Communitas The Origin and Destiny of Community [Paperback]

No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas's ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community's original etymological meaning:cum munus. InCommunitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by H?lderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves. Esposito is an expansive thinker, unusually attuned to the historical as well as the philosophical dimensions of that hybrid field called 'political theory.' After a wondrous excursus on the problematic of 'community,' Esposito's challenging elaboration of community as alterity unfolds. This important and attractive translation brings to political theorists working in English Esposito's skill at speaking across the division between the analytic continental traditions. Thoseespecially English-speaking readersfamiliar with Esposito's later research (and, in particular withBios, Esposito [2008]) will find this work particularly valuable for laying out the ontological ground upon which his account of immunity and biopolitics was subsequently worked out. WithCommunitas, Esposito has made an enormous contribution to the cardinal and complex notion of community, taking issue with the essentializilc-