COMMUNITAS AND THE PROBLEM OF WOMEN

Abstract

From its earliest beginnings, political thought has grappled with the problem of those who both do and do not belong to the city, those who cannot be exactly included or excluded, that is to say, with the problem of difference. Most often this emerges first as the problem of what to do with women. Communitas is an intense engagement with central figures in the history of political thought – Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau – but also a remarkably efficient avoidance of women and difference. Even as he deals with Augustine, who cannot stop discussing begetting and desire, and Hobbes, who insists on the maternal right of nature, Esposito's attention remains fixed on the fraternal violence rather than parental sex as the founding of community, and the result is a strangely phallic work.

• Esposito
• Augustine
• community
• fraternity
• immunity

Notes

My thanks to Greg Bird and Kristin Hole for their very helpful responses to early drafts of this essay.

1 This is not an argument about DNA so much as about how to understand the ontological status of singular beings whose origins are never just singular. See Grosz, Becoming Undone chapters 7 and 8.

2 Note that granting privilege to sexual difference does not entail a social or moral program, and also does not trump racial, ethnic, gender and other differences. Again, see ibid.

3 Esposito is not interested in pursuing the lead, but the simile cannot avoid directing us to Eve, that thorn in Adam's side who gives rise to the perennial problem of women.

4 See Bird 287.

5 Ibid.

6 Augustine, Commentary on Paul's Epistle to the Galatians 56. The passage is quoted in Communitas 11–12.

7 Augustine offers this passage as interpreted by Paul.

8 See McKinney 51–59.

9 Cited by Pateman as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury chapter 9, 116.

10 It is a central claim of Irigaray's that sexual difference is an – if not the – ontologically significant difference. In I Love to You she writes: “Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal” (47). In Bíos, Esposito takes the same position regarding life: “Life as such doesn't belong either to the order of nature or to that of history. It cannot be simply ontologized, nor completely historicized, but is inscribed in the moving margin of their intersection and their tension” (31).

11 See Grosz, Becoming Undone, particularly chapters 6 and 7.

12 In Arendt the question of the ontological and biological status of birth and natality also remains below the surface, but only just.

13 However, see Deutscher's “The Membrane and the Diaphragm: Derrida and Esposito on Immunity, Community, and Birth” in the present issue.

14 Ibid.

15 See Campbell, “Translator's Introduction” in Bíos. See also Morin n. 7:

For Derrida's critique of fraternity in Nancy, see Politiques de l'amitié (1994: 57 note 1), and paragraphs 4 and 5 of Voyous (2003). In this book Derrida also mentions that he had already expressed his concern with Nancy's use of the concept of fraternity at the latter's doctoral defense (2003: 91 n.1). Nancy dismisses Derrida's concern in Être singulier pluriel (1996: 44 n.3).

See also Zakin; and Deutscher, “The Membrane and the Diaphragm.”