Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Abstract

Terms of Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics presents a decade of thought about 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 past, present, and future of biopolitics-from his work on implications of etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of impolitical and impersonal. Taking on interlocutors from throughout Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil, Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces 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 Political calls for 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 breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open language of politics.

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