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

Abstract

This essay is dedicated to exploring a number of consequences of Roberto Esposito’s “The Dispositif of the Person” for contemporary critiques of neo-liberalism. After an initial discussion of the significance of the term, dispositif (apparatus), for contemporary thought, especially in Giorgio Agamben’s recent work, Esposito’s articulation of person as apparatus is discussed in the context of Christian and Roman understandings of personhood. The role of grace comes in for careful scrutiny, especially for how it functions in Esposito’s argument as the mode by which thanatopolitics operates. According to Esposito, the “gift” of grace allows the subject to dominate his or her animal half and so will be awarded the adjective personal. Such a reading of person as dispositif has enormous consequences for critiques of neo-liberalism. When seen in tandem with Max Weber’s and Simone Weil’s perspectives on grace, it increasingly appears that the market today awards grace to those populations that it will count as persons, while at the same time refusing to make such a gift to many others. A number of dispatches from the front-lines of neo-liberalism follow to show how profoundly complicit personhood is in contemporary biopower. In the final pages the essay moves towards a fuller discussion of Esposito’s philosophy of the impersonal to provide more details on how the impersonal might act as a countermeasure to the thanatopolitics of contemporary neo-liberalism. Associating Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics of the impersonal with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of perspectivism, the essay concludes with some considerations of the affirmative potential of the impersonal as a “planetary movement” in Nietzsche’s words; as a previously ignored mode for resisting contemporary biopower operating under neo-liberal cover.