THE DISIDENTIFIED COMMUNITY

Abstract

In The Disavowed Community, Jean-Luc Nancy presents a critique of his seminal 1983 essay “The Inoperative Community.” According to Nancy, his error in attempting to derive a politics from Maurice Blanchot’s concept of unworking (désoeuvrement) lay in conflating politics and ontology. This paper suggests that Nancy’s self-critique is only partially correct. The problem ultimately resides in the theory of unworking itself, I argue, not its misapplication. In pursuing this contention, I trace out the tacit response to the exchange between Nancy and Blanchot developed in Jacques Rancière’s early writings on aesthetics. Rancière’s turn to aesthetics is best understood, I propose, as an intended corrective to Blanchot’s influence on post-Marxist theory. Focusing on Rancière’s critiques of Blanchot in Mallarmé: Politics of the Siren and Mute Speech, I show how Rancière’s rival account of modern art answers the question of non-identitarian left politics that Nancy posed in “The Inoperative Community.”

Keywords:

• Jacques Rancière
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• politics
• inoperative community
• post-Marxism

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 By acknowledging the difficulty of relating his theory of politics to any actual political program, Nancy echoes the observation voiced over the years by many readers, including those sympathetic to Nancy’s approach. See, for example, Christopher Fysnk, Stella Gaon, Oliver Marchart, and Andrew Norris. Wherever possible, I quote from existing translations, modifying as necessary; all other translations are my own.

2 In “La Communauté affrontée,” Nancy lists, in addition, the names of: Rancière, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Federico Ferrari, and Roberto Esposito (37 n. 1). This note is omitted from the English translation of the text, “The Confronted Community.” A precursor to The Disavowed Community, “La Communauté affrontée” was commissioned to preface the Italian edition of Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable. The essay’s publication in French is dedicated to Blanchot.

3 Nancy Fraser pursues these questions in her skeptical account of the “The Ends of Man” conference and events at the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political (“The French Derrideans”).

4 Rancière’s presentation at the Center, given on 15 February 1982, was titled “The Representation of the Worker, or the Impossible Class” (La Représentation de l’ouvrier ou la classe impossible) and proposed to explore the question, “How can a certain social bond be represented in the political order?” (90).

5 The paper was first given at a colloquium in New York titled “Questioning Identity.” I translate from the revised French version of the text since it is clearer than the original which was delivered, as Rancière himself puts it, in “a dialect between French and English” (“Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization” 58). All italicized text in this and subsequent quotations follows the original, unless stated otherwise.

6 In venturing this claim, I mean to push back against Martin McQuillan’s condescending remarks in Derrida without Deconstruction, which include the charge that Rancière “is reluctant to read (all Rancière’s issues stem from this)” (152). Rancière’s relation to Derrida is in fact quite a complex and intriguing matter. Rancière himself prefaces his contribution to a collected volume in memory of Derrida with the proviso: “I was never a disciple of Derrida or a specialist on his thought” (“Does Democracy Mean Something?” 84). Yet, Rancière’s turn to aesthetics was quite clearly guided by a defining encounter with Derrida’s Dissemination; Mallarmé: Politics of the Siren references “The Double Session” and Mute Speech “Plato’s Pharmacy.”

7 As a figure of the two versions of the end or final Aufhebung of man, Derrida refers to “the eve of the last separation, of the Great Noontime” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (“The Ends of Man” 135), on which Nietzsche marks at once the distinction and inseparability of the humanist higher man (höherer Mensch) and the anti-humanist overman (Übermensch).

8 Lacoue-Labarthe develops these ideas more fully towards the end of his paper (see “‘Political’ Seminar” 98).

9 At their opening address at the Center in 1980, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy already identify Heidegger and Bataille as two key references, along with Freud.

10 A subtle inconsistency in “The Inoperative Community” testifies to this virtual interchangeability: Nancy credits Blanchot with the term in the body of the essay and Bataille with it in the footnotes.

11 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s reworking of Blanchot’s comments on the fragment is more complex than I am able to fully acknowledge here. The crux of the difference between them can be glimpsed in the way they read Schlegel’s famous description of the fragment as “like a small work of art [ … ] entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog.” Whereas Blanchot dismisses this passage as simply a regressive moment, emblematic of the contradictions of Romanticism, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see it as an important indication of the dialectical relationship between the absolute and the fragmentary. In his translator’s introduction to The Disavowed Community, Philip Armstrong offers an illuminating survey of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s engagement with Blanchot over the course of their career (xxiii–xxvi).

12 “Literature and the Right to Death” merges two existing essays; the parts I emphasize here come from “The Animal Spiritual Kingdom” (Le Règne animal de l’esprit). First published in 1947 – the same year that Sartre’s What is Literature? appeared – the essay is titled after a section towards the conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I am indebted to Leslie Hill’s genealogical account of the concept of unworking in Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (103–20).

13 Nancy alerts us to this history when he writes in a footnote: “there are two ways of escaping the dialectic (that is to say mediation in a totality) – either by slipping away from it into immanence or by opening up its negativity to the point of rendering it ‘unworked’ (désoeuvré), as Bataille puts it” (“The Inoperative Community” 6 n. 4).

14 Blanchot discusses Acéphale briefly in The Unavowable Community (29).

15 Rancière is quoting from Sartre’s Mallarmé or The Poet of Nothingness.

16 In her otherwise excellent essay on Rancière and poetry, Alison James discusses this claim with reference only to Rancière’s historicization of Mallarmé and therefore does not quite, I think, get to the heart of the matter (James 168–69, 176–77).

17 In his discussion of schizophrenia and Woolf’s The Waves at the conclusion of the essay, however, Rancière distances himself sharply from Deleuze and Guattari (“Why did Emma Bovary Have to be Killed?” 247–48).

18 In Mute Speech, Rancière indicates that he was paraphrasing a passage from The Temptation of Saint Anthony: “clusters of atoms that merge with one another, come apart, and reunite in a perpetual vibration” (117).