A growing body of research informs us that an effective, efficient fight against chronic American poverty, producing benefits far exceeding costs, is possible. It begins by protecting children from developmental risks. This book describes those risks, along with the programs and policies we know protect children and families. A policy framework for the pursuit of an intrepid new goal – the purposeful protection of America’s most vulnerable children on a large scale – would end chronic poverty as we know it.

Working memory has been one of the most intensively studied systems in cognitive psychology. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory brings together world class researchers from around the world to summarise our current knowledge of this field, and directions for future research.

This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, (...) which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito has extended the deconstructive theory of the gift into political philosophy, theorizing the gift as the transcendental form of political obligation. In Esposito's philosophy of communitas, the munus consists of the single obligation to give, a logic of donors without receivers, yet it simultaneously establishes relations of reciprocity, mutuality, debt and gratitude. I argue that that indebtedness and reciprocity are not logically possible in a gift system where donors are bound by the single obligation to give, (...) as the donor has no other and the gift no recipient. These inconsistencies may be addressed by distinguishing two forms of gift in communitas: the impersonal gift characterized solely by the obligation to give to the gods/communitas and the reciprocal gift characterized by the obligations to give, receive and return the gift. Esposito's philosophy of communitas would additionally be strengthened by conceptualizing symbolic practices, specifically collective representations, as intrinsic to the munus. As impersonal gift, the munus is a symbolic practice through which the members of communitas represent to themselves their being-in-common. The munus operates as a vertical relation of expenditure made possible by the collective representation of the political we. The reciprocal gift, in contrast, constitutes differentiated social ties and networks: the being-in-difference of communal life. The distinction between the impersonal and the reciprocal gift gives rise to a minimal division between the political and the communal within the transcendental structure of communitas. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” (...) where being and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them (...) through an orientation toward ‘shared vulnerability’. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation? (shrink)

Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political provides an introduction to this increasingly influentialItalian theorist'sreconceptualisation ofthe relationship between law and community. Focusing primarily on Esposito's worksCatgories de l'Impolitique, Communitas and Bos, andBiopolitics and Philosophy, his work, it is argued, is animated by an abiding concern with the question of the political as that which remains unthought in the tradition of modern and contemporary political philosophy. Esposito's fundamental rethinking of the notion of community thereby breaks with the existing (...) framework of political and legal philosophy; critiquing its traditions and, in the process, rethinking the very form of critique. As the first monograph length study of Esposito in English, Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Politicalwill be of considerable interest to those with interests in contemporarylegal, political and philosophical thought. (shrink)

Analyzes key concepts and arguments in the work of one of Europe’s leading philosophers. One of Europe’s leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito’s political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, (...) affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito’s reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito’s philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns. “To my knowledge there are no other books—in Italian or English—that attempt to provide a critical introduction to Esposito’s works and an engagement with his works in fields outside of political science and philosophy. This volume is an important first.” — Rhiannon Noel Welch, author of Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and (...) Esposito’s is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

Dentro del amplio campo problemático que configuran las diversas indagaciones en torno a la biopolítica, se destacan aquéllas que estipulan la necesidad de ampliar, profundizar, completar e incluso enmendar las significaciones que Michel Foucault le imprimiera a este concepto durante la década de 1970. El presente artículo tomará en consideración la “biopolítica afirmativa” desarrollada por Roberto Esposito, la cual aparece caracterizada como el pasaje desde una política sobre la vida hacia una política de la vida. A partir del establecimiento (...) de algunas tensiones entre los lineamientos generales del pensamiento foucaultiano y la biopolítica de Esposito, se buscará explicitar los supuestos de esta última y ponderar algunas de sus implicancias. (shrink)

Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito have been two of the most influential biopolitical thinkers of the twentieth century, but their respective approaches to the relationship between life and politics do not address the main problem of the Anthropocene: the relationship between life and energy. Thus, this article analyzes the biophysical limits of biopolitics in the works of Foucault and Roberto Esposito and, to overcome these limits, it proposes to analyze the physiological assembly of the devices of power within (...) the energetic flows of social metabolisms. The article concludes that the physio-political approach to human societies allows us to overcome the biophysical limits of both Foucauldian biopolitics and Esposito's immunological paradigm. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito tries to overcome the crisis of contemporary politics by proposing the ‘affirmative biopolitics’ inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s way of thinking about politics. But does this proposal for politics allow Esposito to occupy a unique, powerful place in the constitution of contemporary politics, similar to the original position Machiavelli occupied in the constitution of modern politics? Does Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics really offer an opportunity for contemporary politics? This article, which aims to answer these questions, first argues (...) that there is a Machiavellian mindset behind ‘affirmative biopolitics.’ It claims to represent a break in contemporary politics and a new political possibility. However, the article argues that Esposito is unable to bring to the present the innovation and radicalism that Machiavelli advocated in the literature of political philosophy and fails to offer a clear way to overcome the crisis. The article argues that this inability is due to the ambivalence of his understanding of affirmative biopolitics. On the one hand, he considers politics together with the conflict, absolving it from any external determination. On the other hand, he abrogates this autonomy by determining the purpose and direction of political activities. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective (...) embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. (shrink)

O presente artigo visa apresentar duas teorias biopolíticas, a saber, as de Giorgio Agamben e Roberto Esposito. O primeiro criou um tetraedro conceitual dotado de uma semântica própria que permite caracterizar a biopolítica, enquanto o segundo identificou um paradigma no qual a sociedade contemporânea se insere e qualifica a biopolítica. Longe de uma resposta unívoca ao que seja o fenômeno da biopolítica, esses dois autores italianos fornecem chaves conceituais imprescindíveis para compreender a realidade política em que estamos inseridos, que (...) se qualifica pela inserção da vida em sentido biológico na política. (shrink)

Los discursos sobre el biopoder han marcado buena parte de las discusiones en filosofía política durante la última década. Particularmente, el desarrollo de estos discursos entre diversos filósofos italianos, lo que ha abierto diversas líneas de interpretación sobre el biopoder. A continuación se revisa una de las hipótesis centrales del planteamiento de Roberto Esposito y que justifica gran parte de su trabajo en torno a estos discursos. Esta hipótesis consiste en que la biopolítica mostraría el encuentro léxico entre el (...) vocabulario médico y político que se atestigua durante el siglo XX. Al mismo tiempo el artículo interroga críticamente esta hipótesis de modo que, por una parte, expone el planteamiento de Esposito y sirve como introducción a sus propuestas y, por otra, permite revisar los aportes y límites de esta particular recepción del biopoder. -/- The Biopower discourses have marked much of the discussions on political philosophy during the last decade. In particular, the development of these speechs among several Italian philosophers, which has opened various lines of interpretation of Biopower. Then review one of the central hypothesis of the approach of Roberto Esposito and that justifies much of her work around these discourses. This hypothesis is that the biopolitical would show the lexical meeting between the medical and political vocabulary which is testified during the 20th century. At the same time the article critically interrogates this hypothesis so that, on the one hand, it exposes the approach of Esposito and serves as an introduction to their proposals and, on the other hand, allows to review the contributions and limits of this particular reception of BioPower. (shrink)

Against the enthusiasm for dialogue and deliberation in recent democratic theory, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and French philosopher Jacques Rancière construct their political philosophies around the nondialogical figure of the third person. The strikingly different deployments of the figure of the third person offered by Esposito and Rancière present a crystallization of their respective approaches to political philosophy. In this essay, the divergent analyses of the third person offered by these two thinkers are considered in terms of (...) the critical strategies they employ. Contrasting Esposito’s strategy of “ethical dissensus” with Rancière’s strategy of “aesthetic dissensus,” it is argued that Esposito’s attempts to recruit the figure of the third person to dismantle the dispositif of the person are politically problematic, while Rancière’s alternative account of the third person is more promising for political theory and practice. (shrink)

In this review of Persons and Things, recently translated into English and published by Polity Press, we discuss how this text investigates some of the most important themes of Roberto Esposito’s thought. Specifically, the book continues the process of constructing an idea of community intended as lack, gift and impropriety that the Italian philosopher has been developing since the publication of Communitas. In this case, it is the notion of body that demolishes the metaphysical apparatus that has conditioned the (...) moulding of the philosophical-legal lexicon of the Western tradition. Doomed to constant submission to the rational sphere of the person, hence assimilated to the materiality of a mere thing, the body can win back its full dignity if it is considered as a ‘living body’. Only in this way, according to Esposito, is it possible to move past the ‘proprietary’ and subjectivistic notion that, in philosophy as well as in law, has determined a clear-cut separation between persons and things, as well as between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ persons. Thus, in Persons and Things, the body becomes an actual vector for a trans-individualization of the individual, for an opening to the common, public, and communitarian dimension. According to Esposito, this process is favoured by the changes brought about by biotechnologies and science in general, not only in medical practices, but also in the legal formulations that follow from them. (shrink)

In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito develops a destructionist reading of political philosophy, interested in tracing modernity's attempt to constitute the political as a radical negation of our exposure to others. If the task of contemporary political thinking is to interrupt the myth of the common, without falling back completely into the negative and self-destructive power of immunization, political philosophy must be confronted with itself, searching within itself for the traces and points of departure – (...) hermeneutic supports – for such a destructive gesture. Esposito finds and develops these traces in a genealogical line that, starting with Hobbes, goes through Rousseau and Kant and ends with Heidegger and Bataille. By way of this genealogy, Esposito intends to show how modern philosophy would already have started to interrupt the dialectics between the immunization paradigm and the myth of the common. In this paper I argue that Hegel is not only an interesting figure but also an obligatory step in this effort, and in doing so I will pay particular attention to a notion of being-in-common that arises in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate from his criticism of the violence of law. Hence, Hegel is read here in the light of an unexplored relationship to Esposito's work in Communitas. (shrink)

La violence exercée par la société patriarcale médiévale sur les femmes a fait l’objet de nombreuses études au cours des dernières années. L’accent a été principalement mis sur les agressions physiques (rapts, viols, corrections maritales, etc.) et, plus récemment, pour éviter de considérer les femmes comme d’« éternelles victimes », sur la violence qu’elles ont elles-mêmes exercée. L’un des intérêts de cet ouvrage collectif, centré sur l’Italie des quatre derniers siècles médiévaux, est de p...

This paper analyzes the varying conceptions of ethics underpinning the accounts of community in Blanchot, Nancy, and Esposito. A focus on ethics brings into relief points of divergence amongst accounts of community that otherwise overlap and share in many significant ways. Furthermore, it provides a basis to better assess Esposito's contribution. I focus on the concepts of difference and transcendence and the figure of the lovers, a shared topos in Nancy and Blanchot, to demonstrate these subtle variations. In (...) turning to Esposito, Kantian-inflected notions of duty, obligation, and law shape a community where others recede into the background and the lovers lose their visibility. I suggest that Esposito's focus on duty has consequences that give cause for further reflection. The law renders each of us other, but in its universality it risks losing a sense of the exceptional. Relying etymologically on the notion of duty as that which, following his reading of Kant, undermines the subject and renders possible the impossible community, grounds the Communitas in a law that risks congealing the meaning of community around this impossible obligation. (shrink)

Setting out from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article engages with post-Heideggerian thought on community, seeking to bring out and to enhance its political thrust for contemporary democracies. It shows how Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, ‘common the political’, that is, how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-existence which clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. It then responds to a series of pertinent objections by further politicizing the (...) post-Heideggerian vision of the common. I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden, as they draw from conflicting understandings of ‘the political’, pitting plurality and horizontal relations against division and uneven power. To mitigate that conflict, these two approaches should be situated at different sites of political action, and the hegemonic framework should be recast so as to bring it more into line with horizontalist ‘common’ politics. (shrink)

El presente trabajo reflexiona sobre el pensamiento de la comunidad en Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito. Ambos interrogan lo común desde una perspectiva impolítica que intenta deconstruir los presupuestos de la metafísica y de la filosofía política tradicionales para poder elaborar una conceptualidad afirmativa en clave ontológica. En estos autores predomina el recurso a la figura de la comunidad, situada luego en el horizonte de la biopolítica, ya que la vida deviene el centro hacia el cual apuntarían los dispositivos (...) de poder y las formas de subjetivación política actuales. El trabajo plantea como interrogante si estos abordajes ontológicos logran dar cuenta plenamente de lo común en términos políticos o sólo éticos. (shrink)

This article examines the place of phenomenology within Esposito’s thought on the impolitical. In order to do this, this piece firstly expounds the task of Deconstructionism within the framework of Esposito’s general thoughts about the community. Secondly, it shows the meaning and the relevance that the categories of subject and substance have for the metaphysical tradition of political philosophy. Finally, the article delves into the author’s reading of Arendt’s phenomenology when it comes to the concept of origin. The (...) main purpose of this article is to show the ways in which the impolitical becomes a thought of the community which bears within itself the denial of the political as the effort of a metaphysical subject to make the origin visible as a phenomenon. (shrink)

Na atualidade, parece não haver nenhuma outra categoria que goze de unanimidade tão generalizada e transversal, quanto o de pessoa. Nenhum discurso que pretenda estar em público de forma teórico, jurídico e politicamente correta coloca em questão sua nobreza, principalmente em seu nexo com o direito. Os direitos da pessoa são justamente sobre o quê não se deve tergiversar. No entanto, há um paradoxo incontornável do nosso tempo: nunca como agora, a nobreza da categoria de pessoa foi tão incensada, mas (...) também nunca como agora, tantas vidas humanas foram tão humilhadas pela fome, miséria, epidemias, exílios, etc. O objetivo desse texto é seguir uma trilha já aberta por alguns pensadores de matriz franco-italiana de crítica a essa unanimidade. (shrink)

The essay analyzes some issues in the philosophical works of Merleau-Ponty and Esposito, in particular focusing on the relationship between temporality, institution and phenomenology.

Este artículo se ocupa de la recepción de la noción foucaultiana de “gubernamentalidad” en el pensamiento de Roberto Esposito a partir de la traducción al italiano de las lecciones de Foucault de los años 1977 y 1978 en el Collège de France. En primer lugar, se exponen los diferentes contextos de recepción de estas lecciones, en particular en el ámbito anglosajón de los estudios sobre la gubernamentalidad y en el de la crisis del marxismo italiano de finales de los (...) setenta. En segundo lugar, se analiza la posición de Foucault en sus cursos de estos años desde la perspectiva de la oposición entre maquiavelismo y antimaquiavelismo en vista, precisamente, de la recepción italiana. Por último, se aborda la recepción de la noción de “gubernamentalidad” por parte de Roberto Esposito en su obra de 1980, La politica e la storia. El artículo muestra la importancia de esta recepción temprana de las lecciones de Foucault respecto de la formación de la corriente biopolítica italiana y, sobre todo, sus especificidades. (shrink)