COMMUNITY, IMMUNITY, AND THE PROPER an introduction to the political theory of roberto esposito

introduction

It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. Intimately bound up with this sense of crisis is its apparent multiplicity and lack of isomorphism, as increasingly no single crisis can be seen to function independently of others. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation, be it wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, or political and economic turmoil. There is, accordingly, nothing that can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. In this light the globalized world appears as the sustained crisis of the proper and simultaneously as the endgame of the project of modernization as manifested in ever more intensified, crisis-ridden forms. Even the very framework of crisis theory is itself starting to implode, thus becoming a crisis of second-order proportion.

The centrality of the concept of the proper to systemic crisis is similarly evident. For if the proper would indicate those items that are suitably, correctly, or even essentially joined together, it is precisely this obviousness of connection that is most troubled by the interlinked contemporary form of crisis. In this respect, if as Marx and Engels wrote more than a century ago, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” to describe the globalizing dynamics of the capitalism of their day, they were simply identifying the crisis of the proper on which Western modernization was being built. The paradox of the proper is that the modality of crisis is essential to it. Internal to the associative matrix that links one element properly to another is that spacing Esposito inherits from Derrida and is further elaborated by Nancy – in turn radicalizing the analysis of temporization performed by Husserl – as the underlying structure of temporality in which what appears to be naturally related comes to be opened up, made subject to spacing, and thus exposed to an essential and necessary dissociation and dislocation.

Just as the proper implies an internally necessary connection to crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that politics today revolves around the dissociation and crisis of the proper. The more categorical the exposure of the proper to its essential contingency, the more violent are the political forms seeking to deny any such thing, to carry on with “business as usual” or to reassert the alleged naturalness of its associations in ever more apocalyptic terms. Today we are witnessing ever more drastic assertions of the essentiality of propriety (in the form of religious or socially conservative resurgence), property (in the form of highly concentrated but unstable regimes of capitalist accumulation), and/or authenticity (in the form of competing claims of idiomatic identity or questions of autonomous decision-making powers). Frantic attempts to reassert or bolster propriety, property, and authenticity, in short, the fields of the proper, are but a symptom of the latter's ineluctable crisis and decline.

It is amidst this background of uncertainty and the crisis of received forms that Roberto Esposito's political thought takes on an extreme relevance in the present. Esposito's work excavates and examines in a singularly powerful way how the dominant Western philosophical-political idealization of an immunized and proper community is becoming increasingly untenable in our current geo-political circumstances. Esposito's critique is not simply a nihilistic gesture, but is instead a prelude to a perhaps inevitable, but in any case long-overdue, rethinking of the basis of political and social relations. From his perspective, community is anything but a common essence or a shared property. The immunized models of community, where members are protected against foreign substances, external threats, and internal contagions, so common in our times, are imploding at a frightening pace. Rather than search for new material to mend the breaches of the communal borders and shield community against the nihilism of expropriation, Esposito searches for the original link between community and expropriation. Community does not shelter, contain, and protect us; rather, community is the very inauguration of an expropriation process. In community, so-called proprietary subjects are mutually exposed and suspended in a common munus, which never forms a stable property or furnishes an essential identity. The much-heralded crisis of community today, he contends, is merely the crisis of the project of community conceived under the banner of immunization. Community can no longer be conceived as an archi-original border that shelters the proper from being expropriated in its various senses. If the exigency of community is to be addressed in our times, then we are left with the seemingly impossible task of deconstructing the proper.¹

This task has not been without its detractors. In the burgeoning English literature on Esposito, a single question is constantly being raised about his work: what kind of politics can come from such an approach? Most recognize that he is coming from somewhere on the left – his revision of community is grounded in a notion of communism – but his lack of concrete statements, his insistence that he is more committed to deconstructing core categories in modern political thought than prescribing practical political solutions, and his tendency to present his opinion while working through an interpretation of other theorists, have left many wondering if a concrete politics can be drawn out of his political theory.² This question appears to haunt Esposito himself, who has responded with slightly more practical statements in his recent Terms of the Political and in his article “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” published in this special issue of Angelaki. The latter provides more fodder for those of us who are looking to situate his thought, but for those who want to see what they can do with his theory beyond applying it to concrete case studies – a strain of literature which is surely going to take off over the next decade – we are still left wanting.

The question itself is cumbersome. Where is the question coming from and what is being asked of Esposito? Is he expected to appeal to a prefabricated political roadmap a` la Alain Badiou? Bosteels has argued that without such a gesture Esposito's notion of the “impolitical” leads into the apolitical terrain of the post-political. But is this a fair characterization? He is neither a vanguardist nor an avowed Maoist. Esposito fits within a clear trajectory of critical European political philosophers who prefer to search for new openings for rethinking radical politics by criticizing contemporary political formations rather than provide ready-made prescriptions. Other contemporary thinkers here include Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. Each has been asked the same question. Some have provided clear answers, some elliptical ones, others have deconstructed the question itself.

Esposito has provided hints about his position, 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 Bíos), 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 connected). 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 communitarian 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 establishes 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 characteristic ways to go to the root (i.e., “radical” in the etymological sense) of the concept of association which they each presuppose. We thus also intend to demonstrate how his work radically reformulates some of the key tenets in mainstream political theory. We primarily focus on the relationship between community, freedom, and the proper. In the first section we examine how community is problematized in mainstream political theory. In the second section we begin with Esposito's critique of the mainstream framing of community, then we turn to his alternative solution of “affirmative freedom.”

I the problem of community in mainstream political theory

A core presumption in the liberal approach is that the group is oppressive and individuals need to become autonomous agents to determine their own identity (see Esposito, Third Person; “The Dispositif”). Thus, liberalism, despite significant variations, takes as its fundamental value the autonomy of the individual. Berlin's now-famous distinction between two competing conceptions of liberty articulates how this autonomy has been conceptualized. The first of these, so-called negative liberty, holds that the necessary conditions of autonomy and freedom have been met when there is no external impingement on individual choice and action. The basic political thrust of negative liberty is to remove impediments to the sphere of individual human action. The second concept, positive liberty, holds that the mere absence of external impingement is not enough to assure conditions of autonomy and freedom. There are certain capacities, the possession of which is necessary (although perhaps not sufficient) for autonomy to be realized, such as equality of opportunity; this is something that mere formal equality under the law often cannot deliver. Accordingly, we might say that while negative liberty focuses on the formal or procedural conditions of freedom, trying to ensure that all are as free as far as possible from external constraints, positive liberty seeks to stipulate certain kinds of substantive freedoms the possession of which is needed for freedom and autonomy to prevail.

As is evident, and as Berlin argues in his preference for negative liberty, the realization of positive liberty for some will often require a diminishment of the liberty of others. Even though positive liberty might be desirable, it would seem that the only way to secure it would be to impinge on the sphere of freedom and autonomy enjoyed by others (for instance, requiring universal access to education means some would have to pay higher taxes, so that the loss of income would restrict their options, to some extent). Liberals have difficulty with such choices, since they would seem to require a clear criterion for making the necessary claim that some choices or values are more important than others, since this would clearly violate the necessary equation of freedom with autonomy of (individual) choice on which liberalism rests. For this reason liberals have often been charged by communitarians with espousing an inadequate and abstract concept of the subject and of the good (Taylor, “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?”).

Yet, far from being an admission of relativism or failure to reach consensus on the good (MacIntyre), liberalism can be seen as an epistemology containing a moral doctrine. In espousing individual autonomy and the equal value of the autonomy of each person, liberals are not simply giving in to relativism because they also believe (and here is their Enlightenment heritage), that in conditions of freedom, the truth will be attained. In other words, the corollary of individual autonomy is that this is the only way to attain an adequate conception of the good. The influence of bad or corrupt institutions that impose an obligation to obey established authority, individuals' dependence on a social order in which benefits are very unevenly distributed, and the undue power of received opinion backed by oppressive custom, are for liberals the great fetter to understanding, let alone attaining, the good. Nineteenth-century liberals, such as Mill, were doubtless far too optimistic in their assumption that the removal of oppressive custom would lead automatically to progress, truth, and the good, but were correct in believing that the latter could not be achieved if disagreement as to its nature or form was stifled in advance. Liberals of the classical era could also be faulted for their optimism with respect to the market and capitalism.

Under present conditions, this optimism with respect to the market also appears to be liberalism's Achilles heel. Indeed, if classical liberals could once imagine that the market would automatically harmonize the atomistic choices of free individuals in a manner productive of an optimal or even common good, the events of the last century and the beginning of this one have put paid to any such optimism. In our era, the formally free individual, with her “unconstrained” choice, becomes epiphenomenal to the combinatorial matrix of the global capitalist market; as several thinkers of the Frankfurt School asserted long ago, this puts the individual in an analogous position with respect to capital as that of early hominids confronted with the forces of nature. Today, enlightened reason – or as Sloterdijk would prefer, “cynical reason” – reverses into the hollowly superstitious optimism of the ideologically committed (those, in other words, with much more to lose than their chains). Under these conditions the liberal subject's dependency on a mechanistic framework of insulating and immunizing institutions becomes not only apparent but increasingly suggests that the subject of negative freedom, far from being the authorizing instance of such institutions, is in fact their idealized and ideological fiction.

This faith in the market is becoming liberalism's undoing in the contemporary era. That is, while it is easy to claim that liberalism as a whole is not equivalent to faith in the market, there is what Goethe would call an “elective affinity” between them. If the market is a kind of meta-coordinator of preferences, one allowing self-interested individuals to act freely and “spontaneously,” it follows that for liberals the market is preferable to modes of regulation that require intervention by society (i.e., by the visible hand of the state) which would inevitably reduce the freedom of some (as noted above). If liberals don't have a clear set of criteria for limiting such freedom, the market provides an easy out: the meta-coordination supplied – or imposed – by the market allows liberals of various stripes to remain agnostic with respect to whose freedom should be reduced; if such reduction is merely an outcome of “spontaneous” coordination of choices, then values associated with such choices need not be judged. So the market provides liberals with an easy way out whenever they might otherwise be called upon to limit individual freedom. Further, given the elective affinity at stake here, it is quite tempting for liberals to view the market's coordination and limitation as something ultimately beneficial that works for the good and ensures overall benefit, if not progress.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. There clearly are situations in which no amount of market coordination yields satisfactory results, in which case it will be necessary to appeal to some set of higher-order principles that can be used to make decisions about the overall outcome of social interaction. Whether in the form of Rawls' principle of “justice as fairness” or some version of religious meta-ethics, liberalism is not in principle incompatible with a communitarian scheme that appeals to tradition, community standards, or even “our way of life” to decide conflicts between actors. But what would unite such communitarian versions of liberalism, or would seek to be compatible with liberalism, is an insistence on proceduralism. This is not to say, pace MacIntyre, that liberals are fundamentally committed to the right over the good, with the implication that liberals have no sense of the good, but rather that whatever communitarian values turn out to be appealed to in the case of conflicts between actors, such values must be formalizable in terms of rules. Otherwise, one is stuck with a kind of personal authority to intervene and decide such conflicts, an option that to the liberal mind is far too reminiscent of political theology and the divine right of kings for comfort.

Communitarianism represents a mainstream response to liberal defence of individualism. Communitarians contend that liberals privilege the individual to such an extent that communal bonds are lost. As we've noted, in a liberal democracy, as Isaiah Berlin famously claimed, a free person “should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons” (“Two Concepts” 121). Critiques of communitarianism, however, have argued that they have an “authoritarian tendency” (Esposito, Communitas), not unlike the one found in Rousseau's odd brand of republicanism, i.e., the “forced to be free” dictum (Social Contract). In response, communitarians claim that only their brand of liberty makes sense. Following Rousseau, they argue that the ideal of a pure form of negative liberty could only occur in a mythological state of nature (“Discourse”). Because we are social individuals, we can never be freed from external and internal obstacles. In fact, most communitarians attempt to salvage negative liberty by combining it with a social model of positive liberty. Charles Taylor's famous article “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?” represents the general position held by communitarians on this issue: negative liberty (freedom from) is coextensive with positive liberty (freedom to do and become), i.e., establishing “collective control over the common life” (“What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?” 211). This mixed model of liberty is not unlike the dictum that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 15).

Communitarians also claim that the liberal emphasis on individual rights leads to a strong state and a weak civil society. The proceduralist model of liberalism gives rise to overly active juridical, legislative, and/or executive branches of the state. As an overarching, detached, and value-neutral arbitrator, the liberal state prevents the development of a commonly held value system. The state, in a sense, forces its negative freedom upon individuals and communities alike, which is a source of great tension in civil society. All that is left in civil society are rights-bearing private individuals who pursue their own interests.

Many communitarians thus prefer a weaker model of government and more autonomy for local democracy. In line with the civic republican tradition, they argue that community can only flourish when there is an active, self-governing, and relatively independent civil society. Following other republican thinkers, such as Rousseau (Social Contract) or more recently Arendt, communitarians elevate the role of political activity in the public sphere. Some, such as Robert Putnam, cite Tocqueville's call for a strong and independent public in civil society, held together by voluntary associations; while others recognize that the public, meaning the people, has to be closely aligned with the state (Bellah et al.). Cultural communitarians, such as Charles Taylor, reduce community to cultural identity and then transfer this conflation into the political sphere as a national, ethno-cultural property belonging to a political community (Taylor, “Politics”; “Dynamics”).

In generic terms, then, most communitarians appeal to positive liberty as an ideal for an active, or participatory, model of citizenship. In a civic republic, citizens are expected to exercise political control over their communal lives. Although participating in public life exposes individuals to their community, they stand to benefit more from their public acts than an immunized individual who lives a sheltered life in their own private spheres. Many trumpet the republican ideal of public life as the highest expression of individual life. Some, such as MacIntyre and Bellah et al., promote civic virtue, while others, such as Putnam, promote social capital.

II esposito's position

Rendered in his lexicon, the question about politics in Esposito's theory is posited as what an affirmative biopolitics would look like. What is the relationship between affirmative biopolitics and the common? In this special issue of Angelaki he argues that the “task at hand is to overturn in some way – indeed in every way – the balance of power between ‘common’ and ‘immune,’” which consists of a delicate procedure separating the “immunitary protection of life from its destruction by means of the common; to conceptualize the function of immune systems in a different way, making them into relational filters between inside and outside instead of exclusionary barriers” (“Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” 87, 88). More particularly, we must contend with “two levels: by disabling the apparatuses of negative immunization, and by enabling new spaces of the common” (ibid. 88). Most of the work in Esposito's trilogy Communitas, Immunitas, and Bíos, as well as Third Person, focuses on the first level. He systematically deconstructs the ways in which the immunitarian dispositif operates within modern Western political theory. In the previous section of this paper, we briefly discussed the main contours in the liberal vs. communitarian debate. In this section we begin by outlining Esposito's criticism of this debate. Then we turn to Esposito's alternative proposition. What follows is just a rough outline of potential openings in his work for rethinking the common in an entirely counterintuitive fashion.

(a) esposito's critique

Esposito repeatedly claims that his theory of community differs from traditional accounts found in three representative branches of social and political theory: the organic model of Gemeinschaft in early twentieth-century German sociology, the Habermasian model of the communicative-ethical community, and the Anglo-American communitarian model (“neocommunitarian”) (Esposito, Communitas; Terms of the Political; “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics”). Despite their differences, he contends, each conceives “of community in a substantialist, subjective sense” (“Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” 83). Because each is conceptually derived from the “figure of the proper,” community is treated as a substance that belongs to the members. Membership is staked exclusively on each owner's claim over their commonality. What each has in common is “proper” only to those who belong to community (“Community, Immunity, Biopolitics”). This reading is not entirely new; it is likewise found in other texts written in the debate about community by Agamben, Blanchot, and Nancy (Inoperative Community; Being Singular Plural).

The new thinking of community is marked by a systematic attempt to reconceptualize the exclusionary and closed model. Each theorist argues that this closure is a by-product of the traditional tendency to reduce the common to the proper. Esposito's emphasis on the role of the immunitarian dispositif in the traditional configuration of community adds a new dimension to this discussion. Immunity is a terminological metaphor with several overlapping dimensions. Taken from the field of medicine, immunity indicates a function of the body, its capacity to insulate that body from a destructive external environment by identifying what is the body's own and eliminating or excluding that which is pathological to it. Already we have an organic dimension of the proper: what belongs to the body is that which contributes to its internal harmony, balance, and integrity, while what is improper is what breaks down or attacks such integrity. It is, to be sure, a very short step from this “proper” (literal) deployment of the concept to its metaphorical extension in politics. Here, the Greek notion of the city as the polis, whose citizen-members are constituted as a political body (i.e., a politeuma), displays the conceptual linkages between the city and its political members as a body, and, above all, a proper and “organic” body as natural as that of the biological body itself (see Aristotle, Politics Book I). And it is this body, both natural and political, that must be protected from what is external and improper. The immune paradigm is the mechanism through which the political body will be protected in a way analogous to the way in which the immune function protects the biological body. Meanwhile, according to Esposito's discussion in Bíos, what was already a mixed metaphor, that is, already biopolitical, has become explicitly so in the modern era. Building on the analysis provided by Foucault, Esposito argues that this primarily metaphorical sense of biopolitics has become literal in the application of new techniques of power to the life of populations. In this way it transcribes politics into a biological (and hence biopolitical) register which further expands the immunitarian aspects of modern civil order.

When this biopolitical and immunitarian defence is conflated with the proprietary model of community, members of a community who have exclusive rights to the common property establish collective mechanisms for protecting themselves. Internally, community shelters and protects insiders. Externally, it becomes a hostile and militant fortress. The ever-present threat of alien appropriation invigorates the immunizing apparatuses that create a mythological sense of unification. “[S]mall, micro-communities, opposed by definition to each other by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities” (Esposito, Communitas 54–55) become obsessed with containing their identities and whatever else “is considered to be properly their own” (Esposito, Terms 43). In our globalized era, these “besieged fortresses” (Bauman), whether in the Global North or South, have nearly “exasperated” the “autonimmunization” process to the point that common existence is no longer conceivable within the confines sketched out by traditional models of community (Esposito, Terms). This means, at least, that there can be no clear way to distinguish between inside and outside, us and them, because the inside is already marked by what it wants to exclude. This feature gives attempted reassertions of traditional modes of community membership a dangerously xenophobic character. The spiralling fear of “aliens in our midst” seems to necessitate ever stricter criteria of membership, reactivating the worst forms of racist, religious, and ethnic discrimination; we see this today when authorities are empowered to demand citizenship papers from anyone who looks like an “alien,” as now happens routinely in parts of the United States and Europe.

Esposito argues, quite pointedly, that the “identity-making” communitarians (“Community, Immunity, Biopolitics”) are at the forefront of the defence of the immunitarian model of community (Communitas). Their model of community is a by-product of the successive developments of “state sovereignty” and “individual rights,” which are both at the forefront of the modern paradigm of immunization (Terms 128). After Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau the “regime of the ‘common’” was replaced by the regime “of the ‘proper’” (ibid.). In biopolitical terms, each sphere becomes a form of property that must be immunized, often in contradictory ways, from external appropriation. The state and the individual become two privileged spheres, polarities, against which modern politics is determined. Modern political solutions, Esposito argues, are held by this “vise grip between public and private” (“Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” 89). Community withers into the background, is held back and repressed under the weight of the proprietary, sovereign, and hence privileged spheres of the public and the private. The communitarian attempt to foreground the public sphere thus becomes the mirror-image of traditional liberal commitment to the priority of the private sphere.

(b) esposito's solution

Esposito's notion of “affirmative freedom/liberty” represents a synthesis of his deconstruction of the proper and his critique of the immunitarian paradigm. How, he asks, can freedom be experienced in a community, when our prevailing models of liberty are bound up with a proprietary understanding of our world? This question appears in many of his writings, but for the purposes of brevity we will focus in this section on a short essay entitled “Freedom and Immunity” (in Terms). Esposito provides a whirlwind exploration of the problem of liberty in modern Western philosophy in this essay. Here, he states explicitly that if we are to solve the problem of thinking about community and freedom then we have to liberate “freedom from liberalism and community from communitarianism” (55). We begin by examining his statements about these two camps and then we end this section by examining his statements concerning affirmative freedom.

Mainstream liberal and communitarian models of liberty are derived from the metaphysical model of the subject. Both schools treat freedom as “a quality, a faculty, or a good” that a collective, an individual, or many subjects “must acquire” (50). The negative declension started appearing during the Middle Ages, when freedom began to be conceptualized as a “‘particular right’: an ensemble of ‘privileges,’ ‘exemptions,’ or ‘immunity’” (52). This negative turn gave rise to a notion of liberty that exempts privileged subjects from common obligations and/or juridical responsibilities. Later political theorists, such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, inherited this model and cemented it as a cornerstone of modern political thought. In the negative model, subjects are expected to engage in a struggle to free themselves from any obstacle that could prevent them from becoming autonomous and proper subjects. Freedom is treated as if it is a thing that can be “appropriated” and thus “constituted as a subjective property” (50). Authentically free subjects must become fully-fledged proprietors of themselves, which means that one must become “‘proper’ and no longer ‘common’” (ibid.). Translated into Esposito's lexicon, the private subject must be immunized from the common. In turn, the common becomes the anti-subjective realm that puts up communal barriers and responsibilities that negate the freedom of the subject. It comes to be viewed as the oppressive realm.

Rather than challenge the predicates supporting the negative model of liberty propagated by liberalism, communitarians make the sloppy mistake of merely translating this individualistic paradigm to the level of communities. “American neo-communitarianism,” claims Esposito, mistakenly links “the idea of community to that of belonging, identity and ownership,” meaning that community, as we have seen, is treated as a thing that people identify with “his/her own ethnic group, land or language” (48). Instead of creating an immunitarian enclosure around an individual, communitarians construct a perceived enclosure around the community. For them, community is concomitant with the proper. Communitarians treat the common as if it is “one's own.” Members of the community can only feel secure when their common property is immunized from external appropriation. These communities have built-in immunization mechanisms that are supposed to defend them from alterity. Thus, the negative inflection found in the liberal model of liberty is merely collectivized in this model, which is sometimes exaggerated to frightening degrees. In short, communitarians negate their own efforts to conceptualize a positive model of liberty that occurs within a group setting by reducing liberty to property and hence by reproducing the core logic of the immunitarian dispositif.

Esposito's effort to circumvent the closure of community found in the paradigmatic debate between liberals and communitarians begins with a turn away from the proper. Contrary to the communitarians, argues Esposito, community is “what is not one's own, or what is unable to be appropriated by someone” (49). Community can only be experienced as a “loss, removal, or expropriation” because it voids one's identity rather than fulfils it. Community is thus experienced as a radical alteration that disrupts the rigid boundaries that protect an individual's identity. Rather than appeal to an immunizing “enclosure” locking subjects inside themselves, either on an individualistic or collective basis, community is experienced in and through an opening and exposure that “turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority.” His revision of positive liberty as “affirmative freedom/liberty” directly addresses this open model of community.

Esposito's deconstruction of the mainstream approaches to the relationship between community and liberty begins with a common gesture in his writing – he traces the origins of freedom back to the “semantics of community” (51). Prior to the negative turn, he notes, freedom was conceived as a relational concept with an “affirmative declension.” With the Roman libertas, for example, freedom was configured “as the external perimeter that delimits what may be done from what should not be done” (52). Following the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Esposito ties freedom to the singular plural model of existence. Freedom is not “something that one has,” as if it were a thing one could appropriate, but it is merely “something that one is: what frees existence to the possibility to exist as such” (54). It is, following his work in Communitas, a practical experience in the “decision of existence.” Freedom is nothing in particular. In fact, there really is “no freedom” per se, “only liberation”; “one cannot be” free because one “can only become free” (ibid.).

Without resorting to the evental tradition marking radical philosophical treatises on freedom in the twentieth century, Esposito attempts to “revitalize” the “affirmative power” of freedom by tracing it back to its “common root” where freedom is understood as the “locus of plurality, difference, and alterity” (55). This is the exact opposite of the modern sense of freedom as the “locus of identity, belonging, and appropriation.” For Esposito, this means “freedom is the singular dimension of community” that “sweeps across infinite singularities that are plural” (ibid.). Translated into more practical terms, freedom can only be experienced in an open model of community that “resists immunization.” This is a community that internalizes its exteriority while remaining open to difference. In this open and free community, individuals are exposed to alterity, pluralized, and thus prevented from appropriating differences.

Esposito's discussion of community represents a radicalization and revitalization of the idea of the common or the communal as it appears etymologically in Latin as munus. The munus as exposure to otherness and expropriating difference is not merely negative in the sense that the latter would represent a denial of something positive or good. Rather, nothingness as munus, as exposure to difference, is in itself something “positive” because it is how the relation that creates subject-positions becomes possible at all. Such negativity, although Esposito shies away from discussing it as anything but a lack – and this might well be a symptom of his insistence on de-substantializing communitarian belonging – in fact implies something of the positive freedom that communitarians seek but are inevitably led to reify in terms of the proper and the dialectic of belonging and disenfranchisement.

In any case, what is clear is that, as the munus implies, community takes the form of a collective debt that is owed to itself (and therefore anonymously), and it is here that Esposito's work resonates with the republican tradition. That the munus, as several contributors to this present issue will emphasize, is derived from the Roman Republic should be enough to establish Esposito's republican bent. But before one rushes to place at Esposito's door the defects of republicanism as it has been historically constituted – those precisely of which contemporary communitarianism seems most guilty – we must keep in mind that the munus is utilized by Esposito in order to enact a radical deconstruction of every notion of the proper.

Thus we believe that Esposito gestures towards and remains in proximity to a radical vision of republicanism. The radical in his theory lies both in the original sense of the term, found in his emphasis on the etymological origins of terms in his political lexicon, and in the contemporary sense of a politics beyond mainstream politics, which he usually defines as “impolitical.” For Esposito, the res publica is neither “la chose publique,” the “common wealth,” nor a “common good” because the common is nothing but exposure to common being. The common is not a proprietary and/or moral good around which politics is circumscribed. Politics coordinated, mediated, determined, and grounded in things is closed and exclusionary. Politics, he contends, is ultimately grounded in nothingness. This traversal of the foundational elements of modern politics does not lead us to an abysmal form of absolute nihilism, which is a contradiction of terms; rather, it deconstructs the political terrain so that we are open to rethinking politics and ethics in an ontological manner. It is in this turning where we find his call for an affirmative model of biopolitics, which is as much political, as it is ethical, as it is communal.

It is with this point that we are led into the most difficult and problematic aspects of Esposito's work; these are aspects that it would be safe to say he is in the process of working out, and which form the centre of inquiry for several papers that follow in this special issue of Angelaki. Each paper, in its own fashion, puts a question to Esposito regarding the political significance, or practicality, of his theory of communitas; this is a task he too takes up in his contribution to this collection (see “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics”). What follows in this journal represents the most comprehensive commentary on his work in the English language to date. Although no article is without criticism, we hope that the reader will glean from this special issue a greater understanding of the important role that Esposito's political theory has within our contemporary era. We are thankful for all the strong contributions made.

Esposito raises a profound challenge to the near hegemonic domination that the proper has held over Western political thought beginning in the seventeenth century. Across his works one finds a consistent effort to expose the contours, dimensions, and significance of this crisis. Our intention in this short introduction is to further elaborate and situate his theory in relation to mainstream political discourse. Esposito provides a much-needed alternative perspective that helps us to think outside of the public/common vs. private property dichotomy that continues to shackle most political thought. Regardless of the political issue – immigration, national identity, economic imperialism, civil wars, international law, gender inequality – the discussion is framed by the proper. Competing claims are made on the basis of an individual's or group's proprietary rights over the issue. This now formulaic response logic has only exacerbated our pressing global problems. It reinforces the terms of the political that helped to define social inequalities, exploitation, and oppression, in the first place.

Alongside a handful of other contemporary political theorists that draw from different anti-proprietary strains in communist history, Esposito challenges us to rethink the hegemonic reign that the proper has over our contemporary capitalist sensibilities. Put differently, he re-raises the longstanding problem of thinking about political relations in terms of the market logic of ownership. His central concern traces back to the original enclosure movement that stole the commons from the people and replaced it with a hollow notion of public, state-owned property, up to our current intensive phase of privatization conducted under the auspices of neo-liberal globalization. If we are to combat this process and search for real, practical, political solutions, our politics must be conceived beyond the hegemonic reign that the proper has over our political contemporary political sensibilities. That is, if the proper appropriates and negates the common why do we continue to search for community through the purview of the proper? This question is of the first order for our era.

Notes

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the editorial team at Angelaki for making this special issue possible. We are especially grateful to Charlie, Gerard, Harriet, and James, without whom this special issue would never have come to fruition. It has been a pleasure working with the editorial team at Angelaki and we look forward to possible future collaborations with everyone.

1 An alternative account can be found in Ignaas Devisch's paper that puts this in terms of rethinking the proper in an improper manner.

2 The place of politics in Esposito's theory has been raised from different perspectives by Bosteels, Campbell, and Neyrat. In this special issue of Angelaki, each of the authors has raised the question of politics from different angles, including Acosta, Bird, Deutscher, Devisch, Gratton, Hole, O'Byrne, Short, and Weir. The framing of the question is also the subject of the discussion that Esposito has with Jean-Luc Nancy in “Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come.”