Coming Community (Theory Out Of Bounds) [Paperback]

Giorgio Agamben (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (February 26, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816622353
• ISBN-13: 978-0816622351
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #117,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. He is the author of Profanations (2007), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002), both published by Zone Books, and other books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Coming Community in Context, July 3, 2007

By 

Tony See "New Thinker" (Singapore, Switzerland, Shanghai) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Coming Community (Theory Out Of Bounds) (Paperback)

The Coming Community by the Italian thinker Agamben, translated by Michael Hardt, is an indispensible work for anyone who is interested in a renewed thinking of a political community without identity.

The Coming Community does not refer to a community that will arrive one day in a fixed form. Such an arrival would only indicate that it is not the community that we are talking about. Rather, it is a community which lacks precisely this fixed identity, and which beings must learn to belong to.

This can be seen as a singular attempt at a renewed thinking of community against the background of Jean-Luc Nancy's work in Inoperative Community and Blanchot's Unavowable Community. Also, the work can be read in the context of Derrida's work on "the democracy-to-come".

43 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gateway, January 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Coming Community (Theory Out Of Bounds) (Paperback)

Less an argument and more a constellation or mosaic of insights, formulas, and enigmas, The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben is both a courageous delineation of political crisis and an intervention in thought that is both beautiful and cheerfully destructive. That is, this mosaic (inspired, I think, more by the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and also Walter Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) saves, without naming, the potential for the uprecedented that comes out of the delineation of the astonishing: the 'whatever' which "always matters" but which is in no wise the result of a process of any kind. Composed of twenty-nine brief, dense, suggestive sections, this book opens a gateway out of the space of nihilism that currently enthralls the planet in the form of the Debordian Spectacle. The example of Tianenmen is intended to evoke a scintillating, lawless time--blasted out of history--when everything mattered exactly such as it is. Since Benjamin, no thinker has more clearly entered into the threshold of complicity that thought and politics share.

53 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Obscuratist, August 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Coming Community (Theory Out Of Bounds) (Paperback)

Agamben's book Infancy and History was a superb book, and I was looking forward to reading this book. The book should be twice as big, as seemingly every other sentence calls for further elaboration. To be sure, it is esay to undersatnd that Agamben's language is inspired by the later Heidegger's unfolding of language, particularly through etymology. The grounding of the book is an elaboration of the word "whatever" (qualunque), and perhaps this was more understandable in the original Italian, the point being, for Agamben, that 'being' is not a case of "whatever being" such that it does not matter which, but "such that it always matters". This then becomes his base for human ethics. Fair enough. But who needs the exposition of "whatever" in order to argue for an ethics of understanding? His ultimate argument is that the coming community will not be one of control of the State in politrical terms, but rather a struggle between the State and the non-State. He gives the example of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, whom, Agamben argues, did not demonstate for concrete demands, or rather, that "democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict". This is incredible! Agamben is more familiar with Italian farmers demanding foreign goods be stopped at the borders. My feeling by the end of the book, was that Agamben's Coming Community would be a community of Intellectuals who a few times a year march for people who are no longer a community, the disposessed, (whom, despite their efforts of solidarity with each other's plight, remain ultimately marginal) but after the demonstration the intellectuals return to their comfortable university-paid jobs. This book left me feeling angry.