Roberto Esposito

Taking up current scholarship’s emphasis on Roberto Esposito as a thinker of biopolitics, this collection repositions his thought by addressing those parts of his corpus that cannot be homogenised under the term “biopolitics.” Discussing his earliest as well as most recent work, essays consider his wide-ranging engagement with early modern philosophy, Italian thought, philosophy of biology, politics, ethics, language, the impolitical, and the impersonal, as well as significant dialogues with contemporary theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot. Several essays focus on how Esposito’s biological turn in Immunitas (2002) coincides with an increasing interdisciplinarity and self-consciousness about methodology. A new essay by Esposito himself reveals the importance of philosophical sources and ideas that condition his thinking, especially beyond the dominant biopolitical interpretative framework that has come to mark his reception in the English-speaking world