ABSTRACT
The fragile tradition is presented through the work of Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille; and is centred less upon textual chronology and internal coherence than upon 'the difficulty of taking on and supporting the void of the munus as the object of philosophical reflection'. From this enduring difficulty, Esposito situates Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille as a sequence of responses which each reconsider the limits of the preceding conception of the void of the munus. The break which Hobbes effects, for Esposito, in relation to the Roman and Christian conceptions of communitas, concerns an initial simplification of the connection between death and community through its explicit thematisation as a philosophy of human nature. Rousseau's thought marks the first articulation of the question of community through the critical reflection upon the Hobbesian framework. The modern archaic, which Esposito reveals through Freud, renders Hobbes's political anthropology a far more complex and enduring immunitary paradigm.
