Third Person And Fourth Person: Esposito And Blanchot

Abstract

In several books, Roberto Esposito draws heavily on Maurice Blanchot’s work to develop the notion of a “third person,” a figure of impersonality or neutrality that would escape the binary of personhood/depersonalization that structures the law and philosophical concepts of selfhood. Blanchot often viewed impersonality or the neutral as a feature of literary characters in limit-extreme or “last human” situations. I provide a close reading of passages from Blanchot’s The Last Man (1957) to reflect on what happens at the limit-experience of characterization itself. However, these literary examples from Blanchot do not translate evidently into guidelines for an everyday liveable “third” or impersonal personhood that Esposito estimates would follow from an “affirmative biopolitics.” Instead, I discuss what might be instances of “fourth personhood,” where personification is extended to objects or used in situations where the limits of personhood are not clear. These cases of “fourth” personhood point towards a more ecological sense of how personifications can be distributed across landscapes, taking up Esposito’s challenge to imagine a future sense of person and politics that is not subordinated to the logic of a controlling biopolitics.