Roberto Esposito

COMMUNITY, IMMUNITY, BIOPOLITICS

Abstract In this article, Roberto Esposito lays out the genealogical pathways linking the three major concepts around which his most recent work has wound its way: community, immunity, and biopolitics. Although immunity is necessary to the preservation of our life, when driven beyond a certain threshold it forces life into a sort of cage where not only our freedom gets lost but also the very meaning of our existence – that opening of existence outside itself that takes the name of communitas. A hermeneutics informed by immunity can allow the category of community to regain a new political significance, without ending up in a substantialist metaphysics. This task is dictated by the urgent need for an affirmative biopolitics – a horizon of meaning – in which life would no longer be the object but somehow the subject of politics. But what sort of shape would this take? Where would we trace its symptoms? And with what objectives? A preliminary answer focuses on breaking the vise grip between public and private that threatens to crush the common, by seeking instead to expand the space of the common, in the fight, for example, against the planned privatization of water and the battle over energy sources.

The Dispositif of the Person

In this essay one of Italy’s leading philosophers examines the category of person from legal, historical, and biopolitical perspectives. Reading texts ranging from Roman law to Christian theology to bioethics, Esposito shows how person functions in Foucault’s terms as a dispositif, that is as a way of arranging the relation between the human and animal in contemporary subjectivity. Drawing on the etymology of person from persona or mask, Esposito shows how the term allows a subject to dispose of his or her animal half through the gift of grace in order to become a human person. Reading Saint Augustine, Simone Weil, and others, Esposito shows how the archaic role played by the person in Roman law returns today in liberalism’s objectification of the body as a thing. Esposito concludes by elaborating a counterdispositif of the impersonal as a way of transforming our political lexicon.

Preface to Categories of the Impolitical

����� ��� 1 When I submitted Categories of the Impolitical to the printers exactly ten years ago, my expectations for its success were certainly not high. Those of the editor were even less so, I suppose, even though the faith he afforded the book (thanks largely to friends like Carlo Galli and teachers Nicola Matteucci and Ezio Raimondi) later proved to be decisive. How could we have supposed that a political philosophy conquered by the apodictic certainties of “political science” and the normative stance of various forms of public ethics might be willing to concern itself with the “impolitical”? Faced with an intellectual debate almost wholly occupied with raising methodological barriers between political science, political theory, and political philosophy, how could one present authors with no real disciplinary statute—authors who are in fact decidedly undisciplined—such as those interrogated in this volume? These authors are not only resolutely “undecided” between politics, philosophy, theology, and literature; they are in principle positively allergic to any descriptive or normative model. It is true that some more sophisticated research perspectives were already in play, particularly a new attention to the history of political concepts (which was essentially a descendant of the German Begriffsgeschichte). These perspectives certainly constituted an improvement on the traditional “history of ideas,” but they remained within a hermeneutic frame characterized by a direct, frontal approach to political categories. For this reason, they were incapable of traversing those categories laterally, and even less capable of returning to the place prior to their imagination. It was as if political philosophy remained immune to, or not sufficiently gripped by, the deconstructive vortex that had radically called into question the “positive” sayability of every other object of twentieth-century knowledge—from critical theory to anthropology, from psychoanalysis to aesthetics—suspending it in favor of the determination of its “non-”: the shadowy place from which it came, and the margin of difference which crossed it as its irreducible alterity. It was as though our political philosophy had not fully grasped the heuristic productivity of thinking its lexicon’s grand concepts and big words not as already concluded in themselves, but rather as “terms”: as border-markers, but at the same time as the places of a contradictory overlapping between different languages. Or it was as if the search for the ultimate sense of every concept beyond its epochal stratification, encompassing also the line of tension that connects it antinomically to its opposite, had been neglected. Certainly, this deficit of complexity was not true of the entirety of Ital ian political philosophy. In those same years, important and innovative books on power, modernity, and sovereignty appeared, along with the first attempts at the genealogical reconstruction of and topological inquiry into political semantics. But these represented

POLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE

Despite all attempts at restoring it, the great humanist tradition could not resist the double trauma of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in which the very idea of humanity had been swallowed up by its opposite. Yet, beyond the critique of humanism carried out by twentieth-century philosophers such as Heidegger, the ancient profile of man as essentially humanus delineates itself again. On the other hand, as soon as the Nietzschean anthropo-technical – or biopolitical – vector of artificial intervention into the characteristics of human nature enters into synergy with the Darwinian presupposition about the contiguity with the animal world, the social consequences can be devastating. But is this the only – destructive and self-destructive – face of post-humanism? Is it necessary for it to turn into a form of patent anti-humanism? In opposition to both Heidegger’s foreclosure of biology and the animal as well as the biopolitical misuse of an immunitarian semantics that has led to the most brutal forms of homicidal eu...Despite all attempts at restoring it, the great humanist tradition could not resist the double trauma of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in which the very idea of humanity had been swallowed up by its opposite. Yet, beyond the critique of humanism carried out by twentieth-century philosophers such as Heidegger, the ancient profile of man as essentially humanus delineates itself again. On the other hand, as soon as the Nietzschean anthropo-technical – or biopolitical – vector of artificial intervention into the characteristics of human nature enters into synergy with the Darwinian presupposition about the contiguity with the animal world, the social consequences can be devastating. But is this the only – destructive and self-destructive – face of post-humanism? Is it necessary for it to turn into a form of patent anti-humanism? In opposition to both Heidegger’s foreclosure of biology and the animal as well as the biopolitical misuse of an immunitarian semantics that has led to the most brutal forms of homicidal eugenics, in this article I claim that the overbearing entrance of biological life into socio-political dynamics is not necessarily a danger from which we have to defend ourselves in the name of a self-centred purity of the individual and the species. It might also be regarded as the future of man, a threshold from which he could be stimulated in view of a more complex and open elaboration of his humanitas.

Biopolítica y Filosofía: (Entrevistado por Vanessa Lemm y Miguel Vatter)

El tema central de esta entrevista es la biopolitica y su situacion respecto a las tradiciones de filosofia moderna. Asimismo se discute la relacion entre las ideologias politicas del siglo XX y el surgimiento de la biopolitica. Por ultimo, la entrevista aborda la pregunta sobre que concepcion de la vida esta en juego en la biopolitica.