Abstract
Rather than having a frontal approach toward animality or reflecting on the animal as such, Esposito introduces this problematic as an element that traditional metaphysics has not been able to properly reflect upon. Esposito’s philosophy suggests that if we want to leave behind an immunitarian politics over life that has produced submission, suffering, and senseless death of human beings, animality should not be thought anymore as what can be destroyed with impunity, nor as that part of humanity that must be rejected and controlled by our higher spiritual and mental abilities. Esposito shows that it is only by establishing a new political and philosophical framing of existence, in which animality and humanness cannot be severed, that a politics of life can be thought and experienced.
Matías Saidel wishes to acknowledge the financial support of CONICET/Universidad Católica de Santa Fe, Argentina. He also wishes to thank Professor Constanza Serratore for collaborating with important references from Esposito’s Ten Thoughts on Politics (2011).
Diego Rossello wishes to acknowledge the financial support of FONDECYT, Regular Project 1171154.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important also to stress the difference between Locke’s theorization on the naturality of labor/property as something ontologically primordial that the state must recognize and Hobbes’s recognition of the Leviathan as the condition of possibility of property and labor market. In Leviathan Hobbes points out that in the state of nature “there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it” (Hobbes 2012: 196). Later he adds: “Seeing therefore the Introduction of Propriety is an effect of Common-wealth; which can do nothing but by the Person that Represents it, it is the act onely of the Soveraign; and consisteth in the Lawes, which none can make that have not the Soveraign Power” and that “mans Labour also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing” (Hobbes 2012: 388). See also Macpherson (1962).
- 2.
As Carl Schmitt reminds us, protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state (2008: 52).
- 3.
According to Esposito, the idea of an institution through covenant implies an aporetic relationship for the subjects involved: “they are subjects of sovereignty to the extent to which they have voluntarily instituted it through a free contract. But they are subjects to sovereignty because, once it has been instituted, they cannot resist it, for precisely the same reason: otherwise they would be resisting themselves” (Esposito 2008: 59–60).
- 4.
All translations of not translated works are our own.
- 5.
Diego Rossello (2012) shows how this divide can be deconstructed in Hobbes’s texts through lycanthropy and melancholy, but, for reasons of space, we cannot develop the issue here.
- 6.
In Living Thought Esposito maintains that “Both for Machiavelli and Vico the origin is characterized by violence and lethal conflict” (2012b: 260).
- 7.
“And as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans […]. From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latine writers, in their books, and discourses of Policy, make it lawfull, and laudable, for any man so to do; provided before he do it, he call him Tyrant. […] From the same books, they that live under a Monarch conceive an opinion, that the Subjects in a Popular Common-wealth enjoy Liberty; but that in a Monarchy they are all Slaves” (Hobbes 2012: 508).
- 8.
“It was the speech of the Roman people […] that all Kings are to be reckon’d amongst ravenous Beasts. But what a Beast of prey was the Roman people, whilst with its conquering Eagles it erected its proud Trophees so far and wide over the world” (Hobbes 2002: 23).
- 9.
- 10.
Esposito reminds us that “Nothing is more deadly, for Vico, than the typically modern idea that we can sever the knot that binds history to its nonhistorical beginning, unraveling it through a process that fully temporalizes life” (2012b: 27).
- 11.
- 12.
On the contrary, sovereign power has always tried to separate zoé from bíos and subordinate the former to the latter (Agamben 1998).
- 13.
As Foucault puts it in the last chapter of La volonté de savoir: “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a Living being in question” (1978: 143).
- 14.
“Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (Foucault 2003: 245).
- 15.
As Arendt (1951) pointed out, the individual that arrived in the Nazi concentration camp had to be previously depersonalized in juridical, moral, and even individual terms in order to be annihilated with total impunity.
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Saidel, M., Rossello, D. (2020). Deconstructing the Dispositif of the Person: Animality and the Politics of Life in the Philosophy of Roberto Esposito. In: Cimatti, F., Salzani, C. (eds) Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47507-9_6
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