This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, which Esposito (...) presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. (shrink)

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the varying conceptions of ethics underpinning the accounts of community in Blanchot, Nancy, and Esposito. A focus on ethics brings into relief points of divergence amongst accounts of community that otherwise overlap and share in many significant ways. Furthermore, it provides a basis to better assess Esposito's contribution. I focus on the concepts of difference and transcendence and the figure of the lovers, a shared topos in Nancy and Blanchot, to demonstrate these subtle variations. In turning to (...) Esposito, Kantian-inflected notions of duty, obligation, and law shape a community where others recede into the background and the lovers lose their visibility. I suggest that Esposito's focus on duty has consequences that give cause for further reflection. The law renders each of us other, but in its universality it risks losing a sense of the exceptional. Relying etymologically on the notion of duty as that which, following his reading of Kant, undermines the subject and renders possible the impossible community, grounds the Communitas in a law that risks congealing the meaning of community around this impossible obligation. (shrink)

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in (...) these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and (...) ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

Much has been written about biopolitical sovereignty in the wake of Agamben's work, which relies, at least in the first volume of Homo Sacer, on Carl Schmitt's transcendental account of sovereignty. This article argues, however, that Foucault and Arendt rightly identify what Derrida once called the “changing shape and place of sovereignty” in modernity, which for them is horizontal and disseminated within a presupposed nation. For this reason, we will look to the source of modern philosophical immanentism, Spinoza, to show (...) that he is not extrinsic to this modern biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign exception and its nationalized version work hand-in-glove in the era of which he was a part – and thus is part of all thinking that would take this to form a new communitas. In this way, we argue that it is Spinoza's political theology, not Schmitt's, that is the better pass-key to what Foucault and Arendt identify as biopolitical. By doing so, we put in tension two trends in recent Continental philosophy: philosophical vitalism and the critique of biopolitics at the heart at any contemporary thinking of community. (shrink)

This article shows that the concept of choice is central to Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism. It argues that his valuing of choice is anchored in a particular conception of human nature, one that assumes and presupposes free will. Berlin’s works sketch a metaphysics of choice, and his reluctance to situate himself openly in the debate on free will is unconvincing. By introducing the theory of autopoiesis, this article further suggests that there is a way to take Berlin’s value pluralism seriously, by (...) considering sets of values as autopoietic conscious systems. Drawing on the works of Maturana and Varela in biology and Luhmann in sociology, autopoiesis strengthens value pluralism and acts as a critique of liberalism. By putting objectivity in parenthesis, autopoiesis finally allows for value systems to coexist side by side in a stronger sense than Berlin’s liberalism ever could. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights that Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being (...) and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 101-115, September 2011.

Political consumerism is consumer choice beyond self-interest. Allegedly blurring the public–private threshold and overcoming the limits of traditional politics, it epitomizes in many respects late modern governance. Reflecting on the meaning and scope of consumer political agency, scholarship has engaged with the governmentality perspective. Important studies have ensued, together with irresolvable disputes and a neglect of the relationship that consumers establish with their objects of concern. To address this question, and drawing on the philosophical contributions of Roberto Esposito, the article (...) elaborates on the notion of immunization. Being immune means having nothing in common with others, no obligations towards them. This analytical register may significantly broaden our understanding of current changes in political agency. A review of three main issues (responsibility-taking, downshifting, and the public) shows that the paradox of political consumerism – like other forms of governance that replace political obligations with private autonomies – is that it endeavours to (re)establish or strengthen the communal ties while at the same time using immunization as its fundamental resource. (shrink)