Roberto Esposito,Terms of the Political: Community,Immunity,Biopolitics

Reviewed by: Piero Garofalo, University of New Hampshire, USA

For the past 35 years, Roberto Esposito's innovative philosophical arguments have placed him at the forefront of contemporary political theorists in Italy, Europe, and beyond. Within the Anglo-American academy, however, his emergence as a ‘must read’ philosopher, whose work holds immediate relevance to cultural studies, is relatively recent – sparked in part by a special 2006 issue of Diacritics (36.2). Timothy Campbell, translator of Esposito's fundamental studies, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford University Press, 2010), has been instrumental in advancing Esposito's thought and, as editor of the Fordham University Press ‘Commonalities’ series, has provided this welcome addition to the expanding corpus of Esposito's works available in English.

Terms of the Political is a compilation of 11 articles and papers that span over a decade of research (1996–2006). Although structured to provide an accessible introduction to Esposito's work, each chapter addresses a different question and stands on its own. Nevertheless, because the arguments are organized around the overarching themes of a new political lexicon (e.g. community, immunity, biopolitics, and the impersonal), they are best read in clusters. Given the lack of a systematic presentation on the part of the author, Vanessa Lemm's concise and lucid introduction (pp. 1–13) provides essential guidance to readers unfamiliar with Esposito's thought. By way of contrast, the Italian edition of Termini della politica (Milan: Mimesis, 2008) features Campbell's rigorous and insightful overview, which is a variation of his essay ‘Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito’ in Diacritics (36.2: 2–22).

Esposito's political thought can be read as a response to the crisis of modernity (and, therefore, of the very conception of politics) in the late 1970s. Thus Esposito, for whom the sense of crisis characterizes an ever-present state of being, deconstructs Western philosophical–political terminology to re-imagine political and social relations. Rather than posit solutions, he raises questions whose underpinnings lead to new questions in an ever-expanding inquiry of possibilities. In this sense, he participates in a continental tradition that privileges the hermeneutic critique of contemporary formations over prescriptive resolutions.

Symptomatic of Esposito's explication are chapter titles that present two terms, but eschew binary oppositions to propose interdependent relationships that blur divisions. The result is a nuanced elaboration of political and philosophical categories that question the stability of their apparently defining conceits. The interpretive challenges of his writings reside in their deconstruction of political categories and are less a matter of their exposition than of their inter-referential engagement with other theorists to constitute a textured discourse laden with historical depth and transcultural breadth. Thus Esposito's ‘community’ is only understood within the context of the communities of Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Maurice Blanchot, and Marguerite Duras, who in turn drew on preceding philosophical traditions (Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes), who also echoed influences in a seemingly endless mediation. This interior dialogue with the past that runs throughout Esposito's analysis is not, however, merely historical contextualization. Instead, it produces new concepts that speak to the present so that ‘community,’ for example, through its relationship to ‘immunity,’ presents a new way of understanding society.

Chapters 1, 2 and 11 of the volume focus on the term community, which Esposito radically reinterprets through an etymological analysis of communitas (from the Latin root munus meaning ‘gift,’ ‘obligation,’ and ‘office’). The munus is a specific type of gift (as a gloss on the donum) that requires some form of repayment and, therefore, places a burden on the recipient. Thus, communitas refers to an ever-circulating munus that belongs to no-one, but places everyone in obligation. In other words, a shared desire for community is irremediably thwarted by a lack of community.

Chapters 4 through 6 focus on immunity (also from munus), which Esposito posits as a defining characteristic of modern democracies. Whereas communitas presents a shared obligation, immunitas offers an exemption from this condition. Immunization, contamination, and disease as the defining metaphor of the social order are inscribed in community. Contemporary society's demand for security and protection from others has privileged immunitas, which, although necessary to communitas, has the potential to destroy it. Rather than appeal to the Horatian platitude of moderation, the infringement of immunitas is resisted by pluralizing difference in identity construction.

In the remaining chapters, Esposito discusses biopolitics (drawing heavily on Michel Foucault) and the philosophy of the impersonal (engaging with Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurice Blanchot). He elaborates an affirmative biopolitics – one that remains fully cognizant of its negative potential (as articulated by Giorgio Agamben) – that is open to all forms of bios. The chapter ‘Nazism and Us’ (pp. 79–87) makes clear that such biopolitics do not preclude the actualization of biology – an aspect developed in Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Indeed, self-preservation and self-defense facilitate slippage from the politics of life (biopolitics) to the politics of death (thanatopolitics). The political control of the bios, Esposito argues, is not limited to the Nazi experience, but has the potential to continue under liberalism. Thus, to achieve an affirmative biopolitics, the nexus of biology and politics in immunity must be deconstructed.

Rhiannon Noel Welch's translation captures the rigor and clarity of Esposito's prose, which is at once concrete and engaging. By translating the key term ‘libertà’ as ‘freedom,’ Welch adheres to a norm that promotes lexical consistency within a broad philosophical discourse. The reader, however, should always be cognizant of the fact that ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ do not constitute perfect synonymy so that ‘freedom’ alone deprives ‘libertà’ of its semantic richness. The primary difference between the English and Italian editions (aside from the introductions) is a switching of essays, with the concluding chapter, ‘Community and Violence,’ apparently taken from the volume Dieci pensieri sulla politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011) replaced by ‘Comunità e nichilismo,’ which served as the third chapter of Termini della politica. This discrepancy alters the balance of the Italian text's tripartite structure, but in no way detracts from the value of the Terms of the Political.

Indeed, the translator and editor are to be commended for this rich and suggestive volume, which provides an excellent introduction to Esposito's philosophical project. These stimulating essays hold an urgent and practical import because ‘translating … philosophical formula into reality is anything but easy. Yet as the history of thought as well as the history of humankind demonstrates, for something to be made to happen, one needs to have it gestate over a long period’ (p. 134). Esposito's work is at once a compelling meditation and a call for action.