Openings: Biology And Philosophy In Esposito, Bichat And Hegel

This chapter begins with Esposito’s and Hegel’s discussions of the 19thc physiologist Bichat’s exposure of an aporia or double layer in life (animal vs organic), which both leads to the binaries upholding the “person” and makes us think beyond them. Bichat’s discovery catalyses new thought around the folding of disciplines—biology, sociopolitics, philosophy-- onto each other. The books comprising Esposito’s biological trilogy (Bios, Immunitas, Third Person) all move to the consummation of biopolitics in Nazi thanatopolitics, escaping this fatal history only through multiple contemporary thinkers whose status as “theorists” makes these lines of flight utopian and hypothetical. The chapter reads Esposito’s discussion of Bichat alongside Hegel’s strikingly similar discussion in sections of the Encyclopedia (on “organics,” anthropology and psychology). This “eccentric” reading (Esposito’s word in _Two) discloses how Hegel, whom Esposito often absorbs into the fatal history of political theology, can be seen via Esposito as sensitive to an interbelonging of knowledge and life rather than an immunization of spirit against life. Conversely, reading Esposito’s work alongside German Idealism releases it from its instrumentalisation as simply a critique of biopolitics, and lets us ask whether it can be seen more speculatively and broadly as “biophilosophy.”