Conloquium

To Roberto Esposito's title Communitas I respond with another title in Latin (which is after all the most common language between Italian and French), and we find ourselves together here in the space of the common. This language choice also enables Esposito to distance himself on principle from the word "community" (or communità), and to keep at a distance the temptations of facile thought or the risks of misinterpretation which this word insidiously spreads around itself, as has been evident for some time now.

I respond with the word conloquium, for which I have chosen the most classic form, that of Caesar or of Cicero (conloquia amicorum absentium [conversations with absent friends], as in all the texts), to avoid the academic resonance of the word "colloquium" and in order to indicate that if I play the role of preface-writer here, it is not to introduce a book, or to a book, which like any genuinely worthy book introduces itself, but in order to continue with Esposito, and by way of him along with several others, an exchange (a communicatio, a commercium, a commentarium [a sharing, an exchange of goods, a concentration of thought(s)]) which is already old but not yet aged, and which necessarily concerns us. I take these words in their strongest sense since it is a matter of nothing less than of all of us and of what is between us.

Communitas deploys a work that has been in progress for at least fifteen years. I am speaking not only of Esposito's own work—whose progress, punctuated by several other books (especially Categorie dell'impolitico) has forged a single path up to the present—but of work carried out collectively, in common (as we will quickly and provisionally call it) at first in Europe (specifically in Italy and in France) then elsewhere in the world (and on the world). This work is devoted to the question of what is called "community" or, better yet and as prompted by these works, "being-in-common" or "being-together."

If I say that Esposito deploys this work, I certainly do not mean that he accomplishes and finishes it. Far from it; he instead helps relaunch it from the beginning. With the large number of references deployed in his book, he shows the magnitude of the task of thinking that has been imposed on all of us in recent decades. It was a matter of, simultaneously, rereading otherwise certain decisive moments of our tradition (among others, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, and Bataille) and in various concordant and discordant ways engaging in thinking through what will become of our common existence (which is to say our existence itself).

This work of thinking is imposed on us by a terrible motif that the history of our (because it is ours) century holds out to us incessantly, to the point that the memory of it is as tiring as it is inevitable. Humanity—but first of all in Europe—has shown an unsuspected talent for self-destruction, in the name of community. Humanity has manifested this talent both on the order of quantity (but to a degree that the expressions "extermination" or "mass destruction" convert the numbers into absolutes or infinites) and on the order of ideas or values. Humanity has torn out from "mankind" [l'homme] itself the fragile veins, so recent after all and whose worth was based on fragility.

In fact, the community of mankind has left itself to its own devices, untying itself from the religious bonds that had moreover given it its qualities (hierarchical, hieratic, and seized with fear) and opening up a history of the necessarily collective [commune] self-production of humanity, both generic and singular. Everything happened as if history could not wait for itself, as if it could not defer the production of the figure to come and hurried to mint it like a pre-given prototype, a symbol available to serve as general equivalent [commune measure].

The work of death (in destruction stealing death itself, its dignity) was carried out in the name of the community (either that...