Immanent authority and the making of community: a response

Abstract

The attempt to think community today is necessarily marked by the legacy of communal belonging understood as a sharing of identity and the mobilization of totalizing figures, a legacy which, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is irrevocably tainted by the experience of German National Socialist community. Nancy’s analysis of the ‘nothing’ or absent essence of community understood ontologically as ‘being-with’ poses the challenge of how we may come to think and produce community outside of any totalizing logic of shared identity and in the absence of transcendent figures of authority. Elaborating further on Nancy’s thinking of eco-technicity, this response argues that the key problem facing the Immanent Authority project is that of the techniques or modes by which the ‘nothing’ of community may be realized.

Keywords:

• absence
• being-with
• singularity
• plurality
• technicity

Notes

1. This is the title of the symposium from which this special edition emerged – Immanent Authority and the Making of Community, June 2011, IAS University of Bristol, supported by the IAS Bristol, the University of Warwick and the AHRC as a part of the Connected Communities scheme.

2. The collaborative work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe offers a sustained analysis of this legacy of community. See for example, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1981; 1983, 1991). Nancy’s key work on this subject, La Communauté désœuvrée (1990) contains a sustained critique of the Nazi state as a project of totalizing identitarian community.

3. For extended discussions of this conception of community as an absent essence, the sharing of non-identity, or as the exposure to a void or absent space see Ian James 2005 (pp. 331–349), 2006 (pp. 152–201) and 2010 (pp. 171–187)

4. Nancy’s reworking of ontology as an ontology of excess in a trajectory of thought that builds on the legacy of French thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida is the persistent task of all his thinking from the 1980s to the present day. See in particular Nancy1988, 1990, 1993 and 1996.