Community in work. Jean-Luc Nancy in dialogue with Maurice Blanchot: An unspoken desagreement

Abstract

From the nancyan notion of community as being-in-common, whose formation can not be determinate or realized neither from an essence nor as an origin, destiny or project, but as the simple being together of singularities, beyond their foundation, legitimation or desire of system, the text approaches to a certain notion of communication as other discourse praxis. There, in the notion of literature as inoperability, would be an unspoken disagree between Nancy and Blanchot that founds his place in the different conceptions of literature and language. Even when both authors get close to a differential or deconstructive theory of language, and had never criticized each other explicitly, the unspoken disagree reaches the question of the relation between literature and ontology. The text ventures that while Nancy’s ontological poetics is inspired by Heidegger, the literary language in Blanchot is a mallarméan one. This difference points out the fact that the ontological plane in which Nancy conceives the community, as being singular plural, as inoperability that resists to be work, is not just a matter of literary language but of existence as a silent whisper of things themselves, while the poetic status from which Blanchot understands the notion of inoperability, as that suspension that’s not separable from work, as the unavowable movement that occurs in and as a literary work, suppose at the same time, then, certain working.