Esposito's communitas

So what are we to make of this performative authenticity, if its very naming occasions this dipping and swooning of the analytical language that attempts to grasp it? How are we to understand it, precisely as we bear witness to its impossible ontology? Returning once more to Esposito, it is clear that, for him, the impossible ontology of the community is not something that can be simply set aside or bypassed, but requires a fundamental engagement, a fundamental inclusion within the analytical trajectory, or grasped even as in some sense running alongside it. This first step in Esposito is very seductive since it would seem to be arguing for a radically different conception of the collective than that normally rehearsed within the dialectic of what he terms ‘belonging and owning’: ‘what is common’, as Esposito puts it in his analysis of that dialectic ‘is that which unites the ethnic, territorial, and spiritual property of every one of its members.’

This thing that unites, this ‘substance’ or connection, whatever it may be, is that which binds members together in an enactment of mutual owning and belonging: ‘[Members of a community] have in common what is most properly their own; they are the owners of what is common to all.

The radical turn in Esposito’s argument comes precisely here, at this very early moment in Communitas where he seeks to lay out the problematic of community’s impossible ontology. This dialectic is something he wishes to ‘distance [himself] from’, to ‘search for a point … within the origin of the very thing itself under investigation’, that promises to ‘lead to a notion of community that is radically different from those that have been dealt with up to now.’ Esposito’s achievement is to reset the terms on which community can be thought by unearthing in the roots of our modern conception of community the void of the debt or gift:

[in communitas] there is still another meaning to be added, one, however, less obvious because it transfers properly within itself the larger semantic complexity of the term from which it originates: munus (its archaic form is moinus, moenus), which is composed of the root mei- and the suffix -nes, both of which have a social connotation. The term, in fact, oscillates in turn among three meanings that aren’t all the same and that seem to make it miss its mark, or at least to limit the emphasis, the initial juxtaposition of “public/private” – munus dicitur tum de privatis, tum de publicis – in favour of another conceptual area that is completely traceable to the idea of obligation [dovere]. These are onus, officium, and donum.

In the munus, then, aligned to these three different senses of gifting, is ‘transferred’, to use Espoito’s term, a sense of obligation, in that the act of giving, as a kind of testament to one’s recognition of one’s beholdenness to the other, performs one’s recognition of one’s mutuality in relation to the other(s). The performative nature of this giving, then, is key to how I wish now to elaborate Esposito’s obligation-centred understanding of the communitas for the purposes of the theme of this section, the performative authenticity of communities. If we accept that Esposito’s analysis is sound, or at least strategically productive here, then the relation of gifting to performing will be key to how we proceed.

In the act of gifting, in that staging of one’s beholdenness to the other, one brings into relation the performative and the obligatory,

or, to put it another way, the public and the offices of the public good. This relation, then, points to something quite striking in the communitarian imagination, and, until Esposito, partially hidden - that communities are bound by what is yet to be done as a riposte to the difetto what has been done already. The gift of work, the gift of time, of one’s energies, of food or shelter, of support to another, a sharing of task, a mutual acknowledgement of each other’s needs, is what sets in motion the tying of members of a community to each other, precisely in this sense of debt, of void, of the requirement to give, over and over, in acts of atonement, acts of obligation, acts of deliverance from the debt that grounds those ties. Paradoxically, the desire to cancel that void of debt, to ‘fill’ it, nonetheless points to the function of that debt as constitutive of the community in and of itself.

The rush to fill that debt, the desire for a plenitude at the heart of the community, is a structure that operates according to attraction, in which performative acts of gifting are drawn to the gravity well of the debt to the other.