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)

The question of enhancement occupies a prominent place not only in current bioethical debates but also in wider public discussions about our human future. In all of these, the problem of enhancement is usually articulated via two sets of questions: moral questions over its permissibility, extent and direction; and technical questions over the feasibility of different forms of regenerative and synthetic alterations to human bodies and minds. This article argues that none of the dominant positions on enhancement within the field (...) of bioethics is entirely satisfactory due to the limited, monadic, pre-technological and non-cultural conception of the human that is adopted in these models. Critically engaging with both opponents of enhancement (Habermas) and its advocates (Harris, Agar, Bostrom, Dworkin), Zylinska also takes some steps towards outlining a nonnormative ethics of enhancement. The latter sees its human and non-human subjects as always already enhanced, and hence dependent, relational and coevolving with technology. (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)

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition (...) of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo busca levantar algumas questões a respeito da proposta do filósofo alemão Peter Sloterdijk ao Antropoceno, termo em debate que define a época na qual o ser humano se configurou como um agente de transformação geológica e climática. O debate faz-se pertinente por conta da proximidade de Sloterdijk com nomes como Bruno Latour e Yuk Hui, autores que, de forma central ou tangencial, se debruçam sobre este problema. Neste artigo, começaremos trazendo alguns dos principais conceitos sloterdijkianos de sua (...) obra recente para, em seguida, analisar suas propostas de ‘paradigma homeotécnico’ e de ‘coimunismo’, levantando, ao fim, questões pertinentes às propostas mencionadas. ABSTRACT This paper aims to raise some questions concerning the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s propositions regarding Anthropocene, a debatable term that serves to define the epoch in which human being made itself an agent of geological and climatic transformation. This debate is important because of Sloterdijk’s closeness with names such as Bruno Latour and Yuk Hui, authors that, in a more or less central manner, engage with such a problem. Here, firstly we will gather some of the main concepts of Sloterdijk’s recent work in order to analyze the ‘homeotechnological paradigm’ and the ‘co-immunism’ propositions, raising, at last, some relevant questions to the aforementioned propositions. (shrink)

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized (...) fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia). (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)

Dada la abundante literatura no sólo filosófica, sino también la proveniente de otras disciplinas como la sociología, las ciencias políticas, la medicina, la educación, entre otras que abordan el fenómeno de la biopolítica, este artículo realiza una visión de conjunto por algunas “recepciones” acerca de dicho problema: los Governmentality Studies y algunos filósofos analíticos; el escenario francés y el despegue de la biopolítica en España; la biopolítica negativa y afirmativa; los registros de la biotecnología y la bioética y, por último, (...) la recepción en América latina. Este itinerario, sin pretender ser exhaustivo, permite determinar el carácter transdisciplinario, variopinto, pero también empírico de la “biopolítica”. Asimismo, deja abierta la discusión al hecho de que usualmente se la concibe erróneamente como si se tratara de una esencia o sustancia. (shrink)

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)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 570-587, December 2021.

The aim of my article is to relate Roberto Esposito’s reflections on Europe to his more recent proposal of instituent thought. I will try to do so by focusing on three theoretical cornerstones of Esposito’s thought: the first concerns the evidence of a link between Europe, philosophy and politics. The second is deconstructive: it highlights the inadequacy of the answers of the most important contemporary ontological-political paradigms to the European crisis, as well as the impossibility of interpreting this crisis through (...) theoretical-political categories such as sovereignty. The third relates more directly to the proposal of a new political ontology, which Esposito defines as instituent thought. Esposito’s discussion of political theology is the central theoretical nucleus of this study. This discussion will focus, in particular, on the category of negation, from which any political ontology that is based on pure affirmativeness or absolute negation is criticized. In his opinion, philosophical theories developed on the basis of these assumptions have proved to be incomplete or ineffective in relation to the current European and global philosophical and political crisis. Esposito therefore perceives the urgent need to propose a line of thought that is neither negatively destituent, nor affirmatively constituent, but instituent, capable of thinking about order through conflict. Provided that we do not think of the institution statically–in a conservative sense–but dynamically, as constant instituting in which conflict can become an instrument of a politics increasingly inspired by justice. (shrink)

Today, the improper is not only a philosophical issue; it is also a political question. In particular, striving to abandon the improper is central to the contemporary political agenda in many Western countries. Given the risks of a political agenda abandoning the improper in a proper way and realizing a “closed community,” contemporary philosophers such as Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy have thought about the relationship between the proper and improper. It is remarkable that Martin Heidegger is an exemplary figure (...) in the analyses of both philosophers. I will analyze Heidegger's line of thought on this issue and how Esposito and Nancy have responded to it. Both Esposito and Nancy state that it is “impossible to abandon the improper in a proper way” in their writings on community. Every proper existence is always marked by impropriety, Nancy and Esposito argue; there is no “original” or “proper” commonality that would liberate us from all things improper. Even before one can appropriate one's property, it is already traversed by the improper. The question “how not to abandon properly the improper?” is in fact one of the imperatives behind their arguments: if indeed the proper is always already, in one way or another, related to or contaminated by the improper, it is indeed an illusion to think we can simply leave the improper behind. (shrink)

Despite their common core in statistics, insurance and epidemiology propel two different forms of solidarity. In insurance, the collective is a source of protection, thanks to the pooling of risks; in epidemics by contrast, the group remains the source of danger for the individual. The aim of this paper is to highlight the conceptions of community and solidarity at play in epidemics in contradistinction to insurance, with a focus on the shift introduced by big data and algorithms. Paradoxically, while the (...) new technologies and epidemiology share a common view on the relation between the individual and the collective, tracing apps were not widely adopted in the Covid-19 crisis. This reluctance to use current technologies for the sake of epidemic containments highlights, beyond legitimate interrogations, a confusion between two imaginaries of the social: insurance solidarity where the interdependence is a source of rights, and epidemic solidarity that imposes duties. (shrink)

During the past thirty years, immunological metaphors, motifs, and models have come to shape much social theory and philosophy. Immunology, so it seems, often has served to naturalize claims about self, identity, and sovereignty—perhaps most prominently in Jacques Derrida’s later studies. Yet the immunological science that functions as “nature” in these social and philosophical arguments is derived from interwar and Cold War social theory and philosophy. Theoretical immunologists and social theorists knowingly participated in a common culture. Thus the “naturalistic fallacy” (...) in this case might be reframed as an error of categorization: its conditions of possibility would require ceaseless effort to purify and separate out the categories of nature and culture. The problem—inasmuch as there is a problem—therefore is not so much the making of an appeal to nature as assuming privileged access to an independent, sovereign category called “nature.”. (shrink)

This essay addresses the controversial status of subjectivity in Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics and articulates it using Recalcati’s psychoanalytical theory, with the aim of promoting a non-vitalistic affirmative biopolitics. In biopolitical theory in general, and in Esposito’s especially, subjectivity has a problematic status: while life precedes intersubjectivity, it is not clear whether subjectivity is regarded as a consequence or as the precondition of intersubjectivity. Esposito acknowledges such an aporia, the subjectum suppositum, but fails to recognise it in his own reasoning, ultimately (...) envisioning a powerful interpretative and transformative paradigm—affirmative biopolitics—whilst leaving at its core a life-less subject. In this essay, I read Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics through Recalcati’s clinical approach to the ‘new symptoms’, with the aim of envisioning a subjectivity compatible with the ontogenetic primacy of life posited by biopolitical theory. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to suggest that an affirmative biopolitics, grounded on the promotion of neither a pre-subjective bare life, nor of a lifeless subject, but of a fully subjective life, a living subject is possible. (shrink)