The ambiguous project of atmosphere: a conversation with Michael Tawa
2025
Michael Tawa, ‘The ambiguous project of atmosphere: a conversation with Michael Tawa,’ in Fata Morgana 56, Atmosfera, edited by Luca Bandirali and Chiara Renna. Anno XVIII, N. 56 (May–August 2025), 9-17: https://www.fatamorganaquadrimestrale.it/n-56-atmosfera-indice/
In the opening of your book Atmosphere, Architecture, Cinema, you situate your research within what you call the «atmosphere turn», a multidisciplinary line of reflection that, beginning with the new phenomenology of the 1990s, extends to contemporary debate. Can we say that one of the main characteristics of this «atmosphere turn» is the assertion of the qualitative and immeasurable over the quantitative and measurable?
There appears to be an oppositional setup in the “atmospheric turn”: that because atmosphere is subjective and qualitative, it is therefore unquantifiable. By inference, what is unquantifiable is also undesignable — especially but not only for architecture, since design has to do with designation, allocation, allotment, definition, measurement. Ultimately, the architect must decide, they must determine boundaries of all kinds: situational, spatial, material, technical and so forth. If atmosphere is an undecidable and thus wavering characteristic of human experience, then it cannot be ascertained and it cannot be handled and manipulated in the design process with any degree of precision. Two problematic implications arise here. First is the maintenance of a kind of mystery in the way atmosphere comes about, which in turn serves to maintain the authorial status of the designer as a conjurer, whose means are not open to scrutiny. The second has to do with the maintenance of an opposition between quality and quantity, between the incommensurable and the commensurable, the imprecise and the precise, the irrational and the rational and so on. In my thinking this double opposition is deeply problematic for design — whether we consider the design of a film, a musical composition, a painting or a building. Problematic because it effectively forecloses the possibility that atmosphere, if not designable as such, is at least capable of being designed-for, of being enabled, of being afforded. It leaves atmosphere entirely subject to happenstance, to the accidental; or worse, to the smokescreen of genius and whimsy. My contention, on the contrary, is that atmosphere can be designed-for; that by design we can set up, with some precision, the conditions and the circumstances that enable atmosphere to emerge. In Atmosphere, Architecture, Cinema, I try to sketch out the parameters for that emergence. I say that any designed thing (a film, a musical composition, a building) is an assemblage or a constellation of disparate elements that are brought together in such a way as to preserve the discrepancy between them and yet to allow them to conciliate or resonate in multiple ways and in various combinations across the discrepant intervals that separate them. I’ve called that characteristic of atmosphere-enabled settings “consilient discrepancy.” A pivotal quality of such settings is that of ambiguity: the relationships and interactions between the components of an assembly are ambiguous or indeterminable, because they are interminably open to multiple reconfigurations. When a human being, who is always in a mood, enters into relationship with that assembly or that setting, the inner constitution of their mood will encounter the constitutive assemblage or designed circumstance; and in that encounter, if there is resonance between mood and assemblage, atmosphere emerges and can be noticed, felt, sensed. The undefinable experience of atmosphere is only made possible by a particular and precise circumstantial setup that is both rigorous and open. So, yes, an assertion of the qualitative and immeasurable over the quantitative and measurable in the literature around atmosphere is an evident, but to me lazy way of proceeding: at least for a designer, and certainly for an academic and architect like me, who is interested in knowing how the skills of setting up atmospheric settings can be conceptualized and practiced in the academy and in the studio.
Despite the relevance of the topic, very few scholars have thoroughly examined atmosphere in cinema and, more broadly, in audiovisual production: Julian Hanich, Ines Gil, and in Italy, Ruggero Eugeni with a monographic issue of the journal VCS - Visual Culture Studies. However, in the research work of many other scholars, films are often cited as examples of aesthetic work capable of producing atmospheres. For instance, Jurgen Weidinger states that «what we are studying is the effect that is created when [...] we are exposed to aesthetic situations like films, images, or texts». Conversely, coming from the theory of architecture, you considered that cinema could represent a privileged object of study in the field of atmospheres.
I’m interested in Weidinger’s use of the term “effect,” and in particular, how the term is distinguishable from the allied term “affect.” Atmospheric situations are regularly described in terms of affectivity: atmospheres are affective, they affect us — we might resonate with them if our mood is in tune with the ambient assemblage of the setting we find ourselves in; or we might find the setting disagreeable or discordant, because our mood is unaligned, and might consequently be unaffected or adversely affected. At the same time, we can say that atmospheres are effective: that is, atmospheres can effect a change in our mood, they can work on us or in us (effect means literally to “make-out”; from e- = outward + fact, Latin facere = to do, to make), they unclench or trigger something, maybe very slowly or immediately, such that there is convergence. Cinema clearly has the potential for immediate affectivity, since the linear experience of seeing a film is highly controlled, the cinematic sequences are set in time and space, the narrative draws us forth as the film unfolds, and the combination or assemblage of images and sounds has a more direct, less mediated and visceral effect on our senses than is the case with architecture. Likewise, architecture sets up certain arrangements of spaces and certain possibilities of infiltration and inhabitation that are more or less controlled, more or less hegemonic. We can move around with a certain degree of freedom and choice, which means that the designer cannot be as fully in charge as they are with film or music. Nevertheless, cinema can serve as an instructive parallel to architecture. In cinematographic construction — of space, time, light, sound, the form, materiality and grain of images, narrative structure, the type of montage and editing — all of these cinematic technics parallel the kinds of architectonic concerns played out in architectural design. Of course there are significant differences: cinema manipulates time in ways impossible for architecture, which is by default considered a spatial art; but this is an oversimplification. Architects can also manipulate space, and how spaces are oriented to the changing ambient world, to produce distinctive temporalities. In my book Agencies of the Frame, I gave the example of an Arab bathhouse, an internalized masonry setting, lit only by small openings in the vaults and domes of the roof, that produces radically altered and indefinitely altering temporalities resulting from particular sound and light conditions in the ambient environment, which in turn effect and change the sensed spatiality and atmosphere of the interior.1 In terms of “consilient discrepancy” in cinema, I have used the example of a sequence from the Taviani Brothers’ film Kaos in which the cinematographers construct a complex and ambiguous overlay of discrete elements, comprising precisely calibrated image sequences, music, narrative, setting, sentiment and so forth.2 These amount to an ambient assemblage which, assuming the viewer’s mood is attuned, produces a distinctive atmosphere of melancholia. Likewise, in architecture considered as an affective setting, I refer to Sigurd Lewerntz’ St Peter in Klippan. In the central space of that complex, Lewerentz overlays multiple spatial axes and orientations that appear aligned or coincident, but which in fact are discrete and unaligned. This works in the geometry of the plan, but equally in the hybrid masonry and steel structural system and the brick materiality of floor, walls and ceiling.3 Such tactics effectively trouble, disestablish and challenge the apparent simplicity and unity of the space as it first appears (centralized, symmetrical), rendering it enigmatic and inscrutable. The discrepancies between different components and systems charge the space in a very distinctive way, producing an ambiance calibrated to a particular tenor of Protestant Christian theology and worship, in which uncertainty and doubt feature as genuine ways of encountering the divine. Lewerentz’ tectonic irreconcilabilities mirror the irreconcilability of humanity and divinity, the withdrawal and abandonment of the human by God. Assuming I am in the mood, the atmosphere I feel might be something like melancholia, in the sense that I experience, simultaneously, the adjacency and remoteness of divinity, the presence and absence of God, and the palpability of unrequited love.
For aestheticians like Gernot Böhme, atmosphere is prenarrative and anti-semiotic. In contrast, you argue that it «eclipses formal and aesthetic registers». Thus, the atmosphere of a film is not merely form because «it is fundamentally world-forming and therefore both cosmogonic and ethical: cosmogonic and circumstantial because it produces a world in the midst of and as the spatiality, temporality, and materiality that devolve through its passage; ethical and consequential because the world it brings about is an inhabited world, an affective conjugation of people and place that constructs and promotes particular ways of being there together». This brings to mind Stanley Cavell’s idea of cinema as «successions of automatic world projections».
Cinema is world-forming in that it projects worlds that we enter into or are affected by (that is, it effects, it produces, it causes to emerge and it demonstrates that emergence). In that sense, films — even documentary films — do not simply report on the world in the manner of “factually” describing or accounting for it. In films, fact and fiction become indiscernible — or rather, in film, the double meaning of Latin facere: to do, to make and to fabricate, to fabulate, is played out. The cognate etymological roots are, for fact/facere *DHE = to set, to put, to establish, and for fiction/fingere *DEIGH = to form, to build. Films manufacture worlds; worlds compossible with the one we believe ourselves to inhabit, which is itself a conjuncture of multiple compossibilities. In that sense cinema also projects us out of our world, but in such a way as to recast us within all manner of possible parallel worlds, which is why cinema is often associated with the operation of memory and recollection, dreams, reverie and the oneiric. David Lynch’s cinema is a case in point, wherein the interface of these compossible worlds, their tendency to interpenetrate and affect each other, is radically explored. I would agree with Cavell but have to disagree with Böhme. I wonder about the very possibility of the pre-narrative, of the anti-semiotic, which I consider haunted by oppositional and evolutionary theories. Cinema, if we allow Heidegger’s contention, is world-forming because human beings make films and human beings are intrinsically world-forming. To be human is to think, and to think is to measure, to mentally evaluate (the etymological root in both cases is *MEN = to weigh-up, to consider). For me human beings are by definition narrative beings, semiotic beings, considerate beings, mindful beings: we are and have always been storytellers, seers, makers and interpreters of signs. If Böhme means that atmosphere and the perception of atmosphere are pre-conceptual — that atmosphere is not apprehended by the mind but un-mediatedly, prior to the workings of the mind, prior to thought, prior to interpretation — then I would question the dichotomy at the core of this Enlightenment reading of the human (pre- and post-ratiocination). We can certainly rationalize our experience of atmosphere after the fact, even anticipate it mindfully before the fact, but we can also apprehend atmosphere viscerally, resonantly, by way of our material memory and corporeal intelligence. These two kinds of apperception — rational and haptic — not be separable in us; rather, they can be mutually co-informing, co-producing; and they can manifest simultaneously rather than sequentially. The suspense we are thrown into with Lynch’s diner sequence in Mulholland Drive, for example, is entirely visceral; but the intensity of anticipation and terror we experience is also fueled by our mental processes of making sense of what we simultaneously see and feel.
Part of your reflection is dedicated to the cinema of David Lynch and his ability to represent fear in a Heideggerian sense, that is, fear as an original condition. In particular, analyzing a scene from Mulholland Drive, you focus on the various elements of aesthetic work aimed at producing the atmosphere of fear: the purely verbal recounting of a dream; the scenography, when the two characters pass a series of objects along their path; the mise-en-scène, which renders a corner threatening because we do not know what awaits us behind it; and the music. In this sense, can we say that what scares, destabilizes, and disorients us in Lynch’s cinema is not what we see but the fact that what we see reveals that we are structurally frightened and scared as human beings thrown into a world that offers no protection?
This is the scene I was referring to just before. Its effectiveness (in producing an ambiance of dread) and its affectiveness (in that we find the atmosphere of the scene dreadful) depend largely on the way Lynch builds the assemblage and ambiance of the sequence. The character who recollects the very nightmare that we are seeing, the very world that we are about to be thrown into, becomes radically unmoored as the sequence progresses towards its climactic horror. Key here are the discrepancy and ambiguity that Lynch mobilises to produce the sequence’s suspenseful ambiance and its promise of an uncanny experience: the ordinariness of the diner’s setting, the troubled disposition of the characters, the unresolved, repetitive descending string chords of the soundtrack that rise to a crescendo at the final jump scare edit. As you say, the sequence works primarily because we do not know what is “in back” of Winkie’s Diner; we only know that the man recounting his nightmare hopes to “never see that face outside of a dream.” The monstrous presence there looms (literally monstrates, shows itself), suddenly and brusquely in a fraction of a second, breaching the borderline between the “real” and the oneiric, between the known and the unknown, the homely and the unhomely. In the unhomely we are without coordinates, without orientation, without firm footing, exposed, unprotected. I wouldn’t say that we are preternaturally or “structurally frightened” beings. Rather, I imagine Lynch is wanting us to experience the terror of the terms or borderlines that interface the multiple compossibilities subsisting in every human being: compossibilities that we ordinarily suppress, or have suppressed for us, and that only dreams or reverie (natural or induced) enable us to play out.4 Clearly there is resonance here with the mood or attunement of terror that Heidegger evokes as a constitutive ambiance of our “being-thrown” in the world. The monstration I refer to is precisely equivalent to the emergent character of atmosphere, manifesting as ekstasis, as an instance of what (out-standingly) overflows a boundary (anger, laughter, tears, flood, monsters, ecstasy).
An essential aspect of your analysis is related to the concept of ambiance, which you describe as a property of a space derived from the ways in which it is organized or assembled. A fundamental characteristic of ambiance appears to be its intrinsic ambiguity, its equivocality, determined by what you define as a configuration of «several unaligned yet resonant conditions that together produce the infrastructure of potential necessary for atmosphere». In the context of cinema, ambiance is the result of what Gernot Böhme has called «aesthetic work», thus composed of a deliberately designed set of elements. Given this, is it not possible to align all the conditions that generate the necessary potential for atmosphere in a manner that evokes a sense of clarity, security and trust?
Two issues arise here. First, this configuration of “several unaligned yet resonant conditions” is not a matter of “aesthetic work,” if we mean by that work that proceeds solely by way of the sensate, the subjective, hence the unquantifiable. I have to insist on the precision necessary to effective and atmosphere-enabling configurative assemblages. It cannot be left some loose idea of imagination, creativity, insight, intuition, experience, genius and so forth. There has to be precision at the level of each and every component of an assemblage, as well as at the level of how these components are arranged or organized to enable multiple compossibilities to subsist, as potential and virtual opportunities, within the object, event or space. It is the kind of precision that determines, for example, the ideal height, width and depth of a surface to accommodate a given human gesture and, more critically, to prompt and promote or call for that gesture as an open invitation. It is a question of affordance and applies at multiple scales: the scale of an object (a knife), a piece of furniture (a park bench), a room, building, street or city. Consider a park bench that enables the multiple permutations of sitting, leaning, lying, kneeling, climbing, leaping…; but that does so without explicitly naming any one them (and thereby foreclosing all the others).5
The second issue has to do with the pivotal role of ambiguity in the production of atmosphere. My contention, shadowing William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,6 is that the various components of an assemblage that affords the production of atmosphere must remain in an ambiguous relationship to each other. They must remain in suspension; and their exact relationships within the constellation must remain undecidable, indeterminate, provisional. While there is precision in the determination of each component, the relationships between them must remain elastic, and therefore indefinitely recombinable; much as the letters, semantemes and vocables of a language have precise sense content, indicated by their etymologies for example, and at the same time are open to an indefinite capacity for generating composite terms and texts. This is why I speak of “consilient discrepancy,” in which unalignment, disclocation and indeterminacy provide the charged space, gap or interval between components that enables them to resonate, but without fusing or totalizing — harmony, as the Greeks had it: a matter of alignment among the unlike; or community, as Alphonso Lingis (and Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben) had it: the “community of those who have nothing in common.”7 Were the various components of an assemblage or constellation (literary, musical, cinematic, architectural, urban…) to be brought into strict alignment, to be fully coordinated and ‘unified,’ then the potential for indefinite recombination necessary to the ambiguity on which the experience of atmosphere pivots would be effectively foreclosed. Precision defines the components while the elasticity (or imprecision) of their bonds enables compossibilities to emerge. Precision refers to what is “cut-in-advance,” hence what is preordained and predictable; but ambiguity and atmosphere develop out of unpredictability, out of happenstance, out of situational circumstances and human moods that cannot be known beforehand. For me, closure, certainty, predictability and the like (“clarity,” “security,” “trust”) are counterproductive to and stifling for atmosphere. A systematic analysis of the precise tactics used by cinematographers (Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window; Michael Haneke, Funny Games; David Lynch, Mulholland Drive) to produce filmic suspense would be very instructive here for architecture.
Your analysis of atmosphere in cinema suggests that the filmmaking process involves several activities that generate atmosphere, including the manipulation of light and sound sources, as well as the arrangement of things within the framed area. Additionally, you incorporate the structuring of the storyline, and thus the progression of narrative. However, atmospheric perception appears to occur during periods of suspension in action: as Griffero states, «the situation […] is intensely perceived from an atmospheric perspective especially when it is removed from the ordinary pragmatic relationship», i.e. the film is more atmospheric when the action is suspended and contemplation prevails.
Griffero is certainly right in stressing the role of suspension; but it depends. If we think of a film by Terrence Malick (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups…) for example, what you call the “pragmatic,” by which I think you mean the “everyday” or the “ordinary,” is not separate from the atmospheric dimension that seeks to communicate the wonder, the extraordinariness of the everyday. Everything there is geared to the magnification and amplification of the ordinary, to seeing the exceptional at the heart of the unexceptional, to have an intimation of the eternal or the instant that is both in time and eclipses time. Time (but space, too) is a good example. We live, simultaneously, within multiple temporalities: the mundane time of the screening; the time and era depicted by the film; the subjective sense of time experienced by each protagonist; profane time, sacred time and oneiric time; the elastic time of the narrative in which past, present and future interpenetrate, exchange valencies and become indeterminate. For me, Malick is not positing a temporality outside the everyday; rather, he is showing us how different times coexist in complex assemblages. These different times coincide in suspension, such that one cannot settle on any one of them. They coexist as potentialities together with ordinary time, not apart from it; in the same way that, at any moment, we experience subjective time that might be attenuated, quickened or decelerated, dilated or condensed in relation to mechanical, clock time. We must commonly “suspend disbelief” when watching a film, but that does not necessarily imply that we are thereby “removed from the ordinary pragmatic relations.” On the contrary, the experience of atmosphere is an experience of the intensification of the ordinary (a place, a moment, a place at a particular moment), an amplification of the circumstances of a world in which we are thrown, in which we happen to find ourselves. Architecturally speaking, the pragmatic or factual reality of a given space (dimensions, geometry, functions…) has no ambiance and solicits no atmospheric experience. It is only when the various components of that space, as an assemblage or constellation of conditions held in suspense, begin to interact and relay with the particular ambient circumstances of its setting (light, material, orientation, season, time) and the particular attunement or mood that we are in, that we may experience something like atmosphere. Like film, architectural settings can be set up to highlight, amplify and magnify the places and occasions in which they are situated and in which they take place; and in so doing, reveal something like their extraordinary (oneiric, transcendent…) dimensions.
Atmosphere has been defined by Hermann Schmitz as a spatially effused feeling, with which the subject aligns when perceiving it. This implies an affective involvement, wherein the individual attunes to something external to themselves. However, even when perceiving all the characteristics capable of generating a pleasant atmosphere, a subject might not have any affective response. In contrast, in film production, atmospheres seem to be designed to evoke specific emotions in the audience. Therefore, is it reasonable to suppose that the affective response to an atmosphere is, on one hand, a possible occurrence in everyday life, and on the other hand, a prerogative of the artwork?
There is an ambient circumstance, or a circumambient setting, and there is a mooded human being. Atmosphere emerges in the interaction between these two conditions if there is alignment and attunement, if there is a palpable resonance between the internal constitution of the setting and the internal constitution of the human being. I can be unaffected by an affective setting if my mood is unaligned with the condition of the world in which I find myself thrown. I may even have an intimation of the atmosphere that surrounds me even though it remains effectively closed to me. On the other hand, if I am open — if I make myself available, if I suspend disbelief, if by circumspection I find myself being caught up in the moment, if my mood shifts — then I can experience the fulness of atmosphere. Even if a building, a room or a film is “designed to evoke specific emotions in the audience,” I may remain out of reach because my mood does not align with the film’s intended effect. However — and again, if I am circumspectively open to the compossibilities it presents — I might resonate with the film’s effective ambiance and hence be atmospherically caught up and affected. The task of design is to indicate, then to unclench or trigger these kinds of alignment, whether I find myself thrown into a designed environment (a public square, a street, a foyer, an auditorium, a park), an art gallery or a film theatre. The distinction between the everyday and the artwork is to me immaterial, since every world in which we find ourselves has been designed or at least has resulted from a series of more or less coordinated decisions (demiurgic, religious, political, financial, aesthetic, social, historical, narrative, tectonic, material…).
In your book, you offer a series of case studies to examine the creation of atmospheres in cinema. Specifically, in your analysis of the film The Power of the Dog, directed by Jane Campion, you focus on the constant tension between opposing polarities, which defines not only the spatial articulation but also the conflictual relationships between the characters. This duality is inherent in the character of Phil, who embodies multiple and contradictory aspects. This prompts reflection on the possibility that atmosphere can also be radiated by individual subjects, who color the surrounding world with their presence and physiognomic features.
Yes. Places, spaces, times, stories, human beings are all in their own way assemblages and constellations. The particular elements, relationships and bonds that comprise them constitute a characteristic ambiance for each. It’s important to keep in mind that there is precision and elasticity at play in each constellation — both in the constitutive elements (which are themselves assemblages: “multiple and contradictory”) and the relationships between them. What I call ambiance (of a setting, a film, a novel, a person), to distinguish it from atmosphere, is something like an aureole or halo; a fasciculation that results from internal constitution and emerges (or presents itself) as circumambient shimmer or radiance (more or less colourful, more or less dark). Hence individual subjects (consciously or unconsciously) radiate or broadcast their mood just as a music concert, a painting or an architectural space radiate or broadcast their ambiance. Every encounter is an encounter with ambiance. Atmosphere is what emerges from that encounter. It can be a positive or negative, resonant or conflictual experience; and every player in that encounter has the capacity to affect and be affected by every other player. Because of the mood that I am in, I can find the ambiance of an ostensibly joyful gathering intensely depressing and affect it thereby; or I can allow it to infect me (literally to make-me-(in) from-the-outside), to alter my mood, and hence to draw me into atmosphere.
Endnotes
1. Michael Tawa, Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010: 196-197; https://www.michaeltawa.net/writings/agencies-of-the-frame-tectonic-strategies-in-cinema-and-architecture Retrieved 9 February 2025.
2. Michael Tawa, “Vaporous circumambiance: towards an architectonics of atmosphere,” in Interstices 15 (2014): 18-19; file:///Users/mtawa/Downloads/473-Article%20Text-728-1-10-20190318.pdf Retrieved 8 February 2025.
3. For an analysis of these systems see my Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010: 283-286 https://www.michaeltawa.net/writings/agencies-of-the-frame-tectonic-strategies-in-cinema-and-architecture Retrieved 9 February 2025.
4. See René Guénon, ‘Analogous considerations drawn from the study of the dream state,’ in The Multiple States of the Being. Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004: 35-40 https://maypoleofwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/rene-guenon-the-multiple-states-of-the-being.pdf-pdfdrive.com-.pdf
Retrieved 10 February 2025.
5. See James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979: Chapter 8 ‘Theory of affordances,’ 127-137.
6. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1949. https://ia801306.us.archive.org/23/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/2015.215758.Seven-Types.pdf Retrieved 11 February 2025. I would also cite here Gilles Deleuze’s work on the ‘virtual,’ Manuel Delanda’s work on `assemblage theory,’ and Giorgio Agamben’s work on ‘potentiality.’ See Gilles Deleuze, `The actual and the virtual,’ in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977 https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philosophy/ Deleuze/Deleuze%20-%20The%20Actual%20and%20the%20Virtual.pdf Retrieved 14 February 2025; Manuel Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006 https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781441151742_A23999354/preview-9781441151742_A23999354.pdf Retrieved 14 February 2025; Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999
7. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994; Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community. New York: Station Hill Press, 1988 https://ia801605.us.archive.org/25/items/maurice-blanchot-the-unavowable-community_202307/maurice-blanchot-the-unavowable-community.pdf Retrieved 11 February 2025; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 https://monoskop.org/images/5/56/Nancy_Jean-Luc_The_Inoperative_Community.pdf Retrieved 11 February 2025; Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 http://www.elimeyerhoff.com/books/Agamben/Agamben%20-%20The%20Coming%20Community.pdf Retrieved 11 February 2025.