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Chapter 1 begins with a reading of the Latin root of community (cum-munus) as a “task,” “duty,” or “law” in order to claim that what individuals have most in common is a lack of community. Through readings of the meaning of the political community in Rousseau, Kant, and Heidegger, this chapter argues that community is one with the law, and that both are necessary and impossible. Necessary: the law of community constitutes us (we have always existed in common; members of a community are such because bound by a common law). Impossible: we are likewise constituted by the lack, flaw, or nonfulfillment of the law of community, as all of the narratives that locate the origin of society in a common crime illustrate.

Chapter 2 begins by placing these two seemingly contradictory terms in relation: only individuals may be melancholic, and they are so precisely because of their isolation, asociality, or distance from community. This chapter argues instead that melancholy is not something that separates individuals from a community, but that melancholy is the very form and content of community itself. Through a reading of solitude and a yearning for the ever-absent community in Rousseau; the melancholic nature of the Kantian subject; the superimposition of philosophy and melancholy in Heidegger, the chapter calls for a joining of these two terms toward a reading of community that is neither a goal nor an end, neither a presupposition nor a destination, but the condition, both singular and plural, of our complete existence.

Chapter 3 takes up the relationship between the terms community and democracy, and asks whether an understanding of the etymological kinship of community and immunity (the Latin munus, meaning law, duty, or gift) can shed light on contemporary debates about democracy–a light which would be obscured were we to compare democracy to other definitions of community as, for example, a formation that is imposed from the outside by “society” or “individuals.” This chapter argues that modern democracy speaks a language that is opposed to that of community insofar as it always has introjected into it an immunitary imperative. Only by reversing the operation, by rethinking community beginning by completing the operation of immunization, that is, by eliminating the very notions of outside and inside through immunization, will we be able to rescue community from the negative immunitary drift toward which it seems destined to slide.