Berührung auf Todeshöhe: Maurice Blanchots Uneingestehbare Gemeinschaft (Bataille, Nancy, Duras)

Focusing on Maurice Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (1983), this text investigates possibilities of thinking and performing communities that interact with and constitute one another “à hauteur de mort” (Bataille).Following the twofold structure of Blanchot’s text, the first part of the essay in its first part unfolds the notion of communitas in order to show how Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Jean-Luc Nancy formulated a new concept of community by distinguishing it from liberal, socialist, Christian or fascist forms of community that all had become extremely problematic by the beginning of the Second World War at the latest. By doing so they themselves performed an ‘unavowable community.’The second part of the essay engages with Marguerite Duras’ La Maladie de la mort, a novella that is the main subject of the second part of La Communauté inavouable. Here, the performative power of language is delineated by means of the idea of a ‘community of lovers’ that manifests itself, in contrast to romantic forms of togetherness and unity, precisely in the breakdown of communicatio and communitas.