Containing Community

Greg Bird

Description

Winner of the 2017 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one's share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Political Economy and the Proper

I. The Proprietary Confusion
II. The Dialectic of Alienation and Appropriation
III. Dis-Containing Community

2. Ontology and the Proper

I. The Proper
II. The Ereignis
III. Interpreting the Ereignis

3. The Existential Community

PART 1. THE 1980S

I. The Political
II. The Existential Community, Take One

PART 2. THE 1990S

III. Communism and a Deconstructed Phenomenology
IV. The Existential Community, Take Two

PART 3. THE 2000S

V. Globalization
VI. Existential Democracy

4. The Community Without Content

PART 1. EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL CONCERNS

I. Language and Absolution
II. Impotentiality and Inoperativeness

PART 2. THE COMING COMMUNITY

III. Depoliticization
IV. Ontological Ethos
V. Whatever

PART 3. THE HOMO SACER SERIES

VI. Economic Theology and Political Economy
VII. Language and Ethics
VIII. Priests and Monks
IX. Destituent Power

5. The Deontological Community

PART 1. COMMUNITAS

I. Deontology
II. Ontology

PART 2. COMMUNITY AFTER COMMUNITAS

III. Communitas and Immunitas
IV. Communitarianism
V. Radical Republicanism

Conclusion

Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Ethique et morale

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 21 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438461878
• Langue: English

Extrait

Containing Community
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Containing Community
From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy
Greg Bird
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bird, Greg, 1978- author.
Title: Containing community : from political economy to ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy / Greg Bird.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030427 (print) | LCCN 2015042620 (ebook) ISBN 9781438461854 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9781438461878 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Communities—Philosophy. | Agamben, Giorgio, 1942– comunitàe viene. | Esposito, Roberto, 1950- Communitas. | Nancy, Jean-Luc. Être singulier pluriel.
Classification: LCC B105.C46 (print) | LCC B105.C46 B57 2016 (ebook) | DDC 320.01/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030427
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Kevin my love
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Political Economy and the Proper
I. The Proprietary Confusion
II. The Dialectic of Alienation and Appropriation
III. Dis-Containing Community
2. Ontology and the Proper
I. The Proper
II. The Ereignis
III. Interpreting the Ereignis
3. The Existential Community
P ART 1. T HE 1980 S
I. The Political
II. The Existential Community, Take One
P ART 2. T HE 1990 S
III. Communism and a Deconstructed Phenomenology
IV. The Existential Community, Take Two
P ART 3. T HE 2000 S
V. Globalization
VI. Existential Democracy
4. The Community Without Content
P ART 1. E ARLY P HILOSOPHICAL C ONCERNS
I. Language and Absolution
II. Impotentiality and Inoperativeness
P ART 2. T HE C OMING C OMMUNITY
III. Depoliticization
IV. Ontological Ethos
V. Whatever
P ART 3. T HE H OMO S ACER S ERIES
VI. Economic Theology and Political Economy
VII. Language and Ethics
VIII. Priests and Monks
IX. Destituent Power
5. The Deontological Community
P ART 1. C OMMUNITAS
I. Deontology
II. Ontology
P ART 2. C OMMUNITY A FTER C OMMUNITAS
III. Communitas and Immunitas
IV. Communitarianism
V. Radical Republicanism
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Sections of chapters 1 and 5 appeared in my essay, “Roberto Esposito’s Deontological Communal Contract,” and parts of chapter 5 appeared in “Community, Immunity, and the Proper: An Introduction to the Political Theory of Roberto Esposito” which I co-wrote with Jon Short. Both were published in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (18.3). I am a grateful to Jon for allowing me to use our co-written material in this chapter.
I must begin by thanking Roberto Esposito for not only inviting me to spend two summers in Napoli and Pisa, but for his mentorship and for introducing me to the Italian Theory circle. I am grateful for all the conferences, seminars, and dinners I have had with many friends in this circle, including Stefania Achella, Daniela Calabrò, Diego Ferrante, Dario Gentili, Dario Giugliano, Enrica Lisciani Petrini, Valentina Mascia, Marco Spina, Elettra Stimilli, Davide Tarrizo, and Marco Spina. Thank you to the staff at SUM in Napoli, Antimo Chiariello, Federica Dura, Giovanne Ideale, and Ivana Orefice, for making me feel at home and for being patient with my Italian. Although I still can’t say that agg parlat tropp napulitan , I now feel as if I have found una casa lontano da casa .
Back in Toronto, I owe many thanks. To Brian Singer, Kathy Bischoping, Anne O’Byrne, Philip Walsh, and Lorna Weir; without your intellectual and personal mentorship, this book would never have been written. My department and Wilfrid Laurier University, provided me with the time and means to complete this book. To my close peers, Jon Short, Kristin Hole, James Overboe, Mihnea Panu, Raluca Parvu, and Kristin Shaw, thank you for helping me work through the process of writing and many of the ideas presented in this work. To my many friends in Toronto, thank you for being who you are. To my mother Kathryn Wells, David, Alison and Tony, in-laws Candice and Bob and the rest of the Hegges, and, of course, Kevin, thank you for your love, support, and patience. Finally, thank you to my acquisitions editor, Andrew Kenyon, for your timely responses, encouragement, and patience; to the blind reviewers for your thoughtful feedback; to my copy editor Daniel Otis; to my editorial assistant Jessica Kirschner; to my senior production editor Ryan Morris; and to everyone else who has contributed to printing this book at SUNY Press. Although this book is attributed to a single author, it is not the work of single person.
Introduction
The focus of this book is three key texts that were products of the turn-of-the-century debate about community in continental philosophy: Giorgio Agamben’s Coming Community , Roberto Esposito’s Communitas , and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural. What follows is not an introductory text that provides a comprehensive, synthetic, and categorical summary of this debate. I engage in a politically grounded philosophical elaboration of how the exigency of community has been addressed by each philosopher. I aim to underline and draw attention to the critical insights each makes in regard to the prospect of rethinking community in our globalized world.
The first wave of this debate took place in France. In his original essay “The Inoperative Community,” Nancy explicitly formulated community in Heideggerian terms, with a Bataillian inflection, around the problem of death and finitude. Blanchot’s Lévinasian rejoinder, with an alternative Bataillian inflection, in The Unavowable Community helped Nancy to revamp his original statements. The final result was a redrafted publication as The Inoperative Community . In this work, Nancy drew a line between negative formulations of community based on the Other and his Heidegger-inspired notion of a plural ontology grounded in the existential analytic of being-with. Nancy is quite clear about these distinctions in his introduction to the Italian edition of Blanchot’s book, later published as La communauté affrontée , and in his extensive reflections on Blanchot in his recently published La communauté désavouée .
The texts produced by Nancy and Blanchot in the 1980s revived, emboldened, and updated Bataille’s project of overhauling how community had traditionally been understood in the West. But these texts are only of secondary concern for this book. My main interest is the three subsequent texts that were written in the 1990s. They represent a second wave of this debate. Each expands and further develops the terms laid out by the earlier debate. They helped to elevate the problem of the commons to a position of prominence not only in the rethinking-communism discussion, but also within continental philosophy itself.
The Coming Community , Communitas , and Being Singular Plural play a monumental role in their authors’ larger body of work. These three texts also helped elevate each author to prominent positions in philosophy both on the continent and abroad. They have become, with Esposito arriving on the scene a little later, core references for those interested in a whole series of questions and problematics they address. Surprisingly, very little has been written in English that considers them as a group of thinkers. Although this debate took place in the 1990s, many of the insights made in these texts are directly relevant for contemporary social and political theory. Not only has each philosopher carried the ideas he develops in his text on community forward in his subsequent writings, but many of the insights he makes in these texts are critical for those who remain skeptical of, yet committed to, to the exigency of community—especially those of us who continue to identify as unorthodox communists.
If we were to try to summarize the collective efforts of Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy, we might say that each strives to conceive of community in a way where being is no longer dominated by having. Community can only occur in an ontological ethos or form-of-life where we can use things without appropriating them, or in a deontological modality where the sharing and division that define our being-in-common are no longer conceived in proprietary ways, or, for Nancy, in a coexistential modality of sharing where we no longer attempt to appropriate that which divides and shares us out. Put differently, what might a community look like when our being together is no longer defined by what we have or can have, by what only a few can and do have and the majority can’t or doesn’t have? Moreover, what if community is no longer constituted through the collective appropriation and redistribution of property—that is, if being included and ultimately belonging are no longer determined by one’s possession of common property?
This is a problem of philosophy as much as of political economy. The first two chapters aim to make this clear. The first chapter examines various problems that have arisen in the dispositif of the prop