ON AN OBLIGATORY NOTHING situating the political in post-metaphysical community

Abstract

This essay contends that while Nancy and Esposito have strikingly similar concepts of the place of the political in post-metaphysical community, their respective articulations of these concepts noticeably diverge. Because of his commitment to excavating the political project of immunity as central to the Western political tradition in and through the category of the legal person, Esposito announces community as impolitical, as the interruptive spacing, and thus alternating displacement, of the political conceived as the site of emancipatory agency. In contrast, in the work of Agamben and in the recent work of Nancy, an articulation of (respectively) the person and the political in more agential terms can be found. This divergence presents interpretive difficulties insofar as Esposito's discussion of community as impolitical could be read as advancing ontological neutrality or passivity that threatens to separate political activity from its liberating potential. I argue that such ontological neutrality is a product of Esposito's confrontation with the political as dominated by both the logic of immunity and an engagement with the complex legacy of Heidegger's problematic political trajectory. To this extent it is an open question whether Esposito's project leaves room for a new vision of the political and for political agency.

• Community
• Impolitical
• Immunization
• Proper
• Legal Person
• Esposito
• Nancy
• Agamben

Notes

I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to Greg Bird for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as to my former colleagues at the (now defunct) Theory Department of the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Responding for Existence,” Studies in Practical Philosophy 1.1 (1999): 2–11 (2).

2 This is how Esposito articulates the difference between his work and Nancy's in the paper in this special issue entitled “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.”

3 To this extent I seek to blur the rather stark alternative that Peter Gratton seems to see in his essay in this issue between immanence and transcendence in the work of Esposito (who models an “affirmative biopolitics” on the great “philosophers of immanence,” Spinoza and Deleuze) and Nancy. From this perspective it must be kept in mind that Nancy himself refuses the choice between immanence and transcendence as ultimately impossible. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Imm/Trans,” Polygraph 15/16 (2004): 11–12.

4 Roberto Esposito, Communitas: On the Origin and Destination of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010) 6.

5 Ibid.

6 Roberto Esposito, Third Person, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (London: Polity, 2012) 83.

7 Ibid. 82.

8 Ibid. 77.

9 Ibid. 79.

10 This discussion of the difference between the person and human being recalls Agamben's similar concept of the state of exception as a mobile and shifting threshold between inclusion and exclusion. As Timothy Campbell points out in his article on Esposito's notion of the impersonal, the difference between Agamben and Esposito on this point is that for the latter the zone of indistinction passes through and is located in the entity who is both human and (potential) person, rather than situated between the separation between zoe and bíos. See Timothy Campbell, “‘Enough of a Self’: Esposito's Impersonal Biopolitics,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 8.1 (2012): 31–46.

11 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973).

12 Third Person 92.

13 Ibid. 101.

14 Ibid.; one thinks here of J.S. Mill's contention at the beginning of On Liberty that despotic government is entirely suited to those he calls barbarous peoples.

15 Communitas 15.

16 Ibid. 3.

17 Ibid. 2.

18 Ibid. 16; original emphasis.

19 Ibid. 99.

20 Ibid. 92.

21 Ibid. 94.

22 Ibid. 93.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. 95.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid. 96.

27 Ibid. 97.

28 Ibid. 102; original emphasis.

29 Ibid. 14.

30 Ibid.

31 Esposito's concept of the impolitical is therefore similar to Schmitt's concept of the katechon, the “delayer” who does not redeem but merely holds open the place of transcendence by delaying the triumph of the anti-Christ. See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003) 59–60. For Esposito this function of delay (perhaps via the alteration of difference within identity) is indefinite: there is no “messiah” who is to come, no eschatology, only the infinite task of preventing the worst.

32 This problem of ontology's connection to the political is the basis for both Badiou's philosophical project of recasting politics as one of the fundamental domains of ontology (along with those of love, science, and art), and for the return to Spinoza's creative ontology as found in Negri, Deleuze, and Althusser.

33 This presentation of Agamben as potentially more affirmative of politics is somewhat ironic given that he does not always seem to be so. For example, in apparent contrast to the position he takes in this discussion of Dante, in the appendix to his book on The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 92) Agamben writes that “The world of the happy and that of the unhappy, the World of the good and that of the evil contain the same states of things; with respect to their being-thus they are perfectly identical.” This would seem to license the same ontological indifference toward how things are in the world, and so would appear to endorse a similar remove from the political world of valuation and contestation – whether this is actually the case would require a broader examination of Agamben's work that is beyond the scope of my discussion here.

34 Third Person 74.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid. 75.

37 Giorgio Agamben, “Comedy” in The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 1–22.

38 Ibid. 8; original de-emphasized.

39 There are several texts by Benjamin that one might cite here, but perhaps the most obvious one is the “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmond Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999).

40 Quoted in Agamben, “Comedy” 17.

41 Ibid. 17–18; original emphasis.

42 Ibid. 19.

43 This distinction is Claude Lefort's; see Lefort, “The Question of Democracy” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988) 9–20.

44 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Truth of Democracy” in The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (New York: Fordham UP, 2010) 1–34 (27).

45 Ibid. 24.

46 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Compearance,” trans. Tracy Strong, Political Theory 20.3 (1992): 371–98 (392).

47 Ibid. 372.

48 Ibid.; original emphasis.

49 “The Truth of Democracy” 17.

50 There are certainly passages in Esposito's work where he does situate politics and community in a more affirmative and emancipatory light and which remain consistent with his philosophical project. For instance, in his essay “Freedom and Immunity” Esposito writes that “freedom is the internal exteriority of community: the part of community that resists immunization, that is not identical to itself, and that remains open to difference” in Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch (Fordham: Fordham UP, 2013) 56.

51 See François Raffoul, “The Logic of the With: On Nancy's Être singulier pluriel,” Studies in Practical Philosophy 1.1 (1999): 36–52, for an explication of this.