Barcelona Metropolis

According to Esposito, the impolitical implies that there is no other reality than that of power, without this involving either a defence or a condemnation of power, so much as the acceptance of conflict as the only reality of politics. At the same time, it contrasts the impersonal and the living person as a possible way out for distinguishing between a valuable life and another less valuable one.

Roberto Esposito's intellectual career began at a very early age, with two books, one on the Italian neo-avant-garde and another on Vico and Rousseau, both published in 1976. By 1980 his work included references to Machiavelli, a key author for Esposito. The title of the magazine Il Centauro (1981-1986) in fact refers to a central figure in Florentine thought. In this magazine, which was to be of crucial importance in the Italian intellectual world, Esposito gradually elaborated the ideas and an itinerary which he later systematised in Categories of the Impolitical (orig. ed. 1988), a book that marks a turning point in his career.

The notion of the impolitical had been drawn up by Cacciari in an article in 1978 called Lo impolítico nietzscheano and came at a moment when the relationship between philosophy and politics, between intellectuals and political parties, was being redrawn. This process was especially noticeable in Italy, where intellectual activity had been rigidly subordinated to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) until the seventies, after which various different lines of thought began to emerge that broke with the PCI. Examples of these are the 'weak thought' of Vattimo, the 'negative thought' of Cacciari and the 'operaism' of Tronti and Negri. During that period the figure of the organic intellectual declined definitively and a process began of critical revision of the concepts and premises in political thinking until then.

In this scenario, the impolitical emerged as a realistic way of looking at the political from the fringes, based on the diagnosis that the political categories of modernity were exhausted and it was therefore necessary to deconstruct them, in the same way that Heidegger had done with metaphysics, to find an alternative language that could account for our present.

The impolitical therefore involves a strong criticism both of political philosophy and of philosophical politics and, more decisively, of all forms of political theology, be it a Christian form, which tries to link the political to an asset or value or extract good dialectically from evil, or a functional-modern one going from Hobbes to Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, which finds the distinctive criterion for the political in the distinction between friend and enemy. The latter ―along with the Cartesian subject― are Esposito's great negative idols. As regards the German philosopher, the impolitical fully assumes his diagnoses, but changes their sign. In relation to Hobbes, his sacrifice of the original community of the State of Nature in favour of the Sovereign Order was to be at the heart of all his later reflection, which hinged on the paradigm of immunisation. In Categories of the Impolitical, criticism of Hobbes ―and of modern political philosophy tout court― centres on his theory of representation, which for Esposito is always of Order, while politics, conflict and the plurality of existence ―like the impolitical itself― is what is unrepresentable. The whole of modern philosophy, from Hobbes to Hegel, moves in the direction in which 'fulfilment of subjectivity is possible only by sacrificing its natural immediacy' to alienation in favour of the state in which 'the right of individuals can be realised only in the form of an absolute power destined to dominate them' (Confines de lo político, p. 24-25).

Inversely, an immune person is someone exempt from the burden of the munus, someone who avoids their duties but also the honours these involve. This is why the modern individualism on which our law and our politics are founded is seen as one of the paradigmatic modes of immunity, as the defence of ownership and private property, responding to the vacuum of the communal with an even greater vacuum.

Nevertheless, communitas and immunitas are not antagonistic terms, but two poles in a continuum, one positive and the other negative, as Esposito himself remarks in the book Immunitas. Esposito can not conceive of a community ―a donation, an exposure, an exchange― that does not call on some form of immunity to protect life, but this involves the risk of completely sacrificing life, the relation, and its conservation, which is what the immune paradigm, centred on the negative protection of life against whatever threatens it, tends to do. The immunity drift can always become a deadly way of resolving the conflict we are exposed to by our being-in-common.

In Immunitas, Esposito notes that the logic and language of immunity increasingly dominate the legal and biomedical vocabulary, but also anthropology and sociology. Immunisation involves protecting life by negative means, dialectically, giving it non-lethal doses of death to try, in order to avoid contagion, of which the principal agent and the object of many of our current fears takes the form of viruses: whether a computer virus, AIDS, biological weapons or immigration, we always try at all costs to stop it from spreading out of control. This contagion arises from contact between bodies, hence the centrality (both metaphoric and real) of the body in every sphere of our existence. Other than this, Esposito shows the polemological nature adopted by medical treatises in describing the workings of the immune system, when he says that 'the response to the increasingly widespread danger threatening the communal is the ever tighter defence of the immune' (Immunitas).

But if there is no outside to immunity, the communal can only be thought of in tension with it. Esposito therefore explores a common immunity based on the way in which the immunological conflict between the embryo and the ovule during pregnancy is the condition that makes life possible and in the possibility of an immunological self, in which identity is altered at the same time as it asserts itself, being what is most individual and most shared.