Roberto Esposito , livre ebook

Roberto Esposito
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Roberto Esposito
Biopolitics and Philosophy
EDITED BY
Inna Viriasova AND Antonio Calcagno
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Viriasova, Inna, editor.
Title: Roberto Esposito : biopolitics and philosophy / edited by Inna Viriasova and Antonio Calcagno.
Other titles: Roberto Esposito (State University of New York Press)
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034890 | ISBN 9781438470351 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438470368 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Biopolitics—Philosophy. | Political science—Philosophy. | International relations—Philosophy. | Esposito, Roberto, 1950–
Classification: LCC JA80 .R638 2018 | DDC 320.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034890
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Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction: Thinking with Roberto Esposito
Inna Viriasova
Part I: Reading Esposito
1. The Presence and Absence of Origin: Roberto Esposito’s Early Interpretation of Giambattista Vico
Alexander U. Bertland
2. Thinking Community
Diane Enns
3. Debt and the Proper in Agamben and Esposito
Greg Bird
4. Against the Conspiracy. Revisiting Life’s Vertigo: On Roberto Esposito’s Terza persona and Da fuori
Alberto Moreiras
5. Fold of Life: Roberto Esposito on “the Living Person” and Animistic Personhood
Inna Viriasova
6. The Failure of the Political Concept of the Person? A Foucaultian-Arendtian Response to Roberto Esposito
Antonio Calcagno
7. Person and Munus in the Thought of Roberto Esposito
Jonathan Short
8. From Biopolitics to Political Animism: Roberto Esposito’s Things
Federico Luisetti
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
Federico Fridman
10. Internalities of International Relations and the Politics of Externalities: Affirming the Impossibility of IR with Roberto Esposito
Mark F. N. Franke
11. Living Through Catastrophe: Warring Immunities, Dramatization and Counter-Actualization in Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched
Geoffrey Whitehall
12. Becoming Normative: Law, Life, and the Possibility of an Affirmative Biopolitics
Patrick Hanafin
Contributors
Index
Abbreviations
Esposito’s Works in Italian ( CIM ) Categorie dell’impolitico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). (DF) Da fuori. Una filosofia per l’Europa (Torino: Einaudi, 2016). ( DP ) Dieci pensieri sulla politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011). ( II ) Dall’impolitico all’impersonale: conversazioni filosofiche (Milano: Mimesis, 2012). (MV) La politica e la storia. Machiavelli e Vico (Napoli: Liguori, 1980). ( PC ) Le persone e le cose (Torino: Einaudi, 2014). ( TPN ) Terza persona. Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale (Torino: Einaudi, 2007). (VR) Vico e Rousseau e il moderno Stato borghese (Bari: De Donato, 1976).
Esposito’s Works in English Translation (BS) Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy , trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2008). (CI) Categories of the Impolitical , trans. Connal Parsley (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). (CM) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community , trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). (IM) Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life , trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011). (LT) Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy , trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). (PT) Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View , trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015). (TP) Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal , trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012). ( TTP ) Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics , trans. R. Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). ( TW ) Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought , trans. Zakiya Hanafi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
Introduction
Thinking with Roberto Esposito
I NNA V IRIASOVA
This book is dedicated to the work of the contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. He is currently professor of philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore at Pisa, Italy. Esposito appeared on the philosophical scene in the 1970s with contributions to the history of political ideas, including major publications on Machiavelli, Vico, and Rousseau; he has gradually become one of the most recognized names in contemporary debates in political philosophy through his extensive work on biopolitics, community, immunity, and the person.
Over the past two decades we have witnessed a growing interest in Esposito’s work, and his thought continues to have an impact on scholarship in many disciplines, including politics, sociology, literature, and philosophy. As his work becomes better known in the English-speaking world, more attention is being paid specifically to his intervention in the field of biopolitical theory opened up by Michel Foucault. Esposito’s particular contribution in this regard lies in his development of the project of affirmative biopolitics, which explores the ways in which life, despite its unavoidable politicization in modernity, can nevertheless regain and maintain its creative potential. Due to its innovative and comprehensive nature, Esposito’s writing has already garnered special attention in many leading academic journals, and a number of books are being published that focus on his thought vis-à-vis Italian philosophy. A number of conferences have also been held in Europe and North America, over the past decade, which focused on Esposito’s work. 1
The primary intention of the present collection of essays is to offer readers a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito’s political thought and the key concepts that he has developed up until now. In this regard, our goal is twofold: in addition to exploring some of Esposito’s major conceptual contributions, this book offers a number of their creative applications to various fields of inquiry, such as literary studies, international relations, politics, and law. To date, while there exist a few monographs in English that introduce certain aspects of Esposito’s thought, this is the first volume to provide a comprehensive analysis of his core concepts while also demonstrating some practical uses of his ideas. We bring together a number of leading international scholars on the philosopher’s work in order to explore and critique both his early and more recent contributions in political philosophy. The contributors address particular aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body, as well as Esposito’s reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, and Kant. The reader is thus exposed to not only the most familiar and most recent elements of Esposito’s oeuvre, but also to its earlier conceptual developments and contributions to the study of the history of political ideas. While Esposito’s work is primarily indebted to Western philosophical tradition, a number of essays in this volume bring Esposito’s ideas into a welcome conversation with non-Western and indigenous perspectives, exploring avenues for their creative collaboration and synthesis.
Several essays in this volume employ Esposito’s philosophical ideas for thinking through some pertinent issues in international relations, postcolonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns. This is a propitious time for such an endeavor considering that many of the issues that Esposito raises in his work are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, both at the local level and on the global scale, including environmental degradation, migration and forced displacement, war on terrorism, hybrid wars, processes of decolonization, and the growing violations of human rights. The ongoing work of translation of Esposito’s early and recent works into English also makes it a good time to put multiple interpretations of his work into productive conversation with already established scholarship in the history of ideas, biopolitics, community, immunity, and personhood.
Each of the following essays draws out its singular trajectory of engagement with Esposito’s thought, furthering our understanding of political being, action, personhood, life, and the meaning of the common. Each essay, as it engages the foundational concepts of Esposito’s philosophy, is ultimately an exercise of thinking “with” and even “after” Esposito. Enriched by the intervention of his thought, the authors of this collection invite the reader to partake in the project of discovering how to think and live differently in a time when the negative aspects of biopolitics are progressively enclosing societies in vicious cycles of conflict, death, abuses of fundamen