In a recent book, Jean-Luc Nancy deals again, after thirty years, with Maurice Blanchot. This essay interprets Nancy going back to Blanchot as a symptom of the inability of the negative community theorists to avoid the repetition of arguments and strategies indifferent to historical becoming. Marked by the threat of totalitarianism, these philosophers have made the “community” the place of the “revolution’, that is the event that should oppose the resources of infinite power against the risk of an absolute act. This has two consequences: the inability to grasp the economic, political and symbolic changes of the last thirty years, with respect to which the “community” cannot encounter friction anymore; the shift of political discourse out of the political itself, with the aporias arising from that, especially with regard to the democratic outcome of this shift beyond political.
Keywords: Nancy, Blanchot, Arendt, Community, Revolution, Deconstruction, neo-capitalism
