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Chapter 3 - The Depoliticized Community

The Normative Emptiness of Post-Marxist Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2026

Christian J. Emden
Affiliation:
Rice University, Houston
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Summary

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

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