COMMUNITY, IMMUNITY, ZOOPOLIS: RETHINKING THE POLITICAL BEYOND THE HUMAN

The paper discusses the concept of community in the work of Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito. The relationship between Esposito's idea of communitas and recent literature in animal rights theory is explored. It is argued that the communitas theorized by Esposito contributes to rethinking the political beyond the human, in ways that complement, but also challenge, the idea of political community presupposed in, but not explicitly theorized by, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's notion of zoopolis.