In the mid-1980s three key books were published in the contemporary scenario: The Inoperative Community, by Jean-Luc Nancy, The Unconfessable Community, by Maurice Blanchot, and The Coming Community, by Giorgio Agamben. Each in its own way, resumed the abysmal and risky question for the community; dangerous because of the slippery concept, always connoted by the ghost of the volkgemeinschaft - the community of the Nazi people - or even by communism itself and real socialism. But Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben rethought the community as the "in-common", as the possibility of a "literary communism" - in the inheritance of Bataille and Marguerite Duras -, as the possibility of suspending the myth itself, and imagine a literary community dissociated from a State, Nation, or People; a community that instead of being the place of the One, is a constellation of "singular-plural beings."
Now, thirty years later, in The revoked community, Nancy returns to these discussions - especially her own with Blanchot - to take stock of those debates, still open and always crucial in aesthetic thinking