Roberto Esposito (born 4 August 1950) is an Italian political philosopher and critical theorist, notable for his contributions to biopolitics, Italian thought, and metapolitics. He currently serves as emeritus professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Biography Esposito was born in Piano di Sorrento, Italy on 4 August 1950. He graduated from the University of Naples Federico II. He was vice director of the Italian Institute of Human Sciences of Naples, full professor of theoretical philosophy, and the coordinator of the Ph.D. program in philosophy until 2013. For five years, he was the only Italian member of the International Council of Scholars of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris.
He was one of the founders of the European Political Lexicon Research Centre and of the International Centre for a European Legal and Political Lexicon, which was established by a consortium made up of the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Padua, Salerno, Naples "L'Orientale", and Naples S. Orsola Benincasa. He is co-editor of the book series Filosofia Politica published by il Mulino, the series Per la Storia della Filosofia Politica published by Franco Angeli, the series Storia e teoria politica published by Bibliopolis, and the series Comunità e Libertà published by Laterza. He is editor of the series Teoria e Oggetti published by Liguori and also acts as a philosophy consultant for the publishing house Einaudi. He has been featured in the Summer 2006 and Fall 2009 issues of the journal Diacritics and the Fall 2013 special issue of the journal Angelaki."Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito" Special Issue, edited by Timothy Campbell (Diacritics 36(2), Summer 2006); "Contemporary Italian Thought" Special Issue, edited by Timothy Campbell, Sergia Adamo, and Lorenzo Fabbri. Diacritics 39(3), Fall 2009; and Roberto Esposito, Community, and the Proper Special Issue, edited by Greg Bird and Jon Short. Angelaki 18(3), 2013.
Thought Esposito's core philosophical insight is that the traditional political lexicon has become exhausted. His multi-decade research focuses on reviving and re-conceptualizing the tradition of political philosophy, starting from the point of reinterpreting classical categories. In English, he is best known for his contributions to biopolitics, rethinking the political, the philosophy of personhood, Italian philosophy, and the study of institutions. His work synthesizes various fields of study and languages, from philosophy to literature, art, poetry, anthropology and theology. After his early studies on the thought of Vico and Machiavelli, his philosophy has followed five thematic studies:
The impolitical In the 1980s and 1990s, Esposito engaged in the largely French debate about the waning significance of the political in an increasingly neo-liberal, post-political, even de-politicized era. Inspired by Carl Schmitt's Political Theology (1934, 2004) and The Concept of the Political (1932, 1996), and the deconstructive method of Jacques Derrida, French philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, argued that modern politics meant that the political was in retreat.Bosteels, Bruno. "Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical: Notes on the Thought of Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 2010, pp. 205–38. In a series of papers and books that draw from Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, Esposito introduced an alternative term: the "impolitical". The impolitical does not imply an anti-political end, or the death of politics, but rather the outer limit of the political. It is a border from which we might find a path beyond the horizon of political theology, including the politics of representation, transcendentalism, and the depoliticizing narratives found in those arguing that modernity was completed. The impolitical creates an internal tension within the political, where openings emerge for rethinking the political lexicon of the West.Short, J. (2013). On an Obligatory Nothing: Situating the Political in Post-Metaphysical Community. Angelaki, 18(3), 139–154. This work spanned three books and multiple papers: Categories of the Impolitical (1988, 2015), Nove pensieri sulla politica (1988), and The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? (1996, 2017).Langford, Peter. Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political. London: Routledge, 2016.
Community, immunity, and biopolitics
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Esposito wrote three books culminating in a trilogy on the meaning and place of community in an increasingly immunized world. Some refer to these books as his "biopolitical trilogy", although the first book on community was more inspired by existentialism and the philosophy of ontology.
Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (1998, 2004) represents Esposito's contribution to the fin de siècle debate about the meaning of community in the West. A series of philosophers questioned whether the closed, exclusionary, and identitarian models of community found in the traditions of communitarianism in Anglo-American philosophy and classical social theory were suitable for our globalized world. Instead of abandoning the desire to belong in a community, each attempt to reconceptualize community in an open and inclusive manner.Bird, Greg and Jon Short (2013). "Community, Immunity, and the Proper: An Introduction to the Political Theory of Roberto Esposito". Angelaki 18(3): 1–12. Jean-Luc Nancy is credited with starting this debate with his book The Inoperative Community (1991), followed by Maurice Blanchot's The Unavowable Community (1988), Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community (1993), and Roberto Esposito's Communitas (1998).Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; Blanchot, Maurice. 1988. The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill; Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; and Esposito, Roberto. 2010. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy C. Campbell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. For an overview of this debate, see Bird, Greg. 2016. Containing Community: From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Esposito re-examines classical accounts of the exigency of community in political philosophy (Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger, and Bataille) in order to reconceptualize how belonging-together can be conceived. He draws from the distinction between immunitas and communitas in Roman law. Modern political thought, he argues, is riddled by the problem of immunitas—the exemption from obligations to either the state or a community. Immunized communities are based on private property, self-interest, and regulating borders. Against the tradition which juxtaposes private property with common property, or individual identity with collective identity, Esposito proposes that we return to the munus of communitas.Tierney, Thomas F. (2016). Roberto Esposito's 'Affirmative BiopoliticsC and the Gift. Theory, Culture and Society 33 (2):53–76.
The munus (duty, obligation, gift) is a form of exchange that draws people together, in a "transitive act of giving", which has nothing to do with the "stability of a possession and even less the acquisitive dynamic of something earned, but loss, subtraction, transfer."Esposito, Communitas, p. 5. The munus creates a duty and obligation that binds us together. It is a shared vulnerability and openness that divides us and brings us together in a form of mutuality. In Containing Community, Greg Bird argues that alongside Nancy and Agamben, Esposito seeks to radically rethink community beyond the trappings of the "dispositif of the proper" which shapes how community has been traditionally conceived in the West."Esposito's political and ethical notion of communitas unfolds in an ontology where being is no longer dominated by having. The first thing that must be accomplished is a traversal of Homo approprians and its immunizing apparatuses. In Communitas, this is accomplished by the ontological duty that forces open, exposes, and depropriates the subject. His communitas divides and shares out [condivisione in Italian] subjects in such a manner that they are obliged to give back to the munus. The munus must be shared." Bird, Containing Community, p. 200.
Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2002, 2011) represents Esposito's first full exploration of biopolitics. In contrast to communitas, immunized persons are private legal persons who are exempt "from the obligation of the munus, be it personal, fiscal, or civil" Esposito, Immunitas, p. 5. Drawing on his previous study of the political-legal implications of immunity on community, Esposito turns his attention to the biomedical relationship between human bodies and the social body in this book. Just as a human body's immune system is designed to protect it from deadly threats, such as viruses, the law is designed to protect people from being exposed to the risk of conflict and life-threatening situations.Oliva, Rossella Bonito, and Timothy Campbell. "From the Immune Community to the Communitarian Immunity: On the Recent Reflections of Roberto Esposito." Diacritics, vol. 36, no. 2, 2006, pp. 70–82. Life is protected by denying other life. Modern biopolitical societies and politics are increasingly defined by immunization mechanisms (anti-immigration policies, hyper-individualism, protection of private property, etc.). The more defensive a society becomes, with heightened fears of being infected by foreign elements, the more closed off they become.Cauwer, Stijn De and Kim Hendrickx. "Introduction: Immunity, Society, and the Arts." Configurations, vol. 25 no. 3, 2017, p. 265-277. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/con.2017.0019. He warns that this self-defence mechanism at the core of biopolitical societies contains an inherently negative, lethal principle, which could potentially lead to a mutation of the immunization mechanisms. Hyper-immunized societies can easily morph into self-destructive autoimmune societies, just as the Nazi regime ended by turning on itself.Deutscher, Penelope. (2013). The Membrane and the Diaphragm: Derrida and Esposito on Immunity, Community, and Birth. Angelaki, 18(3), 49–68; also see "The Immunization Paradigm," in Special Issue: Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito, trans./edited by Timothy Campbell, Diacritics – Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2006, pp. 2–22 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Esposito returns to this theme in Common Immunity: Biopolitics in the Age of the Pandemic (2023).