Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (review)

I have often thought of editing a "Dictionary of Damaged Words," whose covert aim would be to rescue at least some of them for intellectual use. Imagine a few likely entries: dialectic, other, difference, desire, identity, discourse, even critical. I hope that community, a word of considerable moral and political value, will not have to be included. I fear it might, though, after reading Esposito's Communitas, which came out, in Italian, in 1998 and was recently translated into . . . I think it is English. I cannot tell if the major problem in this book is the author's style of thinking—his preoccupation is "Biopolitics"—or his way of writing, or his translator's relation to language. My guess is: all of these. I am pretty sure that the issue is not the Being or Non-Being of Community, Esposito's apparent philosophical preoccupation.

Consider the book's opening. We are told that there is a "unique epochal knot" that "joins . . . the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms" and that, as a result, we should be "thinking community." There has been a failure to do so adequately, Esposito believes, despite many discussions of this theme by philosophers in recent decades. He "thinks community" mainly through etymology (of the Latin word for community), which reveals, he says, the "origin of the very thing itself." Etymology, origins, and the "very thing" unfold in a Eurocentric exploration with nearly no reference to anything recognizable as history. The word modern bounces about in a quest to grasp "the very thing," which also, it seems, is a key to modernity. But in place of an examination of actual communities—ancient or medieval, modern or contemporary—there is the presence of a word: community. Readings of Hobbes, Rousseau, Heidegger, Arendt, and Bataille, among others, buoy up Esposito's exploration of the word. From him we learn of the consequences when "the constitutively concave character of communitas is displaced by its affirmative entification." (My dictionary says that this last word means "to make something objective," to make it an entity.)

Has this string of words made a contribution to alliteration or to the way we should think about human community? Can we discern "the very thing itself" or its "origin" through etymology? Or should etymology be a tool, useful but only one among others, when we investigate how human beings have lived together, thought about their problems, and succeeded well, or in less satisfactory ways, or failed catastrophically in coping with them? Such questions have little relevance for Esposito, who is mostly concerned to contrast the words communitas and immunitas. The former is not, he proposes, a people or a territory united by some "property," in contrast to those outside. Rather, communitas is characterized by a debt or an onus or responsibility (munus meaning burden). You have no such obligation, however, if you are immune. The distinction he is making between communitas and immunitas is perhaps comparable, in modern times, to that between the public and the private. He seems to believe that his distinction is necessary for his arguing against those who would ascribe "essences" to communities. But do we really need this whole apparatus to argue, for example, that notions of pure blood can serve as only an odious basis for community? And have there not been social and political orders—federal ones, for instance—with significantly differentiated bonds, responsibilities, and immunities distributed among individuals and communities?

Somehow, somewhere, the history of human communities would have to work itself into this discussion, and 1989, the fall of communism in East-Central Europe, is Esposito's "epochal knot." As it happens, though, some people, indeed a good number of people, back at least to the Mensheviks in 1903, had already noticed that something was wrong with Leninism. It is true that many believers engaged in intellectual acrobatics to save the Leninist "project" from its result, but a hard question ought to be posed to them: why did...