Naming the Nothing: Nancy and Blanchot on Community

Abstract

This article examines the exchange between Jean‐Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot around the question of community. It argues that Nancy from the early 1980s onwards offers an understanding of community as an exposure to, or of, a nothing or empty space. This nothing or empty space can be understood as the space left vacant by the withdrawal of any transcendent principle which would underpin or guarantee various forms of political organization or historical becoming. Whether it be the absence of any divine principle which would legitimate monarchical or imperial authority, or the absence of any essence or goal for the human in history (e.g. the bonds of national community or communism), the ‘nothing’ of community is exposed in the wake of the withdrawal or retreat of political transcendence. Blanchot’s response to Nancy’s essay ‘La Communauté désœuvrée’, entitled La Communauté inavouable is critical of Nancy’s thinking on this subject but, this article argues, he is critical only insofar as he shares with Nancy the problem of thinking, naming, or exposing the ‘nothing’ of community. The difference of these two key French thinkers about this question reminds us that ethical and political stakes of thinking community in the absence of metaphysical ground are always a matter of thinking community as absence. It also remind us that this thinking of community occurs in the experience of the ‘community of writing.’