris: IMEC, 2009); for a cross-section of interviews from various periods, see Duras, Le Dernier des métiers: entretiens 1962–1991, and for an overview of some of the principal themes of Duras’s selfcommentary, see my Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 10–37. 150. Duras, “The Thing,” interview by Rolland Thénu, Le Gai Pied 20 (November 1980): 16. 151. Andréa (formerly Lemée) describes his relationship with Duras at some length in a series of books, notably M.D. (Paris: Minuit, 1983) and Cet amour-là (Paris: Pauvert, 1999), and in an interview given to Michèle Manceaux in October 1982 published after his death (in July 2014) as Je voudrais parler de Duras (Paris: Fayard, 2016). 152. See Duras, “La Littérature est illégale ou elle n’est pas,” interview by Gilles Costaz, Le Matin, 14 November 1986, 24–25. 153. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 80; The Unavowable Community, 48. 154. Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, 240; The Book to Come, 197; translation modified. 155. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 84; The Unavowable Community, 51; translation modified. In criticising Blanchot for supposedly ignoring the theme of male homosexuality in La Maladie de la mort, Duras overlooks this brief but pointed aside, most probably because she had only read the early extract of Blanchot’s review printed in Le Nouveau Commerce. 156. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 64; The Disavowed Community, 26; translation modified.

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157. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 57; The Unavowable Community, 33; emphasis in the original; and Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 86; The Disavowed Community, 34; translations modified. 158. See Edward Said, On Late Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). This mention of Adorno serves also as a reminder of the extent to which Blanchot’s writing is resistant, too, to dialectical negativity. 159. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 18; The Disavowed Community, 4. 160. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 20; The Disavowed Community, 5; translation modified. 161. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 39–40; The Disavowed Community, 14–15; translation modified. 162. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 49, 120; The Disavowed Community, 19, 54. 163. Blanchot, Après Coup, 96; Vicious Circles, 67; translation modified. (Unaccountably, Paul Auster’s translation misconstrues the first part of this sentence as “History does not withhold meaning,” which says the exact opposite of what Blanchot originally wrote.) 164. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 63; The Disavowed Community, 25. For the references to Blanchot, see La Communauté inavouable, 9, 51; The Unavowable Community, 1, 29; translations modified. 165. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 52; The Unavowable Community, 29; translation modified; Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 73; The Disavowed Community, 30. 166. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 67–73; The Disavowed Community, 27–30. For the comment Nancy takes to be a personal retort, see Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 51; The Unavowable Community, 29. In his reconstruction of the chronology of La Communauté inavouable, it is strange that Nancy does not make reference to the letter he received from Blanchot in mid-March 1983 (published in Lignes in October 2000), with its mention of that Italian MS on Bataille that Blanchot had been asked to read. Unfortunately, since no manuscript, typescript, or other archival material relating to the book is currently available, any attempt to establish the exact chronology of its composition is forced to rely on intelligent guesswork. (Readers will find some of the relevant clues in the chronology given at the end of this book.) 167. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 119; The Disavowed Community, 53; translation modified. Surprisingly, Armstrong’s English translation of the phrase introduces a “we” nowhere present in Nancy’s original text. 168. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 90–91; The Disavowed Community, 39; translation modified. 169. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 97, 102, 104n5, 111; The Disavowed Community, 42, 45, 49, 103n38. 170. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 91–92; The Disavowed Community, 39–40; translation modified. For the partial quotation from Blanchot, see La Communauté inavouable, 90; The Unavowable Community, 55; translation modified. 171. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 38; The Unavowable Community, 20; translation modified. 172. Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1257; The Malady of Death, 9; translation modified. 173. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 104n5; The Disavowed Community, 103n38; translation modified. For the passage from Blanchot, see La Communauté inavouable, 81; The Unavowable Community, 48; translation modified. 174. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 87; The Unavowable Community, 52. 175. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 81; The Unavowable Community, 48–49; translation modified. 176. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 117; The Disavowed Community, 52; Nancy’s ellipsis; translation modified. 177. Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 11; La Communauté désœuvrée, 11; The Inoperative Community, 1; translation modified. 178. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 151–52; The Disavowed Community, 71; translation modified.

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179. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 152; The Disavowed Community, 71; translation modified. 180. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 9–10; The Unavowable Community, 1; translation modified. 181. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 85; The Unavowable Community, 51; translation modified. Compare Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 105; The Disavowed Community, 46. 182. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 147; The Disavowed Community, 69; translation modified; see Nancy, Sexistence, 16n1. 183. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 145–46; The Disavowed Community, 68; translation modified. 184. Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1268–69; The Malady of Death, 50–51; translation modified. 185. For more detail, see my Marguerite Duras, Apocalyptic Desires, 56–57, 166n11. 186. Few letters from Blanchot to Duras have so far been published. Those that have are collected in Cahiers de L’Herne: Maurice Blanchot, 162–63. In a letter dated 11 March 1969, Blanchot thanked Duras for sending him Détruire, dit-elle, and, prefiguring aspects of what he would write in 1983, commented that “Alissa [the most significant subversive female character in the novel] is always here, in the youthfulness of the relation with death, and I also in my role of companion in the death she gives, which she forever meets again.” In a subsequent communication, Blanchot made suggestions regarding Duras’s unpublished manuscript for Abahn Sabana David, which, when it came out in 1970, as mentioned earlier, was duly dedicated to Blanchot and to Antelme. 187. Duras, Œuvres complètes, I, 1257; Moderato cantabile, translated by Richard Seaver (London: Calder, 1966), 119; translation modified. 188. Duras, Œuvres complètes, II, 344; The Ravishing of Lol Stein, translated by Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 149; translation modified. In L’Entretien infini, 567n1; The Infinite Conversation, 462n4, Blanchot describes what is at stake in the novel in terms that similarly anticipate his 1983 essay. 189. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 120–21; The Disavowed Community, 55. For the original phrase, see Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 72; The Unavowable Community, 43; translation modified. An “anecdote,” according to the (French) Robert Dictionary, is “a historical detail [particularité historique]” or “the relating of a trivial or curious fact [récit d'un petit fait curieux].” Few readers, one can safely guess, are likely to think La Maladie de la mort replete with historical details or curious facts. 190. Duras, Œuvres complètes, IV, 425; Emily L., translated by Barbara Bray (London: Collins, 1989), 40; translation modified. 191. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 43; The Unavowable Community, 23; translation modified. On “nonacting” in Blanchot, see my “From Deconstruction to Disaster (Derrida, Blanchot, Hegel),” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (July 2016): 187–201. 192. On apocalyptic motifs in Duras’s fiction more generally, see my Marguerite Duras, Apocalyptic Desires, 64–84 and passim. 193. Duras, Œuvres complètes, III, 1269; The Malady of Death, 53; translation modified. Throughout La Communauté inavouable, though not in the prepublication extract in Le Nouveau Commerce, whether intentionally or in error, Blanchot (or his copyist) replaces Duras’s verbs in the conditional by ones in the indicative, as Daniel Wilhem points out in Maurice Blanchot: Intrigues littéraires (Paris: Lignes, 2005), 42–43. 194. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 91; The Unavowable Community, 55. As the Latin Vulgate text of John 19:30 has it: “Cum ergo accepisset acetum, Iesus dixit: ‘Consummatum est!’ Et inclinato capite tradidit spiritum.” Or, in the words of the Authorised Version, “When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.” “Tout est consommé” is the translation adopted by the traditional French Catholic Bible. Alternative and more recent translations into French render the phrase as: “Tout est accompli,” or “C’est accompli,” even “Tout est achevé,” or “C’est achevé.” It may be remembered that Blanchot had also

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used the phrase “‘tout’ ayant été consommé” many years earlier in response to Bataille in L’Entretien infini, 312; The Infinite Conversation, 210–11, to describe “that which, outside all community [hors de toute communauté], may be said to come to be ‘communicated.’” Blanchot advances a similar argument in the preparatory notes for the illfated Revue internationale written around the same time. “All literature,” he explained in a parenthesis, “is a literature of the end of times [de fin des temps].” See Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, 112; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 63; translation modified. 195. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 91; The Unavowable Community, 55; translation modified. 196. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 109–10; The Disavowed Community, 48–49; translation modified. 197. Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, edited by Éric Marty, rev. ed., 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2002), I, 189–90; Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), 30; translation modified. 198. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 36–37; The Unavowable Community, 19; translation modified. 199. See the letter from Blanchot to Pierre Madaule, dated 30 December 1985, in Correspondance 1953–2002, 70. 200. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 138; The Disavowed Community, 64; translation modified. As readers can verify for themselves, Blanchot says no such thing. In particular, he makes no reference at all to any communial first-person plural, which is entirely of Nancy’s imagining. 201. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 37, 86; The Unavowable Community, 19, 52. 202. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, 117–89; Inner Experience, 101–67. 203. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 18; The Unavowable Community, 7; emphasis in the original; translation modified. For the quotation from Nancy, which Blanchot (or his copyist) rephrases, substituting the dialectical “accomplissement” for the more explicitly religious “assomption,” see Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 23; La Communauté désœuvrée, 40; The Inoperative Community, 14; translation modified. 204. See Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 23; The Unavowable Community, 10. Compare Nancy, “La Communauté désœuvrée,” 24; La Communauté désœuvrée, 41; The Inoperative Community, 15. 205. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 110–11; The Disavowed Community, 49; translation modified. For Nancy’s approximate quotation from Blanchot, compare La Communauté inavouable, 91; The Unavowable Community, 55, where one reads in respect of the final exchange between Duras’s lovers that what is described is “said in three lines with solemn simplicity [avec une solennelle simplicité].” The “solemnity” of the female protagonist’s so-called assumption is a gloss for which Nancy bears sole responsibility. 206. Nancy, “Quand le sens ne fait plus monde,” Esprit 2014 (March/April 2014): 27–46 (p. 40). 207. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 52; The Unavowable Community, 30. 208. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 109; The Disavowed Community, 48; translation modified. 209. On Blanchot’s “viens” and use of citation or recitation more generally, see Derrida, Parages, 19–108; Parages, 11–101.

FIVE From Myth to Religion to Politics

I MYTH REDUX Nancy’s own interpretation of the closing pages of La Communauté inavouable and La Maladie de la mort had one clear goal, which was to produce evidence of Blanchot’s desire to overturn the thought of community advanced by “La Communauté désœuvrée” in 1983 and replace it by a version of “community” grounded in some founding myth or myth of foundation. It had not always been thus. In 1986, for instance, as we saw, Nancy had felt able to argue with some confidence that “the unavowable” in Blanchot “by definition” had no myth, did not produce “words or narrative,” and that “unavowable community,” therefore, just like “the withdrawal of communion or of communitarian ecstasy,” implied “the interruption of myth.” 1 But by 2014, strangely enough, Nancy had come to believe the exact opposite. This was no minor adjustment or shift in emphasis. It represented a fundamental reorientation in Nancy’s thinking, and one he trails at several points in the course of La Communauté désavouée before proceeding more explicitly to his Christological reading of the comparison Blanchot draws between the sexed flesh of Duras’s female protagonist and the giving of “the eucharistic body.” In Nancy’s 2014 volume the question of myth first arises in response to Blanchot’s account of inner experience in Bataille. Blanchot, it will be remembered, made the point that such experience is forcibly unavailable in the present, whether in the presence of the “subject” of experience “itself,” or in the present time of experience as supposedly retrieved by memory, and in that sense can be deemed only to have the paradoxical or antinomic status of an “extratemporal memory, or the memory of a past 179

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that may be said never to have been lived in the present (and therefore irreducible to all Erlebnis).” This idea of life or lived experience not wholly accessible in the present is itself of course far from unfamiliar. As readers of Levinas or Derrida will recall, it is an integral part of all deconstructions of the philosophical, metaphysical concept of the subject. Not so, however, for Nancy, who promptly suspects in Blanchot’s formulation an appeal to myth. “One can but note, without going any further,” he says, only then to use a disconcertingly unphilosophical turn of phrase, “that such a past [as described by Blanchot] belongs to what most ordinarily [le plus ordinairement] is referred to as myth.” 2 Here, too, it is hard to avoid the impression that Nancy protests too much. For, as readers may recall, in his essay Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne) from 2001, a text in which the word “myth” does not appear even once, Nancy has recourse to the very same — deconstructive — motif. “If art in general,” he wrote, has some relation to memory [la mémoire], it is to the strange memory of that which has never been laid down in any recollection [un souvenir], which therefore is liable neither to be forgotten nor to be remembered — for we have never lived nor experienced it — but which never leaves us: that which for us, under the heading of the beautiful or the sublime, the terrible or the graceful, the brilliant or the affecting, has for such a very long time (from the very beginning?) been the “splendor of the true” (Plato), that is, at one and the same time, its brilliance and its flash, its lightning bolt, self-evidence, and secret. 3

As elsewhere in Nancy’s thinking, the dividing line or partage between myth and art proves impossible to police. All the more surprising, therefore, is Nancy’s endeavour to enforce it by attributing to Blanchot a fixation on mythic communion while retaining for his own thinking, in strongly contrasting terms, what later in that same 2001 essay he called “the shared access to our common presence,” made available by the benevolent and revelatory transimmanent “presence” of Christian painting — “presence in so far as essentially it exceeds all and exceeds itself [excède et s’excède],” “presence, then, in so far as it is not itself presented nor to which there is properly any access, but in so far as it is offered to a visitation [Nancy’s explicit theme is the episode recounted in Luke 1:39–56] that undergoes the ordeal of the invisible at its heart.” 4 This was not all. Some twenty pages later in La Communauté désavouée, now discussing Blanchot’s memories of May 68, Nancy makes a similar point to that made earlier about the writer’s description of inner experience. In characterising the unprecedented singularity of the May événements, mindful that no event could be what it was without there always being a question as to the actuality of its occurrence, Blanchot had allowed himself a wry, disbelieving query: “The event? Was it something that had even taken place? [Est-ce que cela avait eu lieu?]” 5 Overlooking

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Blanchot’s claim that May itself was resistant to linear narrative (“In May,” Blanchot wrote at the time, “there is no book about May”), 6 and disregarding the extent to which, for Blanchot, using the expression twice over on the same page, it was characterised by “innocent presence,” Nancy’s reaction was once more to reach for myth: “It is therefore possible,” he argued, hastily turning Blanchot’s query into an assertion and again having him say the opposite to what he actually wrote, “to enter into the memory of May 68 as a memory capable of opening itself to the immemorial, i.e., as has already been said [re: the giving of the eucharistic body], to that which takes place by eluding presence [en se dérobant à la présence]. This moment in history can be made into testimony that in the end is no more attestable than that provided by literary narrative (in a word, by myth [ . . . ]).” 7 Readers will recall how Nancy in 1986, not without difficulty, had endeavoured to differentiate clearly between literature and myth. In 2014 that difficulty had disappeared, but only because literature and myth were now indistinguishable. What both had in common, Nancy asserted, was a fictional temporality that consisted in withdrawing from presence or from the present. All the more surprising, then, is the observation that Nancy makes in the introduction to his 2001 volume La Pensée dérobée in which he suggests that “for a humankind maintaining itself in myth, the tense is the permanent present.” 8 This was again to say the exact opposite of what he would later argue, i.e., that the temporality of myth was in fact not the past without present, but a perpetual present bereft of all past or future. Moreover, in dismissing Blanchot’s response to May 68 as reliant on a mythic or mythopoeic eclipse of presence, as he does in 2014, Nancy in a footnote aimed to reinforce his argument by citing a famous passage from a 1936 essay by Thomas Mann, previously mentioned in La Communauté désœuvrée, in which, paying tribute to Freud, and writing in the margins of his own as yet unfinished Joseph tetralogy, the novelist testified to the emotional and imaginative power of what he called “life in myth,” “das Leben im Mythos.” 9 What was this to say? “A ‘life in myth,’ to take up Thomas Mann’s expression,” explained Nancy, “also means life through myth, a life living itself as a myth, that is, living itself (i.e., experiencing and expressing itself) as its own origin and ending.” 10 But in paraphrasing Mann, Nancy failed to notice that for the novelist “living in myth,” if it forcibly entailed repeating the past, did not imply any erasure of presence. On the contrary, it meant inhabiting an eternally recursive present — what Joseph and His Brothers calls an ironically “timeless presence [zeitlose Gegenwärtigkeit]” — in much the same way that Napoleon, according to Mann, achieved true mythic status not by saying “I remind people of Charlemagne,” nor by claiming “my position is similar to his,” nor even by insisting “I am just like him,” but simply by stating “I am him.” “That,” says Mann, “is the formula of myth.” 11

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Between 1986 and 2014, then, not only does Nancy’s account of the relationship between “unavowable community” and the figure of myth shift considerably, but so does his assessment of the defining qualities of myth itself. One could even say that what is most characteristic about the concept or idea of myth in Nancy’s analysis is the strange propensity the term has for coinciding with its own opposite. Just as the possibility of an interruption of myth, for instance, implies its repotentialisation as myth, so the deconstructive withdrawal of presence mutates into the primordial power of the present (and, in principle at least, vice versa). This reversibility of one extreme into the other is perhaps not surprising. Schelling, as Nancy was keen to remind readers in 1986, had already suggested that tautegorical identification between itself and its own exterior was myth’s most distinctive signature, and Lévi-Strauss, whose L’Homme nu (The Naked Man) is also mentioned several times in La Communauté désœuvrée (initially, as it happens, by way of a reference to Blanchot), 12 had long held, in a similar vein, that the function of myth was to reconcile or mediate between binary opposites. 13 If so, unless one were to claim, with little apparent justification, that Nancy’s volte-face was purely opportunistic, it would seem clear that myth was not only the target of Nancy’s thinking, but that it had also somehow taken the opportunity of invading large tracts of his own discourse. It is moreover apparent that, as Nancy’s work proceeds, the reference to myth undergoes something resembling infinite expansion, so much so that, in 2015’s Proprement dit, in dialogue with Mathilde Girard, he may be found declaring, using a pair of terms more commonly associated with the work of Levinas or Blanchot, that “myth is perhaps nothing other than saying [le dire] whereas the logos may be described as the said [le dit].” 14 On this account, myth could not be other than coterminous with all language as such, without identifiable limit or exteriority, in which case the “interruption” of myth, on which much of Nancy’s discourse of 1986 depended, would after all merely be a case of the imperceptible continuation of myth by other means. It was only logical, then, that, moments before in the same dialogue, reviewing his close collaboration throughout the 1980s with Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy should admit that “the expression ‘interrupted myth’ that I employed in La Communauté désœuvrée was not challenged [récusée] by Philippe, quite the opposite, it seems to me, but neither he nor I knew exactly how it should be understood. And I still do not know.” 15 Unexpected though it was, the admission was admittedly nothing new. A deep-seated uncertainty as to what was properly or improperly entailed by the “interruption” of myth (given that, in Nancy’s view, it was anything but a negation or inversion of myth) was already implicit in Nancy’s earlier thinking, and impinged significantly on what he took to be the fundamental difference between myth and literature. In this respect it is again perhaps no surprise that Nancy in 2015 should repeat the claim that “what remains after the ‘interruption’ [of myth]” was nothing other

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than . . . literature.” Rather different, however, only months earlier, had been his reaction to Blanchot’s observation that “the community” between Duras’s two lovers “most astonishingly and yet the most obviously of all, exceeds the mythical and the metaphysical [dépasse le mythique et le métaphysique],” a proposition that Nancy misquotes as advancing “the paradox of a myth [sic] exceeding the mythic [d’un mythe dépassant le mythique],” a lapse that allows him to lock Blanchot’s commentary on La Maladie de la mort within the closure of myth without any chance or hope or possibility of interruption. 16 Curiously enough, Nancy’s most immediate, alternative example of a work “remaining,” so to speak, “after” the interruption of myth, on the other hand, was Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, a text that, without pausing to measure the implications of what Derrida, for instance, with regard to the structure of signatures, articulates as the logic of ex‑appropriation, Nancy still felt able to describe, somewhat surprisingly, as “speaking properly of a proper which belongs to it alone, is inside it, and which searches for itself and finds itself as ‘itself’ — and communicates this properness to everyone around it, at a time and in a place from which in fact it comes.” 17 Myth, then, in Nancy’s thinking, rather than the decisive, operative concept it has ambitions to be, is more often a kind of philosophical filler, a conceptual sticking-plaster, so to speak, that means everything and yet nothing, and is only ever synonymous with its abiding indecision, not to say its fundamental inadequacy. As such, it had at least two notable deficiencies. The first was its seemingly insuperable lack of specificity in each of Nancy’s diverse presentations. This was not a recent problem. Following his early work done alongside Lacoue-Labarthe, prompted by the so-called “Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism” diversely attributed to Hegel, Hölderlin, or Schelling, Nancy’s thinking of myth, as he reminds readers of La Communauté désavouée in a footnote, first found explicit expression in the famous paper, later a free-standing book, entitled “Le Mythe nazi [The Nazi Myth],” coauthored in 1980 with Lacoue-Labarthe, the first version of which, Nancy rightly suggests, it is not impossible Blanchot may have read shortly after. 18 In that paper, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy made the bold, at the time still controversial claim that the ideology of the Third Reich was not an irrational aberration, but the logical culmination of a lengthy sequence in German thought belonging to the mainstream of Western philosophy, in particular when understood in the light of Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysics. “What would also need to be rigorously demonstrated,” they argued, addressing their agenda by preterition, as they frequently did, “is how the Total State [according to Carl Schmitt] should be conceived in fact as the Subject‑State (with the subject, whether a nation or humanity in general, a social class, race, or political party, being or willing itself to be an absolute subject), such that, in the last analysis, it is in modern philosophy or the fully realised metaphysics of the Subject that its ideolo-

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gy after all has its true basis: that is, in the thought of being (and/or becoming, and history) as self-present subjectivity, and as the support, source, and end of representation, certitude, and the will.” 19 Many readers at the time seem to have been broadly sympathetic, with Blanchot, whether in parallel or in response, developing a similar thesis of his own for instance in “Les Intellectuels en question,” as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy later duly noted, albeit with strong reservations concerning the potentially self-defeating circularity of Blanchot’s assertion — in another bold but often unrecognised instance of free indirect speech — according to which “in the Jew, in the ‘myth of the Jew,’ what Hitler sought to annihilate was precisely man set free from myth [l’homme libéré des mythes].” 20 But the pair’s own analysis was not without contentious elements either. As Nancy later conceded, their essay had rather precipitately sought to identify in Rosenberg’s notorious Myth of the Twentieth Century of 1930 a privileged key to Nazi doctrine, notwithstanding the poor esteem in which its author was in fact held by the Nazi hierarchy. This assumption, Nancy agreed, needed to be revisited. In 2015 he nevertheless continued to maintain, without going into further detail, merely citing the evidence of Heidegger’s recently released Black Notebooks, that “the thing to remember was an appeal to the dimension of myth.” What was meant by this, he explained, in a dramatic but only apparent inversion of metaphysical tradition, was not “the misleading fable as rejected by Plato but, on the contrary, the authentic speaking of the origin and the proper [la parole authentique de l’origine et du propre].” 21 This was not all. The attempt to account for Nazism by characterising it as myth was problematic on other grounds too. The appeal to some founding origin is plainly not exclusive to fascist regimes, but, as witnesses, say, of France’s 1989 bicentennial celebrations could not fail to notice, was an abiding feature of republican and reputedly democratic, even secular regimes too. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insisted however that while the former had their roots in the mimeticism of myth, so the latter, they rather piously argued, was marked by their essential “unpresentability,” 22 a criterion one might think to be strangely at odds with the explicit logic of all modern representative democracies. In a similar fashion, the undeniably racist content of the founding myth of National Socialism was hardly specific to it either, but was shared by any number of Western imperialist or postimperialist states, not to mention many others in diverse parts of the world. Conversely, it was surely not impossible for there to be “progressive” myths as well as “reactionary” ones. And it was far from self-evident that a conscious or unconscious commitment to a metaphysics of the Subject, irrespective of how accurate or self-fulfilling any such analysis might be, was adequate explanation for the ideology and rise of National Socialism in particular. True enough, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy made it clear from the outset that they were writing not as historians but as philosophers, and had

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only limited space for what was inevitably a schematic presentation. In any case, they argued, their paper was concerned less with the historical past than with the political present which they thought to be already prey to a resurgence of “myth.” All the same, if the pressing task was indeed, as they suggested, “to reinvent politics” in order to counter “the function of myth with all its national, popular, ethical, and aesthetic effects,” 23 then, there plainly remained much work to be done to isolate and articulate these opposing forces. Part of the problem, no doubt, lay with the concept of myth itself, which, despite all good intentions, Le Mythe nazi too often treats as a self-validating or self-instantiating tautology, according to which the defining characteristic of myth was that it was indeed a myth, which ran the risk of taking at face value the Nazi regime’s own self-identification as a movement that derived its being from its capacity to reembody so-called ancient racial, ethnic, or national . . . myth. Admittedly, in the years that followed, as La Communauté désœuvrée demonstrates, Nancy endeavoured at times to remedy some of these shortcomings and to refine his conceptual framework by appealing to the work done on myth and myths by various leading contemporary French anthropologists. Prominent among these was the celebrated political anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who before his untimely death in 1977 had radically challenged the still powerful Eurocentrism of the models of power and of politics applied by traditional ethnography to the social organisation of numerous tribes or populations from the South American rainforest where he had carried out much of his fieldwork. His main argument, developed in such works as Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, 1972), La Société contre l’État (Society Against the State, 1974), and Le Grand Parler: mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guarani (1974), was that politics or the political in such societies, far from being in a state of embryonic underdevelopment, simply did not follow the standard teleological Western model in which power was configured according to the hierarchical logic of authority and submission, command and obedience. But this absence of centralised authority, he insisted, was no evolutionary deficiency. It much rather testified to an alternative thinking of social interaction according to which power was invested in a chief only insofar as that power, except in rare moments when the very existence of society was under threat, was divested of itself, and the chief as a result rendered impotent. What this implied, Clastres argued, was that “whereas in State-dominated societies [sociétés à État] speech [parole] is the right of power, so, on the contrary, in so-called Stateless societies [sociétés sans État], speech is the duty of power. Or, to put it slightly differently, Indian societies do not recognise a chief’s right to speak because he is the chief: they require that the man due to be chief should prove his domination over words.” 24 And Clastres went on,

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Chapter 5 speaking is an imperative obligation for the chief, the tribe insists on hearing him: a silent chief is no longer a chief. [ . . . ] The word of the chief is not said in order to be listened to. There is a paradox: nobody pays any attention to the chief speaking. Or rather, they feign a lack of attention. [ . . . ] [L]iterally the chief [ . . . ] says nothing. [ . . . ] His discourse for the most part consists of a celebration, repeated many times over, of the traditional norms of life. [ . . . ] To what demand on the part of primitive society does this empty speech emanating from the apparent place of power correspond? The discourse of the chief is empty precisely because it is not a discourse of power: the chief is separated from speech because he is separated from power. [ . . . ] [P]rimitive society is the place of a refusal of separate power, because it, and not the chief, is the real place of power. [ . . . ] By forcing the chief to operate only in the element of speech, that is, at the extreme opposite of violence, the tribe makes certain that all things remain in place, that the axis of power reverts to the social body alone, and that no displacement of forces will come to upset the social order. The chief’s obligation to speak, that constant flow of empty speech that he owes the tribe, is his infinite debt, the guarantee that makes it impossible for the man of speech to become a man of power. 25

Nancy in La Communauté désœuvrée mentions Clastres’s work on at least two occasions, yet without engaging with it in any detail, contenting himself with citing the title Le Grand Parler or “Big Talking,” Clastres’s anthology of Guarani Indian texts containing a small number of creation myths together with various other, more esoteric religious commentaries addressed to the gods. Particularly distinctive about the Guarani, however, according to Clastres, was the way in which “while being poor in myths, [they] were rich in thought.” “Having emerged admittedly from the fertile ground of ancient mythology,” he explains, “this thinking nevertheless went on to deploy itself for itself, emancipating itself from its native territory, with metaphysics taking the place of the mythological.” “If the Guarani have fewer myths to tell us,” he added, “it is because they are capable of a greater depth of thought to set against us.” 26 In the narratives and commentaries of the Guarani, then, what is apparent is the way in which thinking emerges from myth, and in a sense is already announced in those myths in the form of a profound, prophetic reflection on both the present and the future. But none of the complexity contained in the myths or religious meditations of the Guarani is at all acknowledged by Nancy, for whom the sophistication of “le grand parler” does service instead as a kind of reductive shorthand for the unchallenged authority of mythic narrative and for what he calls “absolute community” based on “the desire to effect [opérer] by the power of myth the communion that myth represents, and which it represents as a communion or communication of wills.” 27 The relevance of Clastres’s work for an understanding of the controversy between Nancy and Blanchot may appear contrived. It is however

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striking that, briefly, it is true, and rather unexpectedly, Nancy should return to the work of Clastres in his preface to the English translation of La Communauté désavouée to suggest a possible parallel between La Société contre l’État and La Communauté inavouable. He did so, however, in surprisingly dismissive fashion, merely repeating what he had said about “le grand parler” in 1986, only then, however, entirely to ruin his own proposed comparison by claiming how, in his view, for Blanchot, though obviously not for Clastres, there was no such thing as society. 28 No evidence for this puzzling and somewhat implausible claim is produced by Nancy, and it is fair to say it hardly amounts to a serious assessment of that longstanding “passion” for politics on Blanchot’s part which Nancy had addressed in his 2011 introduction to the writer’s 1984 letter to Laporte, and which, if it implied something less than fulsome belief in “community,” as Blanchot and Nancy, for diametrically opposed reasons, seemed to agree, nevertheless surely implied a commitment to political intervention of some kind for the purposes of social change. 29 On Nancy’s part, true enough, the jibe was a kind of hyperbolic restatement of what, tendentiously enough, he had found wanting in Bataille’s socalled retreat from the public realm more than thirty years before. 30 In formulating his ill-considered barb, he overlooked however — or failed to observe — the fact that Blanchot, some years earlier, had been significantly more receptive to what Clastres, based on his experience of the rainforest, had to say about alternative modes of social organisation in which the use of language and political power were no longer seen as synonymous or continuous with one another. For as readers of Blanchot will have noticed, the passage from La Société contre l’État cited above is reproduced almost verbatim, albeit without explicit acknowledgement, and incorporating some abbreviation or paraphrase and several omissions, as a fragmentary text in L’Écriture du désastre of 1980. 31 It may of course be wondered why, in transcribing Clastres’s words, Blanchot omits to mention or name his source. Admittedly, it may be felt that, in opening the fragment with the words “Stateless society [société sans État],” Blanchot had already suggested enough for contemporary readers to spot the reference. But there was also more at stake than casual reliance on audience familiarity. For to name Clastres as the legitimate owner of his text (which he was) would have been to fall into the trap of replacing a man of words with the spectre of a man of power. By failing or refusing to identify the provenance of his fragment, Blanchot, then, was more effectively paying tribute to Clastres’s thinking than if he had named him explicitly. At the same time, like any quotation, Blanchot’s reproduction of Clastres’s words could not be other than unfaithful, and it is to this that his omission of their author’s name also testified. And there was also the crucial fact, illustrative of Clastres’s general thesis about the relationship between power and language, that, as far as Blanchot’s fragmentary idiom was concerned, everything was quotation, irre-

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spective of its actual source, which also meant that nothing was a quotation, even those extracts from the works of others to which copyright legislation applied — in which case it was only fair that texts of diverse provenance should be allowed to consort with one another, so to speak, in their separation or difference, without having to declare their identity or be commanded by it. There was nothing haphazard, then, about Blanchot’s silent quotation. Moreover, the gesture, in its own way, was a concerted response to a dilemma that coincided with the second major problem facing Nancy in his endeavours to address what he saw as the dangers inherent in all myth. For if myth, in Nancy’s view, insofar as it coincided both with itself and with its interruption, was therefore coterminous with the whole of language and entirely without exteriority, this raised the acute question as to what position one might assume in order to speak of it at all, let alone to meet the challenge of deconstructing it. This again was a perennial question, which was inseparable from the possibility or impossibility of deconstruction itself, and had in any case arisen as a concern in Nancy’s work of the mid-1980s. And it was plainly not an issue that related solely to the problem of myth. Indeed, it had particularly acute relevance for that project for the deconstruction of Christianity in which Nancy was engaged from 1995 onwards at least, that is, as we have seen, for the majority of the time when he was revising his view of Blanchot’s thinking of community and reassessing the extent of the latter’s allegedly unacknowledged debt to Christianity. Here, too, Nancy’s point of departure was the claim that between Christian monotheism and anti‑Christian atheism the relationship was less one of opposition than of deep-seated complicity. Important though it was for Nancy, this argument too was again not a new one. As Nancy freely acknowledged, Blanchot — following Nietzsche, Klossowski and others — had said as much himself in an essay from 1967 reproduced in L’Entretien infini. 32 “No doubt,” Nancy explained, “the face-to-face opposition [between theism and atheism] exists in so far as the one term negates the other. But it is important to remember the extent to which this negation retains the essence of what it negates: atheism argues for the principle of the negation of any divine principle, i.e., any principle represented in the shape of an entity distinct from the entire world of entities, whose first cause and final end it embodies.” 33 Theism and atheism on this reading, then, were but variations on the same founding ontotheological presupposition. And if atheism remained trapped within ontotheology, according to Nancy, it was also because it was itself already a product of monotheism. “In this sense,” he put it, “monotheism will have represented nothing other than the theological confirmation of atheism: the reduction of the divine to the status of a principle within a logic of the world’s dependency upon it.” 34

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But the reverse, Nancy went on, was also true. By dint of the Pauline figure of kenosis, that “emptying out” of Christ’s divinity, and his “‘becoming-human” attested by Philippians 2:7, the one God of Christian doctrine, according to Nancy, “is not some hidden god, lurking in the depths of withdrawal or emptiness (a Deus absconditus): for whithersoever he is withdrawn has neither depths nor hiding place.” “He is the god,” Nancy added, “whose absence constitutes his divinity proper, the god whose void‑of‑divinity [vide-de-divinité] is properly the truth.” In this sense, then, monotheism, in its principle, undoes theism, that is, the presence of the power that assembles the world and assures its sense. It thus renders the name of “god” absolutely problematic — by rendering it meaning‑less — and, most importantly of all, withdraws from it all power of assurance. Christian assurance can only take place on condition of a category completely other than that of religious belief [croyance]: the category of “faith [foi],” which is being faithful to an absence and the certainty of being faithful in the absence of all assurance. 35

The fact was, Nancy concluded, in a move that begged as many questions as it provided answers, Christianity was already, as he put it, “by itself and in itself a deconstruction and a self-deconstruction,” which is to say that it constituted both “the most Westernised — or Westernising — form of monotheism” and, conversely, the best available proof that “monotheism shelters within itself — or, more accurately, more intimately within itself than itself, on the hither or further side of itself — the principle of a world without God.” 36 “Christianity,” he then argued, “designates nothing other, essentially (that is to say simply, infinitely simply: in an inaccessible simplicity), than the requirement to open in this world an alterity or unconditional alienation.” 37 Admittedly, Nancy did concede, somewhat belatedly, that his remarks were addressed to “only one of the veins of Christianity,” that of “the Reformation and of that part of Catholicism which drew inspiration from the Reformation, as well as a part at least of Christian mysticism (particularly Meister Eckhart), but not Roman Catholicism in the strict sense, nor any of the Orthodox churches.” 38 What was essential to affirm, he argued, and thereby to dis-enclose (as in the archaic French déclore, meaning to open up a path or to remove a fence blocking the way) was the possibility of a re-opening both of religion and of reason to the otherness that nestled within them, he argued, as a condition of their possibility, not however in the form of an opening to another world, but to that which was other than all world (a proposition one might think had been amply anticipated by Blanchot when using the exact same expression with regard to the chances of art in that Hölderlinian time of distress “in which the gods are no more and are not yet”). 39 And it is to this task that the deconstruction of Christianity in Nancy was dedicated, that of thinking a this-worldly transcendence ca-

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pable of interrupting immanence in order not to negate but rather to confirm it: a kind of “transcendence without a transcendent,” as he puts it, even a “transcendence immanent to our immanence”: an opening of the world to otherness within the world itself, but by that token simultaneously without it. 40 If Christianity, then, for Nancy, just like myth, had no verifiable outside, it followed that what had to be examined more closely was what Christianity contained, but contained, so to speak, without containing it, according to Nancy’s now familiar logic of partes extra partes. Within aspects of the Christian tradition itself, Nancy argued, there was evidence of an otherness irreducible to what official doctrine had made of it. The risks and challenges of this approach were not inconsiderable. There was always the possibility that the endeavour to identify within Christianity what could not be found outside it, but which alone made it possible to step beyond or beside or before it, so to speak, would itself turn into an example of the very thing it sought to avoid. Indeed, as Nancy had long argued, and as Blanchot agreed, there was no construction that was not forcibly its own deconstruction, and accordingly no deconstruction that was not in some sense already a construction in its turn. There was always the danger, in other words, as Derrida once suggested, that the deconstruction of Christianity might revert to being an idiosyncratic reconstruction of Christianity or, at the very least, a secular or postsecular reinterpretation of the religious beliefs that Nancy and countless others had once fervently held, with the implication that “community,” as Blanchot had feared from the outset, would similarly run the risk of degenerating into a kind of ontological communion according to which all divergence, difference, singularity, or relation was henceforth commanded by the philosophical figure of that which was supposedly “in common.” 41 In general terms, Blanchot could but agree with Nancy’s contention that there was something unspoken, withdrawn, or repressed, notably within the writing of the Christian Bible, which demanded to be analysed anew — not least, in Blanchot’s eyes, its debt to Judaism and to the Jewish Old Testament. That there was something in all language and in writing that escaped power, authority, or identity was already implicit in the passage borrowed from Clastres, and this, more than anything else, is what informed Blanchot’s singular but longstanding commitment to Judaism, insofar as “the Jews,” he emphasised in “Les Intellectuels en question,” “embodied, to the highest degree, not only a refusal of all forms of servitude — these the slaves who came out of Egypt — but a rejection of myths, a forswearing of idols, the recognition of an ethical order manifesting itself in respect for the Law.” 42 This, too, as Nancy and LacoueLabarthe rightly insisted, inevitably ran the risk of mythologising “the Jews,” in which case the only recourse, from Blanchot’s perspective, was not to claim that myths were somehow avoidable, but the opposite, i.e., to reread and thereby attempt to deconstruct the myth, mindful that in or-

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der to do so what was paramount for Blanchot was the historical but more than historical lesson of Judaism itself. For “if Judaism is meant to take on a meaning for us [i.e., for us, non-Jews today],” he wrote in 1962, only months after the end of the Algerian War, “it is indeed by showing us that it is necessary at all times to be ready to go forth, because to leave our homes (to go to the outside) is the exigency from which we cannot shrink if we wish to maintain the possibility of a just relation. The exigency of uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth.” 43 “There is,” he added, “a truth of exile, there is a vocation of exile, and if to be a Jew is to be given over to dispersion, it is because dispersion, in the same way that it calls for residence without place, in the same way that it ruins every fixed relation of power with one individual, one group, or one State, also clears the way, when faced with the exigency of the All, for a different exigency and finally makes the temptation of Unity-Identity impossible.” 44 Prompted by the conviction, as he put it, that “what we owe to Jewish monotheism is not the revelation of the one God, but the revelation of speech as the place where humans hold themselves in relation with that which excludes all relation,” 45 Blanchot’s strategy was neither to accept myths nor to reject them, even assuming such gestures to be possible, but to reinterpret them, just like all other writings, secular and religious, literary and philosophical, in order to disengage or release that of which they spoke which was also radically incompatible with the monolithic, self-evident workfulness attributed to them. This, for instance, as we have seen, was the approach he adopted in his rewriting of the myth of Orpheus and in his recovery, together with Sarah Kofman, of the threefold figure of Aphrodite in La Communauté inavouable, where he also revisited the Tristan and Isolde of Joseph Bédier’s early twentieth-century retelling of the story (not to be confused with Wagner’s opera) to uncover at the core of this archetypal tale of sexual passion not the fusional lust of Liebestod, but the evidence of something very different, an exposure to the outside and to the interruption of all world (“We have lost the world, and the world us,” says Bédier’s Isolde), in which “even the reciprocity of the love relationship,” observes Blanchot, “as the story of Tristan and Isolde represents it, this paradigm of love shared, excludes simple mutuality just as it does any unity in which the Other would merge into the Same.” 46 Blanchot’s deconstructive efforts were not however limited to La Communauté inavouable. In L’Écriture du désastre he had gone somewhat further. Rereading the Greek myth of Narcissus alongside and against its literary adaptation by Ovid, alongside and against its reappropriation by psychoanalysis, he went on to prolong and problematise an observation by Lacoue-Labarthe citing one of the Athenäums-Fragmente attributed to August Wilhelm Schlegel, in which the latter claimed that “each poet is after all really a Narcissus [Dichter sind doch immer Narzisse].” In doing this, however, Blanchot sought to uncover in the myth not the stable

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ground of self-love, self-appropriation, or specular mastery it was most often held to illustrate, but an exposure to dispossession, otherness, and dying, which more nearly turned Blanchot’s Narcissus into a version of Orpheus exposed to the abyss, than into an exemplar of the archetypal Romantic subject interiorising his own destiny. In reading Schlegel’s remark, Blanchot contended, we should not be satisfied with treating it superficially as a feature of Romanticism, for which creation — poetry — is treated as absolute subjectivity, with the poet becoming a living subject in the poem that reflects him, in the same way that he is a poet by transforming his life such that he poeticises it in order for it to embody his pure subjectivity — no, we should no doubt also understand it otherwise: the fact is, [like Narcissus looking at his image in the water] the poet does not recognise himself in the poem being written, nor does he become conscious of himself in it either, excluded as he is from the facile hope of a certain humanism according to which, in writing or “creating,” he is supposed to bring to a greater degree of consciousness that share of dark experience which he may be said to undergo: on the contrary, rejected, excluded from what is written and, without even being present to it by dint of the nonpresence of his very death, he has to renounce all relation between a self (living and dying) and what henceforth belongs to the Other or will remain without belonging at all. The poet is Narcissus but only in so far as Narcissus is anti-Narcissus: someone who, turned aside from self, bearing and tolerating that detour, dying from not re-cognising himself, leaves behind the trace of what did not take place. 47

No privilege, however, devolved to Greek myths as such, or indeed myths of any sort. On the contrary, in the closing pages of L’Écriture du désastre, for instance, now transcribing passages from such diverse sources as Levinas, Kafka, Hölderlin, Melville, or the Talmud, with the help of various other allusions, Blanchot boldly cites each of these texts to appear, so to speak, before one another, questioning, revising, or complementing each other’s testimony, appealing beyond the present to what in each case necessarily remained unspoken, and presenting not “désœuvrement” as the messianic, as suggested by Nancy, 48 but a “désœuvrement” of the messianic, that is, an affirmation of the always imminent promise of indeconstructible justice, to which the decisive, adequate-inadequate response on the part of the interrupted, interruptive writing of the fragmentary was already, as La Maladie de la mort also showed, the insistent injunction: “Come, Come [Viens, Viens].” 49

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II AN EMPTY TOMB And yet, notwithstanding their abiding differences, many of the same questions remained — for Blanchot and Nancy alike. How to think relation or relations between existences otherwise than by recourse to atomistic individualism or to fusional massification? How to meet the challenges of what Nietzsche, with telling ambiguity, famously announced as the death of God? And what, then, to do with the legacy of the Greeks, or with the inescapable heritage of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in the knowledge that no inheritance was ever properly of a piece (or at peace) with itself, 50 and that in any case to accept the past unreservedly was just as impossible as to abandon it altogether? It was therefore perhaps not surprising that, between Nancy and Blanchot, much in the end should turn on a question of religion, and, more specifically, on the question of the enduring afterlife, so to speak, of the Christian Gospels. For that, it will be remembered, is how in 1982 their explicit exchange had first begun, not with the theme of “community” as such, but with a sudden and seemingly irresistible memory on Nancy’s part that prompted him to answer the fragmentary idiom of L’Écriture du désastre by invoking the mythic fragility of the “glorious body” of the risen Christ. This was no casual free association. Nor did the scene it evoked end there. On the contrary, Nancy in 1992 resurrected, as it were, the Pauline motif of the “glorious body” by giving it a three-page entry of its own in his fragmentary, dictionary-like volume Corpus, in which, by way of developing perspectives initiated a few years earlier in L’Expérience de la liberté, he undertook a radical rethinking of the body, hitherto so powerfully invested both by Christianity and by modern philosophy. In the first instance, according to Nancy, following while also radicalising Heidegger, as he so often did elsewhere, this involved dismantling the numerous dualistic constructions that so often empty the body of all existential singularity in favour of the metaphysics of a disembodied subject. This meant setting aside all concepts of the body as a vehicle for signification or representation. “Properly speaking,” he put it, “we only ever know and conceive, or only ever imagine a body that signifies [du corps signifiant]. A body of which it barely matters that it should be here, that it should be the here or the there of a place, but of which it matters above all else that it should operate as the placeholder or stand-in for a sense [un sens].” But this so-called “body,” he insisted, was anything but what it purported to be. The fact was, he maintained, “[t]he convulsion of signification wrests the whole body from the body — and leaves behind a

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corpse in [Plato’s] cave.” Traditionally, then, one of two things was the case. “Either,” he went on, this “body” is itself the “inside” within which representation is formed or onto which it is projected (as sensation, perception, image, memory, idea, or consciousness) — and, if so, the “inside” appears (and appears to itself) as foreign to the body and as “spirit.” Or, alternatively, the body is itself the signifying “outside” (the “degree zero” of orientation and intent, the origin and recipient of relations, or the unconscious), and in that case, the “outside” appears as sluggish interiority, as an overstocked cave stuffed with intentionality. In this way, the signifying body constantly exchanges the inside for the outside and vice versa, abolishing extension to produce a single organon of the sign: that in which sense is formed and from which it takes its form. Particular philosophical perspectives make little difference: whether as the dualism of “body” and “soul,” the monism of the “flesh,” or as cultural and psychoanalytic bodily symbolic structures, in every case the body is structured as a referral to sense. Incarnation is structured as a form of de‑corporation. 51

Quite different, however, was the thinking of the body, or of bodies, put forward by Nancy, not least because the terms of the argument were no longer dualistic, with the second member of the opposition reduced to being an object of the first, but only ever single, in infinite extension, such that “it makes no sense,” he argued, “to speak of body and of thought as separate from one another, as though each might subsist only for itself: for they are only their mutual touching, the touch of their breaking into one another, or of the one breached by the other. This touch is the limit, the spacing of existence.” 52 These bodies, marked by their edges, borders, or frontiers, came in many shapes, colours, textures, densities, compositions, and much else besides. Emblematic among them, as one item in a potentially endless corpus or catalogue, was the “glorious body” of Christ, yet not as the incarnation as such of the divine, but as something far more human: “In truth,” Nancy announced, “the body of God was the body of man himself: the flesh of man was the body God gave himself. (Man is the body, absolutely, or not at all: the body of God, or the world of bodies, but nothing else. This is why the ‘human’ of ‘humanism,’ destined to signify, oversignify, insignify his body, has gradually dissolved both the body and himself.)” What this meant, Nancy went on, is “that ‘creation’ is not the producing of a world from some vaguely nonexistent matter, but this: that matter (that which there is) essentially modifies itself: it is no substance, but the extension and expansion of those ‘modes,’ or, more precisely, the exposition of that which there is.” In which case, it followed that there is “no God, not even any gods, only places, places that are godly because emptied of the Body of God and of Death in Person.” “The very idea of ‘creation,’” he added, “is the idea, or thought, of an originary absence of Idea,

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form, model, or prior outline. And if the body is that which is created par excellence, if ‘created body’ is a tautology — or rather ‘created bodies,’ since body always is in the plural — in that case the body is the plastic matter of spacing without form or Idea.” The body, he concluded, pursuing this purposefully contrary line of thinking, “is a coming into presence,” in the sense that “coming,” he puts it, “happens to a presence that did not and will not take place elsewhere, and which is neither present nor representable outside of its coming. In this way, coming as such does not cease, it goes on coming, it is a coming-and-going, the rhythm of bodies being born, dying, being open, closed, in pleasure, in pain, touching one another, recoiling from one another. The glory is the rhythm, or plasticity, of this — local, forcibly local — presence.” 53 Nancy’s intensive, often emphatic reworking of some of Christianity’s most characteristic theological beliefs constituted a bold attempt to redeem their legacy for a renewed thinking of presence. As such, it sought to overcome all inherited models of other-worldly or this-worldly significance. “The world of bodies,” he put it, “has neither transcendent nor immanent sense. Assuming one wanted to keep those words, one would have to say that the one takes place within the other, but without this involving any dialectical relation, that the one takes place as the other, and that places are this taking-place.” 54 The implications of this double reinscription of the transcendent within the immanent and the immanent within the transcendent, though in neither case was the priority of “sense” questioned or justified, were nevertheless many. They affected not only Nancy’s approach to the founding texts of the Christian religion, but also his understanding of writing (“the body, no doubt,” he suggests, “is that one writes, but absolutely not where one writes, nor is the body what one writes – but always what writing ex-scribes”), and, by that token, of the stakes of “community”: for “[w]hat,” he observed rhetorically, abruptly setting aside gender, sexual orientation, age, health, social class, skin colour, ethnicity, size, or disability, “is more common than bodies?” “Before anything else,” he replied, “‘community’ means the naked exposure of an equal, ordinary, suffering, pleasurable, trembling evidentiality. And it is primarily that which by first light is withdrawn from all sacrifices and spectres in order to be offered to the world of bodies.” 55 As Nancy’s analysis assumed, and then sought to demonstrate, there were however always at least two versions, i.e., two logics, two figures, or two manifestations of “the body” and notably of “the glorious body,” the one reliant on ontotheology, the other on its deconstruction, the one still religious, so to speak, and the other promising its reinvention. And, as before, the crucial question remained as to how the two might reliably be distinguished, or even distinguished at all, particularly since the one, Nancy argued, could not but be accompanied in ghostly fashion by the other, in much the same way that, like community communion, any counterversion always contained within itself the possibility of being no

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more than a continuation by other means of what it aimed to displace. “A single gesture,” Nancy writes, “or almost — a gesture of which it is certain that we will never have done with dividing it into two or doubling it up — installs God as the Body of Death; and gives space to the multiplication of bodies. A single gesture decides upon the taste and distaste for bodies.” From which it then followed, he added, “[e]ither the glorious body is the transfiguration of the extended body, or else it is its extension itself, its figuring in the plasticity of clay. Either the one or the other — yet simultaneously both.” 56 But how then to separate a deconstruction of Christianity from its inadvertent or unconscious reconstruction? Acknowledging the need to address in greater detail what he describes in Corpus as this reversibility of the “glorious body,” Nancy in 2003 once more returned to the episode of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene alongside the now empty tomb. This he did in an extended essay devoted in part to pictorial representations of the Gospel story by Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian, Pontormo, Alonzo Cano, Giotto, Correggio, and others. For the title of his book, as in 1982, Nancy revived the Latin Vulgate text, and once more cited Christ’s canonical words to Mary from John 20:17: “Noli me tangere,” or, as the Authorised Version has it, “Touch me not.” 57 The theological, religious, historical, and aesthetic ramifications of the scene were of course extensive. But there was more. It was not only that Christ’s glorious body, arising again, so to speak, now for the third time at least in Nancy’s work, continued to exert particularly strong fascination over the latter’s thinking. It was also that Nancy’s purpose, as a footnote in his book makes clear, was to respond in more convincing fashion to what he describes as Derrida’s “sceptical or rabbinical distance” regarding the possibility of the deconstruction of Christianity in general. 58 And the fact that Nancy embarked on the volume so soon after substantially revising his account of La Communauté inavouable (as witnessed by his preface to the new Italian translation of the book) was itself not insignificant, nor was the equally revealing circumstance that, in an earlier footnote appended to the passage to which Nancy was alluding, Derrida had also mentioned the possibility of reading Blanchot’s Thomas l’Obscur as “an abyssal, meditative, and fictive memory of the thereby restaged episode from the Gospels.” 59 The key moments in John’s narrative are well known. The morning after Christ’s burial, Mary Magdalene, who earlier witnessed the events of the crucifixion firsthand, finds the tomb gaping open. Leaving to alert Jesus’s disciples, she then returns, and stands weeping by the sepulchre. Gazing into its recesses, she sees two angels in white, seated where Jesus’s head and feet would have been. They inquire as to the reason for her tears. “Tulerunt Dominum meum,” she replies, “et nescio, ubi posuerunt eum.” “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.” Encountering an ordinary-looking man she

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takes to be a gardener, who similarly asks why she is crying, she replies by asking where Jesus’s body has then been taken. To her surprise, the gardener responds by addressing her by name, calling out to her: “Maria!” Now recognising who the gardener is, she turns and spontaneously answers: “Rabboni,” that is to say, in Hebrew, as the text of the Vulgate explains, “Magister,” “Master.” It is at this moment that Christ utters his proverbial words. “Noli me tangere,” he tells Mary, “nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum: vade autem ad fratres meos, et dic eis: Ascendo ad Patrem meum, et Patrem vestrum, Deum meum, et Deum vestrum.” “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” Which she then duly does. Arguably the most singular aspect of Nancy’s reinterpretation of this brief episode is the way it reverses or inverts traditional theological conceptions of what has allegedly taken place. The events of Easter Sunday according to Nancy are perhaps best summed up by the mention made in the book’s subtitle of what he calls “la levée du corps,” an expression that comprises a dual reference to the “raising” of the body both in the customary sense of “burial” or “funeral” and in the biblical sense of “anastasis” or “resurrection.” Resurrection here, however, Nancy puts it, should be understood as “neither regeneration, nor reanimation, nor palingenesis, nor rebirth, nor revivification, nor reincarnation: but uprising [soulèvement], raising [la levée] or rising [le lever], as a verticality perpendicular to the horizontality of the tomb — not leaving it, nor reducing it to nothingness, but affirming in it the holding [la tenue] (and therefore also the retaining [la retenue]) of something untouchable, inaccessible.” 60 In the endeavour to purge this “raising” of the body of its Hegelian overtones (in particular in the light of Derrida’s disconcertingly similar translation of Aufhebung as “relève”), Nancy explains how in his view “it neither dialecticises nor mediatises death: it gives rise within death to the truth of a life, of any life in so far as it is mortal and of each life in so far as it is singular. This truth is vertical truth, incommensurable with the horizontal order in which dead life resolves itself into fragments of matter, but therefore incommensurable too with any representation of a passing on to another life: with resurrection, the dead no longer inhabit the realm of shadows, nor are there dead souls wandering in distress beside the Lethe.” 61 Which was also to say that between Nancy’s two bodies, the body of flesh and the body of glory, on which so much of the argument of Corpus had relied, the relationship was no longer one of opposition, but of profound continuity, not to say identity — in the absence of all identity. Christ’s words, “Noli me tangere,” Nancy concludes, “form the speaking and the moment of the relation and the revelation between the two bodies, that is of a single body [un seul corps] infinitely altered and exposed in its falling as in its raising.” 62

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In the course of the book, Nancy dramatises Jesus’s address to Mary in a number of different, sometimes paradoxical ways. Above all else, he notes, Christ’s is a phrase that, whether it precedes or follows the act it names, in either case reaches out, and, in a word, touches. It says what it says, but also does the opposite to what it says. What it implies in return, however, by dint of a fundamental dissymmetry, is a touch that for its part can but try to touch what must not be touched. And “what must not be touched,” Nancy explains, boldly merging the ethical with the ontological, “is the risen body,” for the simple reason that it is not touchable as such. “Or rather,” he adds, “it eludes all contact to which it might lend itself. The being and truth of the risen body are in this retreat or withdrawal which alone gives the measure of the touch concerned: by not touching this body, to touch its eternity. By not coming into contact with its manifest presence, to accede to its real presence, which consists in its departure.” 63 And if the relation between Christ and Mary is on occasion thought to be a scene of seduction, and is sometimes portrayed as such, it is because what happens or does not happen between the two “mystical lovers” implies not proximity but distance, not promiscuity but separation, 64 and because Mary Magdalene, as the immanent-transcendent figure she is, “joins together caress and tribute as she does life and death, female and male, frivolity and gravity, the here and the elsewhere, without passing from one to the other, but sharing them out without mixing them up, one against the other, by a touching that differs and refrains from itself.” 65 Nancy’s study is a remarkable and often daring piece of recreation. There is however little doubt that what is proposed in Noli me tangere, not least in explicitly presenting itself as a revisionist reworking of established theological accounts of the resurrection, bears all the hallmarks of an alternative, founding myth, one that finds its privileged embodiment, so to speak, in Christ’s mortal-immortal “glorious body.” For the “glorious body,” writes Nancy is simultaneously the one that departs [part] and the one that imparts [parle], which imparts only in departing, which effaces itself, effacing itself just as much in the darkness of the tomb as in the ordinary guise of the gardener. Its glory radiates only for the eyes that can see, and the eyes that can see see only the gardener. But the gardener speaks, and says the name of the woman weeping for the one who died. To say the name is to say the very thing that dies and does not die. It is to say what departs without parting (which often remains engraved on the tombstone). The name departs without parting because it bears the revelation of the infinitely finite in each one of us. “Mary!” reveals Mary to herself, revealing to her the parting [partance] of the voice that names her and the sending to which her name commits her: that she depart in turn and announce the departure. The proper name speaks

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without speaking since it does not mean, but refers — and he or she to whom it refers remains infinitely withdrawn from all signification. 66

Admittedly, the “truth” disclosed here, with implications entirely consistent with Nancy’s thinking of “community,” belongs neither to pure transcendence nor to pure immanence, but to the folding of each within the other in a manner that interrupts both. “Revelation,” Nancy concludes, “i.e., this revelation of which the resurrection is meant to be both the culmination and the final word, reveals that there is nothing to be shown, no appearing, no theophany or epiphany of celestial glory. There is therefore no last word either.” 67 But as Nancy is obviously aware, a revelation that reveals nothing is still a revelation, one that, in withdrawing all affirmation, still affirms that withdrawal, and if no final truth is revealed by the glorious body of the risen Christ, it can only be because what is revealed belongs not to the end, but to the beginning: not as any last word, therefore, but always already as the first word, such as a name, like that of “Mary,” for instance, which, being irreducible to signification, claims Nancy, requires and suffers no translation, but, by dint of its quasi-divine origin, proffered as it is by Christ himself, coincides both with itself and with the exteriority that precedes, exceeds, and outlasts it. Earlier, commenting on the particular status occupied in the Bible by Christ’s encounter with Mary, which he describes accurately enough not as one of Jesus’s parables, unlike other Gospel stories, yet nevertheless as “a scene in the general parable formed by his life and mission,” 68 he had implicitly conceded as much. Repeating a familiar gesture, Nancy explained that, contrary to allegories or fables, which largely serve a moral or pedagogical purpose, what was distinctive about biblical parables was how they “obstinately remain, in some way, ‘tautegorical,’ that is, stating themselves and nothing else, according to the term coined by Schelling precisely in order to characterise the specific force of myth.” 69 Parables, then, just like myths, find their meaning nowhere else than in themselves, only address those who already have ears to listen, and accordingly require no further interpretation than their enunciation or performance. They are the glorious embodiment of their own indisputable origin. “Such at least,” writes Nancy, “is what Christian faith propounds: it is not simply a matter of believing in truths signified, translated or expressed by a prophet, but of also believing, before all else, or in the end perhaps to the exclusion of all else, in the effective presentation of truth as life or singular existence.” “The idea of revelation,” he adds, “as a disclosing of a hidden reality or the deciphering of a mystery is only the religious modality grounded in belief (in the sense of some form of representation or knowledge on the part of a subject) in Christianity or monotheism in general.” 70 Crucial to Nancy’s argument at this stage is the sharp contrast he draws between belief, “croyance,” and faith, “foi,” between that which is

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expressive of a commitment to religious or theological doctrine and that which excedes all religious content as such, and “far from falling short of the concept, by exceeding it, puts the concept outside itself and gives it more to conceive, or more to grasp and to think, more to touch and to point to than what it can conceive.” 71 Were he to “transcribe,” as he puts it, the second of the two “into Blanchotian language,” he added, it would be to say that “faith is the unworking [désœuvrement] that takes place in and as the work [l’œuvre],” 72 a formulation whose accuracy as a gloss on Blanchot, as so often in Nancy, rather precipitately subordinates the relation between belief and faith, on Nancy’s definition, to a binding, albeit deferred dialectic of the work. If so, this would reinforce the reservations of those unnamed readers to whom Nancy replies in the new preface accompanying republication of his book in 2013, in which he insisted that he had been quite scrupulous, he says, in avoiding the trap into which it was claimed he had fallen, which was that of giving too ample credit to the Gospels and allowing his own writing to be compromised by an unthought proximity to Christian theology. “Everything in these texts,” he insisted in reply, referring to his work on the deconstruction of Christianity in general, and appealing in the process to yet another undecidable binary, reflects a concern not to let sense [sens] be arrested by signification [signification], or to allow truth to find itself in any way verified — completed, designated, and saturated. Everything they say is about opening and keeping open “sense” as both passage and sending, as a sending back between one group and the next — a sending back, as a result, therefore, between the living and the dead, i.e., between two kinds of passers-by: those who are still passing by and those who ceaselessly prolong their leaving without ever returning, without ever reversing what is not only the obligatory course of life but corresponds to the leakage according to which there is “sense” without resolution or ultimate reason. 73

Nobody reinterprets the text of the Gospels with impunity, which, as Nancy maintains, is surely one reason why it is essential to revisit them. But to accept or endorse the promise they make is not without risks. For it is true, as Nancy acknowledges, that “[e]verything which is fantasised under the heading of resurrection, reincarnation, revival, or the migration of the soul, always comes down to returning to oneself or reappropriating oneself.” At the same time, he insists, there is another possibility, or another chance for faith, which is that “[t]here is — following what is more than an interpretation of Christianity, following a deconstruction that carries Christianity out of itself on the basis of that more profound movement which opened up the time of man without god — there is, then, the affirmation of a nonreturn and flight following which appropriation and reappropriation reveal themselves to be inferior to the most

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proper impulse of man [l’élan le plus propre de l’homme] and unworthy of him [indignes de lui].” 74 The pathos of these closing lines, the deep desire to which they bear witness, is hard to miss. But in the clumsiness of their wording, not to mention their faintly embarrassing cod humanism, they induce a suspicion which, far from being external to Nancy’s discourse, is inherent within it. For as all readers of the Gospels know, faith is necessarily subject to doubt. Indeed, without the temptation of doubt, it would barely be faith at all. The Gospel writer plainly knows this. For later in the same chapter, as Derrida reminds Nancy in Le Toucher, 75 John introduces the figure of Thomas Didimus, who, having not been present the evening when the risen Christ appeared to the other apostles, hesitates before believing what they tell him, and demands tangible proof. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,” he tells his fellows, “and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe [non credam].” A week later, Christ willingly accedes to this request. “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands,” he tells Thomas; “and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless but believing.” And Christ adds: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed [Quia vidisti me, credidisti. Beati, qui non viderunt et crediderunt].” Nancy’s commentary on this scene is brief, but revealing. To give added pertinence to his account of the irreconcilable difference between faith and belief, he resorts to positing a stark, hierarchical opposition, rather than a mere continuous, complementary redoubling, between sight and touch in the Gospel. For it was not enough, he claims, in what is plainly an unwarranted extrapolation, for Thomas simply to see the body of the risen Christ, it is necessary, indeed more important, for him to touch Christ’s wounds too before he will believe. 76 This was not Nancy’s only attempt at rewriting his source text. Later in the book, he goes on to ventriloquise Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene at some length. But there, too, he repeats the same gesture. “Do not believe,” Nancy has Jesus tell Mary, “there is any guarantee, such as Thomas would like.” 77 What is particularly striking here is how Nancy again dismisses Thomas’s doubts not as a necessary and inevitable aspect of faith as such, but presents them purely in negative terms, as a kind of unrequited nostalgia for metaphysical certainty. This was to pay little attention to the fact that, in the Latin Vulgate, for instance, no difference in vocabulary is used to differentiate between Thomas, who only believes because he has seen, and the blessed, who believe without seeing, since in either case the verb used is the same: credere. Moreover, it is not Christ’s resurrection as such that Thomas refuses to believe, but rather the all-too-human testimony of his fellow apostles. Contrary to what Nancy’s analysis implies, then, there is no suggestion that Thomas is somehow bereft of faith. Indeed, one might easily

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argue that, in wanting both to see and to touch the evidence of the resurrection, he alone was willing to test his faith against something resembling reality, and that he alone found himself in a position properly to affirm his faith, in which case his position might be characterised more accurately as that of a hyperbolic witness to the precarious radicality of faith itself. This possibility is however discarded by Nancy, who passes quickly over the fact that “Thomas” on Christ’s lips, just like “Mary,” was also a name, inseparable however not from any quasi-divine origin, but always already repeated, beyond any origin, insofar as it not only meant “twin,” from the Aramaic, as Blanchot would remember when completing Thomas l’Obscur in 1940 (and its doublet, Thomas l’Obscur: nouvelle version, some ten years later), but also, by that token, in referring not to the one but to the two, already bore witness to the ineliminable precariousness or duplicity of faith, its inability therefore ever properly to coincide with itself. Nancy’s priority, however, was to enforce an unbridgeable divide between belief and faith, with the result that Thomas’s doubts, rather than being inseparable from faith, are promptly attributed, according to an implicit dialectic, to an overriding need for unavailable certainty. The threat to belief Nancy identifies in Thomas is rejected as illegitimate and quickly dispatched. Faith, in other words, even when deconstructed, cannot be other than blind. Blanchot for his part did not of course live to read Noli me tangere, which appeared in April 2003, barely two months after the writer’s death. Nor, for the same reason, did he have the opportunity to consider the generous and carefully nuanced tribute paid to him by Nancy in the closing session of the March 2003 Paris conference on his work, in which, improvising from notes, the latter evoked many of the same topics as he would address in Noli me tangere (joy and faith, death and the resurrection), 78 so much so that, when the book appeared a month later, there was every reason to suppose, on the part of some, that it was secretly dedicated to Blanchot’s memory. But if from 2003 the already virtual dialogue between the two was finally interrupted, unfinished business still remained. Twenty-one years earlier, reading the pair’s “Noli me frangere,” Blanchot had evidently taken note of Nancy’s and LacoueLabarthe’s criticisms of L’Écriture du désastre, framed as they were by an unexpected appeal on Nancy’s part to Christ’s “glorious body” and all it secretly implied. And that very first scene between Nancy and Blanchot would leave a discreet but telltale trace on La Communauté inavouable, written a year later. For in an uncanny moment of anticipatory belatedness, that book too had ended with the touching of an untouchable body or, more accurately, with the mutual yet dissymmetrical touching of two untouchable bodies, which were moreover explicitly differentiated: carnal, sexualised, and gendered. And to dramatise what had or had not occurred between these two bodies, Blanchot in turn also drew on a New Testament scene, this time from the Gospel according to Luke, itself the

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subject of numerous pictorial representations, by Titian, Breughel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and several others: the episode of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. The key aspects of the Gospel story are again well known. Shortly after their discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other unnamed women report their findings to the disciples, who, thinking the women’s words to be “idle tales,” refuse to believe them. “And behold,” the story continues, “two of them went, the same day, to a town which was sixty furlongs from Jerusalem, named Emmaus.” As the pair discuss what is purported to have happened, a stranger joins them, whom they do not recognise, and who asks them what they know. They converse at length. But it is only when they invite him to delay his parting, and he breaks bread with them, that “their eyes were opened, and they knew him,” at which point, according to Luke 24:31, “he vanished out of their sight [Et aperti sunt oculi eorum et cognoverunt eum; et ipse evanuit ab eis].” Later, when they return to Jerusalem to meet the other disciples, Christ once more appears among the assembled company and, seeing widespread consternation, reassures them that he is no ghostly presence, but embodied flesh: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself,” he declares: “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have [videte manus meas et pedes meos, quia ipse ego sum! Palpate me et videte, quia spiritus carnem et ossa non habet, sicut me videtis habere].” They eat together, and the sequence comes to a close. “These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you,” concludes Jesus, “that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.” “Then,” says the Gospel, “opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.” Luke’s story of the travellers on the road to Emmaus enjoys much the same canonical status as the scene of Jesus’s appearance to Mary Magdalen. As such, it is duly mentioned several times by Nancy in the course of Noli me tangere, albeit in passing, and mainly as corroboration of John 20:14. Nancy in La Communauté désavouée returns however to the episode or, more precisely, to Blanchot’s brief allusion to it at the end of La Communauté inavouable. For as Duras’s female protagonist is found to have departed into the night, Blanchot is left musing on the question as to what had indeed occurred between the two lovers. In response, he offers the following series of bifurcating hypotheses: Either [Duras’s male protagonist] was unable to hold onto her [the woman he had hired], and community comes to an end in just as arbitrary a fashion as it begins; or else she completed her work [a fait son œuvre], and changed him more radically than he believes, leaving him with the memory of a love lost even before it could be realised. (In the same way, for the disciples on the road to Emmaus: they convince themselves [se persuadent] of the divine presence only when it has left

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Blanchot’s reference to Christ’s disciples occupies in this passage no more than a sentence, which is itself already in the form of a parenthesis or an aside, a kind of concession, perhaps, to an audience already familiar with the relevant Bible story. For Nancy, it is nevertheless final proof of the Christological scenario allegedly underpinning Blanchot’s thinking of community. “The whole cycle of the Passion is complete,” he asserts: “Last Supper, death, resurrection, departure from this world. Thus is accomplished the work of salvation of the god who abandoned himself to human existence. And the woman too ‘completed her work’ and ‘changed him more radically than he believes’ (turning him into a Christian new man?).” 80 This was brutally to reframe Blanchot’s analysis, with little in the way of supporting evidence, as an uncritical recycling of Pauline kenosis and spiritual rebirth, both motifs which feature prominently in Nancy’s own rewriting of Christianity, and the naïve usage of which he seems eager to discharge onto Blanchot, which also meant putting the latter in the position of convenient scapegoat for the unresolved tensions that belonged just as much, if not more so, to Nancy’s own would-be post-Christian, post-secular thinking. And in a footnote laden with early memories of Paul’s strictures on fornication, Nancy redoubled the innuendo by adding a rhetorical question that was surely less pertinent to the text under discussion than to the one discussing it: “How to avoid thinking,” Nancy asked, “that Blanchot still had in mind from his childhood cathechism the once familiar expression ‘works of the flesh [l’œuvre de chair]’ to refer to the sexual act?” 81 Here, however, as elsewhere in La Communauté désavouée, Nancy proceeds, not with attention to detail, but by a mixture of extrapolation, projection, and free association. His treatment of Blanchot’s analogy between Duras’s lovers and the disciples on the road to Emmaus is a case in point. As elsewhere, Nancy’s strategy is to impose a narrative or conceptual teleology on Blanchot’s text that takes no account of its discursive syntax or explicit letter. In this polemical overbidding, he omits to notice Blanchot’s own polemical suggestion, not dissimilar in fact to what Nancy himself had argued long before in “La Communauté désœuvrée” of 1983, which is that the ritual of holy “communion,” as enacted in the story of the travellers to Emmaus (Christ is properly recognised by the disciples only when he breaks bread with them), and the belief in “community” then produced, was a retrospective illusion, a nostalgic projection based not on direct experience of the real presence, if such exists, but only on an awareness of its absence. Blanchot’s paraphrase of Luke 24:31

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is in this regard revealing. For whereas the Gospel-writer reports that “their eyes were opened, and they knew him,” Blanchot, adapting the Bible text for purposes of his own, redescribes this apparent “knowledge” as something more resembling wilful delusion, according to which “they convince themselves” of what they believe they have seen. This was not all. It is symptomatic that Nancy also fails to realise, as far as Blanchot’s later writing as a whole is concerned, the relatively unusual status of this closing reference to the New Testament. True enough, like other authors of his generation and cultural background, Blanchot in many previous or earlier texts makes relatively frequent use of biblical expressions, parallels, or examples. His use of the figure of Lazarus, say, in “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” or his redeployment of the “Libera me” in Le Pas au-delà, even the gloss on Duras’s reference to the Book of Revelation, are already sufficient indication of this, and many similar instances in Blanchot’s essays or fiction could be cited. But, with notable exceptions, from the early 1980s onwards, in the period corresponding to L’Écriture du désastre or to La Communauté inavouable, these references to the Christian Bible give way almost entirely to a reappraisal of episodes from the Jewish Old Testament. Already in L’Écriture du désastre, Blanchot had reminded readers of Nietzsche’s fiercely worded view on the matter in a famous passage from Beyond Good and Evil: “to have pasted this New Testament, in every respect a monument to rococo taste, onto the Old Testament,” Nietzsche wrote, “in order to make a single, identical book, the ‘Bible,’ the ‘Book as such’: this is perhaps the greatest act of foolishness [imprudence] and ‘sin against the spirit’ that modern literature has on its conscience.” 82 Without fully endorsing the remark, which he suggested was too closely bound up with Nietzsche’s invective against Christianity, Blanchot went on, in a 1985 essay entitled “Paix, paix au lointain et au proche [Peace, peace to the foreign and to the near],” to explain his own position. While paying equal tribute to the Greeks and to the Jews, “these two chosen peoples, and these two ‘miracles’ or enigmas,” i.e., philosophy on the one hand and the law of Moses on the other, he singled out the second to emphasise, as he put it, that “Judaism, by the gift of the written and the oral Thora, in which a unique intrigue with the Most High is inscribed, is the testimony, always worth repeating, which warns against the temptations of Presence and the futile brilliance of Manifestation.” 83 This, then, was to reclaim the teachings of the Old Testament not as a source of religious enlightenment, but as a resource for thinking beyond the metaphysics of presence and sensuous revelation, and as a body of prescription in which what was primary was not morality in the sense of an established code of authorised or imposed behaviour, but the ethical, using the term in the divergent sense elaborated by Levinas, that is, as constitutively unsatisfied requirement.

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In this respect, Blanchot’s reading of the Old Testament often appears idiosyncratic, not to say provocatively unorthodox, and is in any case less concerned with seeking legitimacy or higher sanction than engaged in articulating a more rigorous understanding of the burden of writing as that which, like the tablets of the law, is always already fragmented and bereft of origin, and as a result always already subject to infinite reinterpretation. To this extent, far from it being an instance of that philosemitism which is allegedly but a photographic negative of the prewar antisemitism for which Blanchot is routinely and stereotypically attacked (with vanishingly little evidence ever being cited in support of the claim), it would be more accurate to describe Blanchot’s reading of the Old Testament, like his revisiting of the Greek stories of Orpheus, Narcissus, or the threefold Aphrodite, as corresponding to a distinctive deconstructive strategy of his own, dedicated not to overturning the texts of the past, in what is always a problematic and complicitous dialectical gesture, as Derrida repeatedly made clear, but to reading them otherwise, that is, in hearing what they say or, just as importantly, fail to say, in radically different, ethically probing manner. This much was admittedly already at least partly true of Blanchot’s use of the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus from John 11:38-44, or his citing of the Catholic Office of the Dead, both of which, in Blanchot’s reworking, served to reconfigure, with radical effect, what they were customarily held to express: here the putrefaction of the decaying, unrisen body, there the impossibility of dying, both of which were reaffirmed as such, rather than as the preparatory, negative labour of some impending work of resurrection. During the 1940s and 1950s, even more so in the 1960s and 1970s, this was already a significant departure. But after 1980, even this dissident reworking of canonic material gave way to a more inventive and far less expected style of Old Testament exegesis. Asked in 1981, for instance, by the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur whether it was still possible to give credence to Sartrian “committed literature,” Blanchot replied in the affirmative, and proceeded to cite the example of the Book of Exodus. “There we have everything,” he argued: “the journey out of slavery, the wandering in the wilderness, the waiting for writing, that is, the legislative writing of which one always falls short, such that the only tablets received are broken ones, which cannot in any case constitute a complete answer, except in their fracture, their fragmentation even; finally, the necessity of dying without completing the work, without reaching the Promised Land which as such is inaccessible, yet is always hoped for and is thus already given.” 84 In 1989, addressing the legacy of the Shoah in the course of a tribute to the poet Edmond Jabès, he similarly drew on the story of Amalek’s war against the Jews found in Exodus and Deuteronomy; and in paying his respects to Derrida a year later he likewise chose to write in memory of Moses and of the double status of the Thora. 85

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Against this backdrop, Blanchot’s closing reference to the travellers to Emmaus takes on particularly pointed significance. Given the close parallel with the revelation of Christ’s glorious body, it is hard not to see it as a coded response not only to Nancy’s impatient and misplaced criticisms of L’Écriture du désastre, but also to the residual traces of Christian belief still present, in Blanchot’s estimation, in Nancy’s concept — and by extension every concept — of “community.” For suspecting, even agreeing, as do both Nancy and Derrida in their turn, that what lies beyond Christianity, so to speak, is only a further embodiment of Christianity, 86 what Blanchot’s allusion to the Gospel text nevertheless does is to counterpose to Nancy’s scene of Christian revelation, sensual presence, adoration, and blind faith, a sequence that insists instead, first, on the experience of the travellers as mystified witnesses to Christ’s absent presence, then, on the probing scepticism of the doubting Thomas, given to touch, not an ethereal spirit, but a body and a flesh, and finally, perhaps most importantly of all, on the inescapability of interpretation through questioning. For it is not by chance that, when the travellers return to Jerusalem and see the body of Christ once more, the episode should conclude with Jesus explaining to his disciples how to read scripture, how, in other words, to respect Judaic ethical law. As far as Blanchot was concerned, what might then be deemed worthy of transcendence — transcendence without transcendence — was not the “glorious body” of the risen Christ as celebrated by Nancy, but, in the words of Après coup, at one and the same time for both good and ill, “the glory of a ‘narrating voice’ that gives one to understand clearly, without itself ever being obscured by the opaqueness or enigma or terrible horror of what is communicated.” 87 And it is worth noting here, too, that when Blanchot a year later had occasion to make a similarly unusual, if in this case more oblique reference to the Gospels, in answer to the question “Why do you write?,” asked by the newspaper Libération, he replied by citing Martin Luther’s famous words at Worms, as he had done many years before apropos of Kafka: “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. So help me God,” which he promptly recast however as follows: “In the space of writing, by writing, not writing, here I stand bent, I cannot do otherwise and I expect no succour from propitious powers” 88 — which was to echo the quasi-Judaic rigour of Luther’s gesture of submission, while yet denying scripture any divine or other origin, and refusing to grant it any redemptive or soteriological authority. Did this mean that the serious controversy between Blanchot and Nancy simply amounted to the dissymmetry between two divergent would-be deconstructive readings of the New Testament, the one imbued with blind faith, the other with searing doubt, the one appealing to revelation, the other to the law, the one replete with unquestioning certainty, the other inseparable from its abiding fragility, or alternatively, notwithstanding Nancy’s severe criticisms of Blanchot — and perhaps the very

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reason for those criticisms — was there not in the latter’s writing evidence of a radically different thinking of the politics of “community” than was apparent in the work of his belated antagonist? For there was evidently not only a religious, but also a political subtext to the debate between the pair. III BROKEN TABLETS The realisation that the tomb was empty, as Blanchot and Nancy obviously agreed, was of course not in itself an end, only a beginning. As such, it was in any case a profoundly ambiguous one, not least because of the dialectic of reversibility it implied. Blanchot made that point himself in the opening paragraph of “Les Intellectuels en question,” that March 1984 article written partly in response to Lyotard’s “Tombeau de l’intellectuel,” which Nancy, correctly enough, suggests can and should be read as a continuation of La Communauté inavouable 89 (even, one might add, coming as it does only months before Blanchot’s letter to Laporte in December that year, as already a preliminary, indirectly autobiographical retrospective narrative). Indeed, paraphrasing a famous passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Blanchot started by recalling that apparent dialectic of work and worklessness with which La Communauté inavouable had concluded three months earlier. “Christendom,” Hegel had pointed out, “found the empty sepulchre [das leere Grab], but not the link between the worldly and the eternal, and thereby lost the Holy Land.” 90 In a similar fashion, Blanchot suggested, “artists and writers who are constantly in search of their tomb, are under no illusions of ever being able to find any rest in it.” And he explained as follows: A tomb, then? Were they to find it, in the same way that, in ages past, the crusaders, according to Hegel, set off to liberate Christ from the venerable sepulchre, even though they knew, on the basis of their faith, that it was empty and that, in the case of victory, they would only be able to release the holiness of the void, should they ever find it, so their labours would be far from over, but would have only just begun, once they realised worklessness may be thought to come about only in the endless pursuit of works [il n’y aurait désœuvrement que dans la poursuite infinie des œuvres]. 91

That the tomb was empty, in other words, was nothing new, since whatever it once contained had already been raised up and spiritualised, in which case Christ’s departure or withdrawal, so to speak, was merely further proof of his enduring presence. However indispensable it might be, it was therefore still not enough to reinterpret the lessons of the Gos-

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pels or the Old Testament. And if the Christian crusaders of the thirteenth century, according to Hegel, had been misled into identifying the infinite with a material object, the same was not the case with artists and writers whose experience taught them not only that the two were irreconcilable, but also that the end they sought for their acts — these acts without action, as Blanchot has it — could never be embodied as such, but would only ever coincide with its impossibility, from which it followed that, in pursuing endlessly the prospect or promise of the work, the only certainty was that no end would ever be reached. “I wonder,” Blanchot went on, “whether it is not by dint of their necessary lack of success and distress that artists and writers give help and support to those called intellectuals” — who were not, he insisted, a specific class, indeed, neither poets nor writers, philosophers nor historians, painters nor sculptors, scientists nor academics in that capacity as such, but represented “that part of ourselves which not only turns us aside, momentarily, from our task, but turns us back towards what is being done in the world to judge or assess what is being done there.” An intellectual, in other words, Blanchot argues, is someone who, “standing back from the political, does not withdraw from it, nor retire within it, but attempts to maintain this space of detachment and this effort at discretion so as to take advantage of this proximity and distance in order to take up a (precarious) position, in the guise of a lookout whose role it is solely to keep watch, to remain watchful, to wait with an active attention expressive less of a concern for oneself than of a concern for others.” 92 Writing, then, indirectly, obliquely, and at a distance, implies and enjoins a politics driven not by a quest for power but by a commitment to others. As might be expected, this was largely to reiterate the conclusion Blanchot had reached at the end of La Communauté inavouable, where he had spoken of the question raised by the book, it will be remembered, as having “an exacting political sense,” such that “it does not give us the luxury of retreating from the present which, in opening new and unfamiliar spaces of freedoms, also makes us responsible for new relations, always under threat, always hoped for, between what we call work and what we call unworking.” As Blanchot was surely aware, this was to be schematic to the point of blandness. But it was also a recognition that, insofar as the concept of politics or the political was necessarily bereft of any proper or stable foundation, so the pressing political task today was how to avoid repeating the political past: how, in other words, to invent a political future. It was of course to this crucial exigency that the very notion of “unavowable” “community” was dedicated. In this respect, Blanchot’s understated agenda was modest, but also purposeful and calculated. For what he clearly realised was that it was undesirable, and in any case impossible, in particular during the mid-1980s when so many other transformations were underway, to pretend to identify under some single, totalising, ontological rubric the political challenges of a future

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whose distinguishing trait was that it forcibly interrupted the horizon of the possible. This did not however prevent Nancy from criticising Blanchot’s words for their alleged lack of clarity, though it is hard not to see the largely risible list of possible constructions of this passage that he gives (ranging from “community disavowed” to “a form of monarchy,” “individual or collegial presidency,” “aristocratic oligarchy,” or “the writer” as “philosopher-king”) as an egregious instance of deliberate obfuscation. 93 Admittedly, in “Les Intellectuels en question” the following year, albeit still in nonspecific, summary fashion, Blanchot did take the opportunity to translate these concerns into a brief prospectus of core universalist principles that will strike many as uncontroversial in the extreme, not to say entirely banal, notably, the demand for justice, the commitment to truth, freedom, and equality, and the rejection of all antisemitism, racism, or xenophobia. 94 In conclusion, however, he issued a more chilling warning, reminding readers that “the improbable date” of 1943, that bleakest of all bleak years during the Occupation, could always still return, 95 words that in the mid-1980s may have seemed otiose, but which, thirty years on, events in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, or even further afield, have given startlingly fresh relevance, reinforcing a growing sense that the contemporary world is still in the sway of a political crisis like that of the 1930s in Europe — and of what then ensued. For Blanchot, then, as for Nancy, fundamental concerns remained: what politics, in whose name, and to what end? These were admittedly not new questions. As I have argued elsewhere, Blanchot from earliest times was preoccupied with little else, and it was this that largely motivated his early nonconformist nationalism, his fierce condemnation of the ineffectual legalistic diplomacy of the League of Nations, and his thunderous attacks on the woolly indecisiveness and shortsighted incompetence of the French parliamentary system. 96 Some fifty years later, it was hardly surprising, then, that, when invited by Nancy to contribute to a special issue of the Cahiers Confrontation on the theme “Qui vient après le sujet? [Who Comes After the Subject?],” Blanchot should reply by explicitly endorsing Nancy’s question (itself a logical continuation of the position articulated by the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique some years earlier) in a text entitled precisely “Qui? [Who?],” not least, as he put it in a covering letter to the journal editor, René Major, in that “the question of the subject remains today the question of the question.” 97 Nancy’s most forceful criticisms of Blanchot in La Communauté désavouée are nevertheless directed not only at what he alleges to be the political stance articulated in La Communauté inavouable, but also at what he claims Blanchot’s political actions to have been both in the 1930s and during May 68. But, despite insisting in largely salvationist terms on

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Blanchot’s guilty prewar past, in neither case does Nancy examine the writer’s political thinking or political involvements in any pertinent historical detail. This is a task he leaves to others, notably to Michel Surya, whose assistance he acknowledges in a footnote and elsewhere, 98 and whose extended volume, L’Autre Blanchot, following the special issue of Lignes edited earlier, was published some ten months after Nancy’s own. In that book, Surya mounts an unrelenting, if often laboriously emphatic attack on Blanchot’s prewar political journalism and on his subsequent thinking of the relationship between literature and the political. To do this, however, he resorts to a number of dubious polemical devices. He provides, for instance, only a piecemeal, highly selective account of Blanchot’s 1930s output, the effect of which is to detach Blanchot’s journalism from the often urgent political debates to which it was responding and, moreover, isolate his often seemingly excessive or violent political rhetoric from the discursive economy of 1930s journalism in general. By decontextualising it in this way in deliberately concerted fashion, Surya empties Blanchot’s prewar journalism of any proper political content, and denies it any intelligibility other than as a pathological or deluded aberration issuing from a now fantasmatic past. In dealing with Blanchot’s postwar thinking Surya is similarly impatient, and his long pages of confused, self-serving editorialising are mainly indicative of a manichean rush to judgement, the purpose of which is to discredit the entirety of Blanchot’s writing by contrasting it at every opportunity with the — in its own way far from unproblematic — philosophical and political thought of the talismanic figure of Bataille, whose intellectual heir Surya has ambitions to be. Emblematic among Surya’s many charges is the assertion that Blanchot’s case is little different to that of Heidegger. It had of course long been known, even before French publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme in 1987, and before the posthumous release of the Black Notebooks from 2014 onwards, for which Nancy rightly takes the thinker to task in his Banalité de Heidegger, that Heidegger not only willingly accepted election to the office of Rector at Freiburg University in April 1933, justifying his decision to do so in his notorious inaugural Rektoratsrede by appealing to the fundamental ontology expounded in Sein und Zeit, but that he also campaigned, among other things, in November 1933 in favour of Hitler’s plebiscite on withdrawing Germany from the League of Nations, which was the first move in reasserting Germany’s expansionist territorial ambitions. “The uniqueness of this vote,” Heidegger had told his student readers two days before the plebiscite, lies in the simple greatness of the decision to be taken. But the inexorability of the simple and final tolerates no uncertainty or hesitation. This final decision reaches beyond that, to the extreme limit of the existence of our people [die äußerste Grenze des Daseins unseres Volkes].

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Chapter 5 And what is that limit? It consists in that originary challenge [Urforderung] of all existence [Dasein], which is that it maintain and save its own essence [sein eigenes Wesen]. A barrier is thus erected between what can be demanded of a people and what cannot. By dint of this basic law of honour our people [das Volk] preserves the dignity and resoluteness of its essence [die Würde und die Entschiedenheit seines Wesens]. 99

All this Blanchot duly noted in L’Entretien infini in 1969. But, in the eyes of many, even worse than these expressions of support for the Nazi regime was the fact that Heidegger after the event remained consistently evasive or entirely silent when it came to acknowledging Nazi crimes or publically accepting reponsibility for what he is reported to have once described in private as “the greatest stupidity” of his life. Blanchot, for his part, had, of course, taken Heidegger extremely seriously as a thinker from the outset, though not without a growing sense of detachment from the mid-1940s onwards. Alerted in 1962 by Guido Schneeberger’s anthology Nachlese zu Heidegger as to the true extent of Heidegger’s support for the Nazi regime, Blanchot responded in a late addition to L’Entretien infini in 1969 by noting how Heidegger’s support, among others, for that November 1933 plebiscite, as the lines quoted above clearly testify, “put in the service of Hitler the selfsame language and selfsame writing with which, at a major moment in the history of thought, we had been invited into what was referred to as the loftiest questioning, that which might come to us from Being and Time.” 100 “That, for me,” he added in 1984, returning to Heidegger’s several endorsements of Nazi rule, “was the gravest responsibility: there was corruption of writing, abuse, travesty, and misappropriation of language. Upon Heidegger’s language there will henceforth rest a suspicion.” 101 But if Heidegger stood convicted in this way, Surya claimed, did not Blanchot all the more surely stand condemned as well? Had not Blanchot, he alleged, similarly been a proponent of “French fascistic nationalism [nationalisme fascisant français],” and was it not the case that Blanchot too, just like Heidegger, he went on, now using an oddly Christian turn of phrase, “never showed any repentance”? 102 Both claims, however, are deeply misleading, not to say entirely specious, and Surya produces no evidence to substantiate either one of them. For if “fascism” for most historians, insofar as it can be used to refer to any single entity at all, may be described as an antiliberal revolutionary movement inseparable from a mythic, reactionary, pseudoreligious nationalism, a belief in the need for a hierarchically organised, virile, corporatist State, an aggressive militaristic, expansionist foreign policy, and an all-pervasive single controlling party under the authority of a charismatic dictator, 103 then, however much commentators such as Surya may wish to vilify the prewar Blanchot, out of sentimental nostalgia, it would seem, for the short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful politics of the 1936 Popular Front, it is plain that

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the writer’s position at the time was never in any sense “fascistic,” as such self-avowed fascists of those prewar years as Robert Brasillach or Lucien Rebatet were only too keen to emphasise. 104 Surya’s accusation of “fascism,” then, seems little more than a case of playground name-calling. And in reproaching Blanchot for declining “to repent,” Surya, in confused and uninformed fashion, not only remains blind to the Christian values of sin and remorse that his own discourse recycles, but also fails to take account of the crucially important way in which Blanchot, from the early to mid-1940s onwards, possibly even the late 1930s, was engaged in a far-reaching rethinking of the relationship between literature and politics, as such texts as Aminadab, Le Très-Haut, L’Arrêt de mort, and La Folie du jour or, more recently, L’Écriture du désastre and, of course, La Communauté inavouable, themselves testify. 105 The parallel Surya seeks to establish between Blanchot and Heidegger is unconvincing in other ways too. For unlike Heidegger, Blanchot was not a member of the Nazi Party or any French equivalent, nor did he hold high office in any Nazi or French Fascist State, nor did he swear anything resembling the “Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State [Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Universitäten und Hochschulen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat],” as did Heidegger in November 1933, nor did he use his authority among friends or followers to persuade them to endorse the Nazi regime, nor did he utilise any signature conceptual language of his own — or any words at all — to justify the imposition of a totalitarian State, whether in its actual, supposed vulgar form or the spiritualised alternative that Heidegger came to prefer, nor did he turn a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews, nor did he fail to think through the philosophical and political consequences of the Shoah. Surya’s assimilation of Blanchot to Heidegger, in other words, amounts to no more than trivialising, demagogic invective. It is admittedly true that Blanchot for much of his life observed a discreet silence regarding his prewar political commitments, which remained unknown to many till the publication of Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle’s Les Non-Conformistes des années 30 in 1969, 106 or even his activities under the Occupation, which are still veiled in relative obscurity. When invited to explain his past, as he was by Mehlman in 1979, and by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy in 1984, he largely limited himself to setting forth or correcting matters of historical fact. Sometimes, however, as on the occasion of the 1993 London conference on his work, he chose to judge some of his past writing, in this case an article from 1942 on the celebrated nineteenth-century literary critic Sainte-Beuve in which he had mentioned the name of Charles Maurras, the Action française leader, a powerful voice at the time in support of Pétain and Vichy France (which would eventually lead to him being sentenced to life imprisonment), as “detestable and inexcusable,” 107 and in private correspondence let it be

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known that he similarly disowned most if not all of his prewar literary and political journalism, while also maintaining, unverifiably, of course, though it would not have been inconsistent with journalistic practice at the time, that some articles at least had been altered by others without his consent. 108 At the same time, he visibly refrained from any public act of “repentance,” as required by Surya, or from any “avowal,” as urged by Nancy — always assuming there was something to repent or to avow — and this for one simple reason, which is that repentance or avowal does not simply ask forgiveness for some fault or crime, but, more importantly, also demands to have the blemish lifted by the grace of some superior authority, such as God, the Church, history, public opinion, or the judgement of one’s peers. In these circumstances, repentance, like belated regret, is a largely meaningless token gesture, amounting not to an acceptance of responsibility but to a discharging of it onto others. To accuse oneself, in other words, is not to take responsibility at all, but to try to elude it. What was surely crucial for Blanchot in the end was not the rights or wrongs of his own actions in themselves, whatever he (or others) may have thought them to be, since what is done can never be undone, but rather the inescapable responsibility they implied and required — which it was essential therefore to accept, to affirm, and to think. It was accordingly in those terms that he began his letter to Laporte. “You know my principle,” he wrote. “Let each express themselves according to their own responsibility.” 109 When addressing the question of his political or intellectual evolution, Blanchot in his December 1984 letter had recourse to an unusual turn of phrase. During the 1930s, split as his life was between his day job, political journalism, and the night-time writing that would eventually lead to Thomas l’Obscur, he tells Laporte: “I was exposed to a veritable dichotomy: the writing by day in the service of this person or that [ . . . ] and the writing by night that alienated me from any demand other than itself, while also changing my identity or turning it to face an ungraspable and anguishing unknown.” “If there was some fault on my part,” he added, “it was no doubt in this divide. But at the same time it [the dichotomy] hastened a sort of conversion of myself [une sorte de conversion de moimême] by opening me to an expectation and understanding of the overwhelming changes that were in the offing.” 110 But what, then, did Blanchot mean by “a sort of conversion”? Since publication of the letter in 2011, much ink has been spilled debating the question. Surya for his part, in characteristically leadenfooted manner, reads the phrase as an instance of obscurantist, pseudoreligious mystification. 111 Nancy in his commentary is more nuanced, but comes to a similar conclusion, which would lay the foundations for the interpretation put forward in La Communauté désavouée, according to which, if on the one hand it was impossible to decide whether “conversion” meant “substituting thought for exaltation” or merely “transfiguring exaltation,” so, on the other it was obvious, accord-

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ing to Nancy, that it “was also a conversion of which it might be said that it was internal to Christianity.” 112 True enough, the religious connotations of Blanchot’s expression are hard to avoid. It is however important to note that the word itself was introduced into the discussion of Blanchot’s politics not by the writer himself, but by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In a letter to Blanchot dated 27 July 1984, some five months before Blanchot’s letter to Laporte, LacoueLabarthe had begun by explaining how important it was for him (and for Nancy) to address “the question of politics” in the special Blanchot issue of the Cahiers de l’Herne the two were preparing at the time. He then went on to convey his dissatisfaction with Mehlman’s recently translated Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France, criticising the book, among others, for its “total blindness to what political experience, political awareness, political conversion [conversion], or even conversion in general might actually mean.” 113 In another letter, dated 27 July 1984, this time addressed to Lacoue-Labarthe by Dionys Mascolo, the latter replied to an earlier letter by writing, “You [i.e., Lacoue-Labarthe] refer to a ‘conversion [conversion]’ from fascism to a certain communism on Blanchot’s part,” implying that it was indeed Lacoue-Labarthe who had first used the word. Blanchot himself would implicitly confirm as much in his December letter to Laporte by asking his correspondent to pass on its contents to LacoueLabarthe as an indirect reply to the latter’s earlier inquiry. 114 There seems little doubt, then, that the reference to “a sort of conversion,” as far as Blanchot was concerned, not only had the status of a problematic concept, as the circumlocution “a sort of” testified, but was also an implicit quotation from his letter’s indirect addressee, a kind of acquiescent concession, so to speak, to Lacoue-Labarthe’s own quasireligious formulation. In any case, as the French dictionary confirms, the religious sense of the word “conversion,” though prominent, does not stand alone. For the term can also simply mean the changing of one thing into another, and as such is synonymous with words like “metamorphosis,” “mutation,” or “transformation.” In this regard, it is worth recalling how as early as 1940, as he reflected on his own writing shortly before delivering Thomas l’Obscur to the publisher, Blanchot had already placed Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror under the sign of radical metamorphosis. “For the first time,” he wrote, “the search for metaphors culminates in the production of metamorphoses the strangeness of which is explained by the destruction of any intervening image or intermediary, by the sudden leap of thought or of the simplest of feelings into a stupefying reality that is its distant culmination.” 115 Nine years later, Blanchot would argue, in a similar vein, that at least one of the seemingly minor changes made to the first of the six Chants between the initial anonymous publication in 1868 and its republication, now under a pseudonym, a year later, involved substituting a grotesque animal figure for the name of Georges Dazet,

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one of the author Isidore Ducasse’s former schoolfriends. This was proof, Blanchot put it, “that Maldoror was not, for the man who wrote it, a work without consequences, that it revealed to him a number of things, that it changed and transformed him [elle l’a changé, transformé], and that in the course of this experience, Dazet having now ceased to be Dazet, there emerged, in his place, beneath his appearance, arising from the depths, the ‘octopus, with a gaze of silk [poulpe, au regard de soie].’” 116 This in turn was not all. For Blanchot’s 1953 reading of Rilke is likewise strongly inflected by the term “conversion [conversion],” now serving as a translation of the German “Wandlung,” meaning “change” or “transformation,” of which Blanchot observes that “while not being comparable to the phenomenological reduction, it nevertheless points towards it,” 117 as Derrida would later agree when noting, apropos of Husserl, that “the phenomenological conversion [conversion] of the gaze, the ‘transcendental reduction’ [Husserl] recommended, is perhaps the very condition (I don’t mean any natural condition) of literature.” 118 In much the same way, “conversion” in Blanchot also gestures in the direction of words such as “turning,” “reversal,” or even “revolution,” and towards what Hölderlin in the Notes to his translation of Sophocles’s Antigone once called “vaterländische Umkehr” or “patriotic reversal,” a phrase that Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire opted to translate, no doubt advisedly, as “retournement natal,” i.e., “native reversal,” purposefully resisting any reference to a supposed “fatherland,” but surely also aware that an alternative translation for Umkehr, according to at least some GermanFrench dictionaries, was precisely “conversion.” “Patriotic reversal,“ explained Hölderlin, “is the reversal of all modes and forms of representation,” 119 an epochal interruption, so to speak, the relevance of which for Blanchot’s fiction of the 1940s it would be hard to overestimate. It is revealing that neither Surya nor Nancy draws attention to Blanchot’s unusual phrasing in the Laporte letter. For in evoking “a sort of conversion,” the latter does not say that he “converted” to a different, alternative belief system (which in French would involve the reflexive verb “se convertir,” as in “se convertir au catholicisme”), nor that others duly “converted” him (which in French would be expressed using the transitive verb “convertir,” as in “les missionnaires ont converti les indigènes”), but writes instead that the disjunction between idioms to which he was exposed, that is to say, neither of those idioms themselves but the discontinuity or disjunction between them, did not itself produce, but nevertheless “hastened” “a sort of conversion of myself.” This was to deny him, syntactically, the position of subject or object in his own sentence. Which was also to say that, as far as language itself was concerned, the writer too was neither subject nor object either of the “sort of conversion” described in the letter. So if he was present, it was only, so to speak, in his absence, as the empty space or stage on which the “sort of conversion of himself” occurred, apparently without cause or purpose. If “a sort

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of conversion,” in other words, corresponded to an event, it was only to an interruption, a caesura, and a radical rearticulation of the relation between the literary and the political. And if such an interruption were to have a corollary, it would not be any embrace of religion, whether Catholicism, as presumed by Nancy, or Judaism, as alleged by Surya, but much rather what Bataille called “inner experience,” that is, an event without provenance or goal, neither an experience as such nor anything inner, taking place as an exposure to that interval which, as Hölderlin puts it, is a double infidelity to the gods and to humans, such that the writer’s task, according to Blanchot, was now to “keep to the intersection of this double, divine and human reversal, this double and reciprocal movement by which a hiatus opens, a void that must henceforth constitute the essential relation between the two worlds.” 120 Unlike Surya, Nancy in his probing of Blanchot’s political thinking does not supply much, even superficially, in the way of historical background. When he does so, however, it is with a surprising lack of attention to detail. In “Les Intellectuels en question,” in the course of a summary discussion of the political situation between the wars, Blanchot at one stage asks: “What is it that people found attractive in fascism?” His answer was brief and to the point: the irrational, the power of spectacle, and a muddled resurgence of certain forms of the sacred, in other words, the needs of a society that wanted once more to open itself to myths: something that the democratic regimes, even those that helped give the war a victorious outcome, seemed cruelly to lack. But war itself, even though it ended in victory, precisely because of the methods it was obliged to use, contributed dangerously to a weakening of democracy, and made people forget what democracy meant by associating it in their minds with the overwhelming and pointless miseries of the conflict rather than with its triumphs. Whence no doubt the almost willing acceptance that democracy might disappear momentarily in the USSR if its loss were to be necessary for the advent of ultimate freedom and for the creation of a State that would abolish itself so as to let integral justice reign. Democracy seemed threadbare; it had lost its radiance, it was day-to-day mediocrity whose disastrous weaknesses were highlighted by the economic difficulties created by the war. 121

If one reads these lines in their original context, it is plain that Blanchot’s purpose here, using a kind of free indirect style, was simply to characterise the intellectual climate of the interwar years, why it was that parliamentary democracy came so easily under threat, and why Fascism and Stalinism proved such a draw to so many. But by quoting Blanchot’s analysis only in selective snatches, Nancy in La Communauté désavouée, surely by design rather than by accident, conspires to attribute to Blanchot the very views the latter diagnoses as factors in the rise of Fascism. And he caps it all by confusing Blanchot with Heidegger, pointing to the

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supposed similarity between Blanchot’s remarks about the weakened state of democracy in the 1930s and that central thesis of Sein und Zeit, the hierarchical distinction between authentic (or proper) death and inauthentic (or improper) dying, 122 which is the aspect of Heidegger’s work that Blanchot, from the earliest times, found the most problematic and most worthy of challenge — and which, alongside Levinas, he therefore spent numerous pages dismantling. Elsewhere, in another remark heavy with innuendo, Nancy makes the similar point that Blanchot in La Communauté inavouable “avoids using the word ‘democracy.’” 123 It is indeed the case, as readers can verify for themselves, that the word does not feature in Blanchot’s text at any point, except implicitly, perhaps, in the discussion of May 68. But as readers can also quickly verify, nor is it used in Nancy’s “La Communauté désœuvrée” of 1983 either. Nancy’s objection, if indeed it can be taken as a serious rebuke at all, applies just as much to his own initial article as it does to Blanchot’s book, if not arguably more so, in that Blanchot, in responding to Nancy, could hardly be expected to do other than take up his interlocutor’s preferred terminology, i.e., the word “community.” In reality, of course, such was the broad consensus at the time on the question of “democracy,” that probably neither writer thought it even necessary to mention the term, unless of course, conversely, “democracy,” for Nancy and Blanchot alike, was one of those words they thought it urgent to set aside and cast afresh, which is why both began their thinking elsewhere, i.e., with the word “community.” But these are not the only occasions when Nancy, like Homer, chooses to nod. When Blanchot goes on to pay tribute to those “intellectuals,” who, like himself, it seems, from 1938 onwards grouped together “to defend a regime [un régime] for which they had no esteem [qu’ils n’estiment pas]” — not least as a result of the uninspiring and frequently ineffectual parliamentary system of the Third Republic, which, committed as successive governments were to a policy of appeasement, did nothing to arrest the disastrous slide into war — this, then, is presented as compelling proof of Blanchot’s essential hostility to “democracy” in general. “You’re right,” Nancy told Mathilde Girard in an interview, as their discussion turned to this exact same sentence of Blanchot’s, “it is the lack of esteem for democracy [la démocratie] that should preoccupy us.” He went on to describe Blanchot’s politics as “aristocratic,” and to claim in the preface to the English translation of The Disavowed Community, in a wild extrapolation, that “democracy [sic],” in Blanchot’s eyes — according to Nancy — did not deserve our esteem, “because it has no other virtue than what one grants to managerialism [La démocratie ne peut être ‘estimée’ (c’est le mot de Blanchot) parce qu’elle n’offre rien qui mérite une autre appréciation que celle qu’on peut accorder à un management].” 124 Historical accuracy, in other words, gave way to polemical misrepresentation, and dubious misquotation took precedence over philological integrity.

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What makes Nancy’s misreading all the more surprising is that his own 2008 essay, Vérité de la démocratie (The Truth of Democracy), itself a kind of oblique political memoir, written partly to rebut government-led, revisionist accounts of May 68 on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, also had recourse, at least at first sight, to some of the same motifs. As for Blanchot reviewing the mid- to late 1930s, so too for Nancy during the postwar period “representative, formal, bourgeois” democracy was in a weakened state, “inadequate to its own Idea,” and exposed not only to totalitarian attack on the part of Fascism and Stalinism, but also to its own shortcomings, such that “it demanded as much to be reinvented as to be defended in its current form.” 125 “Democracy,” he argued, attempting to trump in advance his — misleading — verdict on Blanchot’s use of the word, “did not sufficiently remember that it had also, in some way, to be ‘communistic,’ at the risk of being little more than a managing of necessities and stopgap solutions, bereft of all desire, i.e., spirit, inspiration, or sense.” A key symptom of democracy’s need for reinvention, Nancy added, significantly revising his earlier scepticism (and entirely passing over Blanchot’s analysis in La Communauté inavouable), was May 68, this almost messianic “present tense of an irruption or disruption introducing no figure, no agency, and no new authority,” which “was not only possible,” he now suggested, “but necessary.” 126 And just like Blanchot, though, on the evidence of La Communauté désavouée, without actually realising how crucial it was for his predecessor, Nancy too emphasised the irreconcilable gap between egalitarian democracy on the one hand and, on the other, the unacceptable hierarchy between the proper and the improper claimed by Heideggerian fundamental ontology, in which he located, as he put it, “one of the symptomatic impasses of philosophy when dealing with democracy.” 127 Appearances, though, can be deceptive. However much Nancy’s presentation of the challenges facing “democracy” may seem to match aspects of Blanchot’s earlier overview, evidence remained of deep-seated divergences between the pair. In this respect, their respective versions of the political and philosophical significance of the May événements were particularly telling. From Nancy’s perspective, “what is paramount is not the ‘antiauthoritarianism’ and libertarian or libertine sense usually given (not without reason) to May 68, whether as a good thing or a bad thing; what is paramount is a sense of this truth: i.e., that ‘authority’ cannot be defined by any prior (institutional, canonical, or normative) authorisation, but can only flow from a desire that expresses or recognises itself in it. No subjectivism, even less any psychologism in this desire, only the expression of a true possibility and thus of a true potency of being.” 128 “For what was, naturally enough, only a brief moment,” he went on, the time of 68 was less chronos than kairos: less duration and succession than occasion or encounter, an advening without advent [advenue sans

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“In other words,” Nancy added, now with a still contrarian sidelong glance towards Blanchot or Nietzsche, “a more-than-the-work [un plusque-l’œuvre] or an unworking [désœuvrement] is essential to the work [l’œuvre] of existence: for what it places in common is not only of the order of exchangeable possessions, but also of the order of the unexchangeable, of that which is without-value because outside all measurable value.” 130 In the first instance, as we have seen, there are many apparent similarities with Blanchot’s own account of the May events. For Blanchot, too, what was at stake in the événements was what he described as “a possibility, outside all utilitarian self-interest, of being-together which restored to all the right to equality in fraternity by the freedom of speech that made everyone rise up.” This was why, he added, “one could sense that, with authority overthrown or rather ignored, here was a sort of communism never experienced before, which no ideology was in a position to recuperate or claim as its own.” “Innocent presence,” or “common presence,” as mentioned earlier, he called it, now quoting the poet René Char, or “an absence of reaction” inspired, some think, by a Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche. 131 For both Nancy and Blanchot, then, May 68 was testimony to the boundless, affirmative possibilities, if only for the brevity of an interregnum, of being together, otherwise, beyond the grasp of external authority, borne by the uninhibited presence of desire, an openness of language, and the unpredictability of multiple encounters. But as it repeated itself in their thinking, some twenty-four years apart, the memory of May also proved to be a strangely divided or contested one. Where Nancy saw an unworking that was both a work completed and something more, Blanchot saw an event of which it was not even certain that it had ever happened at all. Where Nancy saw presence as multiple possibility, Blanchot saw “presence and absence, if not merged into one, then at least in virtual fashion swapping places with one another.” 132 And where Nancy saw unconditional potency, Blanchot saw what he called a “declaration of powerlessness.” Where Nancy, in other words, found an ontology, even a metaphysics, as he put it in 2008, 133 Blanchot found something more nearly resembling a politics or an ethics, commanded however not by any prescriptive ethico-political law as such, to which obedience was therefore due and which it was

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imperative to enforce, but rather by what precedes the law as its possibility and excess — not the tablets themselves, that is, but the fact that they were always already broken, where what was wanted, so to speak, was what was forever wanting, and where the “event” that was May, in its necessary eclipse, spoke of the interruption of all law which was also a law of interruption. At stake, then, in Nancy’s and Blanchot’s differing accounts of May 68 was a crucial divergence that, in many ways, summed up what they shared yet persisted in dividing them. Whether what Nancy calls “the work of existence” was finally reliant on its boundless possibility, as he suggests, or whether it was dependent on abiding impossibility, as Blanchot maintained, was an issue that, as seen earlier, lay at the centre of their differing responses to Heidegger. And if the figure of Heidegger continued to loom in the distance when, in La Communauté inavouable, referring to the spontaneous street demonstration of 13 February 1962, Blanchot insisted that “the people of Paris,” as Celan once called them in a poem remembering the exact same event, was not “to be translated as Volk,” 134 so the importance of fundamental ontology continued to resonate otherwise in Nancy’s thinking when in 2016 he reiterated the need to reformulate what Marx called “the individual” with the help of “Heideggerian Dasein and therefore of the Mitdasein coessential with it.” 135 This was not to say that between “La Communauté désœuvrée” and La Communauté désavouée nothing on Nancy’s part had changed. On the contrary, the perspective adopted in his later work on Blanchot is informed by a renewed awareness of the need to rethink the conceptual basis of “the political.” This Nancy did by abandoning the attempt to equate the political with being-in-common, a move he justified by citing the authority of the similarly much disenchanted Heidegger of the 1942–1943 lecture course on Parmenides. 136 To do so had nevertheless been Nancy’s original aim in the 1980s, and even in 1993’s Le Sens du monde he may be found arguing that “the political [le politique] is the place of the in‑common as such.” 137 By the start of the new millennium, however, he had quite significantly shifted his ground. Though he continued to insist that, despite appearances to the contrary, the slogan “everything is political” was “a perfectly neo‑theological maxim,” he now responded by endeavouring to force apart “the political” and “being-in-common,” which in turn implied a radical delimitation of the political. “Being neither everything nor, of course, nothing,” he explained, “politics [la politique] must be understood in distinction from — and in relation with — that which cannot and should not be subsumed under it, not, to be sure, because it should be subsumed under some other activity (art or religion, love or subjectivity, or thought . . . ), but because it must fall to the responsibility of all and of each one of us according to modalities of which it is essential that they remain diverse, even divergent, and multiple, even heterogenous.” 138

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In the face of a capitalist world dominated by a principle of equivalence, according to which everything has its price and nothing its value, Nancy argued, it was essential to reaffirm that which is without equivalence. “The fate of democracy,” he put it, is bound to the possibility of a mutation in the paradigm of equivalence. The challenge is to introduce a new kind of non-equivalence which is of course not the non-equivalence of economic domination (whose basis remains equivalence), of any feudal system or aristocracy, of any regime of divine right or salvation, nor that of any kind of spirituality, heroism, or aestheticism. It is not about introducing a different system of differential values, but finding or gaining a sense of evaluation, of evaluative affirmation that gives each evaluating gesture — a decision as to one’s existence, work, or stance — the possibility of not being itself measured in advance by a given system, but of being, on the contrary, on each occasion, the affirmation of a single, incomparable, unsubstitutable “value” or “sense.” Only this can displace supposed economic dominance, which is but the effect of the fundamental decision in favour of equivalence. 139

As Nancy was obviously aware (not for nothing did he conclude the discussion by asking rhetorically whether “the affirmation of incommensurable value” was not “piously idealistic”), 140 this rethinking of the political raised more questions than it provided answers. There was not only the problem of knowing how to maintain or protect or police the allimportant distinction or disjunction between that which, by dint of its “actual infinity,” resisted the logic of general equivalence presupposed and secreted by the exchange economy, and that which, being merely an instance of Hegelian “bad infinity,” was immediately re-absorbed or coopted into it. 141 There was also the issue of the relationship between “politics” in the conventional sense and Nancy’s “new kind of non-equivalence.” His response to these questions was revealing, for what it mainly served to emphasise was the inherent fragility of the delimitation of the political his thinking sought to effect. “The condition of non-equivalent affirmation,” he wrote, “is political in that politics [la politique] must make space for it. But the affirmation itself is not political. It can be anything at all — existential, artistic, literary, scientific, dreaming, loving, thinking, leisurely, playful, friendly, gastronomic, or to do with town planning, and so on: politics subsumes none of these registers, it gives them room and possibility [leur donne place et possibilité].” 142 “Democratic politics,” he added “opens the space for multiple identities and for their sharing [partage], but its role is not to embody itself in any figure [n’a pas elle-même à se figurer]. That is what political courage, today, must learn to say.” 143 But if politics opens the space occupied by democratic pluralism, it presumably, by that same token, has the capacity to close it too. Even on this renewed account, then, politics is the condition which, in the last resort,

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has a commanding position in enabling, governing, and regulating the space occupied by that which it is hoped will resist the baleful logic of general equivalence — which, in turn, is surely exactly what is meant by the assertion that “all is political.” Nancy continued to insist, however, that politics was not all. But if so, what was it, one might ask, that remained outside or irreducible to politics, such as to interrupt its theological closure and point to alternative, affirmative possibilities? The question itself, once again, was nothing new. It was one Nancy had been endeavouring to address since first launching his critique of “immanentism” in the 1980s on behalf of “workless community.” And in much the same way too, for largely similar reasons, it was a question of fundamental importance for Blanchot, one that had prompted much of his own postwar political thinking and activities, including his 1983 response to Nancy. What remains surprising, however, throughout all Nancy’s extensive writing on the topic of “unavowable community,” is how little sustained attention is ever paid to what is undoubtedly a crucial aspect of Blanchot’s writing. Considerable confusion results. It will be remembered how Blanchot, in his discussion of May 68 in La Communauté inavouable, had drawn a clear distinction between two different moments or dynamics in what seemed at the time to be a wholly unprecedented event. In May, he wrote, there were “no serious attempts at reform, but an innocent presence (and, as a result, a supremely unusual one) which, in the eyes of the men of power and dumbfounding their analyses, could only be denigrated with sociologically stereotyped expressions like chienlit [masquerade or bedlam, as famously used at the time by President de Gaulle], i.e., the carnavalesque doubling up of their own disarray, the disarray of a command centre that no longer commanded anything, not even itself, and was left staring, without seeing, at its own inexplicable ruin.” “Innocent presence, common presence,” Blanchot went on, as we have seen, “ignoring its limits, political by dint of the refusal to exclude anything [le refus de ne rien exclure] and the awareness that, as such, it was the universal-immediate, having the impossible as its sole challenge, but without determinate political initiatives and, as a result, at the mercy of any sudden burst of activity on the part of the formal institutions against which it was decided not to react.” 144 The need to distinguish between refusal on the one hand and determinate political initiatives on the other was for Blanchot a familiar imperative. The logic was one he had first articulated explicitly nearly ten years earlier, following the introduction of France’s new constitution which would result shortly after in de Gaulle’s election as president. “At a certain moment,” Blanchot wrote in Le 14 Juillet, the oppositional broadsheet launched by Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster at the time, “in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not negotiate, nor give its reasons. It is in that respect silent

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and solitary, even when it is affirmed, as it must, in the full light of day. People who refuse and who are bound by the strength of refusal, know that they are not yet together. The time of shared affirmation has precisely been denied them. What they are left with is irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakeable, rigorous No that unites them in solidarity.” 145 In this famous opening passage, read in the light of Blanchot’s later account of May 68 in La Communauté inavouable, two important aspects of the writer’s political thinking are worth emphasising: firstly, that refusal itself is unconditional, and therefore not to be determined by circumstance, conjuncture, context, or any specific political initiative; and secondly, that there is therefore a necessary chronological or logical hiatus or caesura between the moment of refusal and the moment of “shared affirmation” that may (or perhaps not) follow in its wake. In considering Blanchot’s response to the May événements, it is remarkable that Nancy, while acknowledging the accuracy of Blanchot’s characterisation (which “I share,” he said, somewhat surprisingly, “without reservation”), and while claiming to note the difference between “refusal” and “determinate political initiatives,” entirely dismisses the force and relevance of that distinction. Moreover, he not only cavils unnecessarily at Blanchot’s grammar, not least, as we saw earlier, to deny the idiosyncratic expression “le refus de ne rien exclure” all affirmative relevance, 146 and, later in the book, derides Blanchot’s reference to the “universal‑immediate” as childishly naïve, not to say entirely foolish. 147 True enough, Nancy is indeed right to suggest that, in “speaking of a ‘universal‑immediate,’ [Blanchot] is not speaking of politics,” but this is not, as Nancy goes on to allege, because Blanchot “knows it without being able or willing to know it entirely,” 148 but rather, as Blanchot explained in 1958, because the moment of refusal, which is also the moment of the “universal-immediate,” is not yet the time of “shared affirmation.” This essential, and crucial difference or deferral between refusal and determinate political initiatives, which no mediating or unifying dialectic can overcome, is however entirely disregarded by Nancy, who conflates the two by having the second take precedence over the first, and concludes, contrary to all the available evidence, that Blanchot “rejects not only the instituted order, but all instituting, revolutionary or reformist projection,” 149 and that refusal or “doing nothing” on the part of “the people” was merely another instance of that Romantic “sublating of inoperability or work of worklessness” 150 he is intent on imposing on Blanchot’s thinking, and which, on Nancy’s part, as Georges Didi-Huberman rightly observes, simply amounts to a refusal to take “refusal” at all seriously as a political intervention. 151 In reality, however, the situation alleged by Nancy is almost exactly the reverse to what is almost certainly the case. Refusal in Blanchot is not some empty, negative, or sterile gesture, but a necessary interruption of power that is constitutive of all democratic politics as such, since without

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the possibility of refusal there would merely be mute obedience to authority, no consent, no legitimacy, and no legality, and therefore no space for the political at all. But this was not to say that refusal for Blanchot was in any sense proof of the sovereign autonomy of the citizen as individual. Rather than implying the reflective power of the subject, the act of refusal, as in the case of Luther, invoked a principle of impossibility: “here I stand, I cannot do otherwise,” and it was in that refusal that responsibility was affirmed. If “sovereignty is nothing,” as Bataille once put it, in a phrase Blanchot, like Nancy, was fond of quoting, 152 then it was because sovereignty, as displaced and rearticulated by Bataille, being now empty, implied nothing outside itself, but merely enacted, so to speak, its own interruption or withdrawal. In this way, then, rather than a gesture embodying greater power, refusal becomes a response to the impossible which traverses, limits, and exceeds all political initiatives as such, and this is why, even when the institutions of the regime riposted with a sudden burst of activity in the form of the half-million Gaullist supporters who marched down the Champs-Élysées on 30 May 1968 to declare their enthusiastic allegiance to the established order, this did not nullify the earlier protests, the supremely unusual nature of which remained, not because power had been achieved as a result of the May events, which it had not, but because power had been called to account, its authority interrupted, and its constitutive vacancy revealed and affirmed. Particularly telling in this context is the persistent reference Nancy makes to a letter sent by Blanchot to Bataille in January 1962, less than six months before the latter’s death, and included, with its author’s permission, alongside seven other letters roughly from the same period in Surya’s 1997 edition of Bataille’s selected correspondence. The early 1960s were a time when Blanchot, alongside Mascolo, Antelme, Duras, and others, was closely involved in the political campaign against de Gaulle and against the continuation of the Algerian war, whereas Bataille, partly for reasons of ill health but, more importantly, on grounds of principle, remained resolutely opposed to the relative character of all such initiatives. When invited in June 1958 to contribute to Le 14 Juillet, as Blanchot would do soon after, Bataille explained his intransigence in the following terms: “The political domain that remains available to us,” he argued, is the domain of the possible. In such a domain I can only profess to have little interest. As far as it is concerned, I can have no logical exigency either, but only the exigency that the possible defines: that the possible must be capable of being. I cannot tolerate the idea of struggling for an impossibility, for instance for a democracy to which the Communist Party (perhaps rightly) has in advance denied all viability. In a struggle of this kind, I see no trace of unconditional refusal, only a derisory confusion with that refusal. Unconditional refusal is the affirmation of my sovereignty, and I do not wish to abandon a violent affirmation of that sort in the swill of compromises. 153

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Bataille’s commitment to absolute, categorical refusal was, in other words, total and unyielding, and brooked no compromise with the messy, day-to-day business of political struggle that, as far as Bataille was concerned, looking back at his own prewar experiences, could but culminate, he presumably then thought, in abject failure. Such, then, was the context within which Blanchot in 1962 wrote back to his friend of more than twenty years in an effort to address their apparent differences as far as the contemporary political situation was concerned. “I do not at all believe,” he began by saying, that the interest or lack of interest in “politics [la politique]” is what is at stake here: this is but a consequence and arguably a superficial one. For my part, I can see, and have begun for some time to see more clearly, to what double movement it is necessary for me always to respond, equally necessary and yet irreconcilable. One (to express myself in extremely crude, simplistic fashion) is the passion, realisation, and language of the whole, in its dialectical completion; the other is essentially non-dialectical, has no concern at all for unity and does not tend towards power (the possible). Corresponding to this double movement is a double language and, for all language, a double gravity: the one in the form of a language of confrontation, opposition, and negation in the effort to overcome every opponent, and so that truth in the end be affirmed in its entirety as a silent equality (by which the exigency of thought passes). But the other is speaking that speaks before all else, and outside of the whole, a speaking that is always first, without concordance, without confrontation, and ready to welcome the unknown, the foreign (by which the poetic exigency passes). The one names the possible and desires the possible. The other responds to the impossible. Between these simultaneously necessary and incompatible movements there is constant tension, which is often very hard to bear and is, in truth, unbearable [insoutenable]. But it is impossible to give up on either the one or the other, out of prejudice, or on the immeasurable quest that their necessity demands of us and the necessity of unifying the incompatible. 154

Quoting these lines, as he does, selectively, on at least three separate occasions, 155 Nancy makes a number of surprising moves. On the grounds that Blanchot uses the word “passion” to describe his relationship with the political in 1962 in the letter to Bataille, and again in 1984 in the letter to Laporte (where he speaks of having “always had a certain passion for politics”), 156 and given that the word “passion” also occurs, apropos of Duras’s La Maladie de la mort, a dozen or so times in the second part of La Communauté inavouable, and since Blanchot’s 1930s journalism might plausibly be described as “impassioned,” so, then, Nancy concludes, there must be fundamental continuity between the Blanchot of the prewar years and the Blanchot of 1962 — and 1983 — and that the incompatibility between the two movements described in the letter to Bataille was therefore largely superficial. “It would therefore be possible

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to show,” contends Nancy, albeit without actually showing anything, “that the earlier [1930s] texts of M.B. wrapped the two up together, or even merged them into a unity preceding the distinction drawn in 1962.” 157 These were, Nancy admits, provisional remarks made in an interview, and as such perhaps ought not to be taken too seriously. But if credibility was already strained, so much more astonishing was the corresponding argument made in La Communauté désavouée to the effect that, in his letter to Bataille, Blanchot “wanted to rise above a tension [voulait s’élever audessus d’une tension] he found ‘unbearable’” — an extraordinary misreading of Blanchot’s letter which Nancy sought to confirm by citing as evidence the last sentence of the passage quoted above, which says the very opposite! 158 And if that were not enough, Nancy, for opportune reasons of his own, also chooses to overlook Blanchot’s caveat in an earlier letter to Bataille, dated 8 August [1960], also contained in the latter’s selected correspondence, in which Blanchot explained the unacceptable philosophical complacency of accepting aporia without traversing time and again the experience of impossibility it implied. “This ‘absence of any way out’ [ce ‘sans issue’],” he rightly argued, “can only be affirmed by the need always to seek a way out and not to give up ever finding one.” 159 Indeed, it was only thus that aporia might be affirmed or underwritten at all. Equally puzzling, though, is the fact that, in order to make this claim, Nancy felt a need to draw on Blanchot’s personal correspondence, thereby implying that the latter’s deliberations were in some sense private ones he was reluctant to expose to public scrutiny. Nancy, it is true, only partly suggests this, though it is revealing that his interviewer and occasional collaborator Mathilde Girard has no hesitation in characterising Blanchot’s letter to Bataille as constituting “an admission [un aveu, an avowal],” 160 a claim that Nancy does not think it worth challenging. But as all readers of Blanchot know, the terms of the argument given in the letter to Bataille were anything but secretive. Indeed, they ask to be read quite explicitly as a radicalisation of much of what Blanchot had written in respect of Hegel, Hölderlin, and Heidegger in the latter half of the 1940s. Moreover, he had already explained them at length, using much of the same vocabulary, in a two-part essay published in the Autumn of 1959, many months before the exchange with Bataille (with whom, by then, for diverse practical reasons, relations seem to have become increasingly intermittent), at a time when France’s colonial war in Algeria was entering into its decisive phase, and later published in L’Entretien infini under the Dantesque title “Le Grand Refus [The Great Refusal].” 161 There, too, Blanchot had recourse to the same lapidary formula: “Naming the possible, responding to the impossible.” And this was no isolated gesture. For Blanchot’s awareness of the urgent need for such unyielding double thinking, in which each of the two terms of the argument was

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radically incompatible with its fellow, but demanded to be maintained and affirmed alongside it, without hope or possibility of synthesis or mediation, in a manner owing absolutely nothing, pace Nancy, to any putative “ultra‑Romantic or meta‑Hegelian dialectic” 162 — this knowledge would accompany Blanchot’s literary, philosophical, and political writing for several decades to come. If there was radical incompatibility, then, between the possible and the impossible in Blanchot’s eyes, it was for reasons that had nothing to do with the writer’s personal state of mind. It was that possibility, this realm of conceptual thinking, worldly action, and political initiatives, as Hegel had famously endeavoured to show, was necessarily reliant on the overcoming of death, or the putting of death to work, in order to secure the survival of a people, a society, or a culture. This is what Bataille in the wake of his encounter with Kojève, and Blanchot in his novel Le TrèsHaut, each realised and maintained. But equally well, as both writers knew, insofar as the singularity of dying was inescapable, so the dialectical overcoming of death was grounded in what Bataille in 1955 called a “sham [une comédie],” and Blanchot in 1959 “a lie [un mensonge].” 163 Human history, in other words, and consequently all political endeavours, however necessary, which sought to influence the course of history, therefore depended on a “great refusal,” which was the refusal of the reality of death. “And perhaps, indeed,” Blanchot conceded, “that is what true death is, death become the movement of truth, but how not to sense that in this veritable death what has been lost is death without truth, that which in death is irreducible to what is true, to all disclosure, i.e., that which never reveals itself, nor hides, nor appears?” 164 Possibility, then, though it defines itself by its limitless, totalising ambitions, was paradoxically not all. It owed its existence to that which it rejected, the thing it negated in order to rise above it, the present moment it converted into an abstraction in order that it be named, and the experience of dying which it denied in order to transform it into meaningful history. Possibility, in sum, perhaps included everything, but could not do so without the impossibility it had to exclude. The impossible in this sense was no longer simply, or even at all, the negation of the possible, since that would merely turn it into a subordinate variety of possibility itself. Which was why, as far as Blanchot was concerned, the impossible, escaping all mediation by the possible, could not be named or grasped as such, only addressed obliquely, by way of deliberately inconsistent (and philosophically scandalous) formulations such as “the universal‑immediate,” and only as a neutral suspending of all power, a caesura or interruption that, escaping the progressive march of the negative, was also a turning towards the outside, towards a relation without relation with the irreducibly other, without which negativity itself cannot even be conceived.

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Beyond or prior to the law of the possible, then, there was another, more compelling law, a law of interruption that forcibly interrupted all law, including itself. Such was the inescapable aporia that, for Blanchot, necessarily preceded and exceeded respect for the moral law and lawless passion alike and, in so doing, always already preceded itself in a vertiginous movement of infinite regress (Nancy would in fact make a similar argument in relation to Rousseau). 165 Such absence of origin or foundation, Blanchot went on, now drawing inspiration from the thought of Levinas, in a kind of abyssal repetition of what itself it sought to affirm, was translatable only as a kind of “relation without relation,” intractably anterior to the dialectic of possibility or power, such that the self cannot be satisfied with recognising the Other, or recognising itself in the Other, but feels itself to be called into question by the Other to the point of not being able to respond except by a limitless responsibility that exceeds itself without ever becoming exhausted. Such responsibility or obligation towards Others does not derive from the Law, but from where the law itself may be said to derive in what makes it irreducible to all forms of legality with which attempts are made to regularise it, necessarily, even as it is deemed to be the exception or the extra‑ordinary that cannot be articulated in any prior language. 166

Evidently enough, this was not in any sense to deny the power and force, or the necessity, of politics as the realm of the possible, which, as Derrida would often remark, would be contrary in fact to the demands of limitless responsibility. Indeed, unlike Bataille, whose political thinking remained blocked, it appears, on the disappointments and frustrations of the 1930s, Blanchot was never willing to disdain the public sphere, as his actions following de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, his part in the campaign against the Algerian War, or again in May 68, amply demonstrate. In doing so, however, Blanchot continued to insist that politics, while being everything, was still not all, and that another dimension remained, in whose name it was on occasion both necessary and urgent to challenge, that is to say, to refuse, to break the law whenever circumstances demanded, as they did for the writer (and many others) in 1960 when he was called before the examining magistrate to answer the charge of “incitement to insubordination and desertion” and of “provoking military personnel to disobey orders.” 167 This was hardly to ground the exigencies of political action in some kind of “ultratheology,” 168 as claimed, implausibly enough, by Nancy, who, surprisingly, at no point chooses to examine the actual thinking behind Blanchot’s postwar “passion for politics.” In all modesty, however, one might say, on the part of a writer who had seen much of the twentieth century pass before his eyes, its numerous defeats as well as its parsimonious victories, that passion was the sign of a desire to bear witness, to interrupt the power of the

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State, and to persist — in measuring the weight of the past, reflecting on the present, and thinking the future. NOTES 1. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 147; The Inoperative Community, 58; translation modified. 2. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 50–51; The Disavowed Community, 19; translation modified. Nancy does not explain what he means by “ordinarily.” 3. Nancy, Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne) (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 9–10; The Ground of the Image, translated by Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 108; translation modified. 4. Nancy, Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne), 51–52; The Ground of the Image, 125; translation modified. 5. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 54; The Unavowable Community, 31. 6. Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, 157; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 95. 7. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 74; The Disavowed Community, 30–31; translation modified. Contrast Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 53–54; The Unavowable Community, 31. 8. Nancy, La Pensée dérobée, 14. 9. Thomas Mann, Ausgewählte Essays, edited by Hermann Kurzke, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977–1978), III, 186; Essays of Three Decades, translated by H. T. LowePorter (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), 423. 10. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 74n2; The Disavowed Community, 99n16; translation modified. For Nancy’s earlier use of the expression, see La Communauté désœuvrée, 116n37; The Inoperative Community, 160n6. The passage also held great significance for Lacoue-Labarthe who refers to it (as proof, he put it, that “the sacred, religion in the sense of re-legere, may be said to be repetition as such”) in Agonie terminée, agonie interminable: Sur Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 72; Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, translated by Hannes Opelz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 34. Many years earlier, in L’Insurgé (14 April 1937), the twentynine-year-old Blanchot had reviewed the third of Mann’s Joseph novels when it first appeared in French translation. At the time, he concurred that “Mann’s characters are constantly living in the stories tradition has handed down to them. In the past they are in their own present.” “In this way,” he concluded, arguing that, unlike the biblical material on which it was based, Mann’s work was decidedly literary rather than mythic, expressive, that is, not of rediscovered identity, but of an unfathomable and irretrievable loss of origin, “the novel of Joseph and His Brothers may also be seen as the novel of Myths, an astonishing attempt to represent for the imagination what happens to products of the imagination, and to derive a story from the very life of stories. To use Mann’s own description [from the Prologue to Mann’s first novel in the series, The Stories of Jacob], it is the Feast of Narration, the ceremonial costume of mystery. The novel of time, naturally enough, no longer seems to be any different from the novel of the novel.” 11. Mann, Ausgewählte Essays, III, 187; Essays of Three Decades, 424; translation modified. For the quotation from the first of the Joseph novels, see Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 98. 12. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 122n40; The Inoperative Community, 160n9. The allusion to Blanchot (and his phrase “the myth of man without myth”) is to the discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques in L’Amitié, 87–97 (p. 97); Friendship, 73–82 (p. 82). 13. See for instance Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale I (Paris: Plon, 1974), 254; Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (London: Penguin, 1968), 229.

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14. Mathilde Girard and Jean-Luc Nancy, Proprement dit: entretien sur le mythe (Paris: Lignes, 2015), 54. On “Saying [le Dire]” and the “said [le dit]” in Levinas and Blanchot, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 300–329. 15. Girard and Nancy, Proprement dit, 53. 16. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 86; The Unavowable Community, 52; translation modified. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 106; The Disavowed Community, 47; translation modified. Oddly enough, when Nancy refers to the passage a second time later in the book (pp. 134–35; 62), he quotes it correctly. 17. Girard and Nancy, Proprement dit, 33. 18. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 57n1; The Disavowed Community, 96n22. As Nancy explains, “Le Mythe nazi” was first published in French in 1981, but little read at the time. It was not until it was republished, in an updated version, first in English, as “The Nazi Myth,” translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 291–312, then, in French, as a slim standalone volume, and with a jointly authored preface in 1991, that the essay achieved any significant visibility. Since then, the French text has been reissued at least twice, most recently in 2016 with an additional foreword by Nancy. 19. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Le Mythe nazi (La Tour d’Aigues: éditions de l’Aube, [1991] 2016), 26–27; “The Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 293–94; translation modified. 20. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 410–11; The Blanchot Reader, 221. Readers often fail to notice that Blanchot here is not himself endorsing this “myth of the Jew,” but summarising the (genocidal) commitment to Aryan myth expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. For Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s response, see their Le Mythe nazi, 70. Nancy returns to this passage in La Communauté désœuvrée, 158n69; The Inoperative Community, 162n40; and in La Communauté désavouée, 56–57; The Disavowed Community, 22. 21. Nancy, “Avant-propos à la nouvelle édition,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Le Mythe nazi, 7. Nancy’s gesture is deceptive: for while he ascribes to “myth” the very qualities of “authenticity” Plato attributes to logos, it is plain that he is only able to do so on the philosophical authority of the logos, which alone has jurisdiction over “myth.” As well as reissuing Le Mythe nazi in response to the appearance of the Black Notebooks, Nancy also published a more convincing interpretation of antisemitic myth in Heidegger under the title La Banalité de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 2015); The Banality of Heidegger, translated by Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 22. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Le Mythe nazi, 15. 23. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Le Mythe nazi, 17. 24. Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l’État (Paris: Minuit, [1974] 2011), 132; Society against the State, translated by Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 153; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 25. Clastres, La Société contre l’État, 132–34; Society against the State, 153–55; emphasis in original; ellipses mine; translation modified. 26. Pierre Clastres, Le Grand Parler: mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guarani (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 10. 27. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 124, 144–45; The Inoperative Community, 49, 57; translation modified. 28. Nancy, The Disavowed Community, ix. 29. See Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 62. 30. See Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée, 63; The Inoperative Community, 24. 31. See Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 20–21; The Writing of the Disaster, 9. Blanchot’s fragment reads: “Among some ‘primitive’ peoples (Stateless society), the chief must prove his domination over words: no silence. At the same time, the word of the chief is not said in order to be listened to — nobody pays any attention to the chief speaking, or rather, they feign a lack of attention; and the chief indeed, says nothing, repeating as it were the celebration of the traditional norms of life. To what demand on the part of primitive society does this empty speech emanating from the apparent

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place of power correspond? The discourse of the chief is empty precisely because it is separated from power — society itself is the real place of power. The chief has to operate in the element of speech, that is, at the opposite of violence. The chief’s obligation to speak, that constant flow of empty speech (not empty, understood in traditional manner, of transmission) that he owes the tribe, is his infinite debt, the guarantee that makes it impossible for the man of speech to become a man of power”; translation modified. 32. See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 367–93; The Infinite Conversation, 246–63. 33. Nancy, La Déclosion, 29; Dis-Enclosure, 16; translation modified. 34. Nancy, La Déclosion, 34; Dis-Enclosure, 20; translation modified. 35. Nancy, La Déclosion, 56; Dis-Enclosure, 36; translation modified. On the further implications of kenosis, see Nancy, L’Adoration: Déconstruction du christianisme, 2 (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 45–46; Adoration: the Deconstruction of Christianity II, translated by John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 30. 36. Nancy, La Déclosion, 55; Dis-Enclosure, 35. Nancy explains elsewhere that the effect of Christianity’s self-deconstruction is also to deconstruct all reference to that “self” as such. 37. Nancy, La Déclosion, 20; Dis-Enclosure, 10; translation modified. 38. Nancy, L’Adoration, 50–51; Adoration, 34; translation modified. 39. See Nancy, La Déclosion, 21; Dis-Enclosure, 10. Compare Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 72; The Space of Literature, 75. 40. Nancy, La Déclosion, 198; Dis-Enclosure, 136. 41. On “dechristianisation” as an ironic “Christian victory,” see Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 68; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 54; and on the “dogmatism” lurking within “being-in-common” or “community,” see Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 65; The Politics of Friendship, 44. 42. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 410–11; The Blanchot Reader, 221; translation slightly modified. 43. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 183; The Infinite Conversation, 125; translation modified. 44. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 184; The Infinite Conversation, 125–26; translation modified. 45. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 187; The Infinite Conversation, 127; translation modified. 46. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 72; The Unavowable Community, 42–43; translation modified. For Isolde’s much-quoted phrase, see Joseph Bédier, Le Roman de Tristan et Iseult (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 69. 47. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 205; The Writing of the Disaster, 135; emphasis in the original; translation modified. For August Wilhelm’s original text, see Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, II, 117; Philosophical Fragments, translated by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 35. 48. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 86; The Disavowed Community, 36. 49. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 214; The Writing of the Disaster, 142. For a detailed analysis of these last pages, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 368–91. 50. On the constitutive deconstitution of the identity of Western culture(s), see Nancy, “Le Judéo-chrétien,” in Judéités: questions pour Jacques Derrida, edited by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 303–21. 51. Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, [1992] 2006), 60–62; Corpus, translated by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 67–69; translation modified. 52. Nancy, Corpus, 34; Corpus, 37; translation modified. 53. Nancy, Corpus, 54–57; Corpus, 61–65; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 54. Nancy, Corpus, 79; Corpus, 89; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 55. Nancy, Corpus, 45, 76; Corpus, 49, 87; translation modified. 56. Nancy, Corpus, 56; Corpus, 63; translation modified.

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57. Nancy, Noli me tangere: essai sur la levée du corps (Paris: Bayard, [2003] 2013); Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 58. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 25n4; Noli Me Tangere, 110n19. For the passage in Derrida to which Nancy is referring, see Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 117–20; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 99–103. 59. Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 120n2; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 335n23; translation modified. 60. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 33; Noli Me Tangere, 18; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 61. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 33–34; Noli Me Tangere, 18; emphasis in the original; translation modified. 62. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 79; Noli Me Tangere, 48; translation modified. 63. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 28; Noli Me Tangere, 14–15; translation modified. 64. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 75; Noli Me Tangere, 45. 65. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 72; Noli Me Tangere, 42–43; translation modified. 66. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 75–76; Noli Me Tangere, 46; translation modified. 67. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 75; Noli Me Tangere, 45; translation modified. 68. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 21; Noli Me Tangere, 11; translation modified. 69. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 16; Noli Me Tangere, 8; translation modified. The term “tautegory,” as Schelling points out, was of course originally coined by Coleridge precisely as a way of accounting for the language of the Gospels. See the discussion in Coleridge, The Major Works, edited by H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 671–72. 70. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 8–9; Noli Me Tangere, 4; translation modified. 71. Nancy, Judéités, 313. 72. Nancy, Judéités, 312. 73. Nancy, Noli me tangere, ii. 74. Nancy, Noli me tangere, viii. 75. Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 120; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 102. 76. See Nancy, Noli me tangere, 48; Noli Me Tangere, 27–28. 77. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 77; Noli Me Tangere, 47; translation modified. 78. See Nancy, “Fin du colloque,” in Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques, edited by Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar (Tours: éditions farrago, 2003), 625–37. The conference on which the volume is based was held between 26 and 29 March 2003. 79. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 91–92; The Unavowable Community, 56; translation modified. 80. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 111–12; The Disavowed Community, 49; translation modified. 81. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 112n2; The Disavowed Community, 103n43; translation modified. 82. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 189; The Writing of the Disaster, 123; translation modified. Compare Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols., 2nd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 5:72; Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 48–49. Blanchot’s own text is slightly adapted from the version given in Par-delà bien et mal, translated by Cornélius Heim (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 69. Among other minor changes, he (or his copyist) substitutes, perhaps inadvertently, for “impudence” in Heim’s version (Verwegenheit, temerity or reckless daring, in Nietzsche’s original) the word “imprudence,” lack of caution or foolishness. 83. See Blanchot, La Condition critique, 419–24; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 162–65; translation modified. 84. Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, 222; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 118; translation modified. 85. See Blanchot, La Condition critique, 443–45, 449–57; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 171–72; The Blanchot Reader, 317–23.

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86. See Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, 73–74; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, 59–60; and Nancy, La Déclosion, 203–26; Dis-Enclosure, 139–57. 87. Blanchot, Après Coup, 98; Vicious Circles, 68; translation modified. 88. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 419; “The question is certainly a traditional one,” translated by Michael Holland, Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 28; translation modified; and Blanchot, “L’Échec de Milena,” La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française 23 (November 1954): 885. Blanchot also cites Luther’s words in “Les Intellectuels en question,” La Condition critique, 404; The Blanchot Reader, 217. 89. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 17, 55–56; The Disavowed Community, 3, 22. 90. Hegel, Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), XII, 471–72. 91. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 390–91; The Blanchot Reader, 206; translation modified. Rather surprisingly, in his summary of these opening lines, Nancy in La Communauté désavouée, 55–56; The Disavowed Community, 22, makes nothing of Blanchot’s explicit reference to Hegel, and attributes the expression “the holiness of the void” to Blanchot’s own reliance on Christology rather than identifying it as a paraphrase (and inversion) of Hegel’s “empty sepulchre.” It is revealing too that Nancy, in the same passage, misquotes Blanchot’s last sentence, replacing the conditional “il n’y aurait,” with its suggestion of unverified hypothesis or reported belief, with an expression of necessity, i.e., “the necessity [la nécessité],” as Nancy rephrases it, “‘of there being worklessness only in the endless pursuit of works’ [‘qu’il n’y ait désœuvrement que dans la poursuite infinie des œuvres’]” — which was entirely to privilege the second to the detriment of the first, and subordinate the complex relationship between worklessness and work in Blanchot to a dialectic for which what counted, as far as Nancy was concerned, was the finality of the work. 92. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 391, 393; The Blanchot Reader, 206, 207–8; translation modified. 93. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 129–30; The Disavowed Community, 59–60. 94. See Blanchot, La Condition critique, 394, 398, 401, 413; The Blanchot Reader, 209, 212, 214, 223. 95. See Blanchot, La Condition critique, 416; The Blanchot Reader, 225. 96. See my “‘Not in Our Name’: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter,” Paragraph 30, no. 3 (November 2007): 141–59. 97. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 440; Who Comes after the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 58–60. Strangely enough, Nancy in La Communauté désavouée never once cites this text. 98. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 8, 15n1; The Disavowed Community, 79, 89n6. 99. Heidegger, “Deutsche Männer und Frauen! [German Men and Women!],” in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), 144–46; The Heidegger Controversy, edited by Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 47–49; translation modified. 100. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 208n1; The Infinite Conversation, 450n4; translation modified. 101. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 392n2; The Blanchot Reader, 226n3; translation modified. 102. Surya, L’Autre Blanchot, 26, 51. 103. Definitions of “fascism” are of course many. The summary given here is adapted from a somewhat fuller description proposed by Emilio Gentile in Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, translated by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 16–17, and cited by Michel Winock, one of France’s most authoritative historians of the period, as “one of the best definitions of fascism available” in Le PSF: un parti de masse à droite, edited by Serge Berstein and Jean-Paul Thomas (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2016), 146. The question as to the existence of a distinct or distinctive “French” Fascism has long been debated, most controversially by Zeev Sternhell who, as mentioned earlier, was one of the first to claim, on the basis of a superficial misreading of a single article

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in Combat, that Blanchot’s journalism in the 1930s was “fascistic,” an assertion that Mehlman in his “Blanchot at Combat,” prompted by Sternhell’s earlier La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Seuil, 1978), had already made his own. For a critique and sober reassessment of Sternhell’s work, see Fascisme français?: la controverse, edited by Serge Berstein and Michel Winock (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2014). 104. See for instance Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre (Paris: Plon, 1941), 185–86. For a brief period through 1936, Blanchot and Brasillach, whose relationship, Blanchot told Roger Laporte, was one of mutual antipathy, both published articles in Combat, established in January 1936 with the clear intention of attacking the Popular Front as it prepared for power later that year. Early in 1937, however, Brasillach quit the journal, subsequently claiming in Notre avant-guerre that “various liberal intellectuals,” among whom he no doubt included Blanchot, in his view “ruined things.” Later, in 1941, when Blanchot’s novel Thomas l’Obscur first appeared, it was promptly condemned (18 October 1941) by an unnamed critic (most likely Lucien Rebatet) in the collaborationist, antisemitic weekly Je suis partout (where Brasillach was editor), as being “as outdated as the Jewish art from which it takes its inspiration [aussi démodé que l’art juif dont il se réclame].” 105. On Le Très-Haut, for example, as a “political novel about politics,” see my Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit, 181–206; and on some of the political implications of L’Écriture du désastre, see Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 339–91. 106. See Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des années, 30, 61, 62, 66, 75, 82, 187, 276. Blanchot comments briefly on the book, which, he argues, alongside various factual errors, presents only a partial picture of his prewar politics, in Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 47–49. 107. See Blanchot, “A Letter” (24 December 1992), in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1996), 209–11. Some years before, in 1937, Blanchot had also published two articles (in L’Insurgé) on recent books by Maurras, the first on La Dentelle du Rempart (24 February) and the second on Les Vergers sur la mer and Mes Idées politiques (28 July). Maurras at the time, it should be noted, as a consequence of a series of violent verbal attacks on those advocating League of Nations sanctions against Mussolini following Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, which included death threats against the Popular Front leader Léon Blum, was serving out an eight-month prison sentence for incitement to murder. When he finally emerged from his unusually comfortable prison cell in July 1937, between forty thousand and sixty thousand sympathisers assembled at the Paris Winter Velodrome to celebrate his release. Reading Blanchot’s two reviews in L’Insurgé against this overheated backdrop, and even after taking account of his 27 January review of Denis de Rougemont’s Penser avec les mains, also in L’Insurgé, in which Blanchot had cited Maurras as offering an object lesson in how to translate thoughts into decisive action, that is, by the very violence of his written words, what is most noticeable of all is the subtly oblique manner in which Blanchot, speaking on behalf of a supposed “perverted reader [lecteur perverti],” entirely ignores what some took to be Maurras’s urgently topical political agenda and concentrates instead, to delicately ironic effect, on the timeless classicism of the writer’s essays, and their aim “to perfect the uses of living and escape the abuses of dying.” 108. See Deborah M. Hess, Politics and Literature: The Case of Maurice Blanchot (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 265. Shortly before publication of her book, Hess had asked Blanchot for permission to quote from a number of articles in L’Insurgé, to which Blanchot replied, in a letter dictated to Monique Antelme (2 March 1998), citing in particular four texts, published on 13 January (including the much cited opening article “De la révolution à la littérature [From Revolution to Literature]”), 19 March, and 30 June 1937, that they “were not all [pas tous] written by him or else had been altered without consulting him.” The letter added that “this was the reason for which, and at [Blanchot’s] request, the paper ceased publication.” (In the letter to Laporte

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written fourteen years earlier, the reason invoked is the “execrable antisemitism” of at least one particularly distasteful article — among many others that could be mentioned.) Admittedly, as I suggest in my Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, 37, even if Blanchot’s memory is accurate, more than sixty years after the event, this still does not explain why he continued to contribute to L’Insurgé till the very end of its admittedly short-lived existence, i.e., until 27 October 1937. 109. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 47. 110. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 61. 111. See Surya, L’Autre Blanchot, 50–52. Surya goes on to claim, in another instance of manichean, anachronistic decontextualisation, that, in December 1984, in describing to Laporte his reaction to the demise of the French Third Republic in July 1940, Blanchot was “deliberately deceiving” (53) his correspondent. 112. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 33, 37–38. 113. Quoted by Aristide Bianchi and Leonid Kharmalov in their introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe’s posthumous Agonie terminée, agonie interminable, 16; Ending and Unending Agony, 4; translation modified. 114. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 65. 115. Blanchot, Faux Pas, 201; Faux Pas, 176; translation modified. Blanchot’s essay was first published in the Revue française des idées et des œuvres 1 (April 1940): 67–72. 116. Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, [1949] 1963), 95; Lautréamont and Sade, translated by Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 80–81; translation modified. For the original passage, see Lautréamont, Œuvres complètes, edited by Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 50. 117. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 142; The Space of Literature, 139; translation modified. On Blanchot’s distinctive recourse to the phenomenological reduction, see my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 54–63. 118. Derrida, “Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature,” Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, 265; Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 46. 119. Hölderlin, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, edited by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 919; Hölderlin’s Sophocles, translated by David Constantine (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 117; translation modified. For Blanchot’s own translation and commentary, see L’Espace littéraire, 285; The Space of Literature, 270. Lacoue-Labarthe, in his 1978 French translation of Hölderlin’s version of Sophocles’s Antigone (Paris: Bourgois, 1998), translates Hölderlin’s phrase as “retournement patriotique,” making the point, following Jochen Schmidt, that it should be understood as an implicit reference to the French Revolution. 120. Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, 288–89; The Space of Literature, 174; translation modified. 121. Blanchot, La Condition critique, 410; The Blanchot Reader, 220–21; translation modified. 122. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 56; The Disavowed Community, 22. 123. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 35–36, The Disavowed Community, 12; translation modified. 124. For Blanchot’s original remark, see Blanchot, La Condition critique, 410; The Blanchot Reader, 221; translation modified. For Nancy’s misreading of the phrase, see Nancy, “Reste inavouable,” Lignes, 43, 175, and The Disavowed Community, x; translation modified. 125. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 17–18, 20; The Truth of Democracy, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 6, 8; translation modified. 126. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 13, 28, 30; The Truth of Democracy, 4, 14, 15; translation modified. 127. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 44; The Truth of Democracy, 23; translation modified.

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128. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 28–29; The Truth of Democracy, 14; translation modified. 129. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 32; The Truth of Democracy, 16; translation modified. 130. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 33; The Truth of Democracy, 17; translation modified. 131. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 52–54; The Unavowable Community, 29–31; translation modified. 132. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 56; The Unavowable Community, 33; translation modified. 133. See Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 62; The Truth of Democracy, 34. 134. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 57; The Unavowable Community, 33; translation modified. On the February 1962 protests, see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 247–52. Events of that day are alluded to in a famous poem by Paul Celan, who was also present; see Celan, “In Eins,” Gesammelte Werke, edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert in collaboration with Rudolf Bücher, 5 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, [1983] 1992), I, 270; Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 188–89. 135. Nancy, Que faire?, 60. Nancy has recourse in passing to a similar pairing in La Création du monde ou la mondialisation (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 28n1; The Creation of the World or Globalisation, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 119n12. On the importance of Heideggerian Ek‑sistenz for Nancy’s thinking of “community,” see Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 29; The Disavowed Community, 9. 136. See Nancy, Que faire?, 31. 137. Nancy, Le Sens du monde, 139; The Sense of the World, 88. 138. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 40–41; The Truth of Democracy, 21; translation modified. 139. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 45–46; The Truth of Democracy, 24; translation modified. See also Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 32–34; The Disavowed Community, 10–11. 140. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 47; The Truth of Democracy, 24. 141. On these two “faces of the infinite,” and the necessarily precarious nature of their opposition, see Nancy, La Création du monde, 44–47; The Creation of the World, 46–47. 142. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 48; The Truth of Democracy, 26; translation modified. 143. Nancy, Vérité de la démocratie, 49; The Truth of Democracy, 26; translation modified. There is an explicit echo here of the tentative, rather conformist claim made in Le Mythe nazi in 1991 to the effect that “democracy from now on poses, or should pose [ou doit poser: sic] the question of its ‘figure’” (p. 15). 144. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 53–54; The Unavowable Community, 30–31; translation modified. De Gaulle’s riposte to the May demonstrations quickly became proverbial. “Reform, yes,” he declared, “bedlam, no [La réforme oui, la chienlit non].” “La chienlit,” replied a famous streetposter at the time, “c’est lui [bedlam, that’s him].” 145. Blanchot, L’Amitié, 130; Friendship, 111; translation modified. Blanchot’s text was first published in Le 14 Juillet 2 (25 October 1958): 3. I examine the political implications of “refusal” more generally in Blanchot’s writing in my Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing, 231–47. 146. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 36; The Disavowed Community, 13; translation modified. 147. See Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 133; The Disavowed Community, 61. 148. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 37; The Disavowed Community, 13; translation modified.

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149. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 75; The Disavowed Community, 31; translation modified. 150. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 36; The Disavowed Community, 13; translation modified. 151. On Blanchot’s “economy of refusal” and Nancy’s “refusal of this type of refusal,” see Georges Didi-Huberman, “Par les désirs (fragments sur ce qui nous soulève),” in Soulèvements, edited by Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016), 344–57 (p. 355). 152. Strangely, however, in La Communauté désavouée, 46–47; The Disavowed Community, 18, Nancy takes Blanchot to task for allegedly ignoring the phrase, as proof, he claims, that Blanchot “quite manifestly turns aside [se détourne très manifestement]” (translation modified) from this “nothing” of sovereignty, preferring, says Nancy, “to leave [it] on the side of the gods.” In fact, Blanchot cites the phrase not once, but twice, as well as commenting on it, in L’Écriture du désastre, 142, 200; The Writing of the Disaster, 90, 131. 153. Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, edited by Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 482, letter dated 22 June 1958. It is on the grounds of Bataille’s uncompromising withdrawal from politics, which he seems to endorse, that Surya in Sainteté de Bataille, 111–12, writing in characteristically overstated and simplistic, not to say mystificatory vein, claims the relationship between Bataille and Blanchot at the end of the 1950s to be one of brutal opposition — to the detriment of the latter and the credit of the former. 154. Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, 595–96, letter from Blanchot to Bataille dated 24 January 1962; emphases in the original. 155. See Nancy, “Passion de la communauté,” interview by Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 2 (Winter 2013/14): 43–47; revised version in Danielle CohenLevinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, Inventions à deux voix (Paris: Le Félin, 2015), 101–7; “Reste inavouable,” Lignes, 43, 155–76; La Communauté désavouée, 55n1, 132–33; The Disavowed Community, 96n12, 61. 156. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 62. 157. Nancy, “Passion de la communauté,” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 2 (Winter 2013/ 14): 44; Inventions à deux voix, 103. 158. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 132–33; The Disavowed Community, 61; translation modified. Unfortunately, the English translation of The Disavowed Community misconstrues Blanchot’s use of the adjective “insoutenable” (to describe the “tension” between irreconcilable movements) as somehow meaning “indefensible,” and not, as the context clearly requires, “unbearable” or “intolerable.” 159. See Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962, 591–92. 160. Nancy, “Reste inavouable,” Lignes, 43, 171. 161. See Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 46–69 (p. 69); The Infinite Conversation, 33–48 (p. 48). Blanchot’s title (“il gran rifiuto”) is a silent quotation of Dante, Inferno, III, l. 60. 162. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 133; The Disavowed Community, 61; translation modified. 163. See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, XII, 336; The Bataille Reader, 287; translation modified; and Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 47; The Infinite Conversation, 34. 164. Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 50; The Infinite Conversation, 36; translation modified. 165. See Nancy, Politique et au-delà, interview by Philip Armstrong and Jason E. Smith (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 10–13. 166. Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable, 73; The Unavowable Community, 43; translation modified. 167. See Blanchot, Écrits politiques 1953–1993, edited by Eric Hoppenot (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 83–87; Political Writings, 1953–1993, 29–31. 168. Nancy, La Communauté désavouée, 93; The Disavowed Community, 40.

SIX Serious Controversy

“If there is ‘work-in-progress’ in contemporary philosophy,” Nancy suggests in the postscript to the English translation of La Communauté désavouée, with more than a hint of self-advertisement, “it is undoubtedly in work on community — on the common, communism, communitarianism, being-in-common, being‑with, being-together, or indeed the ‘living together’ which today reflects, with pathos and undoubtedly some naïveté, the concerns of a society shocked by terror attacks that condemn it in its very being, even as it itself is experienced at the same time as uncertain and insecure.” 1 Nancy’s tenacity in promoting the enduring claims of “community” or the “common” is impressive. But the timeliness of the demand his words served to formulate was forcibly offset, as we have seen, despite precautions to the contrary, by the timeworn recurrence of the terms used to articulate it, not to mention the historical, religious, and mythic baggage they brought with them. Many unanswered questions remained, then, not least the perennially urgent, urgently perennial, properly dizzying question, as Derrida describes it in Politiques de l’amitié, of “what is to be done?” and of “what is to be done — with the question what is to be done?,” what is to be done, that is, politically, among others, when neither subject nor object, neither intention nor purpose, nor even the essential character or defining limits of all “doing” as such, could be taken for granted or their meaning guaranteed. 2 When Nancy in 2016 turned specifically to this very question, i.e., “what is to be done?,” with its echoes of Kant, Chernyshevsky, and Lenin, which Derrida in 1994 had already addressed, with some insistence, to the political thinking of Blanchot and Nancy alike, it was to rehearse many of the same arguments as he had advanced in 1983. Nancy began however by acknowledging that the question, in its own terms, was 239

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strictly speaking unanswerable, since the unavailability of any concept of “an action carried out with a specific purpose in mind and with methods under one’s control” was precisely what prompted the question in the first place. 3 Politics, in other words, was still, if not indeed more so, in distressed and distressing, not to say largely bankrupt state. But this, remarked Nancy, no doubt remembering a famous couplet from Hölderlin’s “Patmos,” often quoted by Heidegger, was forcibly only one side of the coin, for “where there is danger / also grows that which saves.” 4 If there was despair, then, it was because there was hope, and if there was hope it was because there was resistance, which meant that, after all, despite appearances to the contrary, there was indeed an answer to the question or, better, as Nancy went on to explain, not without running the risk of being accused of sophistry, two answers. The first was to change the question itself, a gesture that was no doubt always worth trying, and was plausibly more urgent than ever, while the other was simply a reminder that whatever was to be done was what was always already being done. 5 In what followed, he endeavoured to sketch out the implications for thought of what he had no hesitation in calling, in rather grandiose or emphatic terms, a “profound mutation in the history of the world or worlds (the cosmic, poietical, praxical, theoretical, and spiritual pluriverses).” 6 While adopting this Olympian perspective throughout, he proceeded to paint a by now familiar, if still schematic picture, that of a world dominated in symmetrical fashion, on the one hand, by free-market capitalism, with its ability to transform every aspect of human, animal, or plant life, not to mention all mineral deposits, indeed, time and space themselves, into commodities to be bought and sold, according to its corrosive, secular logic of interminable convertibility of one merchandise into another, and, on the other, by an absolutist commitment to mythic, religious, or statist fundamentalism for which all that counted was adherence to some monolithic foundational, forcibly doctrinaire ideology. Between the two, traversing each and challenging their apparent supremacy, according to Nancy, there nevertheless stood the irreducibility of a demand for justice that, by its very nature, was both infinite and without foundation. 7 Where Nancy struck a different note to some of his earlier writing was in stressing the extent to which, in the modern or contemporary world, any reliable concept of “politics” had somehow gone missing. Even that distinction between “politics” and “the political,” between “la” and “le” “politique,” by which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe had set such store in the early 1980s, was no longer of any avail, and merely reflected the dispiriting fact that, under the pressure of capitalism, technological change, and rampant globalisation, “the thing itself [la chose elle-même] is no longer able to say what it is, nor what it is meant to be, nor what it can do.” “Such is indeed our situation,” he put it elsewhere, “politics no

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longer knows what it is, what it can or should be, nor, consequently, what its place is, nor, more seriously, what its nature is.” 8 This was of course to imply there had been a time, now lost in a seemingly mythic past, when “politics” or “the political” had indeed been present to itself in some verifiable fashion. Nancy does not however linger or expand on this implicit assumption, which in some respects might be thought to be destructive of his entire project, but devotes the bulk of his analysis to a broad-brush history of the way in which “the people,” not to be confused with “the nation” (or the Volk, as Blanchot once had it), having apparently become, without it being clear why, ever more “ungraspable,” had slowly lost the ability to invent its “existence in common” partly as a result of the oppressive power exerted by the ever resilient duopoly of liberal capitalist democracy and totalitarian rule. Here, then, two broad perspectives opened up — what Nancy described, on the one hand, as a “minimal” and, on the other, as a “maximal” understanding of what the word “politics” might now mean. The first, on the face of it, was uncontroversial enough. It flowed from the realisation, as Nancy put it, using the Heideggerian terminology with which his thinking of community first began, that “being-with (Mitsein) or being-alongside (Sein bei . . .) is strictly equiprimordial in and for Dasein.” What this implied more specifically was what he called “la tenue,” i.e., the behaviour or management of human affairs, “indeed,” he explained, “the stability or relative equilibrium between forces, interests, and needs, the possibility of confrontations or even clashes, such that there should at least be possible a being-together that does not lurch into the panic of generalised violence, threatened by energies left abandoned without any possibility of relation, whatever its terms might be.” 9 If “politics,” thus defined, Nancy added, meant — in arguably rather abstract and, in the end, oddly backward-looking fashion — the sovereignty of government over the governed, and the sovereignty of the governed over government, according to some fundamental reciprocity, it was because both kinds of sovereignty were bound by and to the authority of “existence in common, that is, of each and of all, but shared and sharing [partagée et partageante], in relations and apart.” 10 This was Nancy’s “maximal” definition, which prolonged and legitimised his earlier “minimal” gloss. And if politics in “maximal” form, in language and concept, seemed in fact little different to its “minimal” counterpart, it was because in the last instance “the possibility of the common,” he suggested, “is in reality both the origin and the end” of the collecting of “the collective,” “including that solitude in which every one of us, male and female alike, is born, dies, and shares in the common lot.” 11 There is admittedly much here that may appear profoundly circular, not to say complacently formalistic, even deeply conservative, as well as much that recalls Nancy’s earlier attempts to rethink community after Heidegger and, perhaps more surprisingly, to reground “politics” within

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an ontology of the in-common. And no doubt to forestall possible objections Nancy immediately went on to comment on this use of the expression “origin and end” — alpha and omega, first things and last things, as detailed in the Book of Revelation — by offering the following explanation: yes, he wrote, “infinite origin and infinite end: what Christian communion pointed to in ambivalent fashion belonged to infinity [l’infinité] and to its constitutive ambiguity. A ‘mystical’ body — as used to be said of the body of the risen Christ — is a body whose reality withdraws from the indefinite composition of an assemblage and of increase even as it gives itself wholly in a multitude of bodies.” 12 Now, at this exact point, in a kind of additional, supplementary aside, Nancy drops down to insert a footnote, in which he refers for the very first time in this particular text to his long-running controversy with Blanchot. The note reads thus: “One can therefore understand how Maurice Blanchot was able to sketch out a kind of political Christology in The Unavowable Community. He was touching on the innermost depths [le tréfonds: that which is most secret or intimate] of the current problem of politics, but indeed with too mystical a slant [un biais justement trop mystique] not to be called into question.” 13 Nancy’s remark is nothing if not tortuous in its construction. Admittedly, on one level, it simply restates the central thesis of La Communauté désavouée and its wayward and untenable, polemically motivated interpretation of Blanchot’s thinking of “unavowable community.” At the same time it also pays Blanchot the backhanded compliment, no doubt intended as faint praise or as a kind of patronising dismissal, of having understood something about the essential character of politics today — understood it, that is, only insofar as he is charged by Nancy with radically misunderstanding it. So what is it, a reader is entitled to ask, that Blanchot is supposed by Nancy to have understood — even as he is claimed to have misunderstood it — or, perhaps equally well, to have misunderstood, even as he is supposed to have understood it after all? Nancy’s footnote is in this respect unambiguous. What it avows, perhaps in spite of itself once more, is the fundamentally religious, “communial” Christian character of all community; and it is the fact that, in the last analysis, all community has its beginning and its end (its alpha and omega) in the glorious, “mystical” body of the risen Christ — who, manifesting himself again, thus makes his (or His) by now fourth unscripted entrance into Nancy’s reading of Blanchot. It is easy to object that Nancy’s Christological rewriting of La Communauté inavouable has no basis or foundation in Blanchot’s text or his other literary, philosophical, or political thinking. But merely to note this is arguably not enough. For Nancy’s interpretative violence with regard to Blanchot’s writing is itself a symptom. And, by the unconscious logic it instantiates, what Nancy’s footnote discreetly admits or avows in its turn is that, if the question of the political for La Communauté inavouable had nothing to do with fusional communion, then, the same cannot be said of

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Nancy’s own thinking. For as Nancy’s footnote concedes, the fusional experience of Christian communion, knowingly or not, continues to haunt each and every concept of community, including Nancy’s own, which is also why, repeating yet again one of his most persistent gestures in respect to his own thinking of “community,” he seems determined, by whatever means available, to discharge or displace his enduring fascination with the glorious body of Christ onto his counterpart and perceived intellectual rival, Maurice Blanchot, which he does by substituting for Blanchot’s rigorous thinking of relation without relation a biblical myth of his — Nancy’s — own. Prompting Nancy’s recidivist misreading of Blanchot is not only, however, a lingering, one might even say disavowed, commitment to Christology, but an equally fervent belief in the possibility of an ontology of the in-common as the basis for a rethinking of politics. In this regard, the Nancy of 2016 might be thought to be defending much the same position as he did, with sometimes different words, in the early 1980s. For as Blanchot had been quick to argue, any such possibility of an ontology of the in-common was forcibly, as we have seen, an ontology of common possibility, in which “being” or “being-with” was therefore subordinated to the power of the possible shared by all. This was to efface that trace of the impossible that for Blanchot was everywhere inscribed in inner experience, in dying, in writing, in relation without relation with the other, others, or otherness, and in the workless work, among others, precisely, of Bataille and Duras. To this ontology of common possibility, throughout the entirety of his later work, as already in his early writings of the 1960s, now appealing to that “capacity of meaning” identified with Heideggerian Bedeutsamkeit, 14 Nancy gives the name “sense [sens],” that talismanic, one might even say “mystical,” preconceptual, transimmanent, transtranscendent, even transcendental value or intuition, and it is “sense” that remains privileged throughout his thinking as the source and destination, i.e., origin and end, of all being-in-common. Thus it is for instance that, in Que faire?, to be implicated in the doing or making of “what is to be done,” insofar as it is inseparable from existing, is always already to dwell in “sense.” “We make or do,” writes Nancy, “because we exist”; “making or doing [faire],’” he adds, “cannot be dissociated from ‘existing’: to ex-pose oneself also implies ex‑posing oneself to grasping or to inventing goals and tools, relations, and effects. We make [faisons] our life and our death, which make us [nous font] in their turn,” while “to exist, to exit from oneself — to exit from all form of ‘in-oneself,’ to expose oneself and be exposed,” this, adds Nancy, still in largely Heideggerian vein, “to put it more simply,” is “to be [être] in the element of sense [sens].” 15 It is true, of course, that “sense,” for Nancy, is nothing given or selfidentical. Nor is it to be confused with mere thematic “signification [signification],” though the distinction between the two, like so many other

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binary oppositions that litter Nancy’s pages, including most notably the opposition between communion and community, remains at the very least undecidable. “Sense,” for its part, he argues, “is never adequate to an object nor a project nor an effect. It is this inadequation that needs to be put into play.” 16 Were it otherwise, of course, “sense” would not enjoy such privileged status in his ontology, to the point, not unlike myth, as we have seen, of forever coinciding with its own withdrawal, absence, interruption, or negation. Very different however in this respect, insofar as it is radically irreducible to any ontology — both the possibility of ontology and the ontology of possibility — is that “absent sense [sens absent],” invoked by Blanchot in L’Écriture du désastre, which Nancy, it will be remembered, once cited from the opening threshold of Le Sens du monde as one of that work’s precautionary or tutelary epigraphs. But in the second part of the fragment that introduced the expression, which Nancy omitted to quote in 1993, Blanchot had taken great care for his part to divorce “absent sense” from any possible attribution of being or attribution of possible being. “An absent sense,” he wrote, “may be said to maintain ‘the affirmation’ of the impetus beyond loss [that “passive impetus,” Blanchot had just explained, “which is not yet thinking”]; the impetus of dying that, sweeping itself aside, sweeps loss aside, lost loss. A sense [sens], then, that does not pass by way of being [l’être], but beneath sense — the sigh of sense, or sense expired. Whence the difficulty of any commentary on writing; for commentary both signifies and produces signification [signification], and is unable to bear an absent sense,” 17 whence, in Blanchot’s eyes, the dogged resistance of dying, writing, not only to “signification,” but to all “sense,” too, that is, to all possibility or power — and to all post-Heideggerian ontology. But where Blanchot did agree with Nancy on the other hand, it was in realising not only that there was no sufficient or reliable concept of the political on which to ground political decisions, but also at the same time, as Derrida puts it, duly invoked by Nancy, that “no politics has ever been adequate to its own concept.” 18 For Blanchot, this was all the more reason to resist the temptation to provide “politics” or “the political” with an ontological foundation. Blanchot had said as much from the outset in his 1984 letter to Laporte. However constant his passion for politics, he had told his friend, the fact remained, as far as he was concerned, that “political thinking [la pensée politique: the thinking of the political] is perhaps still yet to be discovered.” 19 What this meant was that the abiding frailties, deficiencies, or shortcomings of political thinking were not to be overcome, remedied, or resolved by an appeal to fundamental ontology, be it an ontology of common possibility or of the in-common. Indeed, quite the reverse. All ontology, Blanchot argued in La Communauté inavouable, insofar as it was an ontology, was forcibly a dogmatic assertion of the Same, not a thinking of the impossibilities of experience, dying, or

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relation without relation, but, as in Heidegger, a thinking of power, authority, and foundational myth. And if the thinking of politics or the political was still to be discovered, this was also proof, as Blanchot had it from the very beginning, that it was impossible to abandon or renounce its questions and questioning, and that what was or was not “political” had at every stage to be reinvented, its constitutive vacancy reaffirmed, and its chances countersigned, as it had been Blanchot’s modest aim to indicate in the conclusion to his slim 1983 volume which, as far as Nancy was concerned, fell on deaf ears. But, as it did so, in truth everyday reality begged to differ. For by the mid-1980s, as past empires began to crumble, to be replaced, in some cases, by others even more sinister, exploitative, and oppressive, so too, on hitherto neglected fronts, a new kind of politics, perhaps, began to emerge from the shadows, not for the first time, of course, but nevertheless reviving, as it did so, something of the spirit of May 1968, no longer dedicated to the pursuit of power, but contemptuous of the limits of the possible, and beyond the hegemonic control of political parties and state authorities, decisively redrawing and reinscribing, in perpetually mobile fashion, the shifting frontiers between the personal and the political, the public and the private, male and female, bodies and other bodies, humans and animals, setting aside all established, fantasmatic identities grounded in language, ethnicity, race, gender, or sexual orientation, and reinscribing otherness no longer as a mirror image of the same, but as the condition of (im)possibility of relation without relation. This concept of “relation without relation” may seem poor, and there is no doubt its very formulation is one that can easily be abused. But this is only because what is at stake, even as it requires a concept, forcibly disappoints or defers or interrupts — since such is the future — all conceptuality in general. But what also announces itself in such words is what might be called a new or other politics, whose names are legion, and which, by that very token, exceed or overwhelm the pernicious authority of all naming in general — as though, after all, what was really in question was not community, with its unavoidable legacy of fusional communion, but much rather, for want of a better word, and prior to all “avowable” thematisations or positionalities, a kind of anonymous “communism” — “communism,” so to speak, “without communism” — such as, it may be remembered, “excludes (and excludes itself from) any already constituted community.” It is of course at this precise point between Nancy and Blanchot, and between Blanchot and Nancy, in the unbridgeable divide between “community” and “communism,” that there plunge the abyssal depths of an endlessly unresolved controversy, frequently misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misrepresented, but whose ultimate irresolution only confirms the enduring futurity — perhaps — of its fragile promise, and whose

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seriousness can in any case no longer be ignored by any who appeal, whether in hope or despair, to the still compelling allure of “community.” Most remarkable of all perhaps is that texts written in most cases almost four decades ago, as a protracted but deeply unreconciled political sequence entered into its apparent twilight, should yet prove so timely today, so acutely present to so many of us who, strangely enough, continue still to live on. NOTES 1. Nancy, The Disavowed Community, vii; translation modified. 2. See Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, 330; Politics of Friendship, 297. As Nancy points out in Que faire?, 67, “What Is to Be Done?,” Diacritics 42, no. 2 (2014): 101–2, Derrida also took the opportunity of raising the question in a public debate held the same year. 3. Nancy, Que faire?, 12. Nancy had already asked the question in 1996 in a brief text also called “What Is to Be Done?,” translated by Leslie Hill, in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 151–52. 4. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, edited by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005), 350; Hymns and Fragments, translated by Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); translation modified. For Heidegger’s gloss, see Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 32–33, 39; The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 28–29, 34. 5. See Nancy, Que faire?, 14–15. 6. Nancy, Que faire?, 16. 7. See Nancy, Que faire?, 17–19. 8. Nancy, Que faire?, 25; The Disavowed Community, x; translation modified. 9. Nancy, Que faire?, 37–38. 10. Nancy, Que faire?, 42. 11. Nancy, Que faire?, 43. 12. Nancy, Que faire?, 43. 13. Nancy, Que faire?, 43n1. 14. Not, of course, to be confused with “Bedeutung,” as Nancy explains in conversation with Alain Badiou in Badiou and Nancy, La Tradition allemande dans la philosophie, edited by Jan Völker (Paris: Lignes, 2017), 62. Not surprisingly, Badiou at this points detects “a veritable abyss” between his own thinking and that of Nancy. 15. Nancy, Que faire?, 56, 57, 116. 16. Nancy, Que faire?, 97; “What Is to Be Done?,” Diacritics 42, no. 2 (2014): 113; translation modified. 17. Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre, 71; The Writing of the Disaster, 41–42; translation modified. 18. Nancy, Que faire?, 82; “What Is to Be Done?,” Diacritics 42, no. 2 (2014): 108. For the quotation from Derrida, see Politiques de l’amitié, 134; Politics of Friendship, 114. 19. Nancy, Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, 62.

Chronology

I list here in order of first French-language publication (or, where relevant, the order of writing) the main texts, including books, articles, interviews, and published correspondence, that have direct or indirect bearing on the long-running yet oddly asymmetrical dispute between Nancy and Blanchot. The list is not exhaustive, but is intended to assist readers in navigating more reliably the often confusing sequence of texts written first by the one, then by the other, alongside work by diverse third parties. • Between Blanchot and Bataille, from their first meeting in December 1940 until the latter’s death in July 1962, many letters come to be exchanged. All Bataille’s letters to Blanchot, it is said, will be subsequently destroyed by their recipient, and many of those addressed by Blanchot to Bataille will similarly be lost or become unavailable, with the exception of some ninety-one letters dating from the 1940s, the 1950s, or early 1960s, currently held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. It is from these that are taken the eight letters from Blanchot to Bataille published by Michel Surya in the appendix to his 1997 edition of Bataille’s selected correspondence (Choix de lettres 1917–1962), on which Nancy and Surya will both draw, selectively, in their retrospective accounts of Blanchot’s friendship with Bataille in 2014 and 2015 respectively. • Following Bataille’s death, Blanchot, having already addressed Bataille’s work in 1943, 1955, and 1956, writes a series of articles subsequently collected in L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation) in November 1969, and in L’Amitié (Friendship), two years later, in October 1971. • In September 1973, Blanchot publishes Le Pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond), a book that, in its fragmentary form, is often thought to be a literary and philosophical response to the political events of May 1968 in Paris. • Between October 1973 and the early months of 1976, first on Hegel, then on Kant, Nancy publishes La Remarque spéculative (The Speculative Remark) and Le Discours de la syncope: 1. Logodaedalus (The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus). • In Autumn 1978, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy publish L’Absolu littéraire (The Literary Absolute), an anthology of texts by the German 247

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Romantics, which also comprises a lengthy introduction indebted in part to the work of Blanchot. In July 1980, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy organise their landmark Cerisy conference on the work of Derrida, Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (The Ends of Man: Following the Work of Jacques Derrida). In September 1980, Blanchot publishes a second fragmentary volume under the title L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster). In May 1981, in reply to a questionnaire in a special issue of the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur devoted to the topic of Sartrian “committed literature,” Blanchot publishes a brief response (“Refuser l’ordre établi [Refusing the Established Order]”) in which he takes as his example the Book of Exodus. In 1981, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy publish their essay, “Le Mythe nazi [The Nazi Myth],” which Blanchot may have read at the time. In autumn 1981, in the volume Rejouer le politique (partly translated as Retreating the Political) Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy publish the first collection of papers presented during the preceding twelve months to the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (Centre for Philosophical Research into the Political) set up by them after the Cerisy Derrida Conference. In spring 1982, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, partly in response to Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre, publish their dialogue on the fragment “Noli me frangere [Break Me Not].” In October 1982, Alain Coulange, in the journal Contre toute attente, reprints a short text by Bataille, “À prendre ou à laisser [Take it or leave it],” first published in November 1946, but not collected in Bataille’s Complete Works until 1988. 1 December 1982, in a letter to his friend, the exiled Russian poet Vadim Kozovoi, Blanchot comments on the title of Marguerite Duras’s new book, La Maladie de la mort (The Malady of Death), written between mid-August and mid-October 1982, and on Duras’s precarious state of health. In the first week in January 1983, Duras’s La Maladie de la mort appears in bookshops. As the December letter to Kozevoi suggests, Blanchot has already seen the book in proof (or received an advance copy) a month earlier. In January 1983, the philosopher Sarah Kofman publishes Comment s’en sortir? (“Beyond Aporia?”) which includes a brief discussion of Blanchot’s postwar story La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day). Also in January 1983 Nancy publishes his book L’Impératif catégorique (The Categorical Imperative). In February 1983, under the title D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in

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Philosophy”), in which he quotes Blanchot and makes passing reference to Duras’s story “L’Homme assis dans le couloir [The Man Sitting in the Corridor]” (April 1980), Jacques Derrida publishes in book form a revised version of the paper first presented at the 1980 Cerisy conference organised by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. In February 1983, Nancy publishes the first version of his inaugural essay “La Communauté désœuvrée (Inoperative Community)” in the journal Aléa. 4 February and 16 March 1983, Blanchot writes two letters to Nancy, published in October 2000, in which he indicates his intention to address the question of Bataille’s politics and expresses a keen interest in Nancy’s Aléa essay. In March 1983, a second, final volume of papers presented to the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique appears under the title Le Retrait de la politique. A year and a half later, in November 1984, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy dissolve the Centre. In spring 1983, under the title “(“La Maladie de la mort (éthique et amour) [The Malady of Death (Ethics and Love)],” Blanchot publishes a review of Duras’s La Maladie de l’amour in the journal Le Nouveau Commerce. In a letter dated 18 March, he writes to Vadim Kozevoi, indicating that he has just finished reading the recent French translation (published February 1983) of the correspondence between Rilke, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, in which he will have read the lines from Tsvetaeva quoted at the end of his review of Duras’s story. In a series of three letters written between 10 and 27 May 1983, Blanchot writes again to Kozovoi to inquire after the “Russian proverb” (according to which “lovers’ kisses destroy society”), mentioned by Nancy in his February 1983 Aléa article. In May 1983, Blanchot publishes the volume Après Coup (Vicious Circles), containing his two early stories from the 1930s (which had already been collected in 1951 and again in 1970) together with a lengthy, previously unpublished postface. Between late July and early September 1983, amidst disquiet regarding the policies of by the new Socialist administration under François Mitterrand (elected president in May 1981), the newspaper Le Monde runs a series of articles, and letters from readers, on the question of the responsibilities of “intellectuals.” The debate will culminate in Lyotard’s famous piece “Le Tombeau de l’intellectuel [Tomb of the Intellectual],” published in Le Monde for 8 October 1983. In December 1983, Blanchot publishes La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community), incorporating into it (and significantly extending) the review of La Maladie de la mort that appeared in Le Nouveau Commerce earlier in the year.

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• In March 1984, Blanchot publishes his article “Les Intellectuels en question [Intellectuals under Scrutiny]” in the journal Le Débat, responding in part to Lyotard’s article in Le Monde the previous October. • In December 1984, prompted by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, who, having taken on the task of editing a special Blanchot issue of Les Cahiers de L’Herne in which they consider it important to tackle the question of the writer’s politics, Blanchot addresses a seven-page letter to his friend, Roger Laporte, describing in greater detail than ever before his political decisions during the 1930s. Owing to a shortage of contributors, the special issue of the Cahiers de L’Herne is abandoned, and the text of Blanchot’s letter will remain unpublished until March 2011. • In spring 1985, Blanchot publishes the essay “Paix, paix au lointain et au proche [Peace, peace to the foreign and to the near]” in which he addresses the question of the relationship between (Greek) philosophy and the (Judaic) law of Moses. • In 1986 Nancy publishes his book La Communauté désœuvrée (The Inoperative Community), incorporating an extended version of the 1983 Aléa article with which it shares its title (whence the frequent confusion between the two). Further versions of the 1986 volume will appear in 1990 and 1999. • In November 1987, Blanchot writes a letter to Catherine David about the recent “Heidegger Affair” (regarding revelations about the thinker’s membership of the Nazi party) which will be published in the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur the following January. • In September 1988, at Nancy’s invitation, Blanchot gives a brief text (“Qui? [Who?]”) to a special issue of the journal Topoi devoted to the question: “Who Comes after the Subject?” • In October 1991, together with Jean-Christophe Bailly, Nancy returns to the question of community in the book La Comparution (Compearance). In the decade that follows, Nancy will publish numerous other books, including Une pensée finie (A Finite Thinking), Le Sens du monde (The Sense of the World), Les Muses (The Muses), Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural), Hegel: L’Inquiétude du négatif (Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative), and La Pensée dérobée, in which he pursues the project for an ontology of the “in-common,” but in which Blanchot’s name features only in marginal or incidental fashion. • In March 1992, Nancy publishes the first version of the book Corpus (Corpus). • 24 December 1992, on the eve of the 1993 London conference on his work, organised by Carolyn Bailey Gill, Blanchot writes to Roger Laporte in response to anticipated criticism by Jeffrey Mehlman

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relating to a newspaper article published by Blanchot in the proVichy Journal des débats in March 1942 during the Occupation. Blanchot’s letter appears four years later in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing (1996). In September 1994, Derrida publishes Politiques de l’amitié (The Politics of Friendship), a book widely regarded as Derrida’s own belated, dissenting contribution to the debate on “community.” In May 1998 and in spring 1999, Nancy pays tribute to Blanchot in two brief texts later collected (in English translation) in Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II (2006). In November 2001, Nancy publishes two books. The first, under the title La Communauté affrontée (The Confronted Community), is the text of Nancy’s introduction to a new Italian translation of Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable, which he dedicates to Blanchot, but in which he sets out for the first time his antagonistic or dissenting reading of Blanchot’s 1983 text. Nancy’s second book is the essay Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne) (published in English as part of the volume The Ground of the Image) in which he pursues the deconstructive reinterpretation of Christianity announced some years earlier. 29 March 2003, Nancy brings to a close the first international conference on Blanchot in France, organised by Christophe Bident and Pierre Vilar, which takes place just over a month after the writer’s death (20 February 2003). Improvising from notes, Nancy outlines some of the argument of the book Noli me tangere (Noli Me Tangere) which will appear in April, some weeks later. In March 2005, Nancy publishes La Déclosion (Dis-Enclosure), the first of two volumes on the deconstruction of Christianity, which includes two papers on Blanchot’s alleged debt to Christianity. In April 2008, Nancy publishes Vérité de la démocratie (The Truth of Democracy) to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the May 1968 students’ and workers’ uprising. In March 2011, under the title Maurice Blanchot: passion politique, following the deaths of Blanchot, Laporte, Derrida, and LacoueLabarthe, Nancy finally publishes the text of the letter to Laporte written by Blanchot in December 1984 dealing with his political commitments during the 1930s, to which Nancy adds a lengthy preface. In March 2014, under the title La Communauté désavouée (The Disavowed Community), Nancy publishes his most detailed account so far of Blanchot’s thinking of community, prompting significant controversy and debate. Publication of the book is timed to coincide with the appearance of a special issue of the journal Lignes devoted to Blanchot’s politics. In January 2015, the journal’s editor, Michel Surya, will publish an extended version of his own fiercely polemi-

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cal contribution to the issue as a separate volume, titled L’Autre Blanchot (The Other Blanchot). • Throughout 2014 and 2015, Nancy follows up publication of La Communauté désavouée (The Disavowed Community) with numerous journal and media interviews. • In 2016, Nancy publishes Que faire? (What Is to Be Done?).

Short Bibliography

Yann Andréa, M.D., Paris: Minuit, 1983. ———. Cet amour-là, Paris: Pauvert, 1999. ———. Je voudrais parler de Duras, Paris: Fayard, 2016. Raymond Aron, La Sociologie allemande contemporaine, Paris: (Alcan, 1935) P.U.F., 1966; German Sociology, translated by Mary and Thomas Bottomore, London: Heinemann, 1957. Roland Barthes, Œuvres complètes, edited by Éric Marty, rev. ed., 5 vols., Paris: Seuil, 2002. ———. Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill & Wang, 1968. Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1970–1988. ———. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. ———. Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood, London: Boyars, 1987. ———. The Accursed Share, translated by Robert Hurley, 2 vols., New York: Zone Books, 1988–1991. ———. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, translated by Michael Richardson, London: Verso, 1994. ———. Choix de lettres 1917–1962, edited by Michel Surya, Paris: Gallimard, 1997. ———. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, translated by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ———. Romans et récits, edited by Jean-François Louette, Paris: Gallimard, 2004. ———. Guilty, translated by Stuart Kendall, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. ———. Inner Experience, translated by Stuart Kendall, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Jean Baudrillard, La Gauche divine: chronique des années 1977–1984, Paris: Grasset, 1985; The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977–1984, translated by David L. Sweet, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Michel Bergès, Vichy contre Mounier: les non-conformistes face aux années 40, Paris: Economica, 1997. Robert Bernasconi, “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot,” Research in Phenomenology XXIII (1993): 3–21. Serge Berstein, Le 6 Février 1934, Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1975. ———. (with Michel Winock, eds.), Fascisme français?: la controverse, Paris: CNRS éditions, 2014. Jean-Michel Besnier, Georges Bataille: la politique de l’impossible, Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2014. Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible, Seyssel: Champvallon, 1998; Maurice Blanchot, A Critical Biography, translated by John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ———. (with Pierre Vilar, eds.), Maurice Blanchot: Récits critiques, Tours: éditions farrago, 2003. ———. (et al., eds.), Maurice Blanchot: La littérature encore une fois, Geneva: éditions Furor, 2017.

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Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas, Paris: Gallimard, 1943; Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. L’Arrêt de mort, Paris: Gallimard, (1948) 1971; Death Sentence, translated by Lydia Davis, New York: Station Hill Press, 1978. ———. Lautréamont et Sade, Paris: Minuit, (1949) 1963; Lautréamont and Sade, translated by Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. ———. La Part du feu, Paris: Gallimard, 1949; The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ———. L’Espace littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955; The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1982. ———. Le Livre à venir, Paris: Gallimard, 1959; The Book to Come, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. L’Entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1969; The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. L’Amitié, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. La Folie du jour, (Montpellier: Fata morgana, 1973) Paris: Gallimard, 2002; “The Madness of the Day,” translated by Lydia Davis, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, edited by George Quasha, New York: Station Hill Press, 1998. ———. Le Pas au-delà, Paris: Gallimard, 1973; The Step Not Beyond, translated by Lycette Nelson, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. ———. L’Écriture du désastre, Paris: Gallimard, 1980; The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. ———. “Deux lettres à Jean-Luc Nancy” (4 February and 16 March 1983), Lignes 3 (October 2000): 135–36. ———. Après Coup, Paris: Minuit, 1983; Vicious Circles, translated by Paul Auster, New York: Station Hill Press, 1985. ———. La Communauté inavouable, Paris: Minuit, 1983; The Unavowable Community, translated by Pierre Joris, New York: Station Hill Press, 1988. ———. “A Letter” (24 December 1992), in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill, London: Routledge, 1996, 209–11. ———. L’Instant de ma mort (Montpellier: Fata morgana, 1994) Paris: Gallimard, 2002; in: Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. The Blanchot Reader, edited by Michael Holland, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. Chroniques littéraires du Journal des débats, edited by Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2007; Into Disaster, Desperate Clarity, A World in Ruins, and Death Now, translated by Michael Holland, New York: Fordham University Press, 2014–2018. ———. Écrits politiques 1953–1993, edited by Eric Hoppenot, Paris: Gallimard, 2008; Political Writings, 1953–1993, translated by Zakir Paul, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. ———. Lettres à Vadim Kozovoï, edited by Denis Aucouturier, Houilles: éditions Manucius, 2009. ———. La Condition critique: articles, 1945–1998, edited by Christophe Bident, Paris: Gallimard, 2010. ———. (with Pierre Madaule), Correspondance 1953–2002, edited by Pierre Madaule, Paris: Gallimard, 2012. ———. (with Johannes Hübner), Correspondance: 1963–1973, edited by Eric Hoppenot and Philippe Mesnard, Paris: Kimé, 2014. ———. Chroniques politiques des années trente 1931–1940, edited by David Uhrig, Paris: Gallimard, 2017. Robert Brasillach, Notre avant-guerre, Paris: Plon, 1941. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, edited by Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert with Rudolf Bücher, 5 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, (1983) 1992.

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———. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. René Char, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, (1983) 1995. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London: Penguin, 2013. Pierre Clastres, La Société contre l’État, Paris: Minuit (1974), 2011; Society against the State, translated by Robert Hurley with Abe Stein, New York: Zone Books, 1987. ———. Le Grand Parler: mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guarani, Paris: Seuil, 1974. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, edited by H. J. Jackson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (Henri) Daniel-Rops, Le Monde sans âme, Paris: Plon, 1932. Jonathan Degenève, “A partir de quels modèles Nancy et Blanchot comprennent-ils la communauté?,” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 3 (Autumn 2014): 40–49. Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967; Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, London: Routledge, 1978. ———. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie, Paris: Galilée, 1983; “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” translated by John P. Leavey Jnr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. ———. Parages, Paris: Galilée, (1986) 2003; Parages, edited by John P. Leavey, translated by Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, London: Routledge, 1992. ———. Politiques de l’amitié, Paris: Galilée, 1994; The Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins, London: Verso, 1997. ———. Apories: mourir — s’attendre aux “limites de la vérité,” Paris: Galilée, 1996; Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000; On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Christine Irizarry, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ignaas Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, translated by Joeri Schrijvers and Sigi Jotkandt, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Georges Didi-Huberman (ed.), Soulèvements, Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Souvenirs de la maison des morts, translated by Henri Mongault and Louise Desormonts, Paris: Gallimard, 1932; Memoirs from the House of the Dead, translated by Jessie Coulson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Marguerite Duras, Moderato cantabile, translated by Richard Seaver, London: Calder, 1966. ———. The Malady of Death, translated by Barbara Bray, New York: Grove Press, 1986. ———. Emily L., translated by Barbara Bray, London: Collins, 1989. ———. Œuvres complètes, edited by Gilles Philippe, 4 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 2011–2014. ———. Le Dernier des métiers: entretiens 1962–1991, edited by Sophie Bogaert, Paris: Seuil, 2016. Uri Eisenzweig, Naissance littéraire du fascisme, Paris: Seuil, 2013. Gilles Ernst and Jean-François Louette (eds.), Georges Bataille, cinquante ans après, Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2013. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: origine et destin de la communauté, translated by Nadine Le Lirzin, with a preface by Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: P.U.F., 2000; Communitas: the Origin and Destiny of Community, translated by Timothy Campbell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, translated by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987; Heidegger and Nazism, translated by Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Bertrand Favreau, Georges Mandel ou la passion de la République, 1885–1944, Paris: Fayard, 1996. Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community, London: Legenda, 2007.

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Christopher Fynsk, Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, translated by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Paris: Gallimard, 2004. Jean-François Hamel, Nous sommes tous la pègre: les années 68 de Blanchot, Paris: Minuit, 2018. Robert Harvey et al., Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras: bibliographie des œuvres et de la critique 1940–2006, Paris: IMEC, 2009. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 20 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986; Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. ———. Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983; “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” translated by Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38 (March 1985): 467–502. ———. Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen: Neske, 1954. ———. Was ist das — die Philosophie?, Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1956; What Is That — Philosophy?, translated by Eva T. H. Brann, Annapolis, MD: St John’s College, 1991. ———. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. ———. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980; Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930–1950, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Deborah M. Hess, Politics and Literature: The Case of Maurice Blanchot, New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, London: Routledge, 1993. ———. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, London: Routledge, 1997. ———. Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010. ———. Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch, New York: Continuum, 2012. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, edited by Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2005. ———. Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, edited by Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. ———. Hymns and Fragments, translated by Richard Sieburth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Hölderlin’s Sophocles, translated by David Constantine, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2001. ———. Antigone, translated by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paris: Bourgois, 1998. Eric Hoppenot and Dominique Rabaté (eds.), Cahiers de L’Herne: Maurice Blanchot, 2014. Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, translated by Max Hayward, New York: Doubleday, 1978; Otage de l’éternité: Mes années avec Pasternak, translated by Anne and Stéphane Tatischeff, Paris: Fayard, 1978. Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. ———. “Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community,” Culture, Theory and Critique 51, no. 2 (August 2010): 171–87. Nicolas Kessler, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.

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257

Sarah Kofman, Comment s’en sortir?, Paris: Galilée, 1983; in Post-structuralist Classics, edited by Andrew Benjamin, London: Routledge, 1988, 7–44. ———. Paroles suffoquées, Paris: Galilée, 1987; Smothered Words, translated by Madeleine Dobie, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’Imitation des modernes, Paris: Galilée, 1986. ———. Typography, edited by Christopher Fynsk, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Agonie terminée, agonie interminable: Sur Maurice Blanchot, Paris: Galilée, 2011; Ending and Unending Agony: On Maurice Blanchot, translated by Hannes Opelz, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ———. Phrase, Paris: Bourgois, 2000; Phrase, translated by Leslie Hill, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini, Paris: Le Livre de poche, (1961) 1990; Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1991. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale I, Paris: Plon, 1974; Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, London: Penguin, 1968. Paul Lévy, Œuvres complètes, 4 vols., Paris: Le Rouge et le Noir, 1960–1961. Evelyne Londyn, Maurice Blanchot romancier, Paris: Nizet, 1976. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des années 30: une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française, Paris: Seuil, (1969) 2001. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers, Paris: Galilée, 1984; Political Writings, translated by Bill Readings, London: U.C.L. Press, 1993. Mairi Maclean (ed.), The Mitterrand Years: Legacy and Evaluation, London: Macmillan, 1998. André Malraux, Œuvres complètes, 6 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1989–2010. Thomas Mann, Ausgewählte Essays, edited by Hermann Kurzke, 3 vols., Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977–1978; Essays of Three Decades, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1964; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, translated by C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1947. Dionys Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire, Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1987. Jean-Pierre Maxence, Histoire de dix ans, 1927–1937, Paris: Gallimard, 1939. ———. (et al.), La Révolution nationale sera communautaire: raisons, directions, moyens d’action, Paris: Centre communautaire, 1941. John McKeane and Hannes Opelz (eds.), Blanchot Romantique: A Collection of Essays, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror,” MLN 95, no. 4 (May 1980): 808–29. Gary D. Mole, Levinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Marie-Eve Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Emmanuel Mounier, Œuvres, 4 vols., Paris: Seuil, 1961–1963. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Un certain silence,” Esprit 316 (April 1963): 555–63. ———. “Cathéchisme de persévérance,” Esprit 364 (October 1967): 368–81. ———. Le Discours de la syncope: 1 Logodaedalus, Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976; The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, translated by Saul Anton, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, eds.), L’Absolu littéraire, Paris: Seuil, 1978; The Literary Absolute, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. ———. (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, eds.), Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida, Paris: (Galilée, 1981) Hermann, 2013. ———. (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, eds.), Rejouer le politique, Paris: Galilée, 1981; Retreating the Political, edited by Simon Sparks, London: Routledge, 1997.

258

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———. “La Communauté désœuvrée,” Aléa 4 (February 1983): 11–49. ———. La Communauté désœuvrée, Paris: Bourgois, (1986, 1990) 1999; The Inoperative Community, translated by Peter Connor, Lina Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. L’Expérience de la liberté, Paris: Galilée, 1988; The Experience of Freedom, translated by Bridget McDonald, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. Une pensée finie, Paris: Galilée, 1990; A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Le Mythe nazi, La Tour d’Aigues: éditions de l’Aube, (1991) 2016; “The Nazi Myth,” translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 291–312. ———. (with Eduardo Cadava and Peter Connor, eds.), Who Comes after the Subject?, New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. Corpus, Paris: Métailié, (1992) 2006; Corpus, translated by Richard A. Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. Le Sens du monde, Paris: Galilée, 1993; The Sense of the World, translated by Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. The Birth to Presence, translated by Brian Holmes and others, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. Les Muses, Paris: Galilée, 1994; The Muses, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. Être singulier pluriel, Paris: Galilée, 1996; Being Singular Plural, translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne O’Byrne, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. La Pensée dérobée, Paris: Galilée, 2001. ———. Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne), Paris: Galilée, 2001; in The Ground of the Image, translated by Jeff Fort, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. La Communauté affrontée, Paris: Galilée, 2001; “The Confronted Community,” translated by Amanda Macdonald, Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003); also in part in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. ———. La Création du monde ou la mondialisation, Paris: Galilée, 2002; The Creation of the World or Globalisation, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. ———. Noli me tangere: essai sur la levée du corps, Paris: Bayard, (2003) 2013; Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. “Le Judéo-chrétien,” in Judéités: questions pour Jacques Derrida, edited by Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Paris: Galilée, 2003. ———. La Déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, I), Paris: Galilée, 2005; Dis-Enclosure, the Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. Multiple Arts: The Muses II, edited by Simon Sparks, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. ———. La Naissance des seins, suivi de Péan pour Aphrodite, Paris: Galilée, 2006; in Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, translated by Anne O’Byrne, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. ———. Vérité de la démocratie, Paris: Galilée, 2008; The Truth of Democracy, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. ———. L’Adoration (Déconstruction du christianisme, 2), Paris: Galilée, 2010; Adoration: the Deconstruction of Christianity II, translated by John McKeane, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. ———. Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique, Paris: Galilée, 2011. ———. (with Philip Armstrong and Jason E. Smith), Politique et au-delà, Paris: Galilée, 2011.

Short Bibliography

259

———. (with Pierre-Philippe Jandin), La Possibilité d’un monde, Paris: Les Petits Platons, 2013; The Possibility of a World, translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain, New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. ———. La Communauté désavouée, Paris: Galilée, 2014; The Disavowed Community, translated by Philip Armstrong, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ———. (with Mathilde Girard), “Reste inavouable,” Lignes 43 (March 2014): 155–76. ———. “Quand le sens ne fait plus monde,” Esprit 2014, no. 3-4 (March/April 2014): 27–46. ———. (with Mathilde Girard), Proprement dit: entretien sur le mythe, Paris: Lignes, 2015. ———. (with Jérôme Lèbre), “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy sur La Communauté désavouée,” Cahiers Maurice Blanchot 4 (Winter 2015/2016): 91–104. ———. (with Peter Engelmann), Demokratie und Gemeinschaft, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2015. ———. (with Danielle Cohen-Levinas), Inventions à deux voix, Paris: Le Félin, 2015. ———. La Banalité de Heidegger, Paris: Galilée, 2015. ———. Demande: littérature et philosophie, edited by Ginette Michaud, Paris: Galilée, 2015; Expectation: Philosophy, Literature, translated by Robert Bononno, New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ———. “The Literary Absolute,” the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), February 2016, www.ici-berlin.org/events/the-literary-absolute/. ———. Que faire?, Paris: Galilée, 2016. ———. Sexistence, Paris: Galilée, 2017. ———. (with Alain Badiou), La Tradition allemande dans la philosophie, edited by Jan Völker, Paris: Lignes, 2017. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols., 2nd ed., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. ———. La Volonté de puissance, translated by Henri Albert, Paris: Le Livre de poche, (1901) 1991. ———. La Volonté de puissance, translated by Geneviève Bianquis, 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard, (1935–1937) 1995. ———. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français 17 juin 1940–20 août 1944, edited by Jean-Claude Barbas, Paris: Albin Michel, 1989. Plato, Symposium, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Jean-François Pradeau, “Impossible politique et antiphilosophie,” Les Temps modernes 602 (December 1998–January/February 1999): 132–46. Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987. Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaïeva, Correspondance à trois: été 1926, edited by Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky, translated by Lily Denis, Philippe Jaccottet, and Ève Malleret, Paris: Gallimard, 1983; Letters, Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke, translated by Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988; The Star of Redemption, translated by Barbara E. Galli, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Edward Said, On Late Style, London: Bloomsbury, 2006. F. W. J. Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, 6 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. ———. Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, translated by Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, edited by Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, 6 vols., Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1988; Dialogue on Poetry and Liter-

260

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ary Aphorisms, translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968. Roman Schmidt, Die Unmögliche Gemeinschaft, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2009. Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger, Bern: Suhr, 1962. John M. Sherwood, Georges Mandel and the Third Republic, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970. Philippe Sollers, Éloge de l’infini, Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914: Les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris: Seuil, 1978. ———. Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France, Paris: Gallimard, (1983) 2012; Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre, Paris: Gallimard, (1992) 2012; Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, London: Verso, 2002. ———. Sainteté de Bataille, Paris: éditions de l’Éclat, 2012. ———. (ed.), “Les Politiques de Maurice Blanchot,” Lignes 43 (March 2014). ———. L’Autre Blanchot: l’écriture de jour, l’écriture de nuit, Paris: Gallimard, 2015. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963. Isabelle Ullern and Pierre Gisel (eds.), Penser en commun?: un “rapport sans rapport”: Jean-Luc Nancy et Sarah Kofman lecteurs de Blanchot, Paris: Beauchesne, 2015. Jean Vallier, C’était Marguerite Duras, 1914–1996, Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2014. Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes?, Paris: Seuil, 1983; Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, translated by Paula Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. Daniel Wilhem, Maurice Blanchot: La Voix narrative, Paris: U.G.E., 1974. ———. Maurice Blanchot: Intrigues littéraires, Paris: Lignes, 2005. Michel Winock, Esprit: des intellectuels dans la cité, 1930–1950, Paris: Seuil, (1975) 1986. Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

Index

Adorno, T. W., 148 Andréa, Yann, 146, 156, 169n69 Antelme, Robert, 122, 123, 140, 225 Aron, Raymond, 16 Aron, Robert, 38, 61n84 Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 2, 96, 103 Barthes, Roland, 2, 26, 28, 68, 160 Bataille, Georges, 2, 6, 7, 25, 27, 37, 48, 53, 60n76, 65–68, 70, 71, 72–73, 74–76, 77, 80–83, 85–86, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97n8, 98n24, 99n55, 100n65, 101n71, 101n73, 101n74, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111–113, 116–117, 118–120, 121, 122, 124, 129–130, 131, 143–144, 144, 147, 148, 152, 157, 159, 162, 163, 164, 168n55, 169n66, 170n91, 210; Acéphale, 10, 65, 66, 74, 83–84, 89, 120; Collège de sociologie, 41, 66; politics, 37, 186, 224, 225–228, 229, 238n153; L’Expérience intérieure (Inner Experience), 52, 64n143, 64n144, 64n146, 65, 127–128, 160–161, 179, 216, 243; Madame Edwarda , 10, 34, 86–90, 94, 142, 160, 165; L’Érotisme (Eroticism), 27, 85; the unavowable, 112–113, 124, 167n33, 167n35 Baudrillard, Jean, 59n69 Bédier, Joseph, 191 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 68 Bident, Christophe, 38, 50 Blanchot, Maurice: L’Amitié (Friendship), 73; Après Coup (Vicious Circles), 33, 44–48, 49–51, 89, 149, 157, 160; L’Arrêt de mort (Death Sentence), 46, 58n62, 89, 212; La Communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community), 2, 3, 4, 6–8, 8, 10, 12n11, 15, 18, 24, 27, 33, 51, 52, 261

54, 68, 69, 71–74, 76, 77, 80–82, 84–85, 86, 89, 94, 95–96, 104, 105, 106, 107–108, 109–110, 111–112, 113–114, 115, 116–129, 130, 131, 133–135, 139, 140–148, 149–155, 156, 158, 159, 160–163, 163–165, 172n114, 172n122, 173n145, 174n146, 174n155, 175n166, 176n189, 176n193, 179, 180, 182, 186, 191, 196, 202, 203–204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212, 218, 219, 223, 229, 240, 241–243; correspondence, 6, 71, 107, 175n166, 176n186, 213, 214, 215–216, 225–227, 244; disaster, 2; L’Écriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster), 29–31, 32, 77, 104, 109, 123, 186–188, 191–192, 193, 202, 205, 207, 231n31, 243; L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation), 25, 29, 53–54, 83–84, 85, 89, 104, 156, 176n194, 188; L’Espace littéraire (The Space of Literature), 10, 33, 44, 51, 52, 125, 136–138, 147, 189; Faux Pas (Faux Pas), 44, 94; La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day), 46, 132, 170n86, 212; the fragmentary, 29–31; “Les Intellectuels en question” (“Intellectuals under Scrutiny”) , 184, 190, 208, 210, 217–218; Lautréamont et Sade (Lautréamont and Sade), 215; Le Livre à venir (The Book to Come), 64n143, 93, 147; La Part du feu (The Work of Fire), 78–80; Le Pas au-delà (The Step Not Beyond), 4, 12n10, 32, 52, 82, 96, 205; politics, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 18–19, 34–35, 37–44, 46–52, 59n66, 59n69, 60n81, 61n92, 61n97, 62n102, 62n114, 65, 71, 90, 105, 122, 131, 132, 141, 169n74, 209–221, 223–229, 235n107, 235n108,

262

Index

239, 240, 244–245, 245; reaction to May 68, 4, 65, 110, 140–141, 149, 163, 180, 181, 219, 223–224, 245; relation to Bataille, 7, 10, 34, 37, 52, 60n76, 64n146, 65, 67, 71, 72–73, 74–75, 76, 77, 80–85, 86, 89–90, 98n24, 99n55, 104, 111–112, 117–120, 130–131, 144, 148, 157, 161, 176n194, 179, 225–227, 238n153; relation to Christianity, 6, 25, 32–33, 159, 161–163, 176n194, 188, 190, 204–205, 207, 208; relation to Hegel, 77, 79–80, 83–85, 128, 143, 208, 227–228, 234n91; relation to Heidegger, 5, 17, 37, 74–77, 138, 211–213, 217; relation to Judaism, 50–51, 132, 184, 190–191, 205–206; relation to Levinas, 7, 37–38, 51, 53–54, 81, 89, 142, 143, 229; relation to romanticism, 28–31, 34, 57n45; Thomas l’Obscur (Thomas the Obscure), 44, 196, 201, 214, 215; Le Très-Haut (The Most High), 37, 46, 101n74, 212, 228 Bosco, Henri, 94 Brasillach, Robert, 51, 212, 235n104 Breton, André, 66 Celan, Paul, 221 Char, René, 105, 112, 119, 220 Cixous, Hélène, 9, 146 Clastres, Pierre, 185–187, 190 Coulange, Alain, 35, 72, 112 Daniel-Rops (Henri Petiot), 38–41, 51, 60n80, 60n81, 61n92 Dandieu, Arnaud, 38, 61n84 Debray, Régis, 117 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 4, 7, 8, 25, 36, 51, 54, 67, 76, 84, 86, 103, 112–113, 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 148, 165, 169n74, 179, 182, 190, 196, 197, 200, 206, 207, 216, 229, 239, 244 Devisch, Ignaas, 7, 12n6 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 224 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 50–51 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 20, 51 Duras, Marguerite, 4, 8, 89, 122, 156–158, 176n186, 225, 243; La Maladie de la mort (The Malady of

Death), 10, 13n25, 34, 105, 116, 116–117, 119, 120, 121–122, 123–124, 125, 126–127, 131, 133, 137, 138, 140–155, 156, 157, 158–159, 162, 163–165, 177n205, 179, 183, 203–204, 205, 226 Eisenzweig, Uri, 132 Enriquez, Eugène, 124, 147, 169n72, 173n145 Esposito, Roberto, 2, 15 Esprit , 19–21, 22, 23, 23–24, 41, 51, 56n28, 61n94, 133, 163, 165 Eurydice, 10, 135, 136–139, 172n114, 172n117 ffrench, Patrick, 28, 57n42, 101n73 Fynsk, Christopher, 36 Gentile, Emilio, 234n103 Girard, Mathilde, 9, 59n69, 182, 218, 227 Handke, Peter, 146 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 27, 28, 30, 57n44, 69, 77, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 99n55, 100n65, 103, 105, 112–113, 128, 143, 183, 197, 208, 222, 227–228, 234n91 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 5, 7, 9, 17, 22, 28, 36, 37, 68, 69, 70, 74–79, 94, 104, 138, 183, 184, 193, 211–213, 217, 219, 221, 227, 239, 241, 243, 244 Hess, Deborah M., 235n108 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 17, 52, 64n141, 94, 137, 183, 189, 192, 216, 227, 239 James, Henry, 64n143, 122 James, Ian, 7 John of the Cross, Saint, 160–161 Kafka, Franz, 27, 63n135, 79, 89, 122, 192, 207 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 26, 27, 65, 93, 94, 239 Klossowski, Pierre, 41, 66, 108, 188 Kofman, Sarah, 124, 126–127, 133–135, 170n75, 170n80, 171n111, 191 Kojève, Alexandre, 36, 83, 86, 228

Index Kozovoi, Vadim, 118, 123, 124, 169n69, 169n74, 172n114 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 4, 6, 8, 23, 26, 28–31, 32, 34, 36–37, 37–38, 59n70, 66, 71, 103, 111, 149, 182, 183–184, 190, 191–192, 202, 213, 215, 230n10, 236n119, 240 Laporte, Roger, 6, 33, 38, 186, 208, 213–215, 216, 226, 235n104, 235n108, 236n111, 244 Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), 215 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 37, 38, 51, 53–54, 76, 77, 79, 81, 89, 99n55, 121, 133, 142, 143, 179, 182, 192, 205, 217, 229 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 94, 182 Lévy, Paul, 42–44, 61n97 Londyn, Evelyne, 46, 62n114 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 60n80, 213, 235n106 Luther, Martin, 207, 224, 234n88 Lyotard, Jean-François, 36, 59n69, 208 Madaule, Pierre, 124, 169n74 de Maistre, Joseph, 72 Malraux, André, 48, 63n133, 122 Mandel, Georges, 42, 61n97 Mann, Thomas, 122, 181, 230n10 Marx, Karl, 17, 69, 72, 221 marxism, 19, 21, 36, 39, 152 Mascolo, Dionys, 122, 123, 140, 141, 169n69, 215, 223, 225 Maulnier, Thierry, 61n94 Maurras, Charles, 213, 235n107 Maxence, Jean-Pierre, 19, 71 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 9, 213, 215, 234n103 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 21, 27 Mitterrand, François, 35, 59n69, 141 Mole, Gary D., 50 Mounier, Emmanuel, 20, 21–22, 25, 41, 51, 68 Nancy, Jean-Luc,: (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) L’Absolu littéraire (The Literary Absolute), 28–29, 71, 103; Catholicism, 6, 19, 22–24, 25, 32–33, 111, 129, 189, 241–242; Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le

263 politique (Centre for Philosophical Research into the Political), 36–37; La Communauté affrontée (The Confronted Community), 6, 8, 18, 107, 107–108, 109, 111, 113, 115–116, 116–117, 120–121; La Communauté désavouée (The Disavowed Community), 8, 9, 100n59, 102n107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 118–119, 125, 125–126, 127–134, 140–142, 147–155, 159–165, 166, 167n27, 170n80, 170n91, 171n109, 174n146, 175n166, 176n189, 177n205, 179, 180–182, 203–205, 207, 208, 210, 214, 215–220, 224–227, 229, 231n18, 234n91, 238n152, 238n158, 239; “La Communauté désœuvrée” (article), 2, 6, 15, 52, 68–71, 71–77, 80–81, 83, 84, 85–86, 100n65, 109, 111, 114, 117, 118, 124, 149, 179, 221, 223; La Communauté désœuvrée (book) (The Inoperative Community), 2–4, 4, 5–7, 24, 90–96, 181–182, 186; Corpus (Corpus), 103, 193–195; La Déclosion (Dis-Enclosure), 6; the deconstruction of Christianity, 6, 180, 188–190, 194–201; Le Discours de la syncope (Discourse of the Syncope), 26–27, 103; early career, 22–25, 38; Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural), 78–80, 103; L’Expérience de la liberté (The Experience of Freedom), 166n3, 193; interviews, 96, 218, 226, 227; Maurice Blanchot: Passion politique , 8, 107, 186, 214; May 68, 65, 85, 102n87, 110, 219–221, 224; Les Muses (The Muses), 103, 105; (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Le Mythe nazi (The Nazi Myth), 183–184, 190, 231n18, 231n21; myth, 3, 10, 90–96, 105–106, 131, 133–134, 179–188, 199; (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), “Noli me frangere”, 29–33, 193, 202, 207; Noli me tangere (Noli Me Tangere), 196–202, 203; La Pensée dérobée , 103, 106, 181; Une pensée finie (A Finite Thinking), 97n2, 103–104, 105, 166n3; politics, 5, 10, 11, 35–37, 131–132,

264

Index

210, 217–221, 239–245; (with Mathilde Girard) Proprement dit: entretien sur le mythe , 182; Que faire? (What Is To Be Done?), 97n2, 221, 239–243; relation to Bataille, 10, 27, 65, 68–70, 80–81, 83, 84, 85–86, 87, 101n71, 103–104, 118, 121, 127, 128, 130–131, 186; relation to Hegel, 57n44, 128; relation to Heidegger, 5, 7, 9, 17, 68, 69, 70, 74–76, 78, 193, 219, 221, 239, 241, 243; Le Sens du monde (The Sense of the World), 103, 109, 114, 166n1, 166n3, 221, 243; Sexistence, 5; Vérité de la démocratie (The Truth of Democracy), 219–221, 221–223, 224; Visitation (de la peinture chrétienne) (The Ground of the Image), 103, 180 Narcissus, 191–192, 206 New Testament, 32, 193, 199–201, 207; Book of Revelation, 4, 158–159, 165, 205, 241; Gospel of John, 32, 158, 165, 176n194, 196, 200–201, 203, 206; Gospel of Luke, 180, 202–203, 204 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 66, 67, 91, 94, 97n8, 109, 188, 193, 205, 220, 233n82

Orpheus, 10, 135–139, 172n117, 191, 206

Old Testament, 190–191, 205–206, 206, 207, 208 Opelz, Hannes, 32

Tönnies, Ferdinand, 15–16, 17, 69, 107

Pasternak, Boris, 124, 135, 139, 172n114 Pétain, Philippe, 18–19, 43, 49, 213 Plato, 126–127, 134–135, 136, 147, 180, 184, 193–194, 231n21 Proust, Marcel, 9, 64n143, 147, 182 Ricœur, Paul, 21, 23 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 124, 138, 139, 172n114, 172n117, 216 Rosenberg, Alfred, 184 Rosenzweig, Franz, 132 de Rougemont, Denis, 41, 61n92, 235n107 Said, Edward, 148 Schelling, F. W. J., 28, 90–91, 92, 94, 131, 182, 183, 199, 233n69 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 28, 191–192 Schlegel, Friedrich, 27, 28, 30, 69, 92, 94 Schmitt, Carl, 183 Sternhell, Zeev, 42, 234n103 Surya, Michel, 9, 99n55, 210–213, 213, 214, 216, 217, 225, 236n111, 238n153

Wilhem, Daniel, 44, 62n108, 176n193 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 108