The Unavowable Community is an inquiry into the nature and possibility of community, asking whether there can be a community of individuals that is truly "communal." The problem, for Blanchot, is that the very terms of an ideal community make an "avowal" of membership in it a violation of the terms themselves. This meditation ranges from the problematic effects of a defect in language to actual historical experiments in community. The latter involves the life and work of George Bataille whose concerns (e.g. "the negative community") occupy the foreground of Blanchot's discussion. Taking as his point of departure an essay by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Blanchot appears once again as one of the most attentive readers of what is truly challenging in French thought. His deep interest in the fiction of Marguerite Duras extends this inquiry to include "The Community of Lovers," emerging from certain themes in Duras' recit, The Malady of Death. As Blanchot's first direct treatment of a subject that has long figured in or behind his work, this small but highly concentrated book stands as an important addition to his own contribution to literary, philosophical, social, and political thought, figuring as it does at the center of the emerging concern for a redefinition of politics and community. Readers of Blanchot know not to expect answers to the great questions that move his thought - rather, to live with the questions at the new level to which they have been raised in his discourse.

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly’s initial proposal to think community in terms of “number” or the “numerous,” and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking, from Bataille’s “community of lovers” to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.

A collection of five essays of French philosopher Nancy, originally published in 1985-86: The Inoperative Community, Myth Interpreted, Literary Communism, Shattered Love, and Of Divine Places. A paper edition (1924-7) is available for $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka. The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.

In this book Aaron Hillyer considers the implications of Maurice Blanchot's strange formulation: "Literature is heading to its essence, which is its disappearance." This quest leads Hillyer to stage a dialogue between the works of Blanchot and Giorgio Agamben. Despite being primary points of reference for literary theory, no significant critical work has examined their "literary" writings together. The Disappearance of Literature initiates this new trajectory through readings of Blanchot's The Unavowable Community and Agamben's The Open, two short books that harbor their most enigmatic writings. A series of related concepts-study, community, mysticism, and friendship-emerges from this pairing, and, Hillyer argues, forms the basis of a new vein of contemporary literature found in the novels and hybrid fictions of Enrique Vila-Matas, Anne Carson, and Cesar Aira.

Unquestionably an influential thinker in Italy today, Giorgio Agamben has contributed to some of the most vital philosophical debates of our time. "The Coming Community" is an indispensable addition to the body of his work. How can we conceive a human community that lays no claim to identity - being American, being Muslim, being communist? How can a community be formed of singularities that refuse any criteria of belonging? Agamben draws on an eclectic and exciting set of sources to explore the status of human subjectivities outside of general identity. From St Thomas' analysis of halos to a stocking commercial shown in French cinemas, and from the Talmud's warning about entering paradise to the power of the multitude in Tiananmen Square, Agamben tracks down the singular subjectivity that is coming in the contemporary world and shaping the world to come. Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. "The Coming Community" offers both a philosophical mediation and the beginnings of a new foundation for ethics, one grounded beyond subjectivity, ideology, and the concepts of good and evil. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary and creative response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures. This volume is the first in a new series that encourages transdisciplinary exploration and destabilizes traditional boundaries between disciplines, nations, genders, races, humans, and machines. Giorgio Agamben currently teaches philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata (Italy). He is the author of "Language and Death" (Minnesota, 1991) and "Stanzas" (Minnesota, 1992). This book is intended for those in the fields of cultural theory, literary theory, philosophy.

Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.