The Inoperative Community [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This book has been very influential in France. If you don't take your philophy neat, of if you are new to Nancy's thought, then I recommend starting with Maurice Blanchot's _The Unavowable Community_, which relates Nancy's concept of finitude to the work and life of Georges Bataille. Blanchot shows why, in the face of the various totalitarianisms of the 20th century, we should care about Nancy's work.

Nancy has written on topics as diverse as poetry/aesthetics, history of (the closure) of metaphysics/philosophy, freedom, and what he has called "the deconstruction of Christianity," after first writing books on the Jena (romantic) group and one of Jacques Lacan's essays "The title of the letter." I see his writing as less labyrinthine than other French thinkers; in this book, perhaps, he helps us understand WHY it is a maze (why reading/thinking has to do with the deferral of meaning, the suspension of ____, rather than with "the communication of meaning"). The shortest essay in this collection, "Literary Communism," is a great example of this and is a great entry way into the rest of the book.

Nancy's thinking process approaches the straightforward. His "propositions" do not ask you to blankly accept them, but rather invite you to think with them, and the prose takes us through his movements. Often, he will turn a phrase in six or seven directions to get the reader focused on different implications, different avenues, to consider meaning alongside with nonmeaning and negation (see page 89 per the phrase: "Love is the extreme movement, beyond the self, of a being reaching completion"). And yet, Nancy is never for ambiguity and is never without proposition: when we stick with his ideas we see the reason for all these twists and turns. The ("argumentative") FOCUS of each chapter leads each to the next as much as they stand wholly on their own (though perhaps they cannot 'live' without each other-- Nancy's texts are always retracing themselves).

Nancy is reading a HUGE tradition and weaving them together in a way that gives us a window into a way of thinking through this tradition. I would characterize Nancy's whole work as a type of READING: he tries to let thinkers speak where they could not, to say what they were ("structurally") unable (including himself as time goes on, I think). He seems to let no thinking of the past go away, accepting all of it as there because it is to contribute. Derrida describes him quite adequately (and with all the philosophical implications for the tradition): PUNCTUAL. One gets the feeling that these essays were for the man Jean-Luc quite essential to his being-here with us-- But also that he has written, perhaps more than any other thinker, for US, that the whole past of philosophy (or at least of the more modern French writers) could not do without.

He will be the first to tell you in this book that "community" can only mean the continued articulation of a meaning that is constitutively deferred; again, this emphasizes the space of writing. This means: space for dialog and breathing. Nancy and Blanchot are exemplary as far as constituting this "conversation" in their texts (as when N writes: "Here, I must interrupt myself: it is up to you to allow to be said what no one, no subject, can say, and what exposes us in common.")

The philosophy presented in this book keys around a focal point in all of Nancy's thinking: that there is no longer a common-being (or communion), and that there is only being-in-common (the inoperative community). This is a discussion that leads him through Bataille's thinking on community, the impossibility of "communalism" (ch 1), the suspension of the communal myth and its relation to literature, etc (ch 2), and the type of (inoperative writing) community Nancy sees as the space of sharing this being-in-common (this sharing of the impossibility of a common-being, as my-self or as my-group): a "literary communism" (ch 3).

This lays the foundation for his reflection on the relationship between philosophy and love (ch 4) and question of "God" (ch 5), the two most astounding pieces, both from a philosophical and literary standpoint, I think. Coming long before his deconstruction of Christianity and (perhaps his most astonishing work) CORPUS, these last two especially seem to "tremble" with the question of love/God (i.e. the possibility, meaning of community-- this is a "political" philosophy). He has said himself this text is too mystical for his tastes, but that it was suppose to be an experiment in philosophy. Elsewhere he talks about ch 4 as an "ancient text" of his. I find all these even greater reasons to recommend this early work (along with The Literary Absolute) as a foundation for lots of other thinking, as I can attest it has been for me. Certainly, at least, they contribute immensely to his "tone"-- also an important concept in Nancy's thinking about the history/voicings of philosophical thinking.

I wanted to write this view to respond to the reviewer who said this book was "utter non-sense," not to challenge that claim or that experience of theirs, but rather to draw attention to it and emphasize that THAT IS the sense of it: to emphasize along with Nancy that SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED when it comes to signification and sense. (See his "The Forgetting of Philosophy" for this topic directly). I think his whole work is addressed to this break (I would suggest Holderlin's uniqueness for the modern world when it comes to this break). This is a book that teaches you how to read philosophy and will always help you read it. I am convinced that (following Bataille) Nancy writes for a readership ready to enter greater philosophical texts-- or those who aren't: he writes to be read, to give room for our own speech, and then to be read again.

He writes so that we might be exposed there to ourselves-- and there are no rules for how we follow after it. I hope that my terrible summary of the philosophy in "The Inoperative Community" has only encouraged you to check it out; if it hasn't, please give it a chance and let it speak (GROW) for itself.

Contrary to the previous reviewer, this collection of essays is well worth reading. Of course one can disagree with points made here or there, but if you take the time to actually read the thing I don't see how one can leave the book without having experienced a huge degree of mental stimulation. Yes, it's written in a meandering style, but following the thoughts is the whole point. So--if you like thinking, that is--I say this book is of 4-star calliber!