Repositioning Simone Weil And Roberto Esposito: Life, The Impersonal And The Renunciant Obligation Of The Good

This chapter explores what is not deployed by Roberto Esposito in his thinking about Simone Weil, namely, the possibility of the good and how it comes to challenge Esposito’s own immunitary paradigm through an act of personal renunciation. The chapter argues that if we accept Weil’s notion of personal renunciation, we have before us the possibility of the arising of an embodied individual who can initiate both resistance and transformation of self, others and world. Though Weil advocates an individually and freely willed renunciation of the individual self for the Good, Esposito’s use of Deleuze uncovers the idea of a life, an impersonal life, that calls us to save it, despite the unique individuation of its form. A dialogue between Weil and Esposito brings forward two coeval ethical possibilities: a renunciant, individuated self and a virtual but collectivisable life that absorbs or even displaces the self, both of which call for ethical responses and obligation to human misery and suffering.