"It is not the ultimate truth of a contemporary community that responds to both the desire for and the anguish over present-day togetherness. It is a work only in the radical sense of a work of art. The community of lovers is the shared experience of limits, always occurring between oneself and the other, and it is always carrying us to our own extremes, so that we verge on separation, on finitude, on a tearing split, on facing the encounter in which we each falter on contact with others and the other. It is a philosophical, existential, and artistic program."

"we must ponder the enigma that binds the intimate to the collective, the singular to the plural, love to war. This enigma, said Blanchot, defies statement. He called it the “unavowable community,” purposely using an oblique, obscure word with overtones of secrecy, shameful morality, and unbearable avowals. It is a word that connotes, too, the idea of an “inoperative” community (Jean-Luc Nancy): “a community that is not ‘operative [œuvrée]’ but operated in secret [unavowably] through the shared experience of limits: the experience of love and death, of life itself exposed to its limits.”"