SOURCE: A review of La Communauté inavouable, in World Literature Today, Vol. 58, No. 4, Autumn, 1984, p. 566.

In the following review, Roudiez discusses Blanchot's intellectual concerns in La Communauté inavouable.

Georges Bataille had provided an intellectual backdrop for several of Maurice Blanchot’s recent texts; that is again the case for this brief, two-part essay [La Communauté inavouable]. Each part has its own pre-text, an essay by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (“La communauté désœuvrée”) and a narrative by Marguerite Duras (“La maladie de la mort”). Blanchot’s assumption, not an unusual one, is that human beings are affected by a forgotten or repressed desire for community even though a real sense of community has been lost; at the same time there is a lack of awareness of what has been lost. Hence the appeal of various forms of communism as providing a community responding to immanent needs...