Philosophy distinguishes itself by the unique way it profits from death . . . -Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence Robert Bernasconi once said in a conversation that Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community lacks an adequate, historical account of the concepts of community that he addresses. Robert pointed out that the lineage in which Nancy thinks has made the valuable contribution in contemporary philosophy of insisting that we situate our thought by careful work in the texts that have helped to form the problems and concepts-that we use, modify, define, or take apart. Nancy, he said, presents too little of this historical homework, and that omission leaves his writings often a little thin and rather more like occasional aesthetic reflections of fairly abstract ideas. When such a light approach has to do with weighty matters like human connections and their implications for people's suffering and well being, it this manner of lightness-approaches perversity in addition to irrelevance in its lack of direct, historically grounded, and engaged concreteness. At the very least Nancy might have provided a careful genealogy of the formation of the concept of human community in whose exhaustion he thinks. In contrast to Robert-perhaps-I am more worried about the pathogenic force in most forms of weighty seriousness than I am about aesthetic approaches to political and social issues, although I agree that most of what we philosophers do in ethics and social and political philosophy does not have much practical effect in the halls and councils of governmental power. When we think we generally have more effect on the slow transformation of concepts and conceptual movements than on current policy formations and political practice. And usually concepts and conceptual movements invoke certain aesthetic things like vague, prereflective images and metaphors, associations of certain values, and a range of perception and forceful feelings. If, for example, people like best and most value weighty methodical studies, well stitched and comprehensive systems of thought, and thorough presentations of historical engagements with the problems and questions at hand, Nancy's works will indeed seem occasional and limited in their rigor-they will seem like moments of interesting, if dense, insight but not like major works. They will feel light in their density, too light to be philosophically weighty. But if lightness is valued and if weighty seriousness is an object of suspicion, Nancy's essays will seem all the more valuable because of their occasional manner. A person will then feel differently about their limited range and will appreciate in them a different rigor from that of monumental works, a discipline of constraint that is presented in his style and in what happens in his thought to the affect, imagery, and content of many of the most powerful concepts and meanings in our tradition. In this instance, with immersion in his work, people will find themselves able to perceive Nancy's lineage and their own loyalties differently in comparison to the way they perceived them before their engagement with him. His kind of density and lightness changes the entire atmosphere of thought when compared, for example, to that of Heidegger or Hegel. In Nancy's thought manners of affirmation and feeling change-there is, for example, no predisposition in Nancy's work toward heroes or toward nationalistic or religious mythology. He has learned how to think without the force of the values of ontological reconciliation, immanent universals, or defining grounds, and he has learned this with unusual and persistent discipline, enough discipline to make people uncomfortable when they find or at least sense that they are far more controlled than they thought they were by such meanings as those of reconciliation, immanent universals, and defining grounds. His thought spawns different hopes from those in many other thinkers. Hopes, for example, bred of historical or national teleologies do not arise in his thought. …