The Coming Community

1. Introduction

The Coming Community (La comunità che viene, 1990) is a short, aphoristic work by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that reimagines what it means for people to be “in common.” Instead of grounding community in shared identity, essence, or membership (nation, class, race, religion), the book proposes a form of being-together centered on what Agamben calls “whatever singularity” and “being-such.” In this account, individuals appear to one another not as bearers of fixed predicates—citizen, worker, foreigner—but in their exposed suchness, a mode of belonging that does not pass through classification or representation.

The work is organized as a series of dense, often self-contained reflections that move between ontology, political philosophy, theology, and literary motifs. Rather than arguing for a blueprint of a future society, Agamben is concerned with disclosing a different logic of belonging, which he claims is already at work wherever forms of life escape or suspend the apparatuses that capture them: law, identity, and sovereign power.

A distinctive feature of the book is its insistence that the “coming” of community is not a distant utopia, but a transformation of how singular beings relate in the present. Drawing on Aristotle’s theory of potentiality, medieval theology, and Walter Benjamin’s ideas of messianic time, Agamben situates community at the intersection of language, appearance, and political possibility.

Scholars have interpreted The Coming Community as a pivotal text in contemporary post-foundational and post-identity political thought. It introduces many of the motifs that Agamben would later radicalize in his Homo Sacer series, while retaining a more experimental and open-ended tone. The entry’s subsequent sections examine the text’s context, composition, structure, and central concepts, as well as the debates it has generated in philosophy, political theory, and adjacent fields.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

2.1 Late 20th-Century Political and Philosophical Milieu

The Coming Community emerged at the end of the 1980s, a period marked by the perceived crisis of revolutionary Marxism, the decline of grand political narratives, and renewed debates about community and identity. In European thought, discussions of “the end of history,” postmodernism, and the fragmentation of collective subjects formed an important backdrop. The work participates in, and reacts to, a moment when traditional categories—class struggle, the party, the people—were being questioned as adequate vehicles for political transformation.

At the same time, Italian political and philosophical debates, shaped by operaismo (workerism), autonomia, and legal theory, were rethinking power, law, and subjectivity. Agamben’s reflections on form-of-life and potentiality intersect with these discourses, while also diverging from more programmatic or economic analyses.

2.2 Intellectual Influences and Interlocutors

Commentators commonly identify a constellation of influences:

Agamben’s engagement with Christian theology, especially Pauline and medieval sources, provides the framework for his reflections on messianic time and a “coming” that transforms rather than abolishes the present order.

2.3 Context of Debates on Community

The text can also be situated within a broader, transnational “debate on community” that includes:

• French reflections on community and its “inoperativity” (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, later Roberto Esposito).
• Anglo-American discussions of liberalism vs. communitarianism, in which community is often tied to shared values or traditions.
• Emerging identity politics and social movements, which foregrounded specific predicates (gender, race, sexuality) as political bases.

Agamben’s work both intersects with these debates—by addressing community and belonging—and departs from them by proposing a community grounded in exposure and suchness rather than substantive commonalities or recognized identities.

3. Author and Composition

3.1 Giorgio Agamben’s Trajectory up to the 1990s

By the time The Coming Community was composed (late 1980s–early 1990s), Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) had already established himself as an Italian philosopher working at the intersection of political theory, aesthetics, philology, and theology. Earlier works such as Stanze (1977) and Language and Death (1982) had developed a distinctive concern with:

• The structure of language and the voice.
• The relation between potentiality and actuality.
• The legacy of Heidegger and Benjamin.

These themes inform the later turn toward explicitly political questions that culminate in the Homo Sacer project, for which The Coming Community is widely seen as a crucial precursor.

3.2 Circumstances and Process of Composition

Evidence from Agamben’s own remarks and secondary scholarship suggests that the book took shape as a set of fragmentary reflections rather than as a linear treatise. Many of its aphorisms are thought to have emerged from:

• Lectures and seminars Agamben delivered in the 1980s.
• Ongoing research into Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De anima.
• Studies of medieval theology and legal theory.
• Continuous engagement with Benjamin’s unpublished materials.

The work is dedicated to “Claudio,” commonly identified as Claudio Rugafiori, a friend and collaborator in Turin intellectual circles, indicating a context of close personal and philosophical exchange.

3.3 Position Within Agamben’s Oeuvre

Commentators often treat The Coming Community as a transitional book in Agamben’s development:

The composition of The Coming Community coincided with Agamben’s increasing involvement in international philosophical networks and his engagement with contemporary political problems, which would become more explicit in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). Many scholars propose that the conceptual experiments of The Coming Community provided Agamben with the vocabulary—form-of-life, whatever singularity, deactivation—that later structured his broader political philosophy.

4. Publication and Textual History

4.1 First Publication and Editions

The Coming Community was first published in Italian as ** La comunità che viene ** by Einaudi (Turin) in 1990. The volume appeared as a compact book of aphorisms without conventional chapter divisions, aligning with Einaudi’s interest in experimental philosophical writing.

The standard Italian reference edition remains:

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Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene, Torino: Einaudi, 1990.

Subsequent Italian reprints have largely preserved the original text, with only minor typographical corrections. No significant authorial revisions have been documented.

4.2 Translations and International Circulation

The work has been translated into numerous languages. Three widely cited translations are:

The English translation by Michael Hardt is especially significant for the Anglophone reception. It preserves the aphoristic structure and many technical terms, sometimes leaving them in Italian (e.g., inoperosità is rendered as “inoperativity” or “inoperosità” in scholarly usage), which has influenced how the work is discussed.

4.3 Manuscript and Textual Status

There is no complex manuscript tradition. The original author’s typescript and publisher’s archives reportedly survive, but no major variant versions are publicly known. Scholars typically treat the 1990 Einaudi text as authoritative.

Textual discussions focus less on variants than on translation choices, particularly how terms such as “qualunque”, “forma-di-vita”, and “inoperosità” are rendered. Different language editions occasionally adopt divergent strategies, which can affect interpretive debates about the scope of concepts like whatever singularity or deactivation.

4.4 Publication Context

The book appeared as part of Einaudi’s broader catalogue of continental philosophy and critical theory. In the Italian context, its publication aligned with renewed interest in biopolitics, community, and post‑Marxist theory. The relatively modest initial print run nonetheless facilitated its quick uptake in academic circles, where it circulated alongside contemporaneous works by Foucault, Derrida, and emerging Italian theorists, helping to establish Agamben’s international profile.

5. Structure and Organization of the Work

5.1 Aphoristic Form

The Coming Community is organized as a sequence of short sections or aphorisms, many only a few pages or paragraphs long. These are not numbered chapters in a conventional sense, and they rarely develop arguments linearly. Instead, they function more as conceptual vignettes or “constellations,” returning repeatedly to certain themes (whatever singularity, example, face, love, form-of-life) from different angles.

This structure encourages readers to make connections across dispersed fragments rather than follow a single deductive line. Interpretive strategies therefore often emphasize montage and resonance rather than systematic exposition.

5.2 Thematic Progression

Despite its fragmentary character, commentators commonly discern a loose progression. The work moves:

Each cluster builds on earlier motifs but does not conclusively resolve them, contributing to the text’s open and experimental character.

5.3 Use of Exempla and Intertexts

Within this structure, Agamben frequently cites or alludes to:

• Philosophical texts (Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, Benjamin).
• Literary works (e.g., Kafka, Melville).
• Theological and mystical writings (Pauline letters, medieval treatises).

These intertexts often serve as examples in his technical sense: singular cases that both illustrate and suspend rules, modeling the kind of belonging he theorizes. The organization of the work is thus also intertextual, weaving a network of citations that enact the community of singularities it describes.

5.4 Relationship to Later Thematic Divisions

Subsequent scholarship sometimes retrofits more precise “parts” or “sections” onto the text for purposes of commentary, aligning clusters of aphorisms with key themes such as whatever singularity, example, form-of-life, and messianic time. While these reconstructions vary, they commonly treat the book as moving from ontological and logical questions to more explicitly political and messianic considerations, without thereby imposing a rigid argumentative architecture.

6. Central Arguments and Philosophical Aims

6.1 Reimagining Community Beyond Identity

A central aim of The Coming Community is to rethink community so that it is no longer grounded in identity, essence, or shared predicates (nationality, race, class, religion). Agamben contends that traditional models of community operate through inclusion by exclusion: to belong, individuals must fit certain properties, which simultaneously define those who are excluded.

He proposes instead a community of “whatever singularities” that belong without being subsumed under a common property. The work seeks to articulate the logic of this belonging without property, where singular beings are affirmed in their suchness rather than as instances of a category.

6.2 Critique of Predication and Representation

Agamben argues that modern politics and metaphysics are structured by predication (assigning properties) and representation (speaking on behalf of). These operations underpin systems of law, state sovereignty, and identity. A key argument of the book is that a different politics becomes thinkable if the hold of predicates and representational apparatuses is suspended or deactivated.

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“The coming community is a community of whatever singularities, a community of those who have no identity.”

— Paraphrase of Agamben’s formulation in La comunità che viene

The text’s philosophical goal is to conceptualize this suspension not as a mere negation, but as an opening to new forms of use and relation.

6.3 Potentiality as Political Foundation

Another major argument is that human beings are defined not primarily by what they actually are or do, but by their potentiality, including the capacity not to act (impotentiality). Drawing from Aristotle, Agamben suggests that this shared exposure to potentiality forms the ontological basis for a form-of-life that cannot be fully captured by external norms and roles.

The political aim is to imagine a life in which means are not subordinated to pre-given ends, and in which the capacity to suspend functions or apparatuses creates space for new uses and relations.

6.4 Messianic Orientation Without Utopian Blueprint

While refusing a concrete institutional program, the book’s argument has a messianic orientation: the “coming” of community is conceived as a transformation of time and experience in the present, rather than as a future state. The philosophical aim is to disclose a zone of indistinction within existing orders where law and identity are deactivated, and where a different, non-sovereign politics becomes thinkable.

Interpretations vary on whether this amounts to a political theory, an ethico-ontological proposal, or a quasi-theological meditation. Nonetheless, the central argumentative thrust converges on the attempt to decouple belonging from identity and to connect politics to potentiality and suchness.

7. Key Concepts: Whatever Singularity and Being-Such

7.1 Reinterpreting “Whatever” (Qualunque)

Agamben’s concept of “whatever singularity” hinges on a specific reading of the Italian qualunque (“whatever”). He emphasizes not its colloquial sense of indifference (“it doesn’t matter which”), but its Latin root quodlibet, “whatever you like.” Thus, whatever signifies a being that is lovable or affirmable such as it is, without regard to specific properties.

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“Whatever is not being, it does not matter which, but being such as it is.”

— Agamben, La comunità che viene (paraphrased from the opening sections)

This reconceptualization underpins a mode of belonging that is indifferent to predicates without collapsing into abstract universality.

7.2 Whatever Singularity (Singolarità Qualunque)

A whatever singularity is:

• Singular: irreducibly this one, not an interchangeable instance.
• Non-identified: not defined by any particular property (citizen, worker, etc.).
• Belonging without property: participates in community by virtue of its sheer being-thus.

Agamben contrasts whatever singularity with both:

Commentators debate whether this notion is best understood as a logical category, an ontological claim, or a normative ideal for political relations.

7.3 Being-Such (Suchness)

Being-such or suchness denotes the fact that something is just what it is, apart from evaluative or classificatory predicates. In The Coming Community, being-such is:

• The exposed facticity of a being, not an essence.
• What appears in experiences like love and the face, where someone is encountered “just as they are.”
• The ground for a non-hierarchical mode of recognition.

Some interpreters see suchness as echoing Buddhist or mystical themes of “thusness,” while others stress its roots in medieval theology and Duns Scotus’s haecceity (thisness), though Agamben himself does not equate these directly.

7.4 Philosophical Function of the Concepts

Within the book, whatever singularity and being-such function to:

• Undermine the link between belonging and fixed identity.
• Provide a conceptual basis for community without exclusion.
• Support Agamben’s broader critique of modern apparatuses that operate by sorting, classifying, and representing.

Critics question whether suchness can ever be accessed independently of predicates, or whether this conceptual pair risks obscuring material and historical determinations. Proponents argue that it offers a powerful way to think about post-identity forms of solidarity and coexistence.

8. Language, Example, and Belonging

8.1 Language as Exposure

In The Coming Community, language is not treated merely as a system of signs but as the medium in which human beings are exposed to each other. Agamben explores the threshold between animal voice and human language, suggesting that to enter language is to become available to others in one’s suchness. This exposure precedes and exceeds any particular content or predicate.

The book proposes that this shared exposure in language is more fundamental than political or social identities, and thus can ground a different sense of being-with.

8.2 The Logic of the Example

A key conceptual tool for rethinking belonging is the example. Agamben examines its logical status: an example is a singular case that illustrates a rule, yet in doing so, it both belongs to the class and is withdrawn from it.

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“The example is included in the set of which it is the example, but it is not a particular case of it.”

— Paraphrase of Agamben’s discussion of example

From this, he derives a model of belonging where a singular can be inside and outside a class at once, participating without being fully absorbed.

8.3 Example and Non-Identitarian Belonging

The example becomes a paradigm for the way whatever singularities relate to community:

This logic challenges standard set-theoretical or juridical notions of membership, which depend on clear criteria and boundaries.

8.4 Language, Citation, and Community

Agamben’s own method of heavy citation enacts this logic. Texts by Aristotle, Benjamin, Kafka, and others serve as examples that both participate in and suspend the philosophical claims they illustrate. Some commentators argue that this intertextual network is itself a coming community of texts and voices, where belonging is effected through use and citation rather than identity.

Alternative readings emphasize that the book still presupposes certain linguistic and cultural competencies, raising questions about who can realistically participate in such a community of language. Nonetheless, the central claim remains that language as pure means, and the example as a special linguistic operation, disclose new possibilities for belonging without property.

9. Form-of-Life, Potentiality, and Impotentiality

9.1 Form-of-Life (Forma-di-vita)

Agamben introduces form-of-life as a way of thinking existence in which life and its form are inseparable. Rather than viewing life as a biological substrate that can be given different external forms (roles, functions, legal statuses), form-of-life names a living that is coextensive with its way of being.

In The Coming Community, this notion appears in germinal form, indicating ways of life that are not captured by traditional identities or institutions and that enact a kind of inoperativity—a suspension of prescribed functions.

9.2 Potentiality (Dynamis)

Drawing on Aristotle, Agamben understands potentiality as the capacity to be or do otherwise. He emphasizes that potentiality is not exhausted by its actualization; it persists as a reserve of possibilities even when one acts.

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“To be potential means: to be able not to.”

— Agamben’s Aristotelian thesis, as reconstructed from The Coming Community and related essays

This surplus of potentiality over actuality becomes central to his rethinking of human life and politics.

9.3 Impotentiality (Adynamia)

A distinctive move is Agamben’s insistence that genuine potentiality includes impotentiality: the capacity not to do, to withhold or suspend action. Impotentiality is not mere lack or incapacity; it is an active dimension of potentiality itself.

In The Coming Community, this idea underlies the proposal that the coming politics will center not on heroic deeds or realizations of a predetermined telos, but on the deactivation of apparatuses—rendering them inoperative so that they may be opened to new uses.

9.4 Political Implications

The triad form-of-life / potentiality / impotentiality suggests a politics that:

• Does not separate life from its form (as in classical sovereignty, which can strip life of its political form).
• Resists functionalization, by affirming the capacity to suspend roles and norms.
• Founds community on shared exposure to an open field of possibilities, rather than on fixed identities.

Some commentators read this as a theoretical foundation for later analyses of bare life and destituent power. Others question whether a politics of deactivation risks quietism, or how it engages with concrete economic and institutional structures. The text itself remains primarily at an ontological and conceptual level, sketching rather than detailing practical implications.

10. The Face, Love, and Exposure

10.1 The Face as Site of Appearance

In The Coming Community, the face is treated as a key figure for understanding community. Agamben describes the face as the site where a being appears and is exposed to others without mediation by concepts or roles. The face is not simply a biological feature but a field of visibility where singularities present themselves in their suchness.

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“The face is the exposure of being in its pure being-such.”

— Paraphrase of Agamben’s reflections on the face

The face thus exemplifies a community of appearance, in which relation is grounded in mutual visibility and exposure rather than identity.

10.2 Love and Whatever Being

Agamben links love to the notion of whatever singularity. He suggests that to love is not primarily to value someone for specific qualities (“for being such-and-such”) but to affirm this one, just as they are. Love, in this sense, is directed to the other’s being-such, making it the affective paradigm of non-identitarian relation.

He contrasts this with forms of attachment based on properties (status, character traits), which can be lost or exchanged. Love, as articulated here, persists because it is oriented toward the irreducible singularity beyond predicates.

10.3 Exposure and Vulnerability

Both face and love presuppose and intensify exposure. The face is exposed to others; love exposes one to the other’s contingency and to one’s own vulnerability. For Agamben, this shared exposure is not a deficiency to be overcome but the condition of community.

The coming community is therefore imagined as a space where:

• Faces are not masked by roles or identities.
• Love’s affirmation of suchness becomes a general mode of relating.
• Vulnerability and openness are acknowledged rather than concealed.

10.4 Interpretive Debates

Some readers see in these motifs an ethical dimension that complements the book’s ontological claims, positioning love and the face as resources for resisting dehumanizing apparatuses. Others contend that Agamben idealizes interpersonal relations and underplays conflicts and asymmetries (gendered, racial, economic) that shape real encounters of faces and loves.

Nevertheless, the pairing of face and love serves within the text to show how whatever singularity can be experienced concretely, highlighting forms of relation that prefigure the book’s idea of a coming community of exposure.

11. Messianic Time and the ‘Coming’ of Community

11.1 Messianic Temporality

Agamben draws extensively on Walter Benjamin and Pauline theology to conceptualize messianic time. Unlike linear, chronological time (chronos), messianic time (kairos) is an interruptive now that transforms the meaning of the present without simply projecting a utopian future.

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“The messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.”

— Paraphrase of a Benjaminian motif as taken up by Agamben

In The Coming Community, this serves to articulate how community is “coming” without being an unrealized future state.

11.2 The “Coming” as Immanent

The word “coming” in the title indicates not a distant, teleological horizon but a process at work within the present. The community is “coming” wherever singularities relate in ways that:

• Suspend the force of law and identity.
• Expose themselves in their suchness.
• Engage in inoperative or experimental forms of life.

This immanence is central: the messianic community does not replace the existing order from outside; it perforates and transforms it from within.

11.3 Relation to Law and Its Suspension

Influenced by Pauline notions of being “under grace, not under law,” Agamben considers the messianic as a suspension of law that does not simply abolish it. Law is rendered inoperative—no longer binding in the same way—so that new uses become possible.

This connects to his broader critique of juridical and sovereign structures: messianic time opens a zone of indistinction in which the rigid division between legal/illegal, inside/outside, is loosened, creating space for a different kind of belonging.

11.4 Interpretive Positions

Commentators disagree about the status of this messianic dimension:

Some see the emphasis on messianic time as a way of avoiding utopian blueprints while still affirming transformation; others worry that it risks indefinite postponement or ambivalence about concrete political action. In the text itself, the messianic primarily functions to clarify how the “coming” of community is already operative as a transformation of how time and belonging are experienced.

12. Philosophical Method and Style

12.1 Aphoristic and Fragmentary Form

Agamben adopts a fragmentary, aphoristic style in The Coming Community. Rather than systematic chapters and arguments, the work consists of short textual units that juxtapose philosophical analysis, literary examples, and theological motifs. This method:

• Encourages associative rather than linear reading.
• Allows concepts to reappear in different constellations.
• Mirrors the book’s interest in singularities and examples.

Some scholars argue that this style is itself a form of philosophical experiment, enacting in writing the non-totalizing community the book describes.

12.2 Use of Citation and Montage

The text is densely intertextual. Agamben cites or alludes to a wide array of sources—Aristotle, Aquinas, Benjamin, Kafka, Melville, medieval mystics—often without extensive commentary. This produces a kind of montage, where heterogeneous voices are brought into proximity.

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“The method of this book is that of the example: singular cases that illuminate a rule by suspending it.”

— Paraphrase of methodological hints in La comunità che viene

Through such montage, the work performs the community of texts it discusses, based on use, citation, and exposure rather than doctrinal agreement.

12.3 Conceptual Innovation and Philology

Agamben frequently engages in philological analysis, tracing the etymology and semantic shifts of key terms (e.g., qualunque, forma-di-vita, inoperosità). This combines with conceptual innovation, yielding neologisms or retooled concepts such as:

• Whatever singularity
• Form-of-life
• Inoperativity / deactivation

His method thus blends close reading of language with speculative philosophical construction.

12.4 Interpretive Challenges and Debates

The style has provoked diverse reactions:

Because of this method, The Coming Community has been read in multiple, sometimes conflicting ways: as political ontology, ethical meditation, political theology, or literary-philosophical experiment. The text’s style plays a central role in this plurality of interpretations.

13. Relations to Homo Sacer and Later Works

13.1 Conceptual Continuities

Many key concepts that structure Agamben’s later Homo Sacer series appear in embryonic form in The Coming Community:

Scholars often treat The Coming Community as the philosophical and conceptual groundwork on which the more historically and juridically detailed analyses of Homo Sacer build.

13.2 Shifts in Focus

While The Coming Community concentrates on ontology, language, and community, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) and subsequent volumes move toward:

• Detailed genealogies of sovereignty and exception.
• Analyses of camps, biopolitics, and the production of bare life.
• Historical case studies (Roman law, Nazi camps, modern democracies).

Some commentators argue that these later works “darken” the more open, experimental tone of The Coming Community, grounding its concepts in stark analyses of modern power. Others see continuity: the earlier text already anticipates the concern with how life is captured and classified.

13.3 Reciprocal Illumination

Interpretive approaches differ on how to situate The Coming Community relative to Homo Sacer:

• One view holds that the later works clarify and systematize the implications of the earlier book, making its political stakes more explicit.
• Another suggests that The Coming Community offers a counterpoint to the juridical focus of Homo Sacer, preserving a space for non-negative thought about community and potentiality.
• A third perspective treats them as a single, extended project, where ontology and political-juridical analysis are inseparable.

Later writings, such as The Highest Poverty, The Use of Bodies, and The Time That Remains, often return to motifs introduced in The Coming Community, especially form-of-life, use, and messianic time, indicating the lasting centrality of this early work in Agamben’s oeuvre.

14. Reception, Criticism, and Debates

14.1 Early Reception

Upon its Italian publication, La comunità che viene attracted attention in European philosophical circles as an intriguing contribution to debates on community and political ontology, though its brevity and elliptical style generated both enthusiasm and puzzlement. The 1993 English translation significantly broadened its impact, especially in:

• Continental political theory
• Critical legal studies
• Cultural and literary theory

It quickly became a touchstone in discussions of post-identity and post-foundational politics.

14.2 Main Lines of Criticism

Scholars have articulated several recurrent criticisms:

14.3 Supportive and Appropriative Readings

Alongside criticism, many theorists have found resources in the book:

• Post-structuralist political theorists use it to articulate non-sovereign or non-constituent forms of power.
• Queer theory and post-identity politics have drawn on whatever singularity and form-of-life to think non-normative relationality and coalitions not based on fixed identities.
• Political theology scholars engage its reworking of Pauline and messianic motifs.

Some interpreters emphasize its potential for radical democratic thought, seeing in its critique of representation and sovereignty an opening for experimental practices of assembly and occupation.

14.4 Ongoing Debates

Debates continue around key questions:

• Can whatever singularity be politically effective without becoming another identity category?
• How does the notion of inoperativity relate to concrete forms of resistance, strike, or destituent power?
• Does the messianic framing clarify or obscure the relation between present struggles and future transformations?

These discussions position The Coming Community as a contested but influential reference point, whose concepts are continually reinterpreted across disciplines and political contexts.

15. Legacy and Historical Significance

15.1 Position in Contemporary Political and Social Thought

The Coming Community is widely regarded as one of Agamben’s most influential early works. It has contributed significantly to a shift in political theory from identity-based and institution-centered frameworks toward considerations of:

• Community without identity
• Non-representational forms of politics
• The ontological dimensions of belonging and potentiality

It has thereby shaped discussions within post-Marxism, biopolitical theory, political theology, and critical legal studies.

15.2 Influence Across Disciplines

The book’s concepts have been taken up in diverse fields:

These appropriations have extended the book’s reach beyond strictly philosophical audiences.

15.3 Relation to Broader Debates on Community

Historically, The Coming Community has become a central reference in the “community debate” alongside works by Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. Comparisons often highlight:

• Agamben’s emphasis on whatever singularity vs. Esposito’s focus on immunity and munus.
• Different ways of confronting the legacy of communitarianism and totalitarian appropriations of community.

Such dialogues underline the book’s role in reconfiguring the conceptual landscape around community in late 20th- and early 21st‑century thought.

15.4 Enduring Questions and Assessments

Assessments of its legacy remain mixed but generally acknowledge its importance:

• Supportive readings credit it with opening new ways to think about solidarity and coexistence beyond identity.
• Critical evaluations see it as symptomatic of a broader turn toward ontological and theological vocabularies that, they argue, may underplay material struggles.

Nonetheless, The Coming Community continues to be cited, taught, and debated. Its enduring significance lies less in providing definitive answers than in framing questions about how singular beings can share a world without being subordinated to common identities, a problem that remains central to contemporary political and philosophical inquiry.