Synopses & Reviews
The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity.
The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage-which is anything but uniform-begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer.
The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.
Review
Categories of the Impolitical is an impressive attempt to think about politics beyond sovereignty and against political theology. Through clear and sophisticated readings of crucial yet often neglected political thinkers of the twentieth century like Weil, Bataille, Voegelin, and Broch, this book prepares the groundwork for Esposito s continuing exploration of the possibility of community outside of representation and of politics without transcendence. An indispensable work for anyone interested in Italian theory. --Miguel Vatter, University of New South Wales
"The limbic Esposito is laid bare by his translator. This luculent rendition of Categories of the Impolitical provides a fluent and accessible introduction to Esposito's most intriguing and challenging work. Here, finally, in incisive and poetic prose, in a properly humanistic and engaged tenor, Esposito's contropiano, his counterplan of the impolitical and non categorial is made available in partibus infidelium, which is to say, in the anglophone world."--Peter Goodrich, Cardozo School of Law
About the Author
Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books translated into English include Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics (Fordham); Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy; Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community; and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life.
Connal Parsley is a Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School University of Kent.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface to the Second Italian Edition 000
Acknowledgments 000
Translator's Note 000
Introduction: An Impolitical Departure 1
1. At the Limits of the Political 000
2. The Unrepresentable Polis 000
3. Power and Silence 000
4. A Politics of Ascesis 000
5. The Community of Death 000
Notes 000
Index 000