The Inoperative Community

1. Introduction

The Inoperative Community (La communauté désoeuvrée) is a short but influential work in which Jean‑Luc Nancy rethinks what “community” can mean after the collapse of traditional models based on religion, nation, or revolutionary destiny. Written in the early 1980s and later expanded into a book, it intervenes in debates about the failures of the twentieth century’s totalitarian projects and about the apparent disintegration of shared social bonds in late modernity.

Nancy proposes that community is not a substance, a People, or a collective subject that might be produced or recovered. Instead, he treats it as a way of naming how existence is always already shared. Community, on this view, is not a task to be realized but an ontological condition that precedes and exceeds all institutional, national, or religious forms. The term “inoperative” (désoeuvrée) signals that community is not a work (oeuvre): it cannot be completed, managed, or stabilized without betraying its fundamentally open, plural character.

The book draws on and criticizes earlier philosophical, literary, and political attempts to define community—particularly those that seek fusion, sacred communion, or a homogeneous identity. Nancy’s alternative emphasizes singularities, exposure, and finitude: each being is irreducibly distinct yet exists only in relation to others, exposed to them and to its own mortality. What is “in common” is not a shared essence but the very sharing of this finite existence.

Because of this, The Inoperative Community has been read both as an ontological treatise on being‑with and as a political intervention, suggesting new ways to conceive democracy, equality, and coexistence without recourse to organic unity or mythical collective subjects. The work has subsequently become a reference point in discussions of post‑foundational political theory, deconstruction, and contemporary re‑evaluations of community.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

Nancy’s text emerges from, and responds to, multiple overlapping contexts in late twentieth‑century European thought and politics.

Post‑1968 France and the Crisis of Revolution

The book is shaped by the aftermath of May 1968 and the broader disillusionment with revolutionary politics:

Many commentators see Nancy’s emphasis on plurality and non‑closure as part of a wider response to the perceived failures of grand, unified political projects in the twentieth century.

Post‑Heideggerian and Post‑Structuralist Milieu

Philosophically, the work belongs to the post‑Heideggerian, deconstructive current in French thought. Nancy was closely associated with Jacques Derrida and others concerned with:

• Reinterpreting Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein (being‑with)
• Questioning metaphysical ideas of substance, essence, and presence
• Deconstructing the political significance of myths, sovereignty, and the subject

Within this milieu, The Inoperative Community is often grouped with discussions of the “end of the subject” and the “end of metaphysics,” extending them to the question of communal being.

Dialogue with Bataille, Blanchot, and Political Theology

At the same time, Nancy takes up threads from Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot concerning sacrifice, communication, and unavowable forms of togetherness. He also participates indirectly in debates on political theology, where notions of the People, sovereignty, and salvation are examined for their theological residues. Readers have situated the book alongside contemporary work by authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, who likewise reconsider community in the wake of biopolitics and the critique of sacrificial foundations.

3. Author and Composition of La communauté désoeuvrée

Jean‑Luc Nancy’s Position and Concerns

Jean‑Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher associated with the University of Strasbourg and with a loosely defined group sometimes referred to as “the Nancy–Lacroix circle.” His work spans ontology, art, politics, and religion. When writing La communauté désoeuvrée, Nancy had already developed an interest in being‑with, finitude, and the deconstruction of subjectivity, concerns that directly inform the composition of this text.

His engagement with Heidegger, Bataille, and Blanchot, as well as his collaborations and exchanges with Derrida, shaped his attempt to think community after the perceived breakdown of traditional metaphysical and political foundations.

Genesis of the Core Essay

The central text, “La communauté désoeuvrée,” was composed between roughly 1983 and 1985. Its immediate impetus included:

• Close readings of Bataille’s writings on inner experience, sacrifice, and community.
• An ongoing dialogue—implicit and explicit—with Blanchot’s reflections on unavowable community.
• A broader attempt to rethink political ontology in the wake of totalitarianism and the crisis of Marxism.

Nancy’s essay was initially written for a specific journal context (the review Aléa), prompting a relatively dense, condensed mode of argument. The piece weaves philosophical exposition with critical commentary on literary and political figures, rather than presenting a systematic treatise.

Development Beyond the Initial Essay

Following initial publication and the rapid emergence of responses—most notably Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable—Nancy revisited and expanded his reflections:

In this way, La communauté désoeuvrée is both a discrete essay and the kernel of a longer‑term project in Nancy’s work on community and political existence.

4. Publication History and Textual Structure

Publication Trajectory

The textual history of The Inoperative Community involves several stages:

The English volume follows the expanded French edition and has become the primary point of reference in Anglophone discussions.

Internal Structure of the Volume

Although the book is not organized as a single continuous treatise, it exhibits a recognizable structure around the problem of community:

The structure is cumulative rather than linear: later essays elaborate terms and respond to criticisms raised by early readers, while the title essay remains the central reference point.

5. Central Thesis: Community as Being‑in‑Common

Nancy’s central thesis is that community is not a thing that can be made, produced, or recovered, but the already‑given condition of being‑in‑common (être‑en‑commun). Rather than conceiving community as a collective subject (a People, a Nation, a Class) or as a shared substance (blood, spirit, faith), the book argues that existence itself is constitutively shared: to be is always to be‑with others.

From Substance to Relation

According to Nancy, many philosophical and political traditions treat community as an underlying immanent essence that unifies its members. He proposes instead that:

• There is no communal substance beneath or beyond singular beings.
• Community is the event or happening of coexistence: the way singular beings are exposed to each other.
• What is common is not a property, goal, or identity, but the sharing of existence itself.

In this sense, community precedes any constituted group or institution. Political, religious, and social formations are secondary articulations of a more fundamental co‑existential structure.

Being‑in‑Common as Ontological Condition

Nancy presents being‑in‑common as an ontological, not merely sociological, claim:

• Every singular being exists only in relation to others; there is no self‑enclosed individual prior to its relations.
• This relationality is irreducible: it cannot be totalized into a fusion, nor dissolved into isolated atoms.
• Community is thus the exposure of singularities to one another, including to their mutual finitude.

The thesis implies that projects aiming to “realize” community as a final, harmonious work misunderstand its nature. Community is always inoperative: it cannot coincide with any finished order or collective identity. For interpreters, this has suggested a reorientation of both ontology and politics: rather than searching for a lost or future communal essence, one must attend to how being‑in‑common is already at work in the plurality and openness of shared existence.

6. Key Concepts: Inoperativity, Singularity, Exposition

Nancy develops a distinctive vocabulary to articulate his thesis. Three concepts are especially central.

Inoperativity (désoeuvrement)

Inoperativity names the idea that community is not a work (oeuvre) that could be completed:

• Community cannot be “produced” like an artifact, institution, or unified subject.
• Attempts to realize community as a finished work—whether through national, religious, or revolutionary projects—tend, in Nancy’s account, toward exclusion or violence.
• Inoperativity indicates that community is an ongoing, unmasterable sharing that constantly interrupts such projects.

Some readers link this term to theological or messianic motifs (e.g., suspensions of work), while others stress its deconstructive role in undoing the figure of a self‑identical social body.

Singularity (singularité)

Singularity refers to each irreducible being:

• A singularity is not an atomistic individual; it has no self‑sufficient essence outside its relations.
• At the same time, singularities cannot be absorbed into a common substance or melted into a higher unity.
• Community, for Nancy, is the coexistence of singularities that remain exposed in their difference.

This notion allows him to affirm equality and co‑belonging without identity or sameness. Later commentators describe this configuration as a “democracy of singularities.”

Exposition (exposition)

Exposition designates the condition of being exposed:

• Singular beings are exposed to one another and to the world; they have no protective interiority that would shelter them from relation.
• This exposure includes vulnerability, dependence, and openness, but also the possibility of conflict and misunderstanding.
• Community is precisely this exposition of singularities, not their enclosure in a harmonious totality.

Exposition links Nancy’s ontology to themes of finitude and appearance: beings “exist” by being out‑in‑the‑open with others, not by retreating into an inner substance. The dynamic interplay of inoperativity, singularity, and exposition structures his redefinition of community throughout the book.

7. Critique of Organic and Totalizing Communities

A major strand of The Inoperative Community is its critique of models that conceive community as an organic whole or totalizing unity.

Organicism and the Social Body

Nancy examines metaphors of community as a living organism—a body with a spirit, heart, or will:

• Such metaphors posit a homogeneous interiority (the People, the Nation, the Church) to which individuals belong as organs or cells.
• The organic model often presupposes a telos or destiny that the community is meant to realize.
• Dissent or difference can then appear as pathology, to be healed, excluded, or sacrificed for the sake of the body’s health.

He associates these images with forms of immanentism, where the community is supposed to realize its own inherent essence or truth.

Totality, Myth, and the People

Nancy also interrogates political myths of a unified People:

• The “Myth of the People” figures the community as a self‑present, sovereign subject.
• This myth has, according to Nancy, underpinned both nationalist and revolutionary projects, including totalitarian regimes.
• In these cases, community is conceived as a work to be accomplished—through purification, revolution, or sacrifice—in order to make the People fully present.

Nancy argues that such totalizing images inevitably require exclusions (of foreigners, enemies, traitors) and may justify violence in the name of unity.

Inoperative Community as Counter‑Concept

Against organic and totalizing models, Nancy proposes an inoperative community where:

• There is no underlying social body or collective soul.
• Singularities are neither fused into a whole nor reduced to isolated atoms.
• Community is the open set of relations in which beings are exposed to one another without final synthesis.

Interpreters emphasize that this critique does not simply reject community in favor of individualism. Instead, it challenges a specific tradition of thinking community as a closed, self‑identical whole, suggesting that genuine being‑in‑common requires accepting incompletion, plurality, and non‑closure.

8. Death, Finitude, and the Sharing of Limits

For Nancy, death and finitude are not marginal themes but central to the structure of community.

Finitude as Shared Condition

Nancy maintains that what beings share most fundamentally is not a positive trait (language, blood, faith) but finitude:

• Every singular being is mortal, exposed to its own end.
• This mortality cannot be appropriated or fully experienced by another; each death is singular.
• Yet the very fact of mortality is shared: all beings exist under the condition of possible non‑existence.

Community thus arises as the sharing of this limit—the recognition that each singularity is finite and, in that finitude, related to others.

Death and the Impossibility of Fusion

Nancy contrasts this view with ideologies that found community on sacrifice or heroic death:

• In sacrificial logics, the community is supposedly affirmed or purified through the death of some of its members.
• Heroic or martyr narratives often depict death as the moment when the individual is absorbed into the communal essence (nation, cause, divinity).

Nancy’s analysis suggests that such appropriations of death attempt to deny its radically singular character. They transform death into a work of community, whereas for him death exposes the inoperativity of community: no community can fully appropriate or complete itself through death because each death remains irreducibly someone’s.

The Sharing of Limits

Community, then, is understood as the sharing of limits:

Some readers link this emphasis on finitude to existentialist and Heideggerian motifs, while others highlight its ethical implications: acknowledging that we share only our limits, not a substantive interior, may reorient how obligations, solidarities, and boundaries are conceived within communal life.

9. Engagements with Bataille, Blanchot, and Heidegger

Nancy’s argument is interwoven with sustained, though often implicit, dialogue with three major figures.

Georges Bataille

Nancy draws extensively on Georges Bataille, especially on themes of sacrifice, communication, and expenditure:

• Bataille explored forms of “community of those who have no community”, tied to experiences of excess, eroticism, and death.
• He associated community with moments of sovereign expenditure, often configured through sacrifice or transgression.

Nancy is sympathetic to Bataille’s attempt to think community beyond utility and production, yet he distances himself from sacrificial and ecstatic motifs. He reinterprets Bataille’s insights in terms of inoperativity: community is not realized in a privileged moment of fusion or sacred loss, but in the ongoing exposure of singularities.

Maurice Blanchot

Nancy’s essay prompted Maurice Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable (The Unavowable Community), to which Nancy later responds in “The Confronted Community”:

• Blanchot emphasizes a community of writing and friendship, one that cannot be officially declared or institutionalized (hence “unavowable”).
• He reads Bataille and May 1968 as indicating fragile, fragmentary forms of togetherness.

Nancy both converges with and diverges from Blanchot. Both reject substantial, organic communities; both foreground fragility and interruption. However, Nancy tends to insist more on ontological being‑in‑common, whereas Blanchot stresses the impossibility of naming community without betraying it. Commentators often treat the exchange between them as a key moment in late twentieth‑century reflections on community.

Martin Heidegger

Nancy’s ontology of being‑in‑common is deeply influenced by Martin Heidegger, particularly the concept of Mitsein (being‑with):

• Heidegger suggests that Dasein’s being is always a being‑with others.
• Nancy radicalizes this idea, claiming that being‑with is the very structure of being; there is no being that is not already in‑common.

At the same time, Nancy is attentive to Heidegger’s political entanglements and to possible nationalist or communitarian readings of his thought. He seeks to separate the ontological insight about being‑with from any project of a historical people (Volk) with a shared destiny. This critical retrieval of Heidegger helps Nancy articulate a non‑substantial, non‑destinal sense of community grounded in coexistence and finitude.

10. Philosophical Method and Style

Nancy’s method and style in The Inoperative Community differ from those of a systematic treatise.

Deconstructive Reading and Reconstruction

Nancy combines deconstructive readings of philosophical, literary, and political texts with a constructive re‑articulation of key concepts:

• He closely interprets passages from Bataille, Blanchot, Heidegger, and others, exposing tensions and unspoken assumptions about community.
• Rather than simply negating these traditions, he reinscribes their insights into a new conceptual framework (inoperativity, being‑in‑common).

This method reflects his proximity to Derridean deconstruction, though Nancy places stronger emphasis on ontological claims about being‑with.

Non‑Systematic, Essayistic Form

The book is composed of essays that overlap and return to the same motifs rather than proceeding linearly:

• Concepts are introduced, revised, and nuanced across different texts.
• Arguments are often suggestive and elliptical rather than fully spelled out.
• Literary and philosophical references intertwine, making genre boundaries porous.

Readers have noted that this style can make the work challenging but also allows it to mirror its own theme: just as community is not a closed totality, the text itself resists final systematization.

Lexical Innovation and Precision

Nancy forges or retools several terms (être‑en‑commun, exposition, désoeuvrement). His writing displays:

• A careful attention to etymology and the multiple resonances of French and German vocabulary.
• A tendency to explore how slight shifts in wording can open different philosophical possibilities.

This method aligns with a broader continental tradition that treats language not merely as a vehicle for ideas but as a site where ontology and politics are negotiated.

11. Community, Democracy, and Political Implications

While The Inoperative Community is primarily ontological, it carries significant political implications, which Nancy and later commentators draw out in various ways.

Democracy of Singularities

Nancy’s notion of a “democracy of singularities” emerges from his account of being‑in‑common:

• Each singular being counts as such; none can claim priority as bearer of a communal essence.
• Community is not the rule of a homogeneous People but the coexistence of exposed singularities.

Some interpreters see here a basis for reimagining democracy beyond representation of a unified subject, emphasizing practices that acknowledge and sustain plurality without subsuming it under a higher identity.

Rethinking Equality and Justice

In the essay “Egalitarian Justice,” Nancy relates inoperative community to equality:

• Equality does not imply sameness or substantive similarity.
• Rather, it follows from the fact that all beings share the same exposure and finitude.

Justice, in this light, concerns how institutions and practices respond to and organize this shared exposure, without trying to close or homogenize it. Different commentators debate how far this framework can guide concrete institutional design.

Suspicion of Foundational Myths

Politically, Nancy’s critique of organic and totalizing communities leads to skepticism toward:

• Myths of the sovereign People or Nation as ultimate source of legitimacy.
• Projects that promise a final reconciliation or closure of social conflict.

Instead, politics is framed as the ongoing negotiation of being‑in‑common, where conflict, disagreement, and incompletion are intrinsic rather than temporary obstacles. Some readers relate this to theories of radical democracy or agonistic pluralism, while others question how it addresses urgent demands for order, security, or coordinated action.

12. Famous Passages and Representative Formulations

Certain passages in The Inoperative Community have become touchstones for readers seeking concise formulations of Nancy’s ideas.

Community as Sharing of Finitude

Early in the title essay, Nancy characterizes community not as shared substance but as shared finitude. In one oft‑cited formulation he writes, in effect, that community is:

"

“the sharing of this finite being, the sharing of this being‑toward‑death.”

Though translations vary, commentators highlight this passage as encapsulating the idea that what is in common is not life in the sense of a positive essence, but exposure to mortality and limitation.

Community without Communion

Nancy repeatedly contrasts his concept of community with communion:

"

Community is what takes place always through others and for others.
It is not the space of the self‑same.

— Paraphrase from The Inoperative Community (English ed., early pages)

Summarizing this thought, he introduces the phrase “community without communion”, emphasizing that being‑in‑common does not involve fusion or absorption into a higher unity.

Inoperativity and the Work of Community

A central line of argument turns on the impossibility of making community into a completed work:

"

There is no work of community.
Community is what interrupts the work, what exposes every work to its limit.

— Paraphrase of key claims in “The Inoperative Community”

This cluster of formulations has been widely quoted in discussions of inoperativity, especially by those linking Nancy’s thought to broader debates about unworking, destitution, or the suspension of productivity.

Myth and the People

In his reflections on political myth, Nancy writes of the “myth of the People” as a figure that:

"

seeks to present the community to itself as a substance, a full and present identity,
and thereby effaces the very sharing that constitutes it.

— Paraphrase of his discussion of modern political myth

This passage is frequently cited in analyses of nationalism and political theology using Nancy’s framework.

Because Nancy’s style is aphoristic and allusive, relatively short phrases—“community without communion,” “inoperative community,” “democracy of singularities”—have functioned as condensed references to larger, more intricate arguments.

13. Relation to Other Theories of Community

Nancy’s conception both intersects with and diverges from several major approaches to community.

Communitarian and Republican Traditions

Compared with Anglo‑American communitarianism (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor) and republicanism:

Some readers see Nancy as complementary to communitarian critiques of liberal individualism but more skeptical about positive communal identities.

Liberalism and Individualism

Liberal theories often prioritize individual rights and see community as voluntary association. Nancy:

• Rejects an isolated, pre‑social individual; singularities are always already in‑common.
• Also resists subordinating singularities to a higher collective essence.

This has led some commentators to interpret his position as a possible alternative to the liberal/communitarian divide, though others argue it remains too abstract to replace them.

Marxist and Radical Left Traditions

Compared with Marxist notions of class community or revolutionary subjectivity:

• Nancy de‑centers production and class as the primary bases of community.
• He critiques teleological visions of a reconciled, classless community as forms of communal work.

Some post‑Marxist thinkers (e.g., certain readings of Agamben or Esposito) draw on Nancy to rethink community beyond the proletariat, while more orthodox Marxists question this shift away from material structures.

Theological and Ecclesial Theories

Christian and other religious conceptions often understand community as communion (e.g., the body of Christ). Nancy:

• Acknowledges the historical importance of such images.
• Critically examines their potential to support sacrificial or totalizing logics.
• Offers a version of community that some theologians have received as a challenge to reimagine ecclesial life without strong notions of substance or sacred center.

Debates in political theology often place Nancy alongside or against figures such as John Milbank or Radical Orthodoxy, who defend more robust accounts of communal participation in the divine.

14. Major Criticisms and Debates

The Inoperative Community has generated extensive discussion, with critics and supporters focusing on several recurring issues.

Abstractness and Political Efficacy

Many critics argue that Nancy’s notion of inoperative community is overly abstract:

• It offers few concrete guidelines for institutions, law, or economic organization.
• Concepts like inoperativity and exposition, they contend, lack clear operational meaning in policy or activism.

Defenders respond that the book’s aim is ontological reorientation, not blueprinting institutions, and that such reorientation is a necessary precondition for non‑totalizing politics.

Relation to Material and Economic Structures

From Marxist or materialist perspectives, Nancy is sometimes said to:

• Displace issues of class, exploitation, and production into a philosophical vocabulary of finitude.
• Risk depoliticizing or aestheticizing political struggle by focusing on ontology.

Sympathetic readers counter that his framework can complement material analysis by addressing how collective subjects and identities are imagined and justified.

Role of Shared Narratives and Traditions

Communitarian and republican critics contend that Nancy underestimates:

• The positive role of shared stories, practices, and institutions in sustaining solidarity.
• The need for some substantive common goods to motivate collective action.

They worry that an insistence on inoperativity may discourage efforts to build or reform durable communal structures. Others suggest that Nancy leaves room for such structures, provided they do not claim to close or totalize community.

Religious and Theological Concerns

Theological readers raise questions about:

• Whether Nancy’s rejection of communion and sacrificial foundations flattens distinctions between different religious communities.
• Whether religious traditions might themselves offer non‑totalizing forms of common life that Nancy overlooks.

Some theologians, however, have found in his work resources for rethinking community beyond strong metaphysical or ecclesial boundaries.

Addressing Violence and Injustice

Even sympathetic commentators question whether the language of interruption and inoperativity adequately confronts systemic violence:

• How can one resist oppression or transform unjust institutions without some operative, coordinated collective agency?
• Can a democracy of singularities address issues such as racism, patriarchy, or economic inequality in specific, actionable terms?

These debates continue to shape the reception of Nancy’s work across political philosophy, social theory, and theology.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

Since its publication, The Inoperative Community has become a key reference in contemporary continental philosophy, especially in debates on community, politics, and ontology.

Influence on Political and Social Thought

Nancy’s ideas have informed post‑foundational political theory and related currents:

• Thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean‑Luc Nancy’s interlocutors in radical democracy and biopolitics engage, endorse, or contest his notion of community without essence.
• The vocabulary of inoperativity, democracy of singularities, and being‑in‑common appears in discussions of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and networked forms of association.

The text is frequently cited in attempts to rethink politics after the decline of grand teleological narratives and in contexts concerned with plural, fragmented collectivities.

Role in Debates on Community in Philosophy and Literature

In philosophy and literary studies, the work has:

• Shaped discussions of postmodern or postmetaphysical community, often alongside Derrida and Blanchot.
• Influenced readings of literature, art, and film that foreground themes of shared finitude, exposure, and unworkable togetherness.

Edited collections and monographs have used Nancy’s framework to analyze topics ranging from urban life to digital networks.

Engagement in Theology and Religious Studies

The book has also been significant in theology and religious studies:

• Some theologians treat Nancy as a critical interlocutor for rethinking church, communion, and sacramentality.
• Others position him as a representative of a secular, post‑Christian discourse on community that challenges traditional ecclesial self‑understandings.

Gerald Bruns, for example, reads Nancy as part of a broader “theology of postmodernity,” while other commentators examine convergences and tensions between inoperative community and religious notions of grace or fellowship.

Continuing Relevance

Decades after its initial appearance, The Inoperative Community remains a touchstone for scholars addressing:

• The crisis of national and ethnic identities in an era of migration and globalization.
• The search for forms of solidarity that avoid both atomistic individualism and totalizing communitarianism.
• The conceptualization of democracy and politics under conditions of ongoing plurality and uncertainty.

Though contested, Nancy’s redefinition of community has become part of the standard vocabulary for reflecting on how we are—unavoidably—together.