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Communitas book cover
Communitas
The Origin and Destiny of Community
1998
First Published
3.86
Average Rating
192
Number of Pages
No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of from American communitarianism to Habermas' 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 cum munus . In 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.
Avg Rating
3.86
Number of Ratings
100
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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Author

Roberto Esposito
Roberto Esposito
Author · 8 books

Roberto Esposito was born in Naples where he graduated at University of Naples 'Federico II'. He is Vice Director of the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, is Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and the coordinator of the doctoral programme in Philosophy. For five years he was the only Italian member of the International Council of Scholars of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He was one of the founders of the European Political Lexicon Research Centre and the International Centre for a European Legal and Political Lexicon, which was established by a consortium made up of the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Padua, Salerno, Naples L'Orientale and Naples S. Orsola Benincasa. He is co-editor of Filosofia Politica published by il Mulino, the 'Per la Storia della Filosofia Politica' series for publishers Franco Angeli, the series 'Storia e teoria politica' for publishers Bibliopolis and the series 'Comunità e Libertà' for Laterza. He is editor of the 'Teoria e Oggetti' series published by Liguori and also acts as a philosophy consultant for publishers Einaudi.

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