This article examines the place of phenomenology within Esposito’s thought on the impolitical. In order to do this, this piece firstly expounds the task of Deconstructionism within the framework of Esposito’s general thoughts about the community. Secondly, it shows the meaning and the relevance that the categories of subject and substance have for the metaphysical tradition of political philosophy. Finally, the article delves into the author’s reading of Arendt’s phenomenology when it comes to the concept of origin. The main purpose (...) of this article is to show the ways in which the impolitical becomes a thought of the community which bears within itself the denial of the political as the effort of a metaphysical subject to make the origin visible as a phenomenon. (shrink)

El presente trabajo reflexiona sobre el pensamiento de la comunidad en Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito. Ambos interrogan lo común desde una perspectiva impolítica que intenta deconstruir los presupuestos de la metafísica y de la filosofía política tradicionales para poder elaborar una conceptualidad afirmativa en clave ontológica. En estos autores predomina el recurso a la figura de la comunidad, situada luego en el horizonte de la biopolítica, ya que la vida deviene el centro hacia el cual apuntarían los dispositivos de (...) poder y las formas de subjetivación política actuales. El trabajo plantea como interrogante si estos abordajes ontológicos logran dar cuenta plenamente de lo común en términos políticos o sólo éticos. (shrink)

What relationship is there between violence and language?* What happens when language is the main target of attack? We should perhaps begin by defining the inner logic of violence, and then tackle the question of the monstrous hybrid it has created with language. In one of the texts that make up the collection entitled Difficile Liberte’, Lévinas remarks that violent action is an ‘action where one acts as if one were the only actor: as if the rest of the universe (...) existed only to receive the action; thus every action is violent that we suffer without wholeheartedly collaborating in it’. So violence has two characteristics. On the one hand, it is fed by a fundamental illusion, that is, a fiction of the will that imagines it is so super-powerful and autonomous that it thinks that by itself it can decide the fate of ‘the rest of the universe’. On the other hand, it is never an authentic action, because it prevents others from owning it and becoming co-actors themselves. Thinking perhaps of Spinoza, Lévinas suggests that violence comes into being from the moment when individuals decide to stop being part of the ordinary world of actions and think, ‘like an empire within an empire’, they are the unique cause of their acts and gestures. This subjective decision is clearly a control decision that contradicts the requirement of common sense, which is to be understood here as a sense of the community. It leads inexorably to consigning others to the world of effects in order more easily to turn them into eternal victims. In Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Mishkin perfectly embodies the figure of the other who continually ‘receives’ the action. But when interplay between the will and its own mirrors becomes excessive, individuals always end up confusing the reality of the world with the exaggerated trust they put in their own prejudices. Since the analyses of the psychiatrist Minkowski at least, we know quite well that the more the certainty naturally accompanying the prejudice increases and expands until it borders on madness, the more violence is likely to grow. (shrink)

Employing insights from Italian sexual difference theory on law and rights, this article examines how both the text of the Italian Abortion Law of 1978 and its operation reveal the contradictions within liberal rights discourse on reproductive freedom. The Act itself contains traces of both Roman Catholic and liberal pluralist worldviews and has, since its introduction, been the site of conflict over competing notions of citizenship and legal identity. This article explores the impact of the Act's paradoxical nature on its (...) operation against the background of the complex debates within the different strands of feminist theory in Italy over the question of reproductive freedom. (shrink)

The present contribution tackle the question of which kind of philosophy is apt to thinking contemporary Europe. In order to thematize this problem, the philosophy of Roberto Esposito is analyzed in detail. The central idea of the paper is that contemporary politics cannot be founded upon classical metaphysical instances, such as God, a teleological structur, or some other moral good. The foundation of contemporary politics must rely in politics itself. Esposito’s philosophy of the “impolitico” can help us in thiking this. (...) Following his path, we claim that Europe is to be conceived as a political structure that has its origin in its own “outside”: Europe must take responsibility for its constitute lack of identity, for its own fragility. In this fragility and in the community of death lies the potential for an immanent foundation of European politics. (shrink)

El último libro de Roberto Esposito establece un recorrido por la fi losofía italiana a la que entiende como un pensamiento viviente, en el doble sentido de ser un pensamiento hoy más vivo que nunca y en el de tener a la vida, irreductible a su dimensión meramente biológica, como su referente privilegiado. Este texto implica una continuidad importante al interior del pensamiento del autor tanto a nivel problemático, como de estilo y de método. Por un lado, entronca con su (...) preocupación por la posibilidad de pensar la biopolítica afi rmativa, “comunitaria”, y la interrogación sobre la relación entre vida, política e historia, que es el hilo que teje a lo largo de una serie heterogénea de autores, y que los conecta con su propia producción desde, al menos, Communitas. Por otro lado, la continuidad se exhibe en una lectura que muestra siempre en qué medida las categorías pueden darse vuelta sobre sí mismas y que privilegia al pensamiento realista de lo político, como ya es costumbre del autor al menos desde Categorie dell’ impolítico. (shrink)