THE ETHICS OF COMMUNITY nancy, blanchot, esposito

Abstract

This paper analyzes the varying conceptions of ethics underpinning the accounts of community in Blanchot, Nancy, and Esposito. A focus on ethics brings into relief points of divergence amongst accounts of community that otherwise overlap and share in many significant ways. Furthermore, it provides a basis to better assess Esposito's contribution. I focus on the concepts of difference and transcendence and the figure of the lovers, a shared topos in Nancy and Blanchot, to demonstrate these subtle variations. In turning to Esposito, Kantian-inflected notions of duty, obligation, and law shape a community where others recede into the background and the lovers lose their visibility. I suggest that Esposito's focus on duty has consequences that give cause for further reflection. The law renders each of us other, but in its universality it risks losing a sense of the exceptional. Relying etymologically on the notion of duty as that which, following his reading of Kant, undermines the subject and renders possible the impossible community, grounds the Communitas in a law that risks congealing the meaning of community around this impossible obligation.

• Blanchot
• community
• Esposito
• ethics
• Nancy

Notes

I am indebted to Greg Bird, Jonathan Short, Anne O'Byrne, Dijana Jelaca, and David J. Madden for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

1 Although Esposito himself does not conceive of his work as political philosophy, it is undoubtedly a philosophy that is deeply engaged with how the political is thought, be it in terms of an affirmative biopolitics or his concept of the impolitical as a response to militant politics in practice and theory. See, for example, Esposito, “Totalitarianism or Biopolitics?”

2 For examples of this tendency see Barkan; Bosteels; Campbell, “Bios, Immunity, Life” and “‘Enough of a Self’”; Campbell and Luisetti; Deutscher; Levinson; Minervini; Neyrat; Oliva. Note that the lack of historical engagement with the idea of community is a fault that Bernasconi finds with Nancy's writing on community, namely that it doesn't offer an “historical account of the metaphysical conception of the community that would necessarily underlie any such deconstruction” (15). Esposito's text can be credited with attempting to provide such an historical account.

3 See, for example, Elliott; Norris. See James, The Fragmentary Demand for a nuanced discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the political in Nancy.

4 See again both Elliott and Norris for very recent examples of this tendency.

5 See Gaon who also works in this direction.

6 For other accounts of ethics in Blanchot and Nancy's writing on community see Bernasconi; Gaon. See Ingram for further comparison.

7 See Bird on how Blanchot and Nancy variously approach the problem of immanentism.

8 See Duras.

9 See Levinas, Totality and Infinity.

10 See, for example, Blanchot's The Instant of my Death; The Space of Literature; The Writing of the Disaster.

11 On the Saying/Said see also Levinas, “Language and Proximity.”

12 See also O'Byrne, “The Politics of Intrusion” and Natality and Finitude on Nancy and the body, intrusion, and natality.

13 Although Nancy states in a footnote that this is an allusion to Lacan, the comment applies equally to Levinas in the context of his argument. See Raffoul on Nancy's critique of the Other in Lacan and Levinas.

14 Nancy's concept of “transimmanence” addresses this problematic between transcendence and immanence.

15 See Nancy, The Sense of the World and “The Insufficiency of ‘Values’ and the Necessity of ‘Sense.’” See also O'Byrne, Natality and Finitude.

16 See also James, “On Interrupted Myth.”

17 Compear is Nancy's term for the sharing present at the origin of each person. Rather than appearing, we co-appear or compear; the origin is always multiple. See also “La Comparution/The Compearance.”

18 See “Touching” in The Sense of the World.

19 See Bosteels; Esposito, “Totalitarianism or Biopolitics?”

20 The most relevant texts here are Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason; and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

21 See Bird, this issue, for a discussion of condivisione in Esposito's writing.

22 See also O'Byrne, this issue. The lack of a sustained engagement with sexual difference in Communitas is closely linked to the disappearance of the lovers.

23 See Esposito, “For a Philosophy of the Impersonal.”