Esposito, R. (2009). Communitas: the origin and destiny of community. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.
Communitas was originally published in Italian in 1998 by Roberto Esposito under the title Communitas: origine e destino della comunità and translated into English for this edition by Timothy Campbell. The book examines the idea of community from the perspectives of political philosophy, cultural memory, and history, using the methods of philosophical and textual analysis. He organizes his philosophical argument into five thematic chapters: fear, guilt, law, ecstasy and experience, proposing throughout the book a counter-history of political philosophy that engages with readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger, Bataille, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. He argues-- in a somewhat similar vein to Jean-Luc Nancy who wrote the Inoperative Community-- that community is not an essentialised separate property or territory, but rather it is a 'void', a 'debt', or a 'gift' to others.