ABSTRACT
On the surface, Maurice Blanchot's small book La communautè inavouable seems merely a polite disagreement with Jean-Luc Nancy's more substantial work, La communautè dèsoeuvrèe, but it is what is hidden beneath that is more significant. It is a Jewish critique of the latter's Heideggerianism. At the beginning of La communautè inavouable Blanchot writes of a "communist demand". Communism, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, is now surely only a historical curiosity, and if so, still less a future possibility through which people might secure the present. But the communism of which Blanchot speaks is not an ideology and scarcely a politics that would ordinarily recognise. For Blanchot and Emmanuel Lèvinas on the contrary, the community are impossible. Not as a negative judgment, but as an infinite one. It is what is "not-possible", the infinite before the finite, beyond being.
