ABSTRACT
Jean-Luc Nancy has written extensively about art and for exhibitions and projects. This part of his oeuvre includes exhibition texts and essays, and he has influenced conceptual threads in a number of films. Nancy moves away from traditional phenomenology to develop an understanding of being singular plural rather than individuality. This has significance in terms of how this study approaches ideas of communication and community, and consequently the political. Bourriaud’s spotlight on ‘the gesture’ highlights new questions regarding communicative actions, especially when he claims that in contemporary art ‘the production of gestures wins out over the production of material things’. Virno often writes of the ‘linguistic animal’ and the ‘political animal’ as two separate beings, but for Nancy, communication is initiated by, and yet beyond, linguistics, but is nevertheless a pre-requisite for politics. Kester, in his generalisation of ‘post-structural’ theory, interprets Nancy’s idea of an un-worked community as a reduction of all human labour to simple expression of conative aggression.
