Professor Vanessa Lemm: What do we owe one another? New directions in thinking about community ?

The globalization of social (economic, cultural, environmental) relations has generated a new need for people who have little or nothing in common with others to create community with each other without giving up their differences. The traditional understanding of community was that people want to be together because they feel that they share something, if only the same portion of the world. So what does it mean that people now want or need to be in communities without having anything in common, no shared territories or identities or even values? How can a bond between people be established when there is nothing that unites them? How can radical difference make for communal forms of life? Recent continental philosophy has struggled with these kinds of paradoxes. In this lecture I shall discuss one contribution to these questions found in the work of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. This work brings to light two dimensions of community that have so far not been taken into proper account: First, the idea that community reflects an economical relation where an infinite debt ties the members to each other through continuous gift-giving. Second, the idea that community is inscribed in the horizon of life and reaches beyond the human to all forms of life. In contrast to the communist, communitarian and communicative understandings of community, this presentation argues for what could be called a biopolitical conception of community.