| Abstract: | Jean‐Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community is now one of the most celebrated interventions in rethinking community beyond the traditional substantialist discourses of unity and essence. It challengingly counters contemporary articulations of both communitarianism and liberalism in order to rescue the concept of community from forms of immanentism (Nancy's term for totalitarianism) and absolute individualism. Writing and literature feature quite prominently in Nancy's thesis. They are the “voice of interruption” that destabilises the mythical articulations of community and deconstructs its immanentist figurations. They are the spaces of sharing, exposure and being‐with, which according to Nancy, bring about the experience of community. This paper is, as such, an attempt to engage with Nancy's captivating approach to the concept of community and show how writing and literature provide, to some extent, the condition of possibility for interrupting the metaphysics of subjectivity and opening up an alternative space of community. |
