ABSTRACT
I t is apparent that Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy address similar concerns in their work concerning the nature and meaning of
post-metaphysical community. Esposito, for
his part, takes up the question of the munus
in terms of the community’s quid, asking as to
the substance of the bond that makes commu-
nity what it is. At least as Esposito sees it, the
question of the munus is in apparent contrast
to Nancy’s inquiries in which the question of
relation, of the cum, predominates.2 This articu-
lation, however, seems to raise as many ques-
tions as it answers – something that, given
Esposito’s thinking on the impolitical, can
only be deliberate. While such questioning is
no doubt highly pertinent to the times and the
world we collectively inhabit, I must admit to
a certain perplexity that attends defining the
bond of community in terms of its constitutive
negativity or lack, consigning it to perpetual
alteration and self-difference. More to the
point, I am perplexed about what follows for
politics in such a circumstance, and moreover,
for a strand of political thought that sees politics
as a struggle for emancipation. In this context I
wonder if what Esposito calls “alteration” is a
purely deconstructive force, something that
simply undoes, brings to ruin existing political
categories without being able to propose new
ones. Or is it rather the case that, as one
glimpses in Nancy’s recent work – work that
itself responds to earlier criticisms of political
neutrality – a vision of the political as fostering
a (post-metaphysical) agency of emancipation
also flashes into view? My sense is that these
questions are at this point almost impossible
to answer, but that the contrast I detect
between Esposito’s carefully deconstructive
reading of Western political categories and
Nancy’s more affirmative sense of democracy
as requiring new types of emancipatory agency
might be largely a matter of rhetorical empha-
sis.3 Such rhetoric, I suggest in what follows,
is in turn a product of Esposito’s concern to
loosen the grip of what he construes as a tragic
narrative in which difference is reduced to the
same in the development of the legal person,
finally becoming synonymous with the hyper-
trophy of community itself. My argument will
be that Esposito’s narrative tends to eclipse
the compositional difference that is repressed,
but its
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