Beyond the Person: Roberto Esposito and the Body as ‘Common Good’

The Living Body as ‘Impersonal’

In Persons and Things, the notion of ‘common’ intended as ‘impersonal’ is proposed once more from a different perspective, mainly focused on the concept of the ‘living body’. According to Esposito, the subjectivism of the Western metaphysical tradition, its flattening onto the proprium, finds a privileged way of expression in the treatment that this speculative tradition reserves for the notions of ‘person’, ‘thing’, and ‘body’. The third term is generally included in the sphere of the second: the body, intended as a mere material support, is, indeed, similar to a thing since it can always be acquired by a person, which is equated with the rational sphere. The latter, through a set of instruments ranging from philosophical to legal devices, can own its body as well as other persons who, similar to that, are like mere things, since they are incapable of self-determination.

Thus, Esposito believes that the impersonal, the limit of the owned, the depersonalization of the person, should be searched for in a notion of the body intended as a ‘living body’. Biotechnologies, through the development of techniques such as transplants, are what most open this dimension of trans-individuality in the living flesh of the individual and allow a shifting of the concept of body from property of the person to common good.

The reference to biotechnologies inevitably takes us to a set of issues, from assisted insemination to stem cells and euthanasia, that put life, intended as bios, at the centre not only of philosophical and scientific thought but also of political choices. Hence, to consider the body as a ‘living body’ means to refer not only to the reflections contained in Communitas, but also to the ideas developed by Esposito in Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008 [2004]). This text, significantly, completes a trilogy formed by Communitas and Immunitas (2011 [2002]), marking once again the close bond between the topic of life and the dialectics between own and common. In Bios, Esposito highlights the need to overturn the model of biopolitics, which is always prone to change, into thanatopolitics, a politics devoted to the extermination of forms of life considered inferior, as in the case of the Nazis. Esposito views such a model as a sort of extension of the immunity paradigm that the philosopher had already analysed in Immunitas. It is at work every time the body is conceived of in political terms and, symmetrically, the political community configures itself as a ‘body’, as an organic whole that excludes infected cells. To defend one’s body, intended as a political body, means to immunize oneself from the community, intended as a debt, a lack. Therefore, overturning the notion of biopolitics implies shifting from a biopolitics on life to a biopolitics of life. This opens the community to its outside, rather than closing it into its protective-immunity dimension.

Hence, Persons and Things can be included in this process of de-privatization of the subject (and of the community intended as a collective subject) that takes place, also and most of all, through a reconfiguration of the body and life, now intended in their common and public dimension. But the overcoming of the proprium can take place, only and primarily, by deconstructing the philosophical-legal figure into which such a notion has merged: that of the ‘person’. For this reason, although there are many references to almost all of the most significant notions of his philosophy, Persons and Things is in direct continuity in particular with the thoughts Esposito presented in Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (2012 [2007]) and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (2015 [2013]). In the first of these two books, Esposito identified in the notion of ‘person’ the main device through which the Western tradition, from ancient Greece to Christianity and modern philosophy, has created mechanisms of dominion and exclusion based on the superiority of the rational sphere over that of the merely physical. The person, identified with the soul, with the Cartesian res cogitans, has always had the function of an instrument capable of downgrading the body, the material element of the human being, to the level of a mere thing.

In Two, the same issues are developed through the formal analogy between the notions of political theology and person. For Esposito, the theological-political paradigm is based precisely on the reductio ad unum of the multiple. Starting from a binary logic, theological-political thought achieves unity by excluding one of its parts: this happens, for instance, when the Western world claims to possess universal values and the power to subordinate and exclude those who are hostile to such values or do not accept them in full. This is a topic wholly reminiscent of the criticisms made by one of the main theological-political thinkers, Carl Schmitt, against the supposed universalism of those who define their particular point of view as universal. As Esposito observes, in this way rational thought becomes the property of one of the parts and a vector for concurrent exclusion and separation. For the Italian philosopher, the notion of person follows precisely the same logic: not only does it cut the individual in two, dividing it into a higher sphere (thought) and a lower sphere (matter, the body), but it also establishes thought as a property of the individual. This is especially evident starting with Descartes’s philosophy.

Therefore, both in Third Person and in Two, Esposito’s attempt consists in looking for a way to escape the philosophical and metaphysical tradition in which these models prevail. He identifies this escape route in the notion of the impersonal, albeit with some slight differences between the two works. In Third Person, he mainly searches for the impersonal in an element other than thought – in the unconscious, the non-person that is a part of the person and challenges his/her certainty of subject-substance. In Two, instead of abandoning thought, Esposito looks for ‘another thought’, a notion that identifies in thought not a personal, private property but rather an impersonal, common one. He dates this notion back to the tradition of Aristotle’s Arab exegesis by Averroes, later continued by authors such as Bruno, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze. In any case, what his invitations to abandon the person paradigm in Third Person and Two have in common is their reference to the term “impersonal”. This overturns the mechanisms of exclusion working through the person device, in its terminology but also in its very notion. As we said, the impersonal is strictly connected with the notions of the public and the common, just as the person is related to the notions of the private and property. Hence, Persons and Things represents a development of the notion of the impersonal, this time in regard to the issue of the body.

Deconstructing the Things–Persons Dichotomy

The title of Persons and Things actually includes only two of the three terms along which Esposito’s interpretive path unfolds. His book is an attempt to prove that only a re-semantization of the term body enables us to overcome the separation between persons and things that is typical of Western metaphysics and of its speculative development. This separation is based, as we have seen in the author's previous works, on the domination of the spiritual element over the material one, which implies a supremacy of the former over the latter.

The text is divided accordingly into three chapters, each dedicated to one of the notions that form the plot of the book: persons, things, bodies. As already mentioned, the first two would seem to form a thesis and an antithesis: this, at least, is the position assigned to them by our civilisation, by setting them one against the other from the start. The third, that of bodies, does not join the dyad in order to perform a synthesis but in a thoroughly dialectic fashion questions the elements that constitute such a dichotomy, thus taking on the function of the uncanny.

The first context in the history of Western civilization in which Esposito identifies the progressive drift towards the dichotomous person–thing model is Roman law. In Gaius’ Institutiones there was already a tri-partition between actions, things and persons. The relation between these categories, which is central to the legal formulations of Roman law, has to do with the notion of property. Esposito points out that in the Roman legal system

it is not the legal title that makes someone the owner of a good, but its effective ownership. Vindicatio in rem, laying a claim to a thing, consisted in saying res mea est (the thing is mine), not ius mihi est (it is my right), reflecting the fact that the relationship between the possessor and the thing possessed was an absolute relationship that did not pass via other subjects. Although there were various categories of possession – through purchase, inheritance, and donation – its archetype remained the seizing of a res nullius, a thing belonging to no one. (Esposito, 2015: 25–6)

In short, Roman law is mainly an asset-oriented law, where the ownership of a patrimonium implies also the possession of those who, lacking in wealth, must rely on the patres. Hence, the owner of things also takes hold of persons who are legally non-independent, that is, not sui iuris but alieni iuris, and, as such, are closer to the thing category than to the person category.

In Roman law it was not only slaves who lacked legal independence but also, for instance, insolvent debtors: in fact creditors could even deny a debtor a proper burial, by refusing to return his body to the family; in lieu of the money owed, the debtor's body became the creditor's property, just like a thing. Moreover, Roman law categorized the individual as a person not because of the concreteness of his/her existence, but only in relation to his/her legal status. As pointed out by Esposito (2015: 30), in that system ‘A person was not what one is, but what one has’, in continuation of that asset-based notion that we have just examined. But, obviously, something that a person has can also be lost. This is what happened with the institution of the capitis diminutio, a mutilation of one’s rights that could range from the loss of some liberties to the loss of citizenship. The consequence was a substantial weakening of one’s status as a person, which was strictly linked, as we have seen, to the possession of rights.

Turning to Christianity, here too it is clear how the person is cut into two parts: one, the spiritual part, remains the property of the individual, while the other, the bodily part, is subordinate. We find such dualism in the majority of Christian authors, including the most important ones: not only Augustine, who sets the primacy of the soul over the body, but also Thomas, who believes that reason exercises complete ‘dominion over [a person's] own actions’. Obviously, the Christian reference remains that of a transcendental, divine, supersensory sphere, which the soul, according to the lesson imparted by Plato in Phaedo, resembles much more than the body. The latter, on the contrary, represents its negation, a weakening of the being, which we must get rid of.

This transcendent reference disappeared completely in modern philosophy, and with the scientific spirit that followed it. However, the division in two of the person did not change; rather, it was organized within the relation of the individual within himself. This is what Locke says in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he establishes a connection between the person and his/her ability of self-identification and recognition, made possible by memory. The importance given to the principle of attribution for Locke also means taking responsibility for one’s actions. Here, Esposito points out, the relation between the soul and the body is no longer at stake, but this does not remove the division of the person into two parts: to formulate a judgement on oneself means to split into a judging part and a part that is the subject of such a judgement (as highlighted by the verb kategorein, which can be translated as to attribute but also to impute). To be a ‘moral agent’, meaning an individual able to prove to oneself and to others that one is responsible for one's actions, implies avoiding fragmentation and maintaining a unified subjectivity, here too through a mechanism of dividing into parts. This structure is made even clearer by Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals, where he maintains that ‘only the self that thinks and intuits is the person, whereas the self of the object that is intuited by me is, like other objects outside me, the thing [Sache]’ (Kant, 2002: 362). The reduction of the person (or of a part of the person) to a thing, in Kant’s work, is not only relevant to the relation of the individual with itself, but also to that of individuals between each other. Esposito points out how the Metaphysics of Morals describes a legal structure of a ‘proprietary’ type that is not far from that of Roman law. This happens especially when Kant talks about the ius realiter personale, which consists in the right ‘of possession of an external object as a thing and use of it as a person’ (Kant, 1996: 61). For Kant, personhood is defined especially by the ability to ‘appropriate’ other persons as if they were things, as a boss does to his/her workers or a husband to his wife, thus reproducing the distinction between persons who are sui iuris and those who are alieni iuris.

In Kant, however, the revival of the Roman characterization of the notion of person is offset by the universalization of the same notion in the sphere of ethics. The same cannot be said of neoliberal bioethics, where, as Esposito points out, only individuals who benefit from the qualification of person and who enjoy good physical and psychic health are capable of self-determination. In the works of authors like Hugo Engelhardt and Peter Singer, babies, mentally retarded people, senile people, and so on, cannot be considered moral agents, and thus persons. But, Esposito remarks,

from here, the idea of ‘true’ persons having control over the not-yet or no-longer persons follows as a consequence. Since they cannot support themselves, and do not even have full consciousness of their state, they need someone who decides for them – not only about the conditions of their subsistence, but also regarding the opportuneness of keeping them alive or nudging them to death. We already do this for fetuses. (Esposito, 2015: 53–4)

So, if a part of the individual person as well as some persons compared to others are reduced to the rank of mere things, which can always be seized and manipulated, this process in some way mirrors a parallel one that, in the Western speculative tradition, led to the depletion and de-realization of the thing itself. Already in Plato the thing was conceived as an imperfect copy of the idea. Although Aristotle places the eidos inside the thing and not in a superior sphere detached from it, he presents its partition as immanent, dividing it between a substance that is always the same (the substrate or hypokeimenon) and a shape that changes from time to time. The effect of depletion and de-realization of the thing, this exposure of the emptiness that runs through it, is even clearer in the fields of language and law. As for the law, it tends to overcome the concreteness of particular relations and turn them into general rules. In Roman law in particular, the res is never legally considered from the point of view of its concreteness or actual reality but only referred to with regard to relations between persons that they tend to establish. As we have seen, in Roman law the thing is determined mostly in relation to its appropriability, and being able to seize a thing is also what differentiates some persons from others. Therefore, in commenting on this model, Esposito talks of a ‘functional status’ of things that ‘empties them of any content’ (2015: 69).

This depletion of content is similar to what happens to language. In fact, starting from humanism, the linguistic sign was progressively distanced from the thing to become only its abstract representation. The natural correspondence between words and things described in Genesis was totally lost, and language was built as a complete self-referential system of signs. This process is well summarized by Hegel in philosophical terms. In the Phenomenology, he describes the impossibility for the word to seize the thing in its concreteness, and the necessity for the former to refer to the latter only through the medium of universal categories and notions.

Once again, the de-realization of things finds a privileged space of expression in philosophical reflection over commodities and capitalism. Already in Marx, the distinction between use value and exchange value implies that, in the latter, the commodity appears, like money, only in the form of its general equivalence. Moreover, as we know, when Marx talks of ‘commodity fetishism’ he refers to characteristics, apparently intrinsic to the object, that veil the reality of the relations between the people required to produce them. As things acquire ‘personal’ characteristics, in Marx’s thought, people are reduced to things, to labour exchanged on the market, according to an abstract calculation, in a further expression of the general equivalence mechanism. In the work of Jean Baudrillard, this mechanism is analysed in relation to how reality vanishes in the universe of circulating sign values. Going back to Marx’s distinction between use value and exchange value, Baudrillard extends the subject of the sign’s equivalence, stressing how, through modern communication technologies, there is a continuous reproduction and repetition of reality, which leads the latter to coincide with the virtual reality. Paradoxically, an extreme realism, that of hyper-reality, is overturned into its opposite, and the universe of signs becomes a self-referential system, devoid of references to anything existing outside its simulation mechanism.

Therefore, the de-realization of the thing, similar to the splitting in two of the person, is also the reflection of a subjectivistic paradigm of the ‘proprietary’ type. Just as a person ‘owns’ him/herself by exercising the dominion of his/her rational part over his/her bodily parts, the same dominion can be exercised on the thing, in this case intended as a depleted entity, an element that is ‘at hand', at the disposal of an individual who aims to grasp it in order to assert him/herself in his/her subjectivity. On this point Esposito is in line with another famous exponent of Italian theory, Remo Bodei, who, in his book The Life of Things (2015 [2009]), sought out the potential symbolic, ‘living’ meanings of things. As underlined by Bodei, even from an etymological point of view, the term ‘thing’ is significantly different from the term ‘object’. The latter, in its various roots (the Greek problema, the Latin objectum, the German Gegenstand), identifies what is before the subject as an obstacle, an element whose resistance must be overcome.

On the contrary, the term ‘thing’ finds its roots in the Greek pragma, in the Latin res, and in the German Sache; it is also the contraction of the other Latin term, causa, which identifies a subject that we care for, value, and for which we are prepared to fight. Bodei thus believes that it is necessary to retrieve the original meaning of the term ‘thing’, preventing it from drifting into the realm of lifeless objects. To do so, we must give back to things the many symbolic values (tied to our memory, our affection, and so on) that they have the capacity to bear, while giving up the subjectivistic, ultra-rational, and ‘proprietary’ approach that views them as mere instruments, apt for satisfying the subject's desire for appropriation.

In Esposito’s perspective, the body can allow us to achieve this purpose: it is the third term, able to demolish the binary opposition of the things–persons dichotomy. At the same time it restores to both categories a relation with life that is totally lacking in the metaphysical tradition, which is invested in keeping them separate.

Biotechnologies and the Transindividual

Why just the body? First of all, because of its projection with respect to both things and persons: to equate the body to the mere thing is totally counterintuitive, but at the same time it is difficult to make it coincide in toto with the sphere of the person. Precisely because of these difficulties, notwithstanding some exceptions (especially habeus corpus), the Western legal tradition tends to exclude the body from its codes, since it is based on the dichotomous opposition between things and persons in which the body cannot fit.

Mostly thanks to the development of biotechnologies, however, there has been a double movement in both the philosophical and legal domains: scientists are developing techniques that are bringing about a conceptual shift in the notion of body, from a good owned by the rational individual to a common good that cannot be appropriated in any way. Accordingly, also, the law is forced, if not to overturn, at least to update its paradigms, by including what was excluded before.

The clearest example is that of transplants: thanks to the development of this practice, it has become impossible to refer to the body in the previously examined subjectivistic and ‘proprietary’ terms. When an organ is transplanted from one subject to another, it is a piece of the body that becomes at the same time a common good, serving to improve the health conditions of the recipient and hence totally outside the perimeter of the one's ‘ownership'. Even the law, as we said, has had to adjust to the conceptual redefinition caused by biotechnologies: from the laws that govern blood transfusions, to those on the removal of organs from human corpses for transplant purposes, to the definition given of the human genome by the UNO’s General Meeting as the ‘common heritage of mankind’. The list of rules that, albeit at different levels, return to the body a full legal status is long. This is a legal status that requires the shifting of the body towards what Roman law considered the res communes, directly connected to the res sacrae, based on the characteristic that they cannot be seized by anybody. For Esposito, this means that even the notion of sacredness of the body, far from being lost, is reconfigured within the scope of its public dimension, as stated by Simone Weil: in La personne et le sacré, she connected the notion of the sacred to that of the impersonal.

Nevertheless, the reference to biotechnologies also requires a redefinition of the bond between man and technique that leads, with the same movement, to the deconstruction of both the metaphysical notion of person and that of thing. In both cases, Esposito believes that it is necessary to overcome a humanistic-like model that, through the umpteenth binary opposition, separates technique from nature. From the person’s point of view, the reunion between nature and technique can be found in anthropogenetics, the set of procedures that allows us to modify our genetic make-up, thus configuring the human being as a technical object (and project). But this technical approach is in direct continuity with a concept nature that sees man as the animal able to continuously change his essence and ‘reprogramme’ himself, based on the unlimited potential that he can develop. Esposito attributes this line of thought in particular to Nietzsche and to the notion of the will to power, which, among other things, also refers to humankind's ability to change itself and its environment.

From the thing’s perspective, instead, the reunion between nature and technique can be found in the technical objects that, through computer science and new technologies in general, contain human intelligence. They fill these objects with what Esposito calls ‘social effectiveness’, that is, the ‘intelligence needed to solve the problems that have periodically loomed on the human horizon’ (2015: 133). Revisiting the theories of Gilbert Simondon, Esposito highlights how this social operability refers also to the body, meaning the ‘bodily signs that are deposited in [the technical objects] in the act of their invention’ (2015: 134). Through the transfer from one subject to another, these objects create a ‘transindividual social chain’ that can be associated with the one that Mauss found in gift economies. This social chain was based on the symbolic and ‘living’ character of the thing, which modern technologies can now recover.

It is not by chance that in Simondon the transindividual perspective contains both the individual and the collective dimension. Indeed, for the French philosopher, transindividuality is first of all an internal relation of the individual, and corresponds to his/her relational orientation. Transindividual also means pre-individual and potential: since the subject is lacking a definite essence, what comes before identification is potentiality, a virtuality that is reintroduced in terms of an ego that is ‘out of itself’ and essentially incomplete once the identification has taken place. Such incompleteness is strictly related, as pointed out by Agamben in his interpretation of Simondon’s theories, to the notion of ‘impersonal power’, namely a force that comes from outside the subject and goes beyond its actualizations. Indeed, Agamben connects this external power, as a form of impersonality, to the potentiality and virtuality of an undetermined subject, and calls it a form of ‘desubjectivation’ that opens the individual to relation.

So, as we can see, the transindividual is related to both the ‘objective’ social chain, that of technical objects and of their transfer from one subject to another, and to the ‘subjective’ one connected to the forms of life and to the potentiality that opens them to relation. The two chains can be connected between them only through the medium of the body: the body too, if intended as a living body, ceases to be a mere thing, whose essence is already defined by its inertia, and becomes rather a form of life defined by its openness and potentiality, which always goes beyond the specific actualizations. Just like a technical object, the body is always open to its mutation and, accordingly, allows a humanism of essences to be overcome in favour of an anthropotechnics of ‘virtualities’, which becomes functional to the creation and maintenance of a symbolic horizon given by the circulation of both technical objects and bodies (and of bodies like technical objects). This symbolic horizon of exchange is essential to the creation and maintenance of the communitas.

Esposito's theoretical program, therefore, is to carry on with this examination of the notion of the body as a public thing and a common good, through its interaction with the technical instruments that make it such. The merit of this proposal is that it enters into many debates, ranging from a purely philosophical milieu to the legal sphere, to bioethics, and even to politics. It is a proposal, for instance, that can shed light on the endless disputes about artificial insemination techniques. These controversies are not only tied to the relation between scientific progress and its possible limitations from a moral point of view, but also to the de-personalization of the body that Esposito discusses. To mention a recent case, the United Kingdom has approved a law that allows babies to be born with the genetic make-up of three parents, by replacing damaged mitochondrial DNA cells with those of a healthy donor. This is a provision that has sparked fierce disputes but that, in its substance, confirms the trend to frame a redefinition of the notion of the body in legal terms as a common good that originates from biotechnologies.

Thus, there’s no doubt that Esposito’s proposal has the merit of giving philosophical depth to forms of scientific progress that are not supported in the name of an absolute positivism, deaf to arguments coming from the moral sphere. In this way, the interaction between cognitive and moral topics that Jürgen Habermas, for instance, considered essential to making modernity a finally completed project, is achieved. For Habermas, in fact, the separation of fields like science, arts and morals, operative during the Enlightenment in the function of the liberation of the cognitive potential of each, had to serve the purpose of their ensuing interaction. In this way, science, for example, could not simply lead to dominion over nature but also to moral progress, just as ethics should not ignore the cognitive elements provided by science.

The debate on the ‘three-parent babies’ law has revealed how the philosophical-moral sphere tends, at times, to abandon cognitive elements, thus approaching a view of the theological type, kin to the theological-political paradigm whose metaphysical and subjectivistic risks have been revealed many times by Esposito. If we analyse the positions of those who claim to be against that law, we find not only cognitive-moral arguments (‘the improvement of the child’s health conditions could cause damage to the coming generations, since we do not know the inter-generational effects of those genetic modifications’), but also some issues that are essentially moral (‘to modify the DNA means playing God, doing something unnatural’). In reality, such objections exclude the cognitive elements, whatever they may be. If we decide to apply Esposito’s suggestions on the transindividuality of the body to a case like this, the arguments in favour of the cognitive type (‘healthy children, rather than potentially sick children, will come to life’) can combine with philosophical-moral considerations that view science not as a dogma opposing the religious one, but as a medium to promote forms of solidarity and encourage the success of a public, genuinely communitarian paradigm.

As a further example, we could mention the fact that a medical team has recently performed the first transplant in Italy of an organ coming from a ‘Samaritan’ donor, that is, a transplant in which the donor makes his/her organ available to an unknown beneficiary. It is clear that this is a solution that not only brings advantages from the perspective of people’s health, it also joins the common notion of the body with the notion of gift, made even more significant by the fact that the donor and beneficiary do not know each other. The whole process takes place along a path that follows exactly the one taken by Esposito who, in Communitas, identified the notion of community with that of munus, a term that includes the meanings of duty, debt and gift. This speculative journey is brought to completion through the identification of the community and the gift with the body. As reported in the preface to Persons and Things, it also reflects the changes occurring in our philosophical and legal vocabulary, in line with Esposito's intention to make thought and life, theoretical speculation and analysis of the present, interact – which has always been the focus of his work.