“The alienation of the common”: a look into the ‘authentic origin’ of community

Marchi, Viola (2020). “The alienation of the common”: a look into the ‘authentic origin’ of community. In: Claviez, Thomas; Imesch, Kornelia; Sweers, Britta (eds.) Critique of authenticity. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press

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This paper engages in a critique of social contrary theory as one of political philosophy’s privileged tools for the articulation of community, in its recourse to the authenticity of the covenant and in its claims to legitimacy. By reformulating the question of community in terms of the “common,” as its preliminary conceptual step, my goal is to explore the relationship between the two notions in the foundational texts of the contractual tradition and to show how, given their general assumptions, these texts are intrinsically unable to address the issue of community as such because they rest on the premise of the alienation of the common. The thesis I want to defend is that, in social contract theories, community actually becomes a defense mechanism against the common. Or, as I will try to prove, community and the common appear to be mutually exclusive terms: for the first to exist, the latter has to disappear. Instead of arguing for a further overcoming of the separation between the common and the newly constituted community, that would be only perpetuating the dialectics of alienation and authenticity at play, I propose to concentrate instead on the category of alienation as a theoretical opportunity, rather than as a deficient condition to be resolved, and as a way to inquire into the relation that obtains with the realm of the common.

Item Type:	Book Section (Book Chapter)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures
UniBE Contributor:	Marchi, Viola
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 820 English & Old English literatures 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages
ISBN:	978-1-62273-754-3
Publisher:	Vernon Press
Language:	English
Submitter:	Viola Marchi
Date Deposited:	12 May 2022 09:16
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 15:23
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/122672