Esposito, Nancy And The Evasion Of Dialectics

This essay argues that Jean-Luc Nancy’s influence on Esposito is not just thematic (in their mutual concern for the challenges of community) but methodological. Esposito’s professed aim in Communitas of distancing his work from dialectical thinking shows important resonances with Nancy’s project in The Experience of Freedom. This connection is especially apparent in Esposito’s discussion of freedom in Terms of the Political. Both thinkers recognize that a dialectical account of freedom that attempts to specify what freedom mustbe, given the incoherence of alternatives, will fail to appreciate what freedom actually is. One way that Esposito seeks to avoid a dialectical account of the development of community is by identifying “neutralizing appropriations” in which one term does not simply replace or incorporate another. Because Esposito himself acknowledges that such a move can only be provisional, this essay suggests that a further resource for extending Esposito’s thinking might be Nancy’s use of fragmentary writing not as a permanent interruption of dialectical continuity, but as a way of remaining mindful of the singularity of experience.