On Interrupted Myth

This article engages critically with Jean‐Luc Nancy’s thinking of community such as it develops in his collaboration with Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe in the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political (1980–1984) and in the major work which arises from this collaboration, The Inoperative Community (1986). It examines some of the responses to Nancy’s thinking on community (principally by Nancy Fraser, Simon Critchley and more recently by Andrew Norris), in order to suggest that the (to varying degrees) negative criticisms which have been advanced do not do justice to the philosophical complexity of his account. Through a detailed discussion of Nancy’s engagement with myth in The Inoperative Community and with the notion of “interrupted myth” this article argues that, although Nancy’s thought does not allow philosophy to provide a metaphysical foundation or projected programme for an engaged politics, it does point towards a “politics‐to‐come”. Such a politics would be articulated at the point at which Nancy’s thinking of community, “interrupted myth” and judgment or decision meet or mutually imply each other. Through a final discussion of Nancy’s more recent work around the question of worldhood and what he terms the “creation of the world”, this article will conclude that Nancy’s “politics of interruption” allows for a renewed engagement with the term “communism” and for a limited re‐inscription of the concept of the universal with political judgment or decision.