132

Louis Kaplan

allows us to see how Being has no other meaning than the exposition and the‘dis-position of this between’. To apply this citation from Nancy to the singu-larly plural spacing of Tunick’s photo-installations: ‘It brings to light the factthat “meaning”, used in this absolute way, has become the bared name of ourbeing-with-one-another’ (2000: 27).

The communal cover up

When the discourse of community is invoked to explicate Tunick’s work, itis too often conceived using the nostalgic rhetoric of an organic model ofcommunity. This romantic and mythic formulation looks to community as alost state of communion that it seeks to recover. Communalism thinks commu-nity in terms of fusional unity caught up in the idea that one can come out ofmany. In its Christian version, it is the mystical body of Christ around whichcommunion and communal bonding take place. The communitarian way ofthinking posits community as a single and unified entity or substance whetherit is expressed as a commune, tribe, or clan. On the contrary, Nancy’s post-romantic articulation of ‘community without communion’ retreats from thethinking of community in any fusional way. Nancy warns against any nostalgiclonging for a mythic return to a pre-modern ‘organic’ community.This warningis also linked to Nancy’s critique of immanence or what Ignaas Devisch definesas ‘the communal desire for a closed and undivided social identity’ that is ‘fullypresent’ and ‘closed upon’ itself (see Devisch 2005). Clearly, this self-enclosedcommunal desire is unable to deal with the articulation of being-in-commonas being-exposed and as the experience of limits. The sharing and splitting thatmoves Nancy’s inoperative community or ‘community at loose ends’ – whathe marks in the French with the word partage – cannot be reified into a fixedentity closed in on itself or into a single totalizable body (e.g. the lure of Nazismto which Heidegger himself succumbed and for which Nancy critiques him).Such ‘immanent’ strategies also risk losing community as the experience of fini-tude and as a complex of relations that are always incomplete. Being-exposedand being-in-common give way to the totalizing and totalitarian risks of a‘common being’. As Nancy writes in the ‘Preface’ to The Inoperative Community ,‘The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader ...)necessarily loses the in of being- in -common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truthof community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being’ (1991b:xxxix). The community-exposed installations and photography of SpencerTunick can contribute to this retreat from communion, but only in a mannerthat does not lose track of community in or as relation, in or as being-exposed.In other words, if the viewer becomes fixated only on the finished products ofthese formalized masses as objects of art, then we miss the potentiality for open-ended and indecisive encounters with being with one another that are a crucialpart of these photographic exposures and the process of their enactment.