“What Is Missing: The Poem of Our Being-Together”

The Inoperative Community, published in an intellectual climate nourished by the teachings of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, contains all the major themes that have animated recent continental philosophy: the end of traditional metaphysics; the decentralization of subjectivity (the cogito); the change of language seen as a repository which is always in “excess of”; and, above all, the conception of human existence understood—according to Heidegger’s view—as Dasein and Mitdasein. Moreover, the political context within which Nancy’s work is set fraught with profound changes on a global scale: the progressive fall of official communism, the Cold War, the rise of neoliberalism. Against the latter view, Nancy’s book has acquired its distinctive, and even provocative, outlines—outlines manifested already in its title: The Inoperative Community, precisely. Following the path laid down by Heidegger and the post-structuralist philosophers, the study thus reaffirms the priority of politics over economics, namely, the primacy of the public place seen as an arena of democratic interactions. With this in mind, the French philosopher enucleates an entirely new notion of “community”: as we are about to see, it is a substance-less community and, in this sense, “inoperative” or “nonoperative,” thus it is beyond any instrumental control or purpose.