ABSTRACT
Jacques same
question.
some
the question itself.
Esposito has provided hints about his pos-
ition, more so in recent years. We do not
intend to speak for him; rather, we want to
further situate his theory of community. In this
article, we use his response in “Community,
Immunity, Biopolitics” as a hermeneutical
guide to examine his position on community in
his trilogy (Communitas, Immunitas, and
Bıós), in Terms of the Political, and in Third
Person.We cannot possibly cover all the political
ramifications of Esposito’s work in a short paper.
Instead, we want to engage in a thought exercise
by drawing a comparison between his radical
form of republicanism and the civic republican
strains in the Anglo-American communitarian
movement. We have chosen this route because
we believe it helps to situate Esposito’s theory
in relation to mainstream politics. In other
words, given Esposito’s relative obscurity in
mainstream political theory circles (particularly
in North America), it is not only useful to
situate his thought in relation to the dominant
communitarian strands (and correlatively, to
the liberalism to which it is inevitably con-
nected). There is another reason as well: today
in mainstream political discourse one cannot be
taken seriously unless one acknowledges in
advance that only some variety of liberal or com-
munitarian thought is the basis for conversation.
While Esposito brings in an element that (much
like Nancy) is inevitably connected to the notion
of communism, he does so in a way that estab-
lishes a filial connection to the mainstream
liberal-communitarian tradition precisely by
demonstrating that the latter “debate” shares
the same premises, and that each fails in charac-
teristic ways to go to the root (i.e., “radical” in
the etymological sense) of the concept of associ-
ation which they each presuppose. We thus also
intend to demonstrate how his work radically
reformulates some of the key tenets in main-
stream political theory. We primarily focus on
the relationship between community, freedom,
and the proper. In the first section we examine
