Roberto Esposito: Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (1998/2003/2010) [Spanish/English]

No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas’s ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community’s original etymological meaning: cum munus. In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn’t a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.

Originally published in Italian as Communitas: Origine e destino della comunita, 1998, Giulio Einaudi Editore
Spanish edition: Communitas: Origen y destino de la comunidad
Translated by Carlo Rodolfo Molinaro Marotto
Publisher Amorrortu editores, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2003
Mutaciones series
ISBN 9505187149

English edition
Translated by Timothy C. Campbell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2010
Cultural Memory in the Present Series
ISBN 0804746478, 9780804746472
175 pages

publisher [Spanish]
publisher [English]
google books [Spanish]
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PDF [Spanish]
PDF [English]

Émile Zola: Germinal (1885) [FR, EN, DE]

Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola’s masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries as well as inspiring five film adaptations and two television productions.

The title refers to the name of a month of the French Republican Calendar, a spring month. Germen is a Latin word which means “seed”; the novel describes the hope for a better future that seeds amongst the miners.

commentary (Ruth Scurr, The Guardian, 2010)

wikipedia

PDF (French, published by G. Charpentier, 1885)
PDF (French, published by G. Charpentier, 1900, Vol. 1)
PDF (French, 1900, Vol. 2)
PDF (English, translated by Carlynne, published by Belford, Clarke, Chicago/New York, 1885)
PDF (English, translated by Havelock Ellis, 1894)
PDF (EPUB, German)

Bernard Stiegler: Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Disbelief and Discredit, vol. 1 (2004/2011)

“Bernard Stiegler is one of the most original philosophers writing today about new technologies and their implications for social, political and personal life. Drawing on sources ranging from Plato and Marx to Freud, Heidegger and Derrida, he develops a highly original account of technology as grammatology, as a technics of writing that constitutes our experience of time, memory and desire, even of life itself. Society and our place within it are shaped by technical reproduction which can both expand and restrict the horizons and possibilities of human agency and experience.

In the three volumes of Disbelief and Discredit Stiegler argues that this process of technical reproduction has become dangerously divorced from its role in the constitution of human experience. Radically challenging the optimistic view of new technologies as facilitators of learning and progress, he argues new marketing techniques short-circuit thought and disenfranchise consumers, programming them to seek short-term gratification. These practices of ‘libidinal economics’ have profound consequences for nature of human desire and they underpin the social and psychological malaise of contemporary industrial society.

In this opening volume Stiegler argues that the industrial model implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century has become obsolete, leading capitalist democracies to an impasse. A sign of this impasse and of the decadence to which it leads is the banalization of consumers who become ensnared in a perpetual cycle of consumption. This is the new proletarianization of the technologically infused, hyper-industrial capitalism of today. It produces a society cut off from its past and its future, stultifying human development and turning democracy into a farce in which disbelief and discredit inevitably arise.”

First published in French as Mécréance et Discrédit: Tome 1, La décadence des démocraties industrielles, Galilée, 2004.

Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold
Publisher Polity, 2011
ISBN 0745648096, 9780745648095
200 pages

Review: Tom Bunyard (Radical Philosophy, 2012).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-8-7)