Roberto Esposito Third Person: Politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal (Translated
by Zakiya Hanafi) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, 177 pages.
At the
outset of Third Person Roberto
Esposito forcefully asserts that the category of person occupies an almost
unassailable position in contemporary discourse. From analytic to continental
philosophies and Catholic to secular schools of thought the idea of the person
holds sway as the definitive category of meaning. Esposito holds that the
category of personhood, allegedly the qualification
capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, is in fact guilty
of creating the separation between the voluntary rational part and the purely
biological part of human life. Against
the performative power of the person Esposito pursues a philosophical inquiry
into the impersonal, as a category which can release us from the “exclusionary
mechanism” of personhood into the originary unity of living being.
Esposito
draws on the language of philosophy, bioethics, and law to make his case. Bioethics seems to hinge on defining when a
living being becomes a person or what kind of living can be considered a
person. Yet whether the definition is slated to begin at conception or birth or
somewhere in between, it is the entrance into personhood that secures its
unquestionable value. The centrality of the person cuts across what Esposito
calls the Catholic and secular schools of thought as well:
If a
tacit point of tangency exists between the seemingly opposing conceptions of
the Christian sacredness of life and the secular notion of its quality, it
resides precisely in this assumed superiority of the personal over the
impersonal: only a life that can provide the credentials of personhood can be
considered sacred or qualitatively significant. (2)
Turning to the lexicon of law Esposito points to the belief that
personhood has the conceptual, and subsequently practical, function of bridging
the gap between the concept of human being and that of citizen. The contemporary
discourse on human rights, he argues, is conceivable and viable only through
the language of personhood. In legal discourse too “the category of person
appears to be the only one that can unite human beings and citizens, body and
soul, law and life.” (4)
But all is not as it seems. Growing
numbers of deaths from hunger, war, and epidemics stand as a testament against
the effectiveness of “human rights.” How to respond to this divergence between
principle and practice? One answer is that the concept of the person has simply
not been fully affirmed, and has not taken “root at the heart of interhuman
relations.” Esposito offers us a rather different perspective, wherein the
ancient Roman separation between persona and
homo remains firmly engrained in modern
philosophical, political and legal conceptions.
To be human is not necessarily to be a person, and vice versa. One need
only think of the status of corporations for a contemporary example of this
logic. A person is therefore an artificial entity, the result of abstract
categories which resulted in procedures of exclusion. Esposito argues that the
process whereby the experience of personhood is defined by reducing others to
the level of a thing is still very much at work today, and can be seen at work
in the rise of twentieth century biopolitics as well as the liberal tradition.
Drawing our attention to the work
of the 19th century physiologist Xavier Bichat, Esposito traces the
lineage of biopolitics through linguistics and anthropology. Esposito argues
that the mixing of new biological knowledge with politics and philosophy set in
motion a biopolitical current which, under the guises of the hierarchical
anthropology of the 1800s and later the racist anthropology of the early 1900s,
appeared to crush the person-human dualism into a single biological referent
with incredible and decisive violence.
This biological referent, articulated in terms of comparative zoology,
sought to judge types of human species on the basis of “how closely or
distantly they are related to animal species.” (7) The animal, held by Darwin
to represent the origin of species, thus became a point of division and a
mechanism of exclusion.
That the biopolitical currents produced a politics of exclusion and
destruction in the Nazi regime, dubbed “thanatopolitics” by Esposito, could be
read as an argument in favour of the personal.
Surely the performative space opened up by the separation of the person
from the body affords some protection against the crushing politics of death
which, after all, appeared to undo the distinction. Esposito, however, makes
the case that appearances once again deceive. While conflict between cultures
built around personhood and the ideological attempts to crush the person back
into pure biology certainly exists, there are continuities as well as ruptures
between the two perspectives.
Hearkening back to Roman law, Esposito points to the position of the
slave who is not considered a person, but instead occupies a place somewhere
between person and thing. More than this, the act of defining who is counted as
a person depends on the act of excluding what does not, as Esposito says,
-not only in the general sense that the
definition of the human-as-person emerges negatively out of that of the
human-as-thing, but in a more meaningful sense that to experience personhood
fully means to keep, or push, other living individuals to the edge of
thingness. (10)
On this reading it becomes clear that the “animal” of the emergent
biopolitics and later thanatopolitics of the late 1800 and early 1900s
functions precisely to define the lines between person and thing. The relationship between the two, Esposito is
careful to note, exists at different levels. Under liberalism it is the individual
(person) who is considered to own the body wherein it is implanted. Under
Nazism, by contrast, ownership of the body is assigned to state sovereignty.
What remains constant is the role of bodily life as a subordinate thing to the
higher aims of the person who owns it. Even when the goal of the person is the
maximization of individual freedom, as under liberalism, this freedom “comes by
way of potential reduction of the body to an appropriated thing.” (13) On
careful reading the bioethics developed as part of the liberal tradition
reveals the ancient Roman distinction between persona and homo; not all
human beings are persons and not all persons are human beings. “Hence” Esposito relates,
the resulting gradation –or degradation –from
full person to semi-person, non-person, and anti-person, represented
respectively by the adult, the infant or disabled adult, the incurably ill, and
the insane. Hence to each level of personalization – or depersonalization –
there corresponds a different right to determination, and even preservation of
one’s life. Here, too, in formulations that closely recall the sovereign power
of the paterfamilias over his
children and over anyone whose condition is a reified reproduction of that
state, the personhood-deciding machine marks the final difference between what
must live and what can legitimately be cast to death. (13)
Personhood, and the politico-legal machinery behind, thus threatens to
overwhelm contemporary discourse, but this is not the end of the story. Esposito
counsels the impersonal as a way to trace lines of resistance. The impersonal,
while lying outside the horizon of the person, remains related to the person;
this peculiar relationship allows the impersonal to function as an alteration
to the personal, calling it into question and overturning prevailing meanings. Esposito draws on the work of Simone Weil,
Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze among others to sketch
out the figures of the impersonal in twentieth-century philosophy.
Following Weil, Esposito establishes the third person as a figure of
justice. Opposed to the privative, exclusive character of both Roman and modern
law, the figure of the third person or the impersonal is a generalized term. As
such it renders possible the thinking of a “common right” a term which appears
nonsensical in the lexicon of privative law. The radical formulation here is
that it is not the personal, but the impersonal that constitutes the sacred.
Esposito traces this figure in
from the non-person Emile Benveniste’s linguistic studies, the animal in the
thought of Alexander Kojeve, the neuter in Blanchot’s writing, and the figure
of the outside in the work of Michel Foucault. All of these come to a mighty
crescendo in Deleuze’s “systematic destruction of the category of the person in
all its possible expressions.” (142). In situating the philosophical horizon
towards the impersonal event the category of the person becomes decentred, its
boundaries opened to investigation and reinterpretation. Couched in terms of our animality, what is at
stake here is the possibility of being human in ways not coextensive with the
person or thing, but rather as living
persons, that is, coextensive with life itself.
Third Person recasts the nebulous history of
biopolitics with insight and ingenuity. Weaving together the biological,
anthropological, linguistic and philosophic filaments of its genesis, Esposito
finds that both liberal traditions of personalism and the catastrophic
biopolitics of the twentieth-century share a common focus in the centrality of
personhood. Esposito goes as far as to suggest that the horrors of biopolitics,
which began as a naïve and unprejudiced science, are attributable to the cult
of the personal. The figure of the impersonal, then becomes the place of
refuge, or rather resistance. The book ends with a sort of invitation to meditate
upon the impersonal as a way of being open to the radically new. Whether or not
the impersonal is successful in unseating the hegemony of the personal, or
indeed whether it provides sufficient resources for the conception and practice
of politics, is still very much an open question. Regardless Third Person stands as an important reflection whose demanding
rigor and sparkling insight prove very much worthwhile.
