The Unavowable Community [Paperback]

Maurice Blanchot (Author), Pierre Joris (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1988

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Through more than 40 years, the French writer maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism.... [a] profound theoretical investigation of the literature and those who make it.... --Gilbert Sorrentino, The New York Times Book Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 60 pages
• Publisher: Station Hill Press (1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1581771045
• ISBN-13: 978-1581771046
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #624,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you can locate a copy, you'll entrust it to your friends., March 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Unavowable Community (Hardcover)

I have been reading and re-reading this nearly "page-less"(about 80 pages including the translator's introduction ) volume of ___?(what is it? autobiography?poetry?) for about 4 years now . I can't get it out of my mind. I was hard-pressed to read any philosophy until I tried this remarkable author's work. Since then, I've gradually made my way into this new kind of "inquiry" mainly from the inspiration he has provided in this particular volume. Blanchot was born in 1907 so he would have been nearly 80 years old when this was first published in France in 1983. It is difficult reading and you may come away from the initial reading perplexed. Stay with it. It takes some years getting used to this new way of comporting your "self" in the world which the author seems to offer as a kind and patronly "Instructor". Though it is only a few pages, I can't read it all at once. Instead I'll pick it up every few months and read some of it. Usually this is when I am trying to find someone (like Blanchot) who might want to talk to me about why things seem so hopeless in this technologically driven society. Blanchot even quotes another writer here (Edgar Morin) who expresses the view he(Blanchot) shares "in the possibility of another society and another humanity". This also reveals (even as it conceals) some of Blanchot's major themes including the mystery of "friendship", an "impossible" relation enigmatically exposed to the light of day, that is if we get a glimpse of it at all. ( I recall in another essay, these words that Blancot says have been attributed to Aristotle:"Oh my friends, there is no friend"). This might give some sense of the kind of measure and question Blanchot "risks" in each sentence he writes. Here in THE UNAVOWABLE COMMMUNITY, we have the "evidence" most especially of a significant vulnerability toward friendship as it relates to Blanchot's testimonial of a crucial, yet "unavowable" bond with Georges Baitaille and Marguerite Duras (who by the way wrote the book that the movie "The Lover" was based on as well as the screen-play to the film "Hiroshima,Mon Amour"). I only began my interest in Western Philosophy recently and Blanchot has been the main reason, though I have heard he is difficult and "impenetrable" at times. That surprises me! Considering that I have not read deeply in Philosophy until recently, though I did read quite a bit of "literature". Blanchot entrusts some questions to us in the hopes that we might "choose to carry" them with us; and maybe entrust it to others in our stead ( "live the questions as Rilke told a young poet in a letter once) . I can't get away from these deeply personal reminisences. By the same token,once the reader becomes accustomed (somewhat) to the "difficulty"(or newness) of this kind of writing (as well as a kind of "modesty" on Blanchot's account) the reader gradually moves toward some kind of gap that separates his/her experience from that of Blanchot. Somehow, Blanchot's gazes turns quite movingly and touchingly into the visual context of community and friendship. Unless ,of course, it is the other way around.Perhaps, our sense of the community (or whatever may or may not characterize the social relation) IS the very "visual" or "lighted" place risked or illumined in any speech offering or gesture. Its an "unavowable" relation. A relation which Giorgio Agamben characterizes as "irreducibly social and ethical". Otherwise, perhap there is a darkening region now nearer to the eyes, which by our relation and openness towards each other (or the other) changes the homestead of"light"and its shadings into hope, perception, or memory of light ( or is this"re-presention that I'm speaking of?). Somehow Blanchot's tone is toward "meaning " but without asseting itself as anything "meaningful" . To close let me mention two things. Blanchot led me to Giorgio Agamben's book "The Coming Community" because of its similar sounding title , and I quoted from another Agamben book "Stanzas" above. Also, I'm reminded of Blanchot's appropriation of Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent", to which he offers this toward the end of this book of his(Blancot's) we have been discussing here:"given that by enunciating it he has not been able to impose silence on himself....does indicate that in the final analysis one has to talk in order to remain silent. But with what kinds of words?" I first read that sentence 4 years ago, and I still wonder what kind of words we are and are not using still. Up until now, I've been rather silent about the issue.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars to "A Customer", June 7, 2008

By 

R. Warshawsky (Jaffa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Unavowable Community (Paperback)

Dear "A Customer"
Thank you for your re-view, in which you offered such a clear, transparent view into your experience of reading. I was just purchasing this book which has intrigued me for some years, when I came across what you wrote. I wanted to tell you that I liked it very much. Good luck with your future explorations!