Revolution without Guarantees: Community and Subjectivity in Nancy, Lingis, Sartre and Levinas

Jean-Luc Nancy&rsquo;s <em>The Inoperative Community</em>, a collection of writings first published in 1985 and 1986, suggests an understanding of community as irreducibly linked to finitude. Alongside this, he advocates a redefinition of the project of revolutionary communism.&nbsp;This endeavor draws equally on the writings on communication of Georges Bataille and the insistence on finitude found in Martin Heidegger. First, we should recapitulate Nancy&rsquo;s argument in order to determine his presentation of a novel politics as well as the links and disjunctions of his predecessors. More than this, I would like to suggest that a reading of Alphonso Lingis&rsquo;s <em>The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common</em>, published almost a decade later, suggests an intriguing and promising extension or modification of Nancy&rsquo;s argument. In particular, Lingis suggests an understanding of revolution that appears somewhat closer to the Marxist tradition. I argue that this is partly a result of an inheritance from Emmanuel Levinas, and in particular his account of ethical subjectivity, which, surprisingly, can be productively allied with the political thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. This friendship between the ethics of Levinas and the politics of Sartre suggests the best groundwork for Lingis&rsquo;s development of Nancy&rsquo;s insights.