Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community - Brossura

Esposito, Roberto

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804746478 ISBN 13: 9780804746472

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

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.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

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.

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COMMUNITAS

The Origin and Destiny of Community

By Roberto Esposito, Timothy Campbell

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Roberto Esposito
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-4647-2

Contents

Introduction: Nothing in Common............................................
1
1 Fear.....................................................................
20
2 Guilt....................................................................
41
3 Law......................................................................
62
4 Ecstasy..................................................................
86
5 Experience...............................................................
112
Appendix: Nihilism and Community...........................................
135
Notes......................................................................
151

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fear

More than the thousand books that crowd the immense, officialbibliography for Thomas Hobbes, a short text in the form of an aphorismfrom Elias Canetti introduces the secret heart of Hobbes's thought:

Hobbes. Thinkers not bound to any religion can impress me only if their thinkingis extreme enough. Hobbes is one of these; at the moment, I find him to bethe most important. Few of his thoughts strike me as correct ... Why, then, doeshis presentation so greatly impress me? Why do I enjoy his falsest thought as longas its expression is extreme enough? I believe that I have found in him the mentalroot of what I want to fight against the most. He is the only thinker I know whodoes not conceal power, its weight, its central place in all human action, and yetdoes not glorify power, he merely lets it be.

In Hobbes, hate and love, sharing and refusing to share, attraction and repulsionare based on a singular mixing that has at its origin the same element.The element in question is fear: "He knows what fear is; his calculationreveals it. All later thinkers, who came from mechanics and geometry,ignored fear; so fear had to flow back to the darkness in which it couldkeep operating undisturbed and unnamed." It is the centrality of fear thatexplains for Canetti both Hobbes's greatness and his unbearableness. It iswhat makes Hobbes necessary analytically and unacceptable prescriptively;what makes him almost our contemporary and at the same time distancesus from him as what is and indeed needs to be other from us. Or better:what places us in relation and in struggle with something that is alreadywithin us but which we fear can be extended to the point of taking us overcompletely. This something that we feel is ours (and for precisely that reasonwe fear it) is fear. We are afraid of our fear, of the possibility that fearis ours, that it is really we ourselves who have fear; whereas it is the courageto have fear that Hobbes teaches us, which comes most profoundlyfrom his fear: "I am still attracted by everything in Hobbes: his intellectualcourage, the courage of a man filled with fear." Hobbes has the courage tospeak to us about fear without subterfuge, circumlocution, and reticence;that fear is ours in the most extreme sense that we are not other from it.We originate in fear. In his Latin autobiography Hobbes writes that hismother was so frightened by the impending Spanish invasion that she gavebirth to twins—himself and fear—and that in fear we find our most intimatedwelling. Indeed, what does it mean that we are "mortals" if not thatwe are subjects above all to fear? Because the fear that traverses us or ratherconstitutes us is essentially the fear of death; fear of no longer being whatwe are: alive. Or to be too quickly what we also are: mortal insofar as weare destined, entrusted, and promised to death. Hobbes says it with glacialclarity: "For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and shuns whatis evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death."

Hobbes here examines the fear of death from the point of view of itscomplementary opposite, which is to say that instinct for self-preservation[conatus sese praeservandi] that constitutes the most powerful psychologicalfoundation of man. But the instinct for preservation is nothing butanother affirmative mode of inflecting the same fear of death: one fearsdeath because one wants to survive, but one wants to survive preciselybecause one fears death. Leo Strauss had already assigned this logical-historicalprimacy of the fear of death with respect to the will to surviveto the circumstance that is identifiable with a summum malum and nota summum bonum, the order of good not having any real limit: "Hobbesprefers the negative expression 'avoiding death' to the positive expression'preserving life': because we feel death and not life; because we fear deathimmediately and directly ... because we fear death infinitely more thanwe desire life."

The fact is that fear comes first. It is terribly originary: the originfor that which is most terrible about fear. Even if in daily life fear is neveralone, it is also accompanied by what man opposes to it, namely, hope, inthe illusion that hope is its opposite, while instead hope is fear's faithfulcompanion. What, in fact, is hope if not a sort of fear with its head hidden?Hobbes admits as much when in De homine he explains that hope isborn from conceiving an evil together with a way of avoiding it, while fearconsists, once a good is in view, in imagining a way of losing it. From thiswe read his conclusion, which sounds like a substantial identification betweenfear and hope: "And so it is manifest that hope and fear so alternatewith each other that almost no time is so short that it cannot encompasstheir interchange." Isn't it hope that pushes men to trust in themselves,carrying them right up to the edge of the abyss?

When one moves to the realm of politics, the role of fear becomeseven more decisive. Nowhere more than here is its founding fundamentumregnorum revealed. Fear isn't only at the origin of the political, but fearis its origin in the literal sense that there wouldn't be politics withoutfear. This is the element that for Canetti separates Hobbes from all theother political philosophers past and present, and not only from thosewho belong to the so-called idealist or utopian line of thought but alsofrom those to whom is traditionally assigned the term "realist." But why?What is it that isolates and pushes forward Hobbes with respect to hisand to our current theoretical scenario? Above all, there are two intuitionsand both concern fear. In the first instance, Hobbes raised what wasunanimously considered the most disreputable of the states of mind tothe primary motor of political activity. Compare in this regard Hobbes'sposition on fear to those of his greatest contemporaries. René Descartesexpressly excludes the utility of fear, whereas Spinoza assigns the task ofliberating us from fear to the state. Hobbes's second intuition was to haveplaced fear at the origin not only of the degenerate or defective forms ofthe state but above all, its legitimate and positive forms. Here one findsall of the original power of Hobbes's thought as well as the cause for thevery real ostracism to which that thought has been subjected for morethan two hundred years, beginning with those same authors who derivedtheir thought from Hobbes. Seen from this perspective, all wither whencompared with Hobbes, that is, with the hardest rock, the sharpest blade,the coldest metal.

Certainly, others from Plato to Xenophon, to Machiavelli, accentuatedthe political role of fear. Then there is Montesquieu, who made fearthe principle itself of the despotic regime. But here lies the point: forHobbes fear is bounded by the universe of tyranny or despotism. It isthe place in which law and ethics of the best regime are founded. At leastpotentially, fear doesn't only have a destructive charge but also a constructiveone. It doesn't only cause flight and isolation, but it also causesrelation and union. It isn't limited to blocking and immobilizing, but, onthe contrary, it pushes to reflect and neutralize danger. It doesn't reside onthe side of the irrational but on the side of the rational. It is a productivepower [potenza]. It is this functional side of fear that distinguishes itfrom terror, from immediate fright or absolute panic. It's no accident thatHobbes never confuses metus and pavor, or fear [in English.—Trans.] andterror [in English.—Trans.], as sometimes his Italian and French translatorsdo; in the sense that the second term—the Italian terrore, the Frenchterreur (or crainte), and the German Entsetzen—connotes a completelynegative and therefore paralyzing sensation, the first—the Italian paura(or in a more attenuated form, timore), the French peur, and the GermanFurcht—is also considered to be an element of strength because it forcesone to think about how best to escape a situation of risk. In fact, Hobbesresponds to his critics who accuse him of making fear out to be a unifyingrather than a disunifying power that they confuse apprehension [timore]with terror [terrore], fear [metuere] with being terrified [perterreri]. Oncehe subtracts fear from the negative semantics of terror, Hobbes makes itthe base of his entire political anthropology, the very presupposition ofthe social covenant as Carl Schmitt synthetically represents it: "The terrorof the state of nature drives anguished individuals to come together, theirfear rises to an extreme: a spark of reason (ratio) flashes, and suddenlythere stands in front of them a new god." And this in the sense thatfear not only originates and explains the covenant but also protects it andmaintains it in life. Once tested, fear never abandons the scene. It is transformedfrom "reciprocal," anarchic fear, such as that which determinesthe state of nature (mutuus metus), to "common," institutional fear, whatcharacterizes the civil state (metus potentiae communis). Fear does not disappear,however. It is reduced but doesn't recede. Fear is never forgotten. Asalready noted, fear is a part of us; it is we outside ourselves. It is the otherfrom us that constitutes us as subjects infinitely divided from ourselves.

It is this permanence of fear even within the condition of its modern"overcoming" that attracts Canetti to Hobbes, which makes him seeHobbes as the undisputed head of those "dreadful" thinkers that "lookat reality point-blank and never fear calling it by its name." This is truefrom Joseph de Maistre to Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom the longest ofall the epochs is that of fear since "fear is a human being's original and basicfeeling; from fear everything can be explained," including morality,whose "mother" is fear. To these names we could easily add GuglielmoFerrero, who considered fear "the soul of the living universe." He goeson:

The universe cannot enter into the sphere of life without becoming afraid ... Thehighest living creature is man, who is also the most fearful and the most fearedcreature. He fears and is feared more than any other because he is the only creaturewith the idea, the obsession, and the terror of the great dark gulf of death intowhich the torrent of life has been pouring ever since the beginning of time.

Ferrero's presupposition is Hobbesian, that is, the fear of death not only asthe angle with which to look upon life but also as the "political" conclusionthat inevitably derives from it:

Every man knows that he is stronger than certain of his fellows and weaker thanothers; that, living alone in a state of complete anarchy, he would be the scourgeof the weaker and a victim of the stronger, and would live in perpetual fear. Thatis why in every society, even the crudest, the majority of men give up terrorizingthe weaker so as to be less afraid of the stronger—such is the universal formula ofsocial order.

This is exactly how Hobbes reasons. The texts are well known inwhich this transition from an originary fear emerges, that of everyonetoward each other, to the derived and artificial fear with respect to thestate, which can protect but only in proportion to the continuing threatof sanctions. But it's worth recalling at least that text according to which"the origin of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutualgood will men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear they had ofeach other," for the force with which Hobbes casts aside all the positiveanthropology (of the Aristotelian sort) of the natural sociality of man.This is how the infinite dialectic of fear begins and unravels: to escape aninitial and indeterminate fear, men accept an amount of fear and indeedinstitute a second and certain fear with a covenant. They organize theconditions for rationally stabilizing fear by defining it as the normal state.For this reason it is a legitimate power [potere]. What distinguishes a despoticstate from a legitimate one is not, therefore, the absence of fear orits lessening, but the uncertainty (or certainty) of its object and its limits,according to Franz Neumann's well-known distinction between neuroticAngst and Realangst. The state's task is not to eliminate fear but to renderit "certain." This conclusion opens a tear of unusual analytic depth inthe entire paradigm of modernity. That the modern state not only doesnot eliminate fear from which it is originally generated but is foundedprecisely on fear so as to make it the motor and the guarantee of the state'sproper functioning means that the epoch that defines itself on the basis ofthe break with respect to the origin, namely, modernity, carries within itan indelible imprint of conflict and violence. Note well: I am not speakingof the simple secularization of a more ancient nucleus, nor am I speakingabout a "memory" that is temporarily necessary for reactivating anenergy on the verge of exhausting itself. Rather, I have in mind somethingmore intrinsic that could be defined as the modern archaic [l'arcaicità delmoderno]. By this I mean the permanence of the origin at the moment ofits leaving. Here lies the double layer that is least visible in the Hobbesiantext. Differently from what is generally held, the political-civil state is notborn against or after the natural one but through its reversed inclusion interms of an emptiness rather than a fullness.

This is what the liberal interpretation in all its possible inflections isunable to grasp: it is true that state order puts an end to natural disorder,but within the very same presupposition. What this might be isn't difficultto recognize because it also constitutes at the same time the reasonand the object of that fear that we have identified in the same form of themodern archaic. We are dealing with the relation between equality andthe capacity to kill:

The cause of mutual fear consists partly in the natural equality of men, partly intheir mutual will of hurting: whence it comes to pass, that we can neither expectfrom others, nor promise to ourselves the least security. For if we look on men fullgrown, and consider how brittle the frame of our human body is, which perishing,all its strength, vigour, and wisdom itself perisheth with it; and how easy a matterit is, even for the weakest man to kill the strongest: there is no reason why anyman, trusting to his own strength, should conceive himself made by nature aboveothers. They are equals, who can do equal things one against the other; but theywho can do the greatest things, namely, kill, can do equal things. All men thereforeamong themselves are by nature equal.

What men have in common is the capacity to kill and, correspondingly,the possibility of being killed: a capacity for killing [uccidibilità] generalizedto such a degree as to become the sole link that joins individuals whowould otherwise be divided and independent. This is Hobbes's discoverythat makes him the most tireless adversary of community. The res publicais nothing other than a form of life that is preserved or lost according tochanging and uncontrollable relations of force. We can say that the entireHobbesian anthropology is constructed on this fixed principle: "Men bynatural passion are divers ways offensive one to another." They are unitedby the common desire to injure one another since they aim at the sameobjective constituted by power. But because power isn't measured except inrelation to another's powerlessness [impotenza], all are focused on mutuallydestroying each other. The reason is that men are essentially "against": foreverand always "in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weaponspointing, and their eyes fixed on one another." They encounter eachother in battle; they develop relations in violence; they face each other indeath. They are "those who clash," the "opponents," the "competitors"based on the image of the running to the death, moving toward death, andgiving oneself over to death, which constitutes the most fitting figure ofthe community of the crime: "Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity.And to forsake the course, is to die." For this reason "men are accustomedto hasten to the spectacle of the death and danger of others,"because "the delight is so far predominant, that men usually are content insuch a case to be spectators of the misery of their friends"; and because"the way of the competitor to the attaining of his desire is to kill, subdue,supplant, or repel the other." The fundamental reason for all of this is"metaphysically" planted in that terrible dialectic between power [potere]and survival, whose ancestral, anthropological roots Canetti analyzed withunmistakably Hobbesian overtones: "The situation of survival is the centralsituation of power," to the point that the pleasure that each "drawsfrom surviving grows with his power; power allows him to give his consentto it. The true content of this power is the desire to survive ever greaternumbers of men." Power doesn't need life any less than life needs power.For this reason—and here it is Hobbes who speaks—we fear "death, fromwhom we expect both the loss of all power and also the greatest of bodilypains in the losing" One can ensure life, which is the first necessity, onlyby accumulating power, which is the first passion. Yet one can accumulatepower only at the expense of others; at the cost of their life; living in theirplace, at the cost of their death. After all, Hobbes sees in war—not necessarilyone fought openly but the one that is latent—men's very same "condition"and their "time," with respect to which peace is nothing but an exception,a parenthesis, a contretemps. This means that the relation thatunites men does not pass between friend and enemy and not even betweenenemy and friend, but between enemy and enemy, given that every temporaryfriendship is instrumental ("Friendships are good, certainly useful")with regard to managing the only social bond possible, namely, enmity.

(Continues...)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from COMMUNITAS by Roberto Esposito, Timothy Campbell. Copyright © 2013 by Roberto Esposito. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804746478
• ISBN 13: 9780804746472
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 175
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile