HEGEL ON COMMUNITAS an unexplored relationship between hegel and esposito

Abstract

In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito develops a de(con)structionist reading of political philosophy, interested in tracing modernity's attempt to constitute the political as a radical negation (immunization) of our exposure (contagion) to others (communitas). If the task of contemporary political thinking is to interrupt the myth of the common (and its totalitarian features), without falling back completely into the negative and self-destructive power of immunization, political philosophy must be confronted with itself, searching within itself for the traces and points of departure – hermeneutic supports – for such a de(con)structive gesture. Esposito finds and develops these traces in a genealogical line that, starting with Hobbes, goes through Rousseau and Kant and ends with Heidegger and Bataille. By way of this genealogy, Esposito intends to show how modern philosophy would already have started to interrupt the dialectics between the immunization paradigm and the myth of the common. In this paper I argue that Hegel is not only an interesting figure but also an obligatory step in this effort, and in doing so I will pay particular attention to a notion of being-in-common that arises in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate from his criticism of the violence of law. Hence, Hegel is read here in the light of an unexplored relationship to Esposito's work in Communitas.

Keywords:

• Esposito
• Hegel
• Nancy
• communitas
• immunization
• inoperativity

Notes

This work is the result of an encounter between two ongoing research projects: (1) the project “Narratives of Community: Politics and Violence” (2011–14), co-funded by Colciencias (convocatoria 521: Fondo Francisco José de Caldas) and the Universidad de los Andes; and (2) a book I am currently working on as a Gastwissenschaftler in Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, at the invitation of Professor Christoph Menke, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Some of the ideas that I discuss here were originally presented in the Eugenio Donato Seminar, Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY-Buffalo, in March 2012. I thank Rodolphe Gasché for inviting me to give that seminar, as well as all the participants for their insightful suggestions and questions. I also thank Félix Torres for his help in finding some of the bibliographical sources for this paper, and Sylvia Chaves and Ronald Mendoza for helping me with the final edition of the English version. Finally, I am also grateful to Greg Bird for the invitation to take part in this special issue of Angelaki: not only for his trust in my work but also for his support and endless patience.

1 Several books by Esposito have been translated into Spanish but have not yet been translated into English. In such cases I will provide my own translation of the text. This has also led me to present Esposito's thinking on community within the framework of some of his previous reflections, probably less known in the Anglo-American discussion of his thought: mainly Categorie dell'impolitico (1988) and Nove pensieri sulla politica (1993). I intend to show how Communitas (1998) participates in and continues with – but also deviates from and sheds a different light on – a project that Esposito had already delineated over ten years before its publication.

2 Termini della politica. Communità, immunitià, biopolitica (2008) has recently been translated into English (cf. Esposito, Terms). However, Esposito's original introduction is not included in the English version, so I must refer here again to the Spanish translation.

3 In a recent paper, Bosteels suggestively shows how this “impolitical” move in Esposito may again close the link between thinking and politics, giving as a result what Rancière has described as “metapolitics.” According to Bosteels, what the impolitical “gains in terms of philosophical radicality,” in its search for a deconstruction and a rendering inoperative of political philosophy, “it gives up in terms of political effectiveness” (Bosteels 237). I cannot deal with this criticism here, which may also have to do with a particular understanding of what the political and political action mean in the context of inoperative thinking. I will also show further on how Esposito does not want to naively go beyond politics into the impolitical, but is rather interested in the kind of resistance that can come, time and again, from a radical and continuous interruption of the “Work” of politics, without, however, pretending to “overcome” it or to point to a “truth” of the political that would lie behind politics.

4 Esposito capitalizes the word “Work” in this context to relate it explicitly to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's analysis of the Romantic notion of Work (cf. Esposito, Confines 99). Cf. also their 1978 book on L'Absolu Littéraire (Paris: Seuil).

5 To deal with the question of whether Esposito's argument ultimately regresses to an “original sense of community” (see also Manchev 22), one has first to understand what Esposito means by “constitutive” and “originary” when he refers to communitas. This also takes one back to a crucial aspect in the “impolitical” contemporary debate regarding community: the role that ontology plays in these reflections and how thinking community anew also means rethinking being. For a more detailed reflection on this exigency, cf. Acosta, “Tiny” 96–100.

6 Cf., for instance, Weil's wonderful book, originally published in 1949, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind (London: Routledge, 2002).

7 In a more recent article, written originally for a volume dedicated to Nancy, Esposito confirms again this close relationship between communitas and the Christian community at its origins. In the context of a discussion around Nancy's notion of the body and his deconstruction of Christianity, Esposito writes:The incarnation is the munus par excellence, the gift not only of life but also of the renunciation of the individual identity, at its origin the very idea of communitas as the dividing up of our singular and plural finitude. It is true that this horizontal communitas is destined to quickly roll over into an immunitary-type religio that makes the salvation of Christian society dependent on the preservation of its dogmatic-institutional form. (Esposito, “Flesh” 94)

Esposito proposes, therefore, to differentiate between two “movements” within Christian tradition: one that, in relation to incarnation (“Word made flesh”), “opens and exposes,” and another that, in relation to “mankind's incorporation in the Church, and later in the State,” “has instead the quality of unification and reappropriation” (ibid. 95). In a very similar gesture, as I will show below, Hegel will differentiate between the notion of community that results from Jesus' criticism of the Law, and the “destiny” of Christianity after Jesus' death (the “positivity” of the Church and its Institutions). In this sense, Hegel himself can also be read as the beginning of this “deconstruction of Christianity,” or, as Esposito puts it in his reading of Nancy, of the reading of Christianity as deconstruction (cf. Esposito, “Flesh” 92).

8 In his approach to the subject and while writing the essay, Hegel was closely reading both Paul's Letters in the New Testament and Luther's extensive commentary on “Letter to the Romans.” I must thank Jorge Aurelio Diaz for pointing the latter out to me (cf. Luther).

9 For a much more in-depth analysis of the subject, cf. Acosta, “La ley.”

10 See n. 7 above.

11 For the time being I will leave aside what one could also call the “violence” intrinsic to Hegel's own criticisms, and the anti-Judaism present in his text. I would also like to stress the fact that, in his essay, Hegel genealogically traces the historical origins of modern rationality. Therefore, his assertions about Judaism are philosophically intended and not meant as value judgements (cf. also Ormiston 506).

12 I will quote directly from T.M. Knox's translation into English (SC), followed by the page number in Nohl's edition (GC) and also in Suhrkamp's revised edition, which will appear in brackets.

13 There is a connection here between Hegel's argument and Benjamin's diagnosis in his famous essay on Zur Kritik der Gewalt. There is also a very interesting link here between Benjamin's approach to the idea of sovereignty and Esposito's own analysis of the subject (cf. Esposito, Confines, especially the chapter on “Sovereignty”).

14 As mentioned previously, this kind of community will not itself be exempted from fate. In Hegel's text, with and after Jesus' death the essence of community is again posited outside, in an external and future promise, instead of remaining within community as an infinite bond living in the between. The second part of Hegel's essay is therefore dedicated to exploring the fate of Christianity, but I will not elaborate on this side of the argument here.

15 Here I had to modify Knox's translation of this passage considerably: “Liebe […] in der alle Entgegensetzungen, als solche Feindschaften, und auch die Vereinigungen der bestehenden Entgegensetzungen, -Rechte, aufgehoben sind.”

16 I cannot elaborate further here on this particular notion of love of friendship, also always marked by the farewell of the other, like that which takes place at the last supper between Jesus and his friends. For a more detailed development of this topic, cf. Acosta, “La amistad.”

17 For Hegel, whereas the relation to law, and hence to others under its command, can always be understood in terms of a debt that has to “be settled” – as is the case with punishment – the relation to others under the “commandment of love” introduces a radical interruption of this economy. Hegel speaks here henceforth of forgiveness, to show that there is nothing that guarantees the path towards others except for this infinite gift: an absolute thrownness for the other that can neither be commanded nor demanded, but only received. I cannot elaborate on these concepts here, but they constitute a whole different trail that can also shed light on the possibility of very interesting aspects of this unexplored relationship between Hegel and the thinkers of the impolitical community (cf. Acosta, “Variaciones,” and idem, “La ley”).

18 The word makes its appearance twenty-seven times in the New Testament, twenty-six of them in Paul's Letters.