Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy

Description

One of Europe's leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito's political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito's reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito's philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns. Contents Abbreviations Esposito’s Works in Italian Esposito’s Works in English Translation Contents Introduction: Thinking with Roberto Esposito Central Themes of Esposito’s Work Contributions Notes Part I: Reading Esposito 1. The Presence and Absence of Origin: Roberto Esposito’s Early Interpretation of Giambattista Vico Notes 2. Thinking Community Immunitary Obsessions Communitas without the Common Immune Tolerance The Common The Urge to Unify Conclusion Notes 3. Debt and the Proper in Agamben and Esposito The Dialectic of Alienation and Appropriation Debt Agamben Esposito Conclusion Notes 4. Against the Conspiracy. Revisiting Life’s Vertigo: On Roberto Esposito’s Terza persona and Da fuori Beatitude Against Subjection The Zone of Indistinction The Shadow of the Impersonal Against Subjectivation Countercommunity The Critical Threshold An Infrapolitical Solution Notes 5. Fold of Life: Roberto Esposito on “the Living Person” and Animistic Personhood The Apparatus of Separation and Exclusion: Human and Animal, Person and Thing The Power of the Impersonal: Toward the Dispositif of the Living Person Animistic Personhood Notes 6. The Failure of the Political Concept of the Person? A Foucaultian-Arendtian Response to Roberto Esposito Esposito and the Biopolitics of the Person Esposito and the Introduction of the Impersonal, Third Person, or Negative Self Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault: The Introduction of Competing Discourses Notes 7. Person and Munus in the Thought of Roberto Esposito Introduction The Person The Impersonal as a Right in Common Conclusion Notes 8. From Biopolitics to Political Animism: Roberto Esposito’s Things Res/Persona Nonmodern Eyes States of Nature Notes Part II: Applying Esposito 9. The Impolitical Dimension in Jorge Luis Borges’s Literature: A Gaze on the Impossible for Politics through Roberto Esposito’s Thought Introduction The Impolitical Gaze The Impolitical Dimension in Borges’s Literature Ground Zero: The Social and the Political Notes 10. Internalities of International Relations and the Politics of Externalities: Affirming the Impossibility of IR with Roberto Esposito Esposito’s Relation with IR: Readings of Thomas Hobbes Esposito’s Displacement of IR as a Concern: Readings of Immanuel Kant Negating IR: A Theory of Immunity From the Apolitical Humanism of IR to the Politics of the Impersonal Thinking Politics; Not Thinking IR Notes 11. Living Through Catastrophe: Warring Immunities, Dramatization and Counter-Actualization in Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched Immunity Warring Immunities Political Transformation A Dramatization of Catastrophe Notes 12. Becoming Normative: Law, Life, and the Possibility of an Affirmative Biopolitics Introduction Law’s Politics Over Life Vitalizing the Norm: Toward a Politics of Life Life, Humanity, Rights Becoming Normative? Notes Contributors Index