ABSTRACT
This chapter provides to the renewal of interest by suggesting that James Baldwin's political vision has things to teach contemporary theorists. The conceptual lineage in this case is philosophical and more explicitly deconstructive than the first, and it finds its richest expression in Jean-Luc Nancy's extension of Jacques Derrida's thinking into the conceptual terrain of "community." Community has been predominantly construed as a form of non-bodily immanence, which either one seeks to reinstitute in the present or pines for as irrecoverable wholeness. The word "joy" actually appears in the devastating story – twice. Baldwin proposes that racism works, in the contemporary US, by confounding this distinction: it authorizes "white" folk to disavow the fact of finitude and project their fear of it onto black folk, building institutions that provide an illusory "safety" from death, the illusion of permanence and unalterable stasis that makes social "renewal" impossible.
