From here it emerges that communitas is the totality of persons united not by “property” but precisely by an obligation or a debt; not by an “addition” but by a “substration”: by a lack, a limit that is configured as an onus, or even as a defective modality for him who is “affected”, unlike for him whi is instead “exempt” or “exempted”. Here we find the final and most characteristic of the opposition associated with (or that dominate) the alternative between public and private. those in other words that contrast communitas to immunitas. If communis is he who is required to carry out the functions of an office―or to the donation of a grace―on the contrary, he is called immune who has to perform no office, and for that reason he remains ungrateful. He can completely preserve his own position through a vacatio muneris. Whereas the communitas is bound by the sacrifice of the compensatio, the immunitas implies the beneficiary of the dispensatio.

– ESPOSITO, Roberto ([1998]2010). Communitas, tr. by Thimothy Campbell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 6.
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