From the Obligation of Birth to the Obligation of Care: Esposito’s Biophilosophy and Recalcati’s ‘New Symptoms’

ABSTRACT

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 (and thus of life). 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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributors

Alvise Sforza Tarabochia was awarded a PhD in Italian Studies in 2011 at the University of Kent, defending a thesis on the thought of the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. He was appointed Lecturer in Italian at Kent in the same academic year. Dr Sforza Tarabochia has completed a large research project on biopolitics, Italian Theory and psychiatry, which culminated with the publication of a monograph entitled Psychiatry, Subjectivity, Community. Franco Basaglia and Biopolitics (Peter Lang, 2013). His main research foci, in addition to biopolitical and Italian theory, are now photography and visual culture in Italy, especially in connection with psychiatry and medicine.

Notes

1. All citations from Italian sources have been translated by the author of this essay.