“Enough of a Self”: Esposito’s Impersonal Biopolitics

In one of the most startling moments of her seminal reading of the then emerging field of biopolitics, Donna Haraway asks a question, perhaps the central question of the entire essay: “When is a self enough of a self that its boundaries become central to entire institutionalized discourses in medicine, war, and business? . . . Immunity and invulnerability are intersecting concepts.” ¹ That Haraway raises the question rhetorically doesn’t diminish in the slightest its import. When is the self “enough of a self” to engender and/or strengthen the discourses of war and business (medicine has long since become a business)? When, in other words, do the boundaries of the self, thought in relation to the other, become the very boundaries of war? Her answer, offered in a sort of parataxis, will be found in the lexical crossing of immunity and invulnerability: the self is enough of a self for war when it is immune and invulnerable to the other.

Haraway responded to this “enough of a self” with the cyborg, an institital entity capable of tolerating the highest levels of contamination from and by the other. This is not the place to register the fortunes of the term since Haraway wrote, but what cannot be doubted is that the cyborg went the way of postmodernism generally. Rarely do we speak today of the cyborg but the self is still with us. Indeed we might say that today what we find everywhere is an intensification of the self, much more than “enough of a self,” a self that continues to reinforce institutionalized discourses in ways just as destructive if not more so than those earlier forms from twenty years ago.

One of the signal contributions of Roberto Esposito’s essay, “The dispositif of the Person,” collected in this volume of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, is to provide us with the name of this self so profoundly enmeshed in contemporary forms of power. It is the person, the personal, or if we prefer, with a gesture to Haraway, the personal self. ² In the place of the self (and cyborg) the boundaries of the person have become central to discourses of war and business (the business of war and war as business). One need only look at the way cybernetic interactions take place across the internet – a technology that grew up we should note in response to the precise thanatopolitical threat of nuclear war – to see that it is the person and not the cyborg who has friends, who twitters, and who manages identities and with them boundaries. The Invisible Committee’s recent broadside against contemporary forms of technology registers precisely the rise of the networked person across the ruins of the cyborg: “Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions … Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity.” ³

What is it about the person that makes it so deeply complicit with contemporary forms of power? What is it about the category of the person that accounts for its heightened role in policing the milieu of war and business, in what today is called biopower? And what might our response be when faced with such complicity? In the following pages, I want to tackle some of these questions by reading closely Esposito’s deconstruction of the “dispositif of the person” for some of our answers will be found there. That Esposito provides the foundation for such a response to Haraway’s insights isn’t surprising. His perspective on biopolitics elaborated across the trilogy of Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, and Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy in no small way reads as an answer to Haraway’s question. ⁴ For Esposito the self is enough of a self when in the modern period immunization begins to be extended to nearly every facet of political and social life. On Esposito’s read, however, it is only in the twentieth century that immunization begins to intensify to such a degree that political life itself, bíos, comes under dramatic pressure. In this moment of intense immunitarian crisis the dispositif of the person looms as the locus not only of the self but of modern immunization. ⁵

Obviously, the relation of one dispositif, immunization, to another, the person merits our attention. Yet in the following pages I want to take up the larger relation of the dispositif of the person to contemporary thanatopolitics by reading Esposito’s perspective on the person with an eye towards elaborating a critique of neo-liberalism. That Esposito has repeatedly resisted collapsing neo-liberalism into thanatopolitics in no way should preclude us from attempting to think through such a possibility; we might say that such an undertaking is warranted precisely because of Esposito’s hesitation (and we might well ask what about the perspective of the personal causes such hesitation). In the conclusion I will fill in some of the blanks concerning Esposito’s perspective on the impersonal, especially how it might counteract the thanatopolitics that inheres in neo-liberalism today.

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The term dispositif continues to dominate contemporary discussions of biopolitics. Hardt and Negri in their recent Commonwealth continue to employ dispositif as a methodological tool. ⁶ So too Giorgio Agamben who in a recent essay asks the same question Gilles Deleuze asked twenty years ago: what exactly is an apparatus [dispositif]? ⁷ Something clearly about the term makes it central for contemporary thought. Esposito is little different. He too repeatedly employs dispositif as a lexical and semantic tool, especially regarding immunization. However, Esposito, unlike Agamben and Hardt and Negri, doesn’t offer anything like a methodology of the dispositif in his essay or anywhere else. Rather his perspective only becomes visible when we see that both the category of person and dispositif are intimately associated with a politics over life. This initially occurs thanks to Esposito’s distinction between subject and person. The reasons for Esposito’s change of emphasis from subject to person are many, ⁸ but primarily they concern his attempts at constructing an affirmative biopolitics through a philosophy of the impersonal and not of the subject (presumably because nothing like an “im-subject” is readily at hand for thought today, but also because in classical models of the subject, to be a subject means to be subjugated to the sovereign). ⁹ As Esposito notes, the notion of person occupies a much more important place in current biopolitical debates than does the subject, in areas ranging from euthanasia to abortion to the mapping of the genome. We might also add that the term subject remains wedded to a limited view of politics as always already inscribed in a “sovereign biopolitics” to borrow Agamben’s formulation. ¹⁰ Accordingly, the use value of the subject for creating a different model of biopolitical reflection is small, while person and its impolitical form, the impersonal, might offer a larger arena for thought to come to grips with what is most pressing today – thinking life beyond the biopolitical distinction between bíos and zoē, which is mimicked in the distance between subject and desubject. ¹¹ In other words, choosing to focus on person rather than subject (or indeed the self) looks forward to Esposito’s elaboration of an affirmative biopolitics that moves through the impersonal.

The inflection of self away from subject towards the person depends largely upon a subtly anachronistic reading of both Roman jurisprudence as well as the deconstruction of Agamben’s oikonomia through a reading of the notion of Trinity as person in Christian theology. ¹² Although space doesn’t allow more than a brief synthesis of Agamben’s thinking on this score, for the purposes of highlighting Esposito’s differences with Agamben, two points are crucial. The first concerns Agamben’s insistence on linking the dispositif to oikonomia, or what he calls a “theological genealogy of economy.” ¹³ Of crucial importance for Agamben will be the Trinity, or “the threefold nature of the divine figure (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit)” and how the Church Fathers successfully argued that the Trinity functioned as a form of God’s oikonomia, or administration of the household, an administration performed by Christ. Thus Agamben writes in What is an Apparatus?: “oikonomia therefore became a specialized term signifying in particular the incarnation of the Son, together with the economy of redemption and salvation … oikonomia became thereafter an apparatus [dispositif] through which the Trinitarian dogma and the idea of the providential governance of the world were introduced into the Christian faith.” ¹⁴ Most important for Agamben’s reading of dispositif will his superimposition of oikonomia, incarnation, and apparatus [dispositif]. Indeed as Agamben notes in the opening pages of Il regno e la gloria the relation between oikonomia and dispositif is quite close given that “dispensatio is, with dispositif, the Latin translation of oikonomia.” ¹⁵ Thus at the heart of Agamben’s understanding of contemporary political life is the decisive dispositif of oikonomia.

The second point to be made is how such a superimposition of dispositif and oikonomia for Agamben creates an economic, biopolitical, and juridical space in which subjects are desubjectified.

What defines the apparatuses that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that they no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification … But what we are now witnessing is that processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seems to become reciprocally indifferent, and so that they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, spectral form. ¹⁶

In this extended spectrality of the subject we face “the triumph of the oikonomia, that is to say, of a pure activity of government that aims at nothing other than its own replication.” ¹⁷ Government for Agamben is what emerges when desubjects and not subjects are produced by dispositifs, by a network of dispositifs that Agamben names oikonomia.

With this context of dispositif in mind, let’s turn to two passages from Esposito’s essay. The first appears in those sections in which Esposito distances himself from Agamben’s understanding of dispositif as a mode of separation. After noting how the Christian idea of person is encapsulated in Augustine’s dictum that “each individual man, who is called the image of God … is one person [secundum solam mentem imago Dei dicitur, una persona est],” Esposito turns to the dispositif’s duplicitous features:

Already here, and in a formulation unparalleled for its dogmatic clarity, the Christian idea of person adheres to a unity that consists not only of a duplicity, but such as to subordinate one of the elements to another to the point at which it expels the other from the relation with God.

He continues:

But distance from God also means the weakening or the degradation of that humanity that only takes on its proper and ultimate truth thanks to a relation to the Creator. For this reason the need in mankind to provide for his bodily needs can be defined by Augustine as a “disease.” ¹⁸

There is much to say about this passage – the eloquence with which Esposito grafts a Heideggerean division of eigentlich [proper] and uneigentlich [improper] onto his interpretation of Augustine, as well as the distance he will take up from it through the impersonal. ¹⁹ For now let’s limit ourselves to how Esposito reads the dispositif of the person in relation to the thanatopolitical. It’s worthwhile in this regard to recall the entire passage that immediately precedes the one Esposito includes here. Augustine writes:

For man, as the ancients defined him, is a rational mortal animal. These things, therefore, are the chief things in man, but are not man themselves … But if, again, we were so to define man as to say, Man is a rational substance consisting of man and body, then without doubt, man has a soul that is not body, and a body that is not soul. And hence these three things are not man, but belong to man, or are in man. ²⁰

What Esposito latches onto in his account of the dispositif of the person is the implicit difference between what belongs to man, that is those elements that will characterize him, namely rational substance, body, and soul, and what is properly of man. The dispositif of the person for Esposito isn’t merely a mode of separation of man from what properly belongs to him, but is the mode of their conjoining as well. To the degree that the three elements of man (rational substance, body, and soul) mirror the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the Trinity will then name the totality of God and by extension the category of person that subsumes man. Esposito’s critique of Agamben is clear enough. For Agamben the notion of the Trinity serves to allow Tertullian and Ippolito to say that “God … is certainly one; but as for his oikonomia, that is about the mode with which he administers his house, his life and the world that he created, he is instead threefold.” ²¹ Left unanalyzed, however, in Agamben’s narration of oikonomia is the function of the dispositif of person. Rather than separating being and action, or “ontology and praxis” in God as Agamben argues the Trinity does, the dispositif of person according to Esposito separates in man those things that together make up his person in distinction from man proper. ²² On Esposito’s read the emergence of the dispositif of the person runs concurrently with that of the Trinity and with it oikonomia. What appears here then is a first layer in a genealogy of the personal, a mode by which man is separated and joined with features that are not properly his.

Esposito’s insight merits careful attention, especially in the relation he will then set out among subjectification, objectification, and person. By noting how subject and object were until Leibniz indistinguishable from one another, Esposito will in turn make homologous the process whereby one is subjected to the process of being made an object. The ultimate importance of the dispositif of the person that separates and joins what belongs to man is situated there:

Person is precisely that which, dividing a living being into two natures of different qualities – the one subjected to the mastery of the other – creates subjectivity through a procedure of subjugation [assoggettamento] and objectification. Person is that which renders a part of a body subjected to another to the degree in which it makes of the second the subject of the first. ²³ To be a person is to be so divided as to make possible the subjugation of one part to another. For Esposito, the process of subjugation (and thus of constructing the subject) cannot be thought apart from how the dispositif of the person arranges the two halves of man such that one half is sovereign over the other. Yet the passage from Augustine suggests something else. Not only does an indistinction arise between subject and object thanks to the operation of the dispositif (with the result that to be subjected by the dispositif of person also means to be objectified), but a superimposition of objectification with the body also occurs. If we push Esposito’s argument, to be a person means quite literally to have one’s nature so divided as to make one half the object of the first.

It is at this juncture, with one half subjugated to another, that Esposito posits a fissure in the ontology of person such that the animal emerges as simultaneously within and outside the person:

Man is a person if and only if he masters the more properly animal part of his nature. He is also animal but only so as to be able to subject himself to that part which has received as a gift the charisma of person. Of course not everyone has this tendency or disposition to de-animalize. The degree of humanity present in all will derive from the greater or lesser intensity of de-animalization and so too the underlying difference between he who enjoys the full title of person and he who can enjoy it only if certain conditions have previously been met. ²⁴

The dispositif of the person thus entails a shifting line between de-animalization and personalization. Indeed the humanity of the living being in question will depend largely upon the gift of charisma and the degree to which charisma allows for such a process of personalization, indeed mass personalization to take place. ²⁵ The less one’s nature is disposed by charisma towards animalization, the more one enjoys the title of person and hence the more human one is; the more humanity one enjoys. In other words, only those who have sufficiently been personalized, which is to say those who have successfully subjugated the animal, are considered to be fully human. What Esposito has unearthed is a layer between the human and the animal that before either went unremarked or was subsumed into the larger category of subjectification. The dispositif of the person is the hinge on which an individual’s humanity relies.

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A number of questions arise but none more pressing than the way we will want to speak about this hinge that the dispositif operates since an opening appears there for employing Esposito’s critique more forcefully against neo-liberalism. For Esposito a principal way of thinking the dispositif of the person will be to link it to grace. ²⁶ Kharisma as we know originates in the Greek to name the “gift of grace” and is of course an integral part of an early Christian lexicon (though not only if we recall Benveniste’s gloss of grace and gratitude in Greek antiquity). ²⁷ In the modern period, the secular form of Kharisma also plays a central role in Max Weber’s analysis of different forms of modern leadership. Thus Weber will define charisma as “a certain quality of individual personality because s/he is set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as divine in origin.” ²⁸

It is Weber’s reading that shares the most with Esposito’s perspective. Both see charisma as a fundamental biopolitical operator, one that separates ordinary people from extraordinary individuals. But where Weber distinguishes charisma as what marks the extraordinary “personality,” Esposito will transfer the personal difference separating “ordinary people” from “extraordinary individuals” onto the individual in question. ²⁹ It is this shift of grace towards the individual and the subjugation that grace performs over the other half that signals where a critique of neo-liberalism might be elaborated. Consider briefly for instance the question of where secularized forms of grace today are found in liberal democracies and the answer increasingly will be thought with the ultimate awarder of grace, namely the market. With more time it would certainly be profitable to read Foucault’s critique of neo-liberalism in this key, especially the degree to which his critique of ordo-liberalism in German and neo-liberalism in the United States after World War Two depend upon the workings of the dispositif of the person that allow individuals to see (and sell) their own bodies as possible reserves of “human capital,” that is as persons able to mine and harvest their animal halves thanks to the grace portioned out by the market. The first layer of thanatopolitics in contemporary biopower will be found in the separation that the dispositif enacts over man and in particular in separating what properly and improperly belongs to him as a person thanks to neo-liberalism’s appropriation of grace.

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Yet Esposito’s reading of the category of person moves well beyond an early Christian archaeology to include an earlier moment in the development of the dispositif of the person, namely Roman jurisprudence. A more pronounced relation between the intensification of personhood and contemporary neo-liberalism becomes visible here. Without being able to enter into all of the details of Esposito’s re-reading of Roman law and its anachronistic presence in our own contemporary period, what stands out in these pages is the sheer mobility of the dispositif of the person; its capacity to construct thresholds not just between subject and de-subjectified subject, but among a host of human beings who move (and are moved) from one register of person to another. The result is the creation of spaces of personal indistinction among individuals. The reference to Agamben is explicit enough, but what sets Esposito’s discussion apart is how the dispositif of person, in superimposing the human being and thing, sutures subject and object together. The figure of the slave appears decisively as one of the outputs of the dispositif of the person. The slave in Roman antiquity occupies a middle status between person and thing such that the slave can be defined as a living thing and as a reified person. ³⁰ The status of the slave as thing allows Esposito to radicalize the nature of person as involving the creation of new slaves as a way of guaranteeing the personhood of others in Roman antiquity. Esposito writes:

Here then is the perpetual oscillation between the extremes of the person and the thing that makes one its opposite and the background of the other – not only in the general sense that the definition of man-person emerges negatively from that of man-thing, but in that more pregnant sense that to be fully a person means to maintain or push other living individuals to the border with the thing. ³¹

Esposito introduces two figures from antiquity, manumissio and mancipatio, to name the continual back and forth movement of personalization and depersonalization. Yet what counts is the place awarded “thing” in both. To be a person in Roman antiquity, other persons had to be pushed across the threshold of the person to become less a person; or those who were already non-persons, slaves, had to stay that way.

At this juncture Esposito begins to put some distance between the Roman dispositif of the person and its function in twentieth-century thanatopolitics – there will be no easy overlaying of Roman antiquity, Nazi thanatopolitics and liberalism (Esposito remains mum on the question of neo-liberal governance preferring to speak generally of negative biopolitics or biopower). Nowhere for instance will Esposito argue that the Nazis turned millions of persons into non-persons who could then be killed. Although he doesn’t offer more than a few words on this score, we can well imagine why. Such a leveling would not only collapse Roman law into a form of thanatopolitics avant la lettre in ways akin to Agamben’s most recent reading of the dispositif, but would also fail to register Nazism’s fundamentally biocratic features that Esposito will associate with immunization in Bíos. Instead, Esposito asks another question: how are we to think twenty-first century thanatopolitics across the different thresholds of the person? For Esposito, thanatopolitics will not consist in the attempt to turn persons into things (or people into populations, pace Foucault and Agamben, or even into animals), but rather in the attempt to fuse the person and thing, to make them coextensive in a living being. This thing for Esposito is understood to be the body, the biological material that is both person and thing, the person as biological thing. ³² In Nazi thanatopolitics, bodies belonged to the Führer, who could do with them what he wanted. ³³ Today the biological thing that lives belongs to the person as his or her property to be disposed of as he or she sees fit. Thus Esposito sees the dispositif of the person as today marking “the predominance over the object,” one established “by the movement of its incorporation.” This mode of domination through incorporation marks the signal feature of the dispositif of the person for contemporary biopower. ³⁴

In another work concurrent with the essay on the dispositif, Esposito offers more details on the relation between thanatopolitics and liberalism in the dispositif of the person. In Terza Persona, Esposito is unwilling again to collapse them together into a broad conception of the thanatopolitical. After noting a certain symmetry of their cultural, ethical, and political dimensions, he will go on to say that both Nazism and liberalism share “a productivist conception of life,” which in the case of Nazism was “made functional to the superior destinies of the elected race and in the other to the maximum expansion of individual liberty.” ³⁵ Liberalism and Nazism in this addendum avail themselves of the suturing possibilities offered by the dispositif of the person but for different ends. What cannot be in doubt is that they both utilize the same dispositif. In the case of liberalism, the separation that the dispositif of the person institutes between person and what belongs improperly to the body is what allows an individual to incorporate the body as living object in order to donate organs for instance, or to oversee and manage the body as human capital; all in the name of an expansion of individual liberty premised on the possibility of administering forms of thingness on the living being that prosthetically connects to a proper, personal identity. Nazism will do it in the name of managing the biological health of the collective body politic by administering death. ³⁶ For Esposito contemporary liberalism’s dispositif of the person represents a powerful mode by which an individual harvests his or her own biopower through a process of potentializing his or her second nature; to use the body as a biological material (or living thing) in a reverse zero sum game; through a split between natures brought on by the dispositif itself that is itself productive. That is exactly the sense with which Esposito speaks of a “liberatory function,” here though in the service of an expansion of individual biopower.

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As I suggested earlier, I want to take up the possibilities offered by Esposito’s reading of personhood for a broader critique of neo-liberalism. To what extent does the thanatopolitics of neo-liberalism reside in the thingification that occurs under cover of massive personalization? Some dispatches from a variety of neo-liberal fronts may help shed some light. João Biehl for instance pithily describes personhood under neo-liberalism this way: “You shall be a person there where the market needs you.” ³⁷ Biehl will go on to note that being a person not only involves making a person stronger, faster, and more intelligent, but also entails the reverse through the biomedical power of pharmaceuticals: a person can essentially put his or her body – his or her animality – on hold and thus can for a time become a person. Thus Biehl writes regarding those suffering from AIDS in Brazil: “They know they are trapped between two destinies: dying of AIDS like the poor and marginal, that is animalized, and the possibility of living pharmacologically into a future, thereby letting the animal sleep and preventing it from consuming the flesh.” ³⁸ This latter possibility of sleepwalking through a precarious future suggests that personhood today is often made or unmade in an instant, creating regimes of persons, semi-persons, and non-persons. Here medicine obviously plays a crucial role for the ability to medicalize larger populations will depend upon the ability of governments and businesses to have created conditions in which it becomes easier for the individual to be personalized. Medicalization in turn will lay out in front of each individual the possibilities for future personhood in ways that give the lie to the truth of the market. The dissemination of antidepressants for instance creates and requires a massive personalization of individuals as a number of recent essays have shown. ³⁹ Increasingly, it is thanks to personalization that one’s own individual biopower can be tapped under contemporary neo-liberal regimes.

Or consider other changes in the notion of personhood that go hand-in-hand today with the greater circulation of goods and people (of people as goods), in particular that of genetic material. ⁴⁰ This is the horizon in which Aihwa Ong speaks of Singapore’s recent and successful attempts at creating laboratories dealing in genetic material and a new kind of “biosociality” that requires “the domestic populations to turn against its own deeply held beliefs … and to yield up genetic tissues for transreligious commingling.” ⁴¹ The result in the case of Singapore (though not only) is that under cover of greater circulation authorized by the market, a resort to a sort of sovereignty inscribed in political authoritarianism is more likely since one of the tasks required is precisely to provide coordinates for who (and what) qualifies for future personhood. One result perhaps is the devolution of community as a political and spatial category into mere territory, but not in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialization, but rather literally a territory in which terror is the order of the day. ⁴² Here we find neo-liberalism exploiting the conceptual and structural weakness of person to its own ends, awarding personhood through medicalization or by accelerating the circulation of genetic tissues to facilitate the creation and production of future persons (and with it the copresence of those who will be considered less of a person). ⁴³ Other dispatches could be offered in support of such a reading and what they point to is an intensification of the dispositif of the person across larger sections of populations given the possibilities the dispositif of the person offers for biopower. In such a setting the human being is increasingly configured as becoming a person and that the thingification of the body taking place today occurs under cover of personalization.

Other questions arise here but none more important than whether the incorporation of the object, the body, by the subject which the dispositif makes possible is always on the road to the thanatopolitical. In some sense it would seem so given the dependence of the dispositif of person in what Victor Turner in an earlier moment of critical anthropology called the liminal persona: the semi-person, the non-person, and the former person. ⁴⁴ In these mobile thresholds of personhood, it isn’t simply that individuals move across these thresholds on their own as neo-liberalism would have it, but rather that many are pushed to do so by the demands of the market, in a form of deadliness that Warren Montag calls “necroeconomics.” ⁴⁵ The thanatopolitics of liberalism that Montag describes intensifies to such an extent thanks to the extension of the dispositif of the person across communication and information technologies today as well as biotechnologies. To the degree that the human is slotted into personhood it appears that death or something like thanatos continues to be present.

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If the dispositif of the person is inscribed in a power over life then where might we look for a counter-dispositif able to counteract it? In Esposito’s essay as well as in his most recent work Terza Persona, he sketches the outlines of such a possibility in the impersonal. Space doesn’t allow me to do much more than outline the features of his perspective and how we might employ the impersonal as a response to neo-liberalism’s increasing use of the dispositif of the person. Esposito’s implicit suggestion is that if the assorted forms of the personal is the problem, then it might be fruitful to think through the advantages afforded by impersonality. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze as well as Simone Weil’s reflections on the impersonal, Esposito argues that to the degree the impersonal does not depend upon gift of grace in order for one part to be tamed to another – there is no mastery over life in such a formulation – then the self, which is always a personal self for Esposito, no longer experiences any internal division or external expropriation. In its place will be the truly undivided individual whose ability to “see” things impersonally makes it less available for the web of relations running between the personal and the thanatopolitical. Esposito doesn’t offer many details but the suggestion appears to be of a one-on-one relation between dispositif (person) and counter-dispositif (impersonal). Much of the efficacy of the impersonal will depend upon the ability of the individual to elaborate impersonal perspectives on precisely those occasions and interactions in which a sense of a personal self undertakes measures of self-protection, of a defense of a personal perspective. The question is how (and where) can institutions so embedded in contemporary thanatopolitics locate an accomplice if the person is not where he or she was assumed to be. Where the person is not available, a supporting structure, perhaps the supporting structure for thanatopolitics, will be less available as well. An accompanying effect would be a weakening of the various thresholds of personhood premised on the division between human and animal, organic and inorganic and hence a weakening of biopower.

What are the roads that lead to an impersonal perspective? Esposito has little to say on the matter. Perhaps some of the difficulty will be found in the impersonal depending upon a personal choice to emerge. Presumably too an impersonal perspective will depend on renouncing the gift of grace, which in turn might require some kind of political and self-impoverishment at odds with a number of radical traditions. There are less nervous ways for approaching the impersonal. William Connolly for instance introduces the metaphor of slackening in a context of disciplinary control. ⁴⁶ A slackening of the personal towards the impersonal would in effect move the individual away from the bordered self that traffics so easily with thanatopolitics. This is where Esposito’s critique of a politics over life through the personal resides – not only in the impersonal’s capacity to forsake borders, but to forego any complicity with the grace that neo-liberalism offers. Nietzsche’s perspective on perspective is apropos in this regard:

A point of view: in all valuations there is a definite purpose: the preservation of an individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a belief, or a culture. – Thanks to the fact that people forget that all valuing has a purpose, one and the same man may swarm with a host of contradictory valuations, and therefore with a host of contradictory impulses. This is the expression of disease in man as opposed to the health of animals, in which all the instincts answer certain definite purposes. This creature full of contradictions, however, has in his being a grand method of acquiring knowledge: he feels the pros and cons, he elevates himself to Justice – that is to say, to the ascertaining of principles beyond the valuations of good and evil. The wisest man would thus be gifted with mental antennae wherewith he could understand all kinds of men, and with it he would have his great moments, when all the chords of his being would ring in splendid unison … A sort of planetary movement.” ⁴⁷

A Nietzschean perspective on the impersonal is premised on the recognition of swarming perspectival evaluations and then a failure to identify with them. It is this slackening of identification with the perspective that one begins “to know” impersonally. Esposito offers something similar to what Nietzsche has in mind; a harmony borne out of the knowledge of the cost in illness caused by the personal self to the individual rich in contradictions. In the move from swarming to contradiction, an impersonal knowledge occurs precisely in “feeling” and not defending the registers of for and against, which is to say that the impersonal perspective holds these contradictions together beyond any personal perspective whatsoever. In the division between human and animal on which the dispositif of person is premised through the workings of grace, what is not to be done away with is the reference to the animal as homologous to the “contradictory creature.” In different words, a valuation beyond good and evil evades a series of borders the personal self inevitably calls forth: a commonality, a race, a church for Nietzsche, institutions of war and business for Haraway, and power over life for Esposito. In the move towards an impersonal perspective, justice is reached when one no longer erects borders but grows “feelers” instead for all kinds of life. Foregoing the distinction between animal and man one feels and hence knows different perspectives.

Donna Haraway proposes something similar in “The Cyborg Manifesto,” when she speaks of “embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in connection with others, in communication with all our parts.” ⁴⁸ Esposito’s impersonal perspective aims at much the same: the continuous construction and dismantling of boundaries in daily life that depend upon a perspective that recognizes its own perspectival antimony, or as Haraway will describe it, the situated feature of all knowledge. Because the boundaries of the personal coincide with the thanatopolitical, attempts are constantly needed to remember the perspectival nature of all knowledge and hence the borders the personal perspective often shares with the thanatopolitical. If the personal is the political, then the impersonal is the affirmative biopolitical, a way of weakening the superimposition of boundaries enacted in the name of the personal self.

The natural question that follows concerns the efficacy of the impersonal given the sheer power of neo-liberalism to appropriate the dispositif of the person for its own ends. Here I think we ought to take Nietzsche at his word in the passage cited above when he links understanding of all kinds of men to “a planetary movement.” We come up against the limits of our own understanding of the possibilities afforded by the impersonal for responding to a neo-liberal thanatopolitics when we fail to register the power afforded by an impersonal perspective on a planetary scale. With that said, the power of the impersonal surely depends upon its ability to penetrate to the core relation at the heart of thanatopolitics, namely self-preservation and defense of borders, what Freud saw as homologous to making identical the bad, the alien, and the external which together spell an “instinct for destruction.” ⁴⁹ The personal self appears as a much intense form of such a self (or ego in Freud’s formulation) to the degree that self-preservation is experienced more intensely and more broadly than in previous iterations of the self given precisely neo-liberalism’s appropriation of the self under cover of the person. The impersonal isn’t simply the negation of the personal, but rather an affirmation of the possibility of hybridity and copresence to the degree it favors and enables copresence. In other words, the impersonal short-circuits self-defenses by bringing the outside in.

Where finally does that leave us regarding thanatopolitics? To the degree the impersonal foregoes the instinct for destruction by blocking an identification with the self’s normalized borders, the impersonal can be seen as working against thanatos by leading to a non-fractured notion of bios not riven by zoe. This is not to say as some today do in their refusal of biopolitics as paradigm, that the division between bios and zoe must somehow be pushed back into the box, Pandora’s or any other. Rather, once we recognize that neo-liberalism not only depends upon but continues to deepen the division between bios and zoe, we cannot simply hope to turn back the clock to a time of non-biopolitics. No. Biopolitics demands that we adopt the division; that we adopt the negative so as to move towards a future biopolitics, which for Esposito will be affirmative to the degree we adopt an impersonal perspective. The impersonal offers the possibility of de-sundering the biopolitical division between bios and zoe. With no division in life or among lives, no structure for expropriation will be found.