The Mystery of Body: Nancy's Corpus and the Christian Body

After the initial contextualization of the topic, by following Nancy's juxtaposition strategy, this article points to two senses of the body that, according to him, have defined the Western culture. The first one, logos (principle precedes the body and gives it meaning); the second, sarx (the meaning of the body comes from the body itself, so that the body comes out of itself, alienates itself, and deconstructs its own representative activities). Next, I give a more precise depiction of Nancy's deconstruction of the body through an analysis of Corpus because it is precisely with this work (in the chapter On the Soul, which is also the title of Aristotle's well-known treatise dealing first and foremost with the body, and in the chapter The Extension of the Soul) that Nancy most explicitly deconstructs hylomorphic somatology, which largely influenced the Christian theology of the body. Furthermore, I interpret Genesis 2:18–25 (in constant dialogue with Nancy) as a theological reaction on Nancy's deconstruction of the body. In other words, on the basis of biblical texts, the “mystery of the body” is depicted. Finally, the article ends with a comparison of Nancy's “inoperative community” (communauté désoeuvrée) and the Body of Christ (church).

Contingency Plans: Art Collectives, Shared Pseudonyms, and Theories of Collectivity

This review considers Jacopo Galimberti's Individuals Against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969), 2017, and Marco Deseriis's Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous, 2017 and the theories of collectivity that inform them (multitude, inoperative community, and transindividuality). While Galimberti looks at how collaborative practices model new strategies for collective action, and Deseriis examines forms that allow multiple actions and ideologies to flow through them, they authors share a desire to move beyond representation to model, enact, and realize real change in the world. Taken together, these two books afford us the opportunity to evaluate the critique of cultural and political representation at the heart of these theories of collectivity and assess the limits of analogies between aesthetic and political forms.

Theatre at the Impasse: Political Theology and Blitz Theatre Group's Late Night

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy’s inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity.

‘For We Are American’: Postmodern Pastiche and National Identity in Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

The final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play features a Greek tragedy-like distillation of the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons, performed many decades after an unspecified catastrophe has left the former United States in a state of post-apocalyptic ruin. After the first two acts’ depiction of an earlier generation’s struggles to both survive and connect with each other through the preservation of some elements of their previous shared culture, the third act’s culmination in a display of treadmill-powered electric lights accompanied by an inspirational anthem has often been interpreted as a celebration of the timelessness and tenacity of the human storytelling impulse. But while earlier versions of the play structured this final moment within a pastiche expression of American patriotism (sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “For He Is an Englishman”), subsequent versions have expunged this final reference to national pride, as well as any reference to the satirically nationalistic source material from which it stemmed, opting instead to trace the development of a more ‘empty’ G&S quotation into its post-apocalyptic future. This paper will examine the implications of this change in regards to the play's pastiche portrayal of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “myth of myth” and the role of its interruption in imagining an “inoperative community” beyond or to the side of nation-based constructions of identity.

Community beyond Work

This chapter sketches the outlines of the post-work community through a critical reading of Gorz and Hardt and Negri. All three share a commitment to the UBI, and also see in contemporary capitalism openings for radical transformation. Yet the specter of the work society haunts them, specifically in their view of community as constructed by work. We therefore need to think community distinctly from work or cooperation. Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically his concept of the inoperative community offers key guidance. In place of a community based on work, Nancy proposes the “communionless communism of singular beings,” which takes place “in the unworking and as the unworking of all its works.”

Undoing Work, Rethinking Community

This book argues that the civic duty to perform paid work in contemporary society undermines freedom and justice. While workplace flexibility and the unconditional basic income (UBI) both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also harbor the risk of shoring up the work society. To avert this danger, we must therefore reconfigure the value and place of paid work in our lives. Moreover, we need to rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level, and in particular, abandon the view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not. This task raises significant challenges, but Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on the “inoperative community” provides key philosophical guidance. Since the relational ontology of this alternative view of community stands in stark tension with capitalism, a liberal-reformist approach to lessening the burden of paid work that fails to tackle the underlying economic and social structure offers only limited gains in terms of freedom and justice. Moving beyond the work society and more fully realizing freedom and justice therefore entails nothing short of a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism.