BRENO ISAAC BENEDYKT

This doctoral dissertation is dedicated to analyzing the impasses and shifts that have led French philosophy to an inflection in the concept of community, which is now intertwined with a dialogue with the arts, notably literature and particularly cinema. Thus, we start from the observation that the differentiated return and dissemination of the concept of community in contemporary French philosophy is inseparable from a set of historical events that have called into question the meanings previously attributed to both the idea of community and communism. These events include the artistic movements of the early 20th century, especially surrealism, literary modernism, and the advent of cinema; the Second World War; the Soviet dictatorships; the Shoah and May 68. From there, we analyze the serious controversy between Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot over the concept of community, in light of which we try to show how an attentive analysis of this controversy has become essential to understand what is at stake in the heated debate around the concept of community in contemporary French philosophy. To this end, we show how his essays on community have been read by other philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. We also try to locate some echoes of this controversy in their respective philosophies. At this point, we venture to understand to what extent it is possible to bring Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of community closer to Gilles Deleuze's thinking of the community that is missing and the community to come, especially in the way the latter presents it in his books on cinema and in his essay dedicated to the literature of Herman Melville. At a time when Jean-Luc Nancy's essay was already circulating in French intellectual circles, Gilles Deleuze explicitly expressed his interest in Nancy's work. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, we set out to understand what kind of presence and level of relevance modern cinema has for the concept of community. To do this, we draw from Gilles Deleuze's analysis of the films of Alain Resnais, Pierre Perrault, and the duo Jean-Marie and Danièle-Huillet Straub, to then understand the relevance of Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah to Jean-François Lyotard's concept of community and Pedro Costa's films to Jacques Rancière. Finally, we turn to an analysis of Béla Tarr's films, in other words, how they present us with the possibility of a new unfolding of the concept of community in dialogue with the questions to which the entire generation of French thinkers that this dissertation has dedicated itself to studying have been exposed; questions which, perhaps, remain our own.