Description
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. In Communitas: 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 Hölderlin, 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.
Author: Roberto Esposito
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 10/29/2009
Pages: 192
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780804746472
ISBN10: 0804746478
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | Political
- Philosophy | Ethics & Moral Philosophy
About the Author
Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008) has also been translated into English.