Terms of the Political ─ Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics presents a decade of thought about the origins and possibilities of political theory from one of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito. He has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics-from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal.

Taking on interlocutors from throughout the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil, Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon-"freedom," "democracy," "sovereignty," and "law"-that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, and death). Terms of the Political calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms-such as "community," "immunity," "biopolitics," and "the
impersonal"-in ways that affirm rather than negate life.

An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.

ROBERTO ESPOSITO teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books translated into English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy; Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community; and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life.

RHIANNON NOEL WELCH teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is completing a book on race and biopolitics in post-unification Italy titled Vital Subjects: Race, (Re)productivity and Italian Modernity.

Vanessa Lemm is Full Professor in Philosophy at the School of Humanities of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She is also full professor and recurrent visiting professor at the Institute of Humanities at the Diego Portales University in Santiago de Chile. Last year she taught as a DAAD guest professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She is the author of Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (Fordham, 2009).