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

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.