Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political

250 Pages·2015·14.18 MB·English

by  Peter Langford

Roberto Esposito
Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political provides a critical legal
introduction to this increasingly influential ltalian theorist's wode, by focusing on
Esposito's reconceptualisation of the relationship between law, community and
the political. The analysis concentrates primarily on Esposito's Catégories de
l'Impolitique, Communitas, Immunitas and Bios, which, it is argued, are animated
by an abiding concem with the position of critique in relation to the tradition of
modem and contemporary legal and political philosophy.
Esposito's fundamental rethinking of these notions breaks with the existing
framework ofpolitical and legal philosophy, through the critique ofits underlying
presuppositions. And, in the process, Esposito rethinks the very fonn of critique.
As the first monograph-Iength study of Esposito in English, Roberto Esposito:
Law, Community and the Political will be of considerable interest to those working
in the areas of contemporary legal and political thought and philosophy.
Peter Langford is Senior Lecturer in Law at Edge Hill University, UK.
Nomikoi: Critical Legal Thinkers
Series editors:
Peter Goodrich
Cardozo School of Law, New York
David Seymour
School of Law, City University, UK
Nomikoi: Critical Legal Thinkers presents analyses ofkey critical theorists whose
thinking on law has contributed significantly to the development of the new
interdisciplinary legal studies. Addressing those who have most influenced legal
thought and thought about law, the aim of the series is to bring legal scholarship,
the social sciences and the humanities into closer dialogue.
Other titles in the series
Judith Butler: Ethies, Law, Polities
Elena Loizidou
Evgeny Pashukanis: A Critieal Appraisal
Michael Head
Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism
Thanos Zartaloudis
Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justiee, Society
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Henri Lefebvre: Critieal Legal Studies and the Polities of Space
Chris Butler
Carl Schmitt: Law as Polities, Ideology and Strategie My th
Michael Salter
Althusser and Law
Edited by Laurent de Sutter
Deleuze & Guattari: Emergent Law
Jamie Murray
Bruno Latour: The Normativity of Networks
Kyle McGee
Zizek and Law
Edited by Laurent de Sutter
Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Politieal
Peter Langford
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3061002046493 9
ob rto sposito
Law, Community and the Political
Peter Langford
1
~~~:!~n~~~up
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© 2015 Peter Langford
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Contents
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction
1 Rethinking community and law as genealogy: the mode
of critique in Catégories de l'Impolitique 10
Genealogy and secularisation Il
Hobbes, Schmitt, Weber 14
The place of law 17
The question of the subject 18
2 Catégories de l'Impolitique 1: from the closure ofpolitical
theology to the negativism of Canetti 20
The unpolitical as political theology: Guardini
and Schmitt 21
Beyond political theology: the unpolitica1 from
Voegelin to Arendt 26
The unpolitical as the thinking of the negative:fi'om Broch
to Canetti 37
3 Catégories de l'Impolitique II: from the negative
anthropology of Canetti to the negative community
of Bataille 46
The other Canetti: beyond the confines ofn egative
anthropology 47
Simone Weil: j1'OJn negative anthropology to heterodox
theology 48
Georges Bataille: the experience of the negative as the
experience of community 56
viii Contents
4 From the unpolitical to Com11lullitas 68
5 Commlillitas 78
The installation of the modern imnnmitmy paradigm:
Hobbes 's fear 79
The questioning of the modern iml11 un itary paradigm:
Rousseau 's guilt 84
The recognition ofCommunitas: Kant's law 87
Beyond law to coexistence: Heidegger 's Communitas 93
The experience ofnon-knovvledge: Bataille 's Communitas 99
6 From C011l11l11llitas to /11llll11llitas 103
7 /lIl11l11llitas 110
Law 110
Theology 118
Philosophical anthropology 126
Biopolitics 133
Common immunity 138
8 From /lIllll11llitas to Rios: the outline of an affirmative
biopolitics 141
9 Rios 1: rethinking biopolitics - from Foucault to Nietzsche 148
The limits ofF oucauldian biopolitics 148
Thinking with Foucault beyond Foucault: biopolitics and
immunisation 156
The biopolitics off irst modernity 160
The return to Nietzsche 166
10 Rios II: towards an affirmative biopoIitics 173
National Socialism: biopolitics as thanatopolitics 174
An affirmative biopolitics: the philosophy ofB ios 181
Conclusion 197
Bibliography 210
Index 229
Acknowledgements
1 would like to thank the Commissioning Editor, Dr Colin Perrin, for his support
for this contribution to the Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers Series, and my
Editorial Assistant, Rebekah Jenkins, for aU her assistance and help during the
preparation and submission of the manuscript. 1 am very grateful to Professor
Roberto Esposito, for his willingness, at a very busy period in his own schedule,
at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences, in Naples, to me et and discuss
celiain of the initial aspects of the project, and for his very generous provision of
relevant materials. 1 would also like to acknowledge and thank aIl my friends for
their interest and encouragement in this project. FinaIly, 1 would like to thank my
father, to whom this book is dedicated, for his empathetic presence throughout
this book proj ect.
AlI translations from the French versions of Roberto Esposito' s work in this
text are my own, with acknowledgement to the original Italian editions. Many
thanks to Il Mulino, Editions du Seuil, Polit y Press, Einaudi and University of
Minnesota Press for their kind permission for the use of material from Catégories
de l'Impolitique, Immunitas and Bias in this book.