Geography and the Coming Community

The chapter focuses on the fortune of the concept of community in contemporary geography. In particular, we argue that the community debate is currently unproblematized. “Community” is assumed to be a positive, emancipatory concept, both at the national and the local scale. The reactionary and repressive dimension of communitarianism is hence relinquished as marginal or residual, as the failure of a concept that is intrinsically positive. To deconstruct these assumptions, we turn to a critical understanding of the community that involves philosophersRoberto Esposito, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben. In this philosophical journey, we envisage a new possibility for geography to engage with an affirmative community. Only a geography that accepts a void, empty space at the inner core of the community can escape the exclusionary outcome of communitarianism.