Review of Roberto Esposito, Communitas (SUP, 2009)

Community is generally understood as a shared property, something individual beings have in common. Through etymological analysis of the Latin word that is the title of his book, Roberto Esposito attempts to demonstrate that community is properly understood as a shared lack, a constitutive void that governs the relationships between men. Community is a gift that demands repayment, a debt that can never be fulfilled. In this sense, Esposito understands community as a no-thing in common. This common nothing that all beings share is the finitude of mortality, according to Heidegger. However, according to Esposito, Heidegger doesn't properly elucidate the nature of this finitude in relation to Mitsein, being-with. Bataille, on the other hand, argues that it is the mortal nature of men that most properly separates them. It is this mortality that allows finite beings to transcend themselves in the impossibility of community. "In a flash that relation between community and death is displayed…it is the non-being individual of the relation" (Communitas, pg. 18). Mortality is what renders beings finite, yet in community finiteness is overcome. This does not mean that the infinity of community renders beings whole, or more than themselves. Indeed, it is clear that it is death itself that is the origin and locus of communal existence.
Esposito claims that it is within Bataille's thought that the deep connection between death and community becomes clear. This is because the inadequacy of Heidegger's approach becomes obvious in the face of his political engagements. However, Esposito shows that this inadequacy isn't separate from Heidegger's thought, while denying that this inadequacy renders the entirety of Heidegger's philosophy suspect. Indeed, according to Esposito, Bataille represents the unthought of Heidegger's thinking. As Esposito writes, "Bataille is situated exactly…on the moving and jagged line in which a philosophy of the end opens to the end of philosophy" (Communitas, pg. 112). The deficiency of Heidegger's thought lies in its incapacity to confront the radical identity that exists between the authentic and the inauthentic—or as Esposito terms them, the proper and the improper. Where Heidegger establishes a juxtaposition, in contrast to the most lucid line of his thinking, Esposito offers a different interpretation of the relationship between the proper and the improper: "…Hölderlin's sea reminds us of our shared inability to be appropriated; pure crossing without 'forward' or back'…the present is the time of the loss of the origin" (Communitas, pg. 109). This originally-lost origin also finds echoes in Bataille. Bataille famously develops the theme of non-knowledge throughout his career, a thinking that takes as its object the unknown. However, in opposition to traditional thinking, which attempts to know the unknown, non-knowledge experiences the unknown in a manner hostile to the conceptualizing thrust of traditional philosophy. As Esposito writes, "The end of philosophy isn't the epochal task that opens a virginal space but precisely a 'non-knowledge', which from the beginning destines thought to a chronic 'unfulfillment'" (Communitas, pg. 115). The experience of non-knowledge is not directed at any sort of subjective appropriation. In fact, one's relationship with the unknown in this mode is governed by the incapability of just such an appropriation—in the face of one's finitude, non-knowledge can only be a joyous affirmation of the unknown, of what lies outside the self. According to Esposito, "The term Bataille uses to express 'the affirmation of this radical negation, a negation that has nothing more to negate,' is an 'inner experience'" (Communitas, pg. 116).
We have demonstrated how Bataille substitutes non-knowledge for Heidegger's appropriation. But what is the nature of this non-knowledge, and how does it relate to community? According to Esposito, what Bataille terms inner experience is the aim of non-knowledge. But precisely what is most interesting about inner experience is that it is not 'interior' to a metaphysical subject. Inner experience takes as its object what lies outside the subject, what renders the subject finite and lacking—the absolute Nothing which divides and at the same time constitutes being. As Esposito writes, "Why is it [experience] nothing other than this lack? Bataille's response arrives quickly: because experience is what carries the subject outside itself and for which reason therefore there cannot be a subject of experience" (Communitas, pg. 117). What becomes clear through Esposito's analysis of inner experience is that it is neither inner, nor experience. Indeed, for it to be an experience there would have to be an 'experiencer'. However, it is this subject which is called into question by the logic of inner experience itself. Inner experience takes the 'experiencer' out of itself. How could this experience then be the property of the experiencer, which is truly outside or beside itself in the act of experience? As Bataille decisively states, "In experience, there is no longer a limited existence. There a man is not distinguished in any way from others: in him what is torrential is lost within others" (Inner Experience, pg. 27).
This fundamental questioning of the subject of experience also holds deep implications for community. If all community is a community of those who are lacking, those whose most proper experience lies outside themselves, must not community itself have some originary connection with the site of this outside? It would seem as if community is this very outside, the basic possibility for a 'communication' between the one and the other. According to Esposito, "…for Bataille the cum constitutes the limit beyond which one cannot have an experience without losing oneself" (Communitas, pp. 121-122). Now, it is clear that, more than anything else, what defines this experience of or beyond the limits of subjectivity is the finitude of man, i.e. his mortality. The limit experience par excellence is death. However, one cannot experience one's own death—we are beings-towards-death only in the sense that the death of the Other is what is most capable of drawing us out of ourselves. As Esposito puts is, "The death of the other instead directs us again to the nature of every death as incapable of being properly made one's own" (Communitas, pg. 123). Indeed, beyond the limit, this conmingling (which is precisely not a fusion of subjectivities) constitutes the truest and most proper experience of community. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, "…this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community" (The Unavowable Community, pg. 9). Of course, such a community of death demonstrates the very impossibility of community as such. If it is only through the absence of the Other that I am taken outside myself, then the purpose of community is this sacrifice of the Other (or of the other of the Other) in a profound display of excess. It would seem that our circumlocutions have placed us right where we started, thinking the connection between death and community. Is not Hobbes' immunitarian project characterized by just such a shared sacrifice of men to the community? But perhaps the difference is that for Bataille, the sacrifice of men is not to community but of community. In other words, community is constituted by and reveals itself in the sacrifice of the Other (and the other of the Other, who is myself) that it necessitates. As Esposito writes, "Bataille responds that it is this repositioning that constitutes the only way to break free of the Hobbesian logic of sacrifice…taking it on, therefore, no longer as a painful means for the realization of an ultimate purpose…but as purpose itself" (Communitas, pg. 126).
This conception of community is radically opposed to the Hobbesian logic of sacrifice and preservation. Indeed, Bataille's community paradoxically sets itself upon its very impossibility, its inevitable loss. So is the pursuit of this doomed community then useless? Not necessarily. In fact, perhaps the most meaningful thing that can be said about community is its use-less-ness. To think community in utilitarian terms is to once again enter that dialectic of sacrifice and gain, loss and rediscovery, which permeates all modern conceptions of community. Community is that which is lost and found at the same time, for it is only that which simultaneously divides and connects finite beings in its most proper guise as mortality. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, "Communication consists before all else…in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-in-common" (The Inoperative Community, pg. 29). Community is the site of this disjointed communication, in which both the Same and the Other place themselves at risk, not in pursuit of an aim or goal, but as what is most proper to their very nature as finite beings. In Bataille's words, "I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate" (Inner Experience, pg. 42). As such, this mutual exposing to risk cannot ever be seen as an attempt to fill the lacerations of singularity. Communal life does not fill the wounds of being—it is these wounds, and can never be seen as a fusional subject that overarches those that 'make up' the community. Bataille states: "There exists at the basis of human life a principle of insufficiency…The sufficiency of each being is challenged unceasingly by those who surround him" (Inner Experience, pg. 81-82). This 'principle of insufficiency' renders all attempts at wholeness or subsistence not only misguided but contrary to the 'essence' of community. Community can neither be given nor taken away—it is always with us, whether we care for it or not. For it is in community that the wounded beings we are can find ourselves, not in order to fill a void, but in order to truly experience this void as it is. Community is this being challenged unceasingly, the unceasing challenge to communicate our wounds, through our wounds. For, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, "Sharing is always incomplete, or is it beyond incompletion or completion. For a complete sharing implies the disappearance of what is shared" (The Inoperative Community, pg. 35).
What our exploration so far demonstrates is the impossible possibility of community, bereft of all 'positive' content. Community, this lack or void, thus seems suspiciously close to that to which it is commonly opposed: nihilism. In fact, Esposito argues, nihilism and community are closer than they first appear: "No-thing is what community and nihilism have in common" (Communitas, pg. 137). Both nihilism and community are no-thing, in that they are defined not by any sort of proper character but by a lack. However, there is one crucial difference between the two. According to Esposito, "The community isn't the site of the juxtaposition but the superimposition between thing and no-thing" (Communitas, pg. 137). This is precisely what nihilism lacks. Nihilism is the "the lack of a lack" (Communitas, pg. 146), the very denial of what makes community possible in an attempt to improperly fill the void, tragically sacrificing community while attempting to save it. In contrast, community is the 'no-thing of the thing', the thing of course being the gift of Being which demands to be shared. In Esposito's words, "The community is the exteriorization of what is within…it exposes us to the most extreme of risks…of suddenly falling into the nothing of the thing" (Communitas, pg. 139). This danger cannot be abandoned. To do so is to deny the Mitsein that we always already are. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, "…this 'origin'—the origin of community or the originary community—is nothing other than the limit: the origin is the tracing of the borders upon which or along which singular beings are exposed" (The Inoperative Community, pg. 33). This extreme identification between nihilism and community once again demonstrates the incomparably originary character of community. Community is literally a no-thing, yet this no-thing is perhaps the most important aspect of man's existence. What nihilism imposes on our thinking is an incapacity to be in this no-thing, to extend ourselves into it beyond any project or work. Yet, Bataille's thinking once again provides a model for the means by which we can approach this no-thing authentically beyond the confines of nihilism.
With the identification of the tragic connection between nihilism and community, Esposito claims that that Heidegger and Bataille's discourses are exhausted, that we must think beyond them in a radical fashion. Yet to do so would be to deny these incomparable thinkers the Sorge they demand. The two thinkers Esposito finds himself indebted to the most in attempting to think through and past Bataille both touch on the notion of love as one that provides the utmost insight into how to think the nihilism that overcomes community in our age. Blanchot's reading of Plato's Phaedrus contains this suggestive sentence: "Love which does not suppress death, but which oversteps the limit death represents…to give life a transcendency without glory that puts it endlessly at the service of the other" (The Unavowable Community, pg. 45). Love does not glorify the death that makes community possible—it overcomes it, negates it, accepting finitude as its condition while nevertheless avowing the unavowable. In a similar vein, Jean-Luc Nancy writes: "Lovers expose, at the limit, the exposition of singular beings to one another and the pulse of this exposition: the compearance, the passage, and the divide of sharing" (The Inoperative Community, pg. 38). Does not love in these examples contain a sort of model of the nature of community itself? Community is the impossible union, worked for but never attained, precisely an unwork, a work that undoes itself in continuous reformulation and re-exposition. Bataille famously considers his inner experience as a 'Joy towards Death'. Love, as hastily elucidated in these preceding comments, is exactly this ecstatic experience. Love is the eternal affirmation of the finitude of being, in a manner that nevertheless impossibly overcomes such a finitude. This places Bataille's extraordinary comment in sharp relief: "A truth that will change the appearance of human things starts here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT THAT GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMUNAL LIFE IS DEATH" (Visions of Excess, pg. 210). The community, as the site of no-thing and thing, must continuously wrestle with its incomplete nature, the finite character that colors it just as it colors those who engage in that community. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, "'Political' would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing" (The Inoperative Community, pg. 40). In the final analysis, the authentically political nature of a community that does not nihilistically dispose of the death that always lies at its core and limit must recognize the infinitely finite character of such a politics, the inevitability of failure and loss without any hope of completion or end. Only in this sense can a community claim to be what it truly is—a gift which must be repayed, a debt which can never be repayed. This community is the world we always inhabit, like ourselves finite and incomplete. The only authentic stance toward such a community is one of Sorge, of care.

Bibliography
Bataille, Georges, and Allan Stoekl. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985. Print.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Albany: State University of New York, 1988. Print.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988. Print.
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota, 2008. Print.




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