The Unavowable Community

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. 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.

This extended essay is an inquiry into the nature and possibility of an ideal community. Readers of Blanchot know not to expect answers to the great questions that move his thought -- rather, they must live with the questions at the new level to which they have been raised by his discourse. Those discovering Blanchot's thought will be compelled by its uncompromising exploration and leaps of immediacy in a time like Blanchot's own, in which existing concepts of community may no longer be enough.

Maurice Blanchot was an important influence on Derrida, an intimate friend of Georges Bataille, and a powerful force in modern literature. Other books include Thomas the Obscure, When the Time Comes and The Gaze of Orpheus, collected in Barrytown, Ltd.'s The Station Hill Blanchot Reader.

Publishers Weekly

For French thinker Blanchot, community can exist at many levelsin social groups, in the restricted ``community of two'' that unites lovers or friends, in sets whose members run the risk of losing their identities by merging with a collective ego. Indeed, the two essays in this short, frustrating book are most interesting when they deal with the perils of community. Blanchot cites the total communion that led a cult in Guyana to collective suicide. He also deconstructs the communitarian yearnings of French writer Georges Bataille. In the 1930s, Bataille and others sought refuge in myth and worshipped sensuality; their secret society held meetings around trees that had been struck by lightning. In Blanchot's second essay, on Marguerite Duras, he waxes lyrical over the May 1968 Paris student revolt. Both essays are difficult and often incomprehensible, due to either Blanchot's clotted, mind-numbing prose or the translationor both. (October)

Maurice Blanchot is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing. His work encompasses the writing of novels and récits as well as articles and books of philosophical (or to be precise anti-philosophical) criticism. He is one of the few significant theorists of literature of the last century to have worked outside a university context.