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As the present volume testifies, the term "community" has generated a prolific debate. J. Hillis Miller ( "Unworked" 86–7) revises the axes traditionally employed to define a community, such as the number of members, the sense of place, or the aegis of shared beliefs, laws and assumptions. In addition, he offers a clarifying explanation of the unworked and unavowable communities of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot respectively, which, in his own words, constitute "The Other Model of Community" Miller's "commonsense" model—which I will call "organic" or "operative" community—presupposes pre-existing, self-enclosed individuals or subjectivities who, through intersubjective communication, create a contract, society or community based on myths and shaped by ideological state apparatuses, that is, "a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions' (Althusser 143).¹ By contrast, in Nancy's and Blanchot's models, there are no individualities but singularities.² Each singularity "is not a self-enclosed subjectivity. . . [It] is exposed, at its limit, to a limitless or abyssal outside that it shares with the other singularities, from the beginning, by their common mortality" (Miller "Unworked" 91). In this model there are no subjectivities or collective consciousness. The first model is unworked by the alternative model, which is a negation, "the community of those who have no community" (Blanchot 24) or, in Derrida's words, a "community without community" (qtd. in Caputo).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137282842_8

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