This article reflects on the radical change in the meaning and role of the economy in relation to processes of subjectivation, and to the social and political bond. The genealogy of the theological-economic paradigm, accompanying the development of the theological-political, highlights how the meaning of economy cannot be exhausted in economy strictly defined, but rather fulfils the role of the logic of government. On this path, the turn towards the bio-economic production of lives is marked by a marginalizing perspective that (...) replaces the centrality of needs with desire, only so as then to rule desire through rational choice. (shrink)

Comments on Arendt's views on the link between politics and history, referring to her work on antisemitism and on the "Jewish question" (pp. 44-51). Defines Arendt's historiographical method as non-temporal - she focuses on individualized experiences which express a historical conflict; she prefers biographies, portraits, and chronicles. Arendt's non-temporal approach is expressed in the assertion that the tragedy of the Jews in Europe was rooted in the paradox that the political powers granted them rights and privileges, but excluded them, in (...) differing degrees, from political participation. This fact made the Jews a strange implant in European society. Pp. 84-92 present Arendt's definition of evil, based on her experience in the Eichmann trial. While the Christian philosophical tradition defines evil as a deficiency in character, Arendt considered it to be a banal component of the human personality. The deeds of the Nazis were, consequently, the result of Philistinism and lack of moral judgment. (shrink)

Arendt's interpretation of Hobbes is an external and critical approach: so there are some reductionisms. Hobbes is an example of the nullification of politics typical in Western history–the withdrawal from the contingent nature of action. The artificial genesis of State is an example of eidetic and theoretical coercion of Plato's praxis, to eliminate the risk and to reduce the politics to the modality of cause-effect. What is lost is reality. The Leviathan, born out of an artifice to attain order, includes (...) in his internal logic, the dissolving, the insecurity, a vacillating structure, in a paradoxical heterogenesis of the ends. (shrink)

In this essay Laura Bazzicalupo surveys the contemporary biopolitical landscape from the war on terror to biotechnology to migration. Characterizing the biopolitical chiefly as a move from the juridical toward the normalizing, Bazzicalupo both critiques recent neomaterialist theorizations of biopower as vitalist and singles out some currents of feminist thought for their modern, anticommunitarian bias. A discussion of Arendt's analysis of depoliticization is then taken up from the perspective of immunity, one indebted to the thought of Roberto Esposito. She concludes (...) with a spirited defense of aesthesis, which she defines as the creative assimilation of the other and an active reactivity, and an argument in favor of a non-normative ethics capable of resolving some of the most glaring ambivalences of biopolitics. (shrink)