Terms of the Political:Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Terms of the Political:Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0823242641

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This title calls for the opening of political thought toward a re-signification of terms - such as 'community, ' 'immunity, ' 'biopolitics, ' and 'the impersonal' - in ways that affirm rather than negate life.


Terms of the Political

Terms of the Political

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher:

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9780823292745

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Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics presents a decade of thought about the origins and possibilities of political theory from one of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito. He has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics--from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal. Taking on interlocutors from throughout the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil, Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon--"freedom," "democracy," "sovereignty," and "law"--that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, and death). Terms of the Political calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms--such as "community," "immunity," "biopolitics," and "the impersonal"--in ways that affirm rather than negate life. An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.


Terms of the Political

Terms of the Political

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780823242672

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This title calls for the opening of political thought toward a re-signification of terms - such as 'community,' 'immunity,' 'biopolitics,' and 'the impersonal' - in ways that affirm rather than negate life.


Community, Immunity and the Proper

Community, Immunity and the Proper

Author: Greg Bird

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9781138057487

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It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation. Wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, nor political and economic turmoil, none of these can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. This collected edition considers this crisis of the proper with a focus on Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito's work on community, immunity, and biopolitics. This collection introduces Esposito's work to a wider English-speaking audience and provides many important contributions to the burgeoning scholarship on his political theory. Important international scholars working in this area examine and analyze his theory from a variety of perspectives, including those of biopolitics, feminism, political theory, the history of philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy), property, community, and gift economies. The collection also includes previously untranslated essays by Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy. This collection will be of interest to those just discovering Esposito and for those who are already familiar with his work. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.


Politics and Negation

Politics and Negation

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 150953945X

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For some while we have been witnessing a series of destructive phenomena which seem to indicate a full-fledged return to the negative on the world stage – from terrorism and armed conflict to the threat of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, politics seems increasingly impotent in the face of these threats. In this book, the leading Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito reconstructs the genealogy of the reciprocal intertwining of politics and negation. He retraces the intensification of negation in the thought of various thinkers, from Schmitt and Freud to Heidegger, and examines the negative slant of some of our fundamental political categories, such as sovereignty, property and freedom. Against the centrality of negation, Esposito proposes an affirmative philosophy that does not negate or repress negation but radically rethinks it in the positive cipher of difference, determination and opposition. The result is a rigorous and original pathway which, in the tension between affirmation and negation, recognizes the disturbing traumas of our time, as well as the harbingers of what awaits at its limits. This highly original and timely book will be of great value to students and scholars in philosophy, cultural theory and the humanities more generally, and to anyone interested in contemporary European thought.


Immunitas

Immunitas

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 150952617X

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This book by Roberto Esposito - a leading Italian political philosopher - is a highly original exploration of the relationship between human bodies and societies. The original function of law, even before it was codified, was to preserve peaceful cohabitation between people who were exposed to the risk of destructive conflict. Just as the human body's immune system protects the organism from deadly incursions by viruses and other threats, law also ensures the survival of the community in a life-threatening situation. It protects and prolongs life. But the function of law as a form of immunization points to a more disturbing consideration. Like the individual body, the collective body can be immunized from the perceived danger only by allowing a little of what threatens it to enter its protective boundaries. This means that in order to escape the clutches of death, life is forced to incorporate within itself the lethal principle. Starting from this reflection on the nature of immunization, Esposito offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary biopolitics. Never more than at present has the demand for immunization come to characterize all aspects of our existence. The more we feel at risk of being infiltrated and infected by foreign elements, the more the life of the individual and society closes off within its protective boundaries, forcing us to choose between a self-destructive outcome and a more radical alternative based on a new conception of community.


Improper Life

Improper Life

Author: Timothy C. Campbell

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2011-10-28

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1452932786

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How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death


Bíos

Bíos

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0816649898

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Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bíos-his first book to be translated into English-builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual-with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers-is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community. In Bíos, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical transformation of the political into biopolitics. Bíos discusses the origins and meanings of biopolitical discourse, demonstrates why none of the categories of modern political thought is useful for completely grasping the essence of biopolitics, and reconstructs the negative biopolitical core of Nazism. Esposito suggests that the best contemporary response to the current deadly version of biopolitics is to understand what could make up the elements of a positive biopolitics-a politics of life rather than a politics of mastery and negation of life. In his introduction, Timothy Campbell situates Esposito's arguments within American and European thinking on biopolitics. A comprehensive, illuminating, and highly original treatment of a critically important topic, Bíos introduces an English-reading public to a philosophy that will critically impact such wide-ranging current debates as stem cell research, euthanasia, and the war on terrorism. Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books include Categorie dell impolitico, Nove pensieri sulla politica, Communitas: orgine e destino della comunità, and Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita. Timothy Campbell is associate professor of Italian studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minnesota, 2006).


Biopolitics and Historic Justice

Biopolitics and Historic Justice

Author: Kathrin Braun

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 3839445507

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Human rights violations linked to norms of health, fitness, and social usefulness have long been overlooked by Historic Justice Studies. Kathrin Braun introduces the concept of »injuries of normality« to capture the specifics of this type of human rights violation and the respective struggles for historic justice. She examines the processes of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the context of coercive sterilization, institutional killings, as well as the persecution of homosexual men and of »asocials« under Nazi rule. She argues that an analytic perspective on political temporality allows us to better understand the formation of these biopolitical human rights violations and their exclusion from memory and historic justice.


Two

Two

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0823267636

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The debate on “political theology” that ran throughout the twentieth century has reached its end, but the ultimate meaning of the notion continues to evade us. Despite all the attempts to resolve the issue, we still speak its language—we remain in its horizon. The reason for this, says Roberto Esposito, lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event; rather, it is the pivot around which the machine of Western civilization has revolved for more than 2,000 years. At its heart stands the juncture between universalism and exclusion, unity and separation: the tendency of the Two to make itself into One by subordinating one part to the domination of the other. All the philosophical and political categories that we use, starting with the Roman and Christian notion of “the person,” continue to reproduce this exclusionary dispositif. To take our departure from political theology, then—the task of contemporary philosophy—we must radically revise our conceptual lexicon. Only when thought has been returned to its rightful “place”—connected to the human species as a whole rather than to individuals—will we be able to escape from the machine that has imprisoned our lives for far too long.