Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal

All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life assuch whether philosophical, ethical, or political assumethe notion of personhood as their indispensable point of departure.This is all the more true today. In bioethics, for example, Catholic and secular thinkers may disagree on what constitutes aperson and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisiveimportance: human life is considered to be untouchable only whenbased on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment ofsubjective rights continues to be increasingly linked to thequalification of personhood, which appears to be the only onecapable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, rightand life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins ofWestern civilization.

The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is thatthe notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it isprecisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to createa separation in both the human race and the individual between arational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into theinferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to theperformative power of the person, whose dual origins can be tracedback to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues hisstrikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry byinviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the thirdperson, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of theperson, points toward the orginary unity of the living being.