Containing Community: From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy (SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy)

Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 1. Political Economy and the Proper 16 I. The Proprietary Confusion 19 II. The Dialectic of Alienation and Appropriation 32 III. Dis-Containing Community 38 2. Ontology and the Proper 48 I. The Proper 49 II. The Ereignis 54 III. Interpreting the Ereignis 64 3. The Existential Community 74 Part 1. The 1980s 77 I. The Political 77 II. The Existential Community, Take One 80 Part 2. The 1990s 84 III. Communism and a Deconstructed Phenomenology 84 IV. The Existential Community, Take Two 92 i. The Horizons Behind Us 93 ii. Coexistential Analytic 101 Part 3. The 2000s 105 V. Globalization 105 VI. Existential Democracy 108 4. The Community Without Content 114 Part 1. Early Philosophical Concerns 118 I. Language and Absolution 118 II. Impotentiality and Inoperativeness 122 Part 2. The Coming Community 128 III. Depoliticization 129 IV. Ontological Ethos 133 V. Whatever 140 Part 3. The Homo Sacer Series 144 VI. Economic Theology and Political Economy 145 VII. Language and Ethics 149 VIII. Priests and Monks 151 IX. Destituent Power 157 5. The Deontological Community 162 Part 1. Communitas 165 I. Deontology 167 II. Ontology 174 Part 2. Community After Communitas 182 III. Communitas and Immunitas 182 IV. Communitarianism 187 V. Radical Republicanism 191 Conclusion 199 Conclusion 204 Abbreviations 214 Giorgio Agamben 214 Maurice Blanchot 215 Roberto Esposito 215 Martin Heidegger 216 Jean-Luc Nancy 216 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 217 Notes 218 Bibliography 236 Index 250 Winner of the 2017 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one's share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory.