"An infinite task at the heart of finitude": Jean-Luc Nancy on Community and History

Near the end of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, one finds the following quote:

Community is given to us—or we are abandoned and given to the community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced. But it is a task, which is different—an infinite task at the heart of finitude.

(Nancy 1991, 35)¹

As paradoxical as it may seem, community is not only a gift but also, and simultaneously, "a task and a struggle" (Nancy 1991, 35), an infinite demand. I have tried to read this quote—what it promises, what it demands, and the nature or status of this "demand"—in connection to what it would mean to understand ontology, in Nancy (an ontology of being-in-common) not only as the "stumbling block" of metaphysics, as its ineradicable suspension, but also, and connected precisely to this interruptive gesture, as a form and a mode of critique (see Acosta 2017).

Following this same impulse, but dwelling now on the subject that reunites the contributions to this issue, namely, the question of finitude, I would like to go back to this passage and explore in what ways the connections at play in this quote—the conceptions of community, of gift, of work and task it presupposes, together with the differences among them—can help us further understand Nancy's conception of the finite. Or more exactly, as Rodolphe Gasché has developed it in his own contribution to this issue, I would like to further explore Nancy's notion of the "infinitely finite" as a notion that attempts to displace and interrupt, or at least that needs to be read as entirely different from, a metaphysical and a dialectical relation between finite and infinite and, thus, disconnected from any mode or moment (bad or true) of Hegelian infinity.

Following Gasché's cue, and moving further and looking from a different angle into Nancy's work, I would like to explore the essential connections Nancy draws between the "infinitely finite," history, and community. Different from Gasché, though, but presupposing his very close reading of Nancy's essay on "Finite History" (and the analysis of the conceptions of history and being-in-common that Nancy advances in this essay), I would like to flesh out the two concepts that have always stood out to me in the above-mentioned quote and that remain for me still an enigma—an enigma that summons me every time and suggests that there is something essential about Nancy's work captured in these two words, in their intriguing combination—namely, the notions of task and of heart. Through an exploration of these two concepts—the notion of "an infinite task" as different from a "work," on the one hand, and, on the other, the notion of the "heart of the finite" as the space or the site where that task takes "place" and "ought" to happen—I hope to arrive at a clearer explanation of what the "infinitely finite" means in Nancy and how it is possible to understand community, as he writes, as a gift, as the resistance of being (of being-in-common) to its erasure and obliteration, while simultaneously affirming community's status as a task, as an infinite demand and an ontology "to come" (see Nancy 1992, 388).

Besides dealing with how it is that one can speak without contradiction about the infinitely finite (something that Gasché, I think, does very well in his paper), this entails an understanding of the kind of temporality that would allow for the simultaneity between the gift and the task to be possible in the first place—that is, between something given and something yet to come, demanded—and the connections between this temporality and the question of history. After following some of the key elements surrounding the questions of the "task" and the "heart of the finite" in Nancy's thought, I would like to end...