Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)-a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on -the inoperative community--Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly-s initial proposal to think community in terms of -number- or the -numerous,- and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot-s text, Nancy-s new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot-s thinking, from Bataille-s -community of lovers- to the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; to Marguerite Duras, to the Eucharist. A key rethinking of politics and the political, this exchange opens up a new understanding of community played out as a question of avowal.
