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Community Unclaimed: Plurality And The Problem Of Sovereignty In Bataille, Nancy, And Blanchot, Gregory J. Grobmeier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes up the exchange between three prominent French thinkers on the question of “community”: Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot. Taken together, and starting with Bataille’s prewar writings and communitarian activism in the 1930s, the exchange between them now spans nearly a century. Georges Bataille’s importance as a political thinker and writer was brought out of relative obscurity with the publication of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “La Communauté désoeuvrée” in 1983. Less than a year after the appearance of Nancy’s inaugural essay, Maurice Blanchot, a close friend of the late Bataille, published La Communauté inavouable. Blanchot’s text was …