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

Esposito, Roberto

ISBN 10: 0804746478 / ISBN 13: 9780804746472

Published by Stanford University Press, 2009

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. An apparently unread copy in perfect condition. Dust cover is intact with no nicks or tears. Spine has no signs of creasing. Pages are clean and not marred by notes or folds of any kind.

Seller Inventory # rev8256285560

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804746478
• ISBN 13: 9780804746472
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Like New
• Weight: 300 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.