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This is why community cannot arise from the domain of work. One cIoes not
produce it. one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of
finitude. Community understood as a work or through its works would
presuppose that the common being. as such. be objectifiable and producible (in
sites. persons. buildings. discourses. institutions. symbols: in short. in subjects).
Products derived from operations of this kind. however grandiose they might
seek to be and sometimes manage to be, have no more communitarian existence
than the plaster busts of Marianne.
Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called ·unworking·.
referring to that which. before or beyond the work. withdraws from the work.
and which. no longer having to do either with production or with completion.
encounters interruption. fragmentation. suspension. Community is made of the
interruption of singularities. or of the suspension that singular beings are.
Community is not the work of singular beings. nor can it claim them as its works.
just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings. for
community is simply their being - their being suspended upon its limit.
Communication is the unworking of work that is social. economic. technical and
institutional.' [ ... J
The political. if this word may serve to designate not the organization of society
but the disposition of community as such. the destination of its sharing. must
not be the assumption or the work of love or of death. It need neither find. nor
regain. nor effect a communion taken to be lost or still to come. If the political is
not dissolved in the sociotechnical element of forces and needs (in which. in
effect. it seems to be dissolving under our eyes). it must inscribe the sharing of
community. The outline of singularity would be 'political' - as would be the
outline of its communication and its ecstasy. 'Political' would mean a
community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication. or destined
to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the experience of its
sharing. To attain such a signification of the 'political' does not depend. or in any
case not simply. on what is called a 'political will'. It implies being already
engaged in the community. that is to say. undergoing. in whatever manner. the
experience of community as communication: it implies writing. We must not
stop writing. or letting the singular outline of our being-in-common expose
itself.
Not only will this have been written after Bataille. but also to him. just as he
wrote to us - because one always writes to - communicating to us the anguish
of community. writing from a solitude prior to any isolation. invoking a
community that no society contains or precedes. even though every society is
implied in it:
68/ /THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS