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New metropolitan areas, without borders and incessantly extended, contain traces of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “absent community”, of people living for a longtime in same spatial frameworks. We try in this article to point out the way recent French literature, through Jean Echenoz (Goncourt prize 1999) novels Un an and Au piano, represent the breaking of the communitarian tissue into small marginal spots of communitarian life at the margin of new Occidental towns, practiced as a cultural regression in sort of an original, natural way of living. New French literature may be thus considered as realizing what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “literary communism” as an aesthetic project originated in a repressed desire or community nostalgia, impossible to realize otherwise than as artistic creation or philosophical thinking. These two French novels are in a way a farewell addressed either to a idyllically communitarian Europe, nowadays entirely transformed by the capitalist runaway and to the communist project, deserted as a fake Paradise to which everybody prefers the misadventures of freedom.

Keywords. Community, absent community, Jean-Luc Nancy, French literature, Jean Echenoz, communism