Terms of the Political
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.
Roberto Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His many books in English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Fordham).
Rhiannon Noel Welch teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is completing a book on race and biopolitics in post-unification Italy titled Vital Subjects: Race, (Re)productivity and Italian Modernity.