Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Esposito, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804746478 ISBN 13: 9780804746472

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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COMMUNITAS

The Origin and Destiny of Community

By Roberto Esposito, Timothy Campbell

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Roberto Esposito
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-4647-2

Contents

Introduction: Nothing in Common............................................
1
1 Fear.....................................................................
20
2 Guilt....................................................................
41
3 Law......................................................................
62
4 Ecstasy..................................................................
86
5 Experience...............................................................
112
Appendix: Nihilism and Community...........................................
135
Notes......................................................................
151

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fear

More than the thousand books that crowd the immense, officialbibliography for Thomas Hobbes, a short text in the form of an aphorismfrom Elias Canetti introduces the secret heart of Hobbes's thought:

Hobbes. Thinkers not bound to any religion can impress me only if their thinkingis extreme enough. Hobbes is one of these; at the moment, I find him to bethe most important. Few of his thoughts strike me as correct ... Why, then, doeshis presentation so greatly impress me? Why do I enjoy his falsest thought as longas its expression is extreme enough? I believe that I have found in him the mentalroot of what I want to fight against the most. He is the only thinker I know whodoes not conceal power, its weight, its central place in all human action, and yetdoes not glorify power, he merely lets it be.

In Hobbes, hate and love, sharing and refusing to share, attraction and repulsionare based on a singular mixing that has at its origin the same element.The element in question is fear: "He knows what fear is; his calculationreveals it. All later thinkers, who came from mechanics and geometry,ignored fear; so fear had to flow back to the darkness in which it couldkeep operating undisturbed and unnamed." It is the centrality of fear thatexplains for Canetti both Hobbes's greatness and his unbearableness. It iswhat makes Hobbes necessary analytically and unacceptable prescriptively;what makes him almost our contemporary and at the same time distancesus from him as what is and indeed needs to be other from us. Or better:what places us in relation and in struggle with something that is alreadywithin us but which we fear can be extended to the point of taking us overcompletely. This something that we feel is ours (and for precisely that reasonwe fear it) is fear. We are afraid of our fear, of the possibility that fearis ours, that it is really we ourselves who have fear; whereas it is the courageto have fear that Hobbes teaches us, which comes most profoundlyfrom his fear: "I am still attracted by everything in Hobbes: his intellectualcourage, the courage of a man filled with fear." Hobbes has the courage tospeak to us about fear without subterfuge, circumlocution, and reticence;that fear is ours in the most extreme sense that we are not other from it.We originate in fear. In his Latin autobiography Hobbes writes that hismother was so frightened by the impending Spanish invasion that she gavebirth to twins—himself and fear—and that in fear we find our most intimatedwelling. Indeed, what does it mean that we are "mortals" if not thatwe are subjects above all to fear? Because the fear that traverses us or ratherconstitutes us is essentially the fear of death; fear of no longer being whatwe are: alive. Or to be too quickly what we also are: mortal insofar as weare destined, entrusted, and promised to death. Hobbes says it with glacialclarity: "For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and shuns whatis evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death."

Hobbes here examines the fear of death from the point of view of itscomplementary opposite, which is to say that instinct for self-preservation[conatus sese praeservandi] that constitutes the most powerful psychologicalfoundation of man. But the instinct for preservation is nothing butanother affirmative mode of inflecting the same fear of death: one fearsdeath because one wants to survive, but one wants to survive preciselybecause one fears death. Leo Strauss had already assigned this logical-historicalprimacy of the fear of death with respect to the will to surviveto the circumstance that is identifiable with a summum malum and nota summum bonum, the order of good not having any real limit: "Hobbesprefers the negative expression 'avoiding death' to the positive expression'preserving life': because we feel death and not life; because we fear deathimmediately and directly ... because we fear death infinitely more thanwe desire life."

The fact is that fear comes first. It is terribly originary: the originfor that which is most terrible about fear. Even if in daily life fear is neveralone, it is also accompanied by what man opposes to it, namely, hope, inthe illusion that hope is its opposite, while instead hope is fear's faithfulcompanion. What, in fact, is hope if not a sort of fear with its head hidden?Hobbes admits as much when in De homine he explains that hope isborn from conceiving an evil together with a way of avoiding it, while fearconsists, once a good is in view, in imagining a way of losing it. From thiswe read his conclusion, which sounds like a substantial identification betweenfear and hope: "And so it is manifest that hope and fear so alternatewith each other that almost no time is so short that it cannot encompasstheir interchange." Isn't it hope that pushes men to trust in themselves,carrying them right up to the edge of the abyss?

When one moves to the realm of politics, the role of fear becomeseven more decisive. Nowhere more than here is its founding fundamentumregnorum revealed. Fear isn't only at the origin of the political, but fearis its origin in the literal sense that there wouldn't be politics withoutfear. This is the element that for Canetti separates Hobbes from all theother political philosophers past and present, and not only from thosewho belong to the so-called idealist or utopian line of thought but alsofrom those to whom is traditionally assigned the term "realist." But why?What is it that isolates and pushes forward Hobbes with respect to hisand to our current theoretical scenario? Above all, there are two intuitionsand both concern fear. In the first instance, Hobbes raised what wasunanimously considered the most disreputable of the states of mind tothe primary motor of political activity. Compare in this regard Hobbes'sposition on fear to those of his greatest contemporaries. René Descartesexpressly excludes the utility of fear, whereas Spinoza assigns the task ofliberating us from fear to the state. Hobbes's second intuition was to haveplaced fear at the origin not only of the degenerate or defective forms ofthe state but above all, its legitimate and positive forms. Here one findsall of the original power of Hobbes's thought as well as the cause for thevery real ostracism to which that thought has been subjected for morethan two hundred years, beginning with those same authors who derivedtheir thought from Hobbes. Seen from this perspective, all...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804746478
• ISBN 13: 9780804746472
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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