What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for (...) developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. -/- Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research. (shrink)

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a (...) barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie. (shrink)

This article suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, and Jürgen Habermas, among others, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, as this article argues, because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability (...) and centrality of the human being, these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not merely circumscribed to sovereignty’s juridico-political dimension, but that it also includes a peculiar commitment to God’s decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism, the article draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida to propose an alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy. (shrink)

This essay provides a genealogy of corporate personhood as it exists currently in US law and places moral personhood in a similar genealogical context. This treatment demonstrates that the two are inextricably intertwined in both conception and institutionalized practices. We would do well to dismantle both; meanwhile, however, corporate personhood's implicit illiberal notion of collective mentality and responsibility may suggest possibilities for establishing collective counterforces to oppose activities of transnational for-profit corporations and mitigate their devastating political, economic, and environmental effects (...) upon actual people and the ecosystems upon which we depend. (shrink)

In the perhaps most decisive reopening of philosophy in the twentieth century, Heidegger presented an existential analytic. This can be viewed as the highly complex analysis of one simple action: being-there. In the paper at hand, a Spinozist interpretation of this action is proposed. This implies a shift in the Aristotelian conceptuality, which, to a large extent, informs Heidegger’s analysis. The action of being-there is not a movement from potentiality to actuality. It is a force of existence. However, this force (...) is located right at the threshold between potentiality and actuality. Accordingly, it is not a matter of dismissing Aristotle’s concepts, but—with Heidegger—to observe carefully their deconstruction and pursue it to the point where these concepts become indistinct and where—beyond Heidegger—a Spinozian force of existence emerges. (shrink)

Setting out from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article engages with post-Heideggerian thought on community, seeking to bring out and to enhance its political thrust for contemporary democracies. It shows how Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, ‘common the political’, that is, how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-existence which clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. It then responds to a series of pertinent objections by further politicizing the post-Heideggerian (...) vision of the common. I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden, as they draw from conflicting understandings of ‘the political’, pitting plurality and horizontal relations against division and uneven power. To mitigate that conflict, these two approaches should be situated at different sites of political action, and the hegemonic framework should be recast so as to bring it more into line with horizontalist ‘common’ politics. (shrink)

Recent theories of community aim to think the term beyond its definition as the ownership of shared identity, language, culture or territory. For Esposito, to reduce community to a property whose possession distinguishes members from non-members undermines the commonality the term implies. The common opposes what is proper or one’s own; it belongs to everyone and anyone. Rather than securing identity and belonging, community, defined by its impropriety, disrupts them so that we are in common. While his work successfully illustrates (...) the incompatibility of the common and the proper, it leaves unanswered the question of how communities come to experience their impropriety. Through a comparison with Rancière’s improper community, we can identify and gesture beyond this limit. Its members intervene in proper communities by exercising the right to decide on common matters despite officially having no right to do so. Their actions, by demonstrating the openness of the common to anyone and everyone, turn its privatisation into a shared wrong that connects community with non-community. By supplementing Esposito’s work with Rancière’s, we see how communities relate to what they have deemed improper in a way that both challenges and revitalises their sense of commonality. (shrink)

Zusammenfasung: In diesem Artikel fokussiere ich auf die Kluft zwischen dem Begriff des „Menschen“, der den Menschenrechten zugrunde liegt, und dem Konzept der universellen Rechtspersönlichkeit, das ich im Hinblick auf die mediterranen Flüchtlingsbewegungen untersuche. In Anlehnung an Arendts berühmtes Diktum vom „Recht, Rechte zu haben“ analysiere ich die Spannung zwischen den souveränen Rechten von Staaten und den Rechtsansprüchen von Migrant*innen, was wiederum auf das hinweist, was ich als „Grenzen der Menschenrechte“ bezeichne: Sie beziehen sich auf die Begrenztheit der Menschenrechte angesichts (...) der staatlichen Souveränität und sind in der Grenzkontrollpolitik der einzelnen Staaten und ihrer Grenzbehörden verkörpert. Wie ich unter Bezugnahme auf den Fall Hirsi vorschlage, sollte die Rechtspersönlichkeit von Migrant*innen jenseits territorialer Grenzen gedacht werden, während staatliche Funktionen, wie die Kontrolle der Staatsgrenzen, im Lichte der Menschenrechtsnormen überdacht werden müssen. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to relate Roberto Esposito’s reflections on Europe to his more recent proposal of instituent thought. I will try to do so by focusing on three theoretical cornerstones of Esposito’s thought: the first concerns the evidence of a link between Europe, philosophy and politics. The second is deconstructive: it highlights the inadequacy of the answers of the most important contemporary ontological-political paradigms to the European crisis, as well as the impossibility of interpreting this crisis through (...) theoretical-political categories such as sovereignty. The third relates more directly to the proposal of a new political ontology, which Esposito defines as instituent thought. Esposito’s discussion of political theology is the central theoretical nucleus of this study. This discussion will focus, in particular, on the category of negation, from which any political ontology that is based on pure affirmativeness or absolute negation is criticized. In his opinion, philosophical theories developed on the basis of these assumptions have proved to be incomplete or ineffective in relation to the current European and global philosophical and political crisis. Esposito therefore perceives the urgent need to propose a line of thought that is neither negatively destituent, nor affirmatively constituent, but instituent, capable of thinking about order through conflict. Provided that we do not think of the institution statically–in a conservative sense–but dynamically, as constant instituting in which conflict can become an instrument of a politics increasingly inspired by justice. (shrink)

In this essay I explore competing senses and tensions of the relation between the etymology of ta pragmata and praxis, with specific attention paid to Heidegger’s theorization of modernity. In so doing I question the relation between rights and persons, and whether there might not be a new way of thinking about rights that does not presuppose or privilege the agency of personhood. Pragmatic rights would not assume the liberal values of self-determination that underpin personhood, and would enable a notion (...) of rights beyond liberal humanism more appropriate for twenty-first century political concerns and problems. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and (...) ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights that Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being (...) and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory. (shrink)

Straipsnyje analizuojamas žmogaus teisių paradoksas, atskleistas Hannah’os Arendt, Jacques’o Rancière’o ir Giorgio Agambeno darbuose. Žmogaus teisių konceptas veikia kaip biopolitinis aparatas, įdiegiantis žmogaus kaip gyvos būtybės ir žmogaus kaip politinio subjekto perskyrą. Ši gyvūniškumo ir žmogiškumo perskyra, atrandama pačiame žmoguje, rezonuoja su žmogiškumo ir gyvūniškumo klausimu filosofijoje. Klasikinė filosofija – nuo Aristotelio iki Heideggerio imtinai – postuluoja žmogaus ir gyvūno skirtingumą, o Agambenas ir Derrida teigia, kad žmogaus gyvūniškumas ir gyvūno humanizavimas yra tik dvi tos pačios problemos pusės. Toks klausimo (...) performulavimas leidžia pereiti prie Roberto Esposito filosofijos, kurioje teigiamas visų gyvų būtybių lygiavertiškumas bei pačios gyvybės imanentiškumas. Priešingai nei negatyvioji biopolitika, kuri siekė pajungti gyvybę normai ir įstatymui, Esposito nori sukurti teigiančiąją biopolitiką, kurioje norma laikoma imanentiška taisykle, leidžiančia gyvybei siekti maksimalios išraiškos. Nors atrodytų, jog tokia teorija turi mažai ką bendra su politiškumo konceptualizavimu, Esposito teigia, jog būtent ribos tarp zoē ir bios, tarp nuogos gyvybės ir politinės egzistencijos, panaikinimas ne tik nesumažina galimybių veikti politinėje plotmėje, bet, atvirkščiai, yra bet kokio bendro buvimo sąlyga. (shrink)