Senses of Relation: ‘Literary Communism’, Democracy, and the Common

Jean-Luc Nancy wrote what is probably still his most well-known book, The Inoperative Community [La communaut e d esœuvr ee], over thirty years ago. It has not only been widely read and translated since its publication in 1986 but has prompted many other philosophers to contend with the ontological and political dimensions of community, notably Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe. From the mid 1980s onward, Nancy’s sustained deconstruction of community converged with postcolonial critiques of ethnonational identity and the state, as well as rearticulations of democracy no longer based on a politics of representation determined by fixed relations of common belonging and ownership. Furthermore, it resonates with an array of contemporary writing on assembly, queer antisociality, diaspora, blackness, and the commons, all of which interrogate the appropriative and possessive structures of relationality at the source of modern subjectivity. If this nexus of thought explores another way of being in relation with the other, then Nancy reminds us that those senses of being-in-common are already shared out in the ordinariness of everyday existence here and now.