In western tradition, there have always existed groups of individuals excluded from the full membership of a political community: women, poor, slaves, and so on. This exclusion has not come to an end in the contemporary liberal world order, quite the contrary. The developed countries are erecting walls on their borders everywhere in order to exclude the masses of the poor endeavoring to enter the paradise of prosperity. Even the internal exclusion continues: the increasing number of illegal immigrants is facing incessant persecution in all western countries and even many legal citizens, such as gypsies in Europe, are suffering constant oppression. In this situation, I argue in this paper, we need to rethink the foundation of political community entirely anew. Instead of sticking to the ancient Greek polis as the model of political community in which the gesture of exclusion is constitutive for the identity of community (not only the nation-state which nowadays is allegedly withering away but even the Stoic idea of cosmopolis which is gaining more and more currency in today’s globalizing world is based on the Greek model), we need to outline a theory of political community in which the very idea of identity is rendered inoperative. For as long as a political community is based on an identity, whether ethnic or universal (liberty, equality, and so on), exclusion does not cease, because every identity is constituted by its opposite, its “enemy”. Therefore, what we need is a theory of political community without identity or, as I call it, political community of whosoever. In my theoretical endeavor, I will rely, on the one hand, on the work of Giorgio Agamben and, on the other, on St Paul’s Epistles.
