Community and Loss

When we talk about community, we usually mean belonging - a sense of shared identity, values, or history that ties us together. Modern political thought has often treated community as something to be built, something we can imagine into being through symbols, institutions, and rituals. Benedict Anderson’s famous idea of the “imagined community” captures this powerfully: nations hold together not because their members actually know each other, but because they participate in shared cultural forms - newspapers, anthems, monuments - that allow millions of strangers to feel like compatriots.

Anderson’s insight remains crucial: modern belonging is aesthetic before it is political. We “see” ourselves as part of a collective through the styles and forms that shape our everyday lives. Yet Anderson’s model still assumes that community works by turning singular lives into a common narrative - a story strong enough to inspire sacrifice, even death, for the nation. The monument to the unknown soldier crystallizes this logic: one life is erased in its particularity so that death itself can be absorbed into the collective.

It is precisely this move that philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy resists. In his 1986 book The Inoperative Community, Nancy asks: what if community is not the absorption of singular deaths into a myth of unity, but the recognition that death is irreducible, unassimilable, and inescapably shared? What if community arises not from imagining ourselves the same, but from being exposed to what we cannot control or symbolize away - our fragility, our finitude, our mortality?

This shift marks a profound rethinking. Nancy’s community is not something we can design, plan, or finish. It is not a project of myth-making. It is what he calls “inoperative”: a fragile openness that interrupts every attempt to close community into a completed whole.

The Myths of Unity

Was there ever a “true” community? An organic unity of people fused by shared essence, identity, or spirit? Romantic nationalism often dreamed of such a past, whether in the image of a harmonious polis, a medieval village, or a mythic folk community. But for Nancy, this nostalgia is dangerous. Every attempt to recreate such unity, he warns, leads not to solidarity but to totalitarianism. Fascism is precisely the fantasy of a community completed, purified, and closed.

Ontology enters here as critique. By rethinking what it means to be, Nancy shows how political projects of unity rest on a false metaphysics - the idea that individuals can be fused into a higher essence without remainder. He insists instead that existence is always plural, always exposed, always incomplete. Community is not a substance but a relation - and relations cannot be totalized.

This is why he calls community “inoperative.” It cannot be turned into a work or project to be realized. Any attempt to do so risks violence. Instead, community happens in interruptions, in the cracks of meaning, in the sudden awareness that we are with others whether we want to be or not, and that this “with” cannot be reduced to sameness.

Death and the Other: The Unsacrificeable

For Nancy, the deepest site of community is death - not in the sense of shared sacrifice for a collective cause, but in the opposite sense: the recognition that every death is singular, irreplaceable, and cannot be redeemed by myth.

Here he parts ways with Anderson’s logic of the monument. The tomb of the unknown soldier makes anonymous sacrifice into the ground of national belonging. It transforms the loss of the singular into a symbol for the collective. Nancy insists on refusing that move. Death must not be absorbed. The loss of another is not ours to use.

Community emerges precisely in the encounter with the unsacrificeable nature of the other’s death. When someone else dies, I cannot take their place, I cannot make their death meaningful in the same way for myself, I cannot redeem it by turning it into my cause. Their death is the exposure of finitude - both theirs and mine - in a way that resists any closure. And yet, this very exposure is what binds us.

Community, then, is not built on shared identity, but on shared exposure. We are in common not because we are the same, but because we are all exposed to finitude.

In the television series Twin Peaks, the town first comes into view through the ripple of Laura Palmer’s death - not as a display of unity, but as a sequence of scattered, singular shocks that bind its people through a shared exposure to fragility and mortality.

From Work to Inoperativity

Nancy calls community “inoperative” to resist the temptation to turn it into a project. The modern imagination is deeply marked by the idea that community must be made - built, engineered, realized, coming together. Nations are imagined, movements are organized, identities are forged. But this “productive” model treats community as an object to be constructed, as a work .

Nancy insists instead that community is given in advance, though not as a substance. It is given in our being-with, our coexistence. We do not first exist as isolated individuals who then contract into a group. Existence is always already plural. To be is to be-with.

What follows is that community is not something we can complete. It is not a destiny to be achieved. It is always inoperative, not because it fails, but because its truth lies in its refusal to close, to totalize, to become an essence.

Nancy’s thinking here is deeply shaped by Martin Heidegger, but also pushes beyond him. Heidegger had already challenged the idea of the solitary subject by insisting that Dasein is always being-in-the-world, always already in relation. He also emphasized being-toward-death as the horizon of authenticity.

But for Heidegger, death is primarily one’s ownmost possibility - what makes my existence mine. Nancy insists instead that death comes to us first through the other. I never actually experience my own death; what I experience is the death of others, their absence, their irreplaceability. That is where finitude strikes. And it is in this shared exposure that community arises.

Thus Nancy reworks Heidegger’s Mitsein (being-with) into something more radical: not just a structure of Dasein’s world, but the very condition of existence itself. To be is to be-with; there is no solitary existence.

Nancy also links his rethinking of community to a critique of what he calls immanentism - the fantasy that a community can be entirely self-grounding, self-sufficient, and closed. Whether in nationalist myths, communist utopias, or neoliberal social networks, the danger is the same: the belief that community can be completed, purified, made whole.

For Nancy, this is not only politically dangerous but ontologically false. Existence is never closed. It is always open, finite, exposed. Attempts to totalize community - to absorb all difference into one identity - collapse into violence.

Against this, Nancy proposes an “ecstatic” model of community. Ecstasy, in its philosophical sense, means “standing outside” oneself. Existence is always already outside itself, exposed to others, never fully coinciding with itself. Community, then, is ecstatic: it happens in the openness of beings that overflow themselves in relation, not in a self-enclosed unity.

Community as Interruption

This leads to Nancy’s most radical claim: community is not continuity but interruption. It appears not in the smooth flow of shared identity but in the breaks where we are exposed to others. Community is not the solidarity of the same but the sharing of what cannot be shared - finitude, mortality, exposure.

This makes community fragile, but also ethical. Because it cannot be completed, it resists the temptation of myth. Because it is not based on sameness, it resists exclusion. Because it happens in exposure, it calls for responsibility.

To live in community, then, is not to seek fusion, but to remain open to interruption - to be willing to be touched, unsettled, and transformed by the singularity of others.

In our age of digital networks and algorithmic identities, Nancy’s warning feels urgent. Communities are constantly being imagined and reimagined - fan groups, political movements, nationalisms, online tribes. But the risk remains the same: to confuse symbolic forms with community itself, to fuse singular lives into abstractions that exclude and control.

Nancy offers another path. Community is not a project of identity but a practice of exposure. It is not the dream of unity but the acceptance of finitude. It is not something to be achieved, but something already given in our being-with.

The challenge is to resist the temptation to close it - to let community remain inoperative, unworked, fragile, and open.