Roberto Esposito’s ‘Affirmative Biopolitics’ and the Gift

What is it about?

This essay cultivates the affirmative biopolitical potential that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas (2010 [1998]), Immunitas (2011 [2002]), and Bíos (2008 [2004]). In this series Esposito performs a genealogy of the relationship between the obligations that attend membership in a community (communitas) and those practices that immunize individuals from those obligations (immunitas), and argues that modernity is characterized by a particularly dangerous form of this relationship, the “immunization paradigm.” The “thanatopolitical declension” of this paradigm resulted in Nazism, and Esposito attempts to sketch an alternative biopolitical course “that is of, not over, life.” I suggest that the key to this affirmative biopolitical potential lies in the relationship between Esposito’s concept of the munus, a particular form of gift which is the common root of communitas and immunitas, and the discourse that developed throughout the twentieth century around the contested concept of “the gift.” In the first of four sections, I use an earlier essay of Esposito’s, “Donner la technique” (1995), to position his munus-based conception of communitas in relation to Mauss’ The Gift (1990 [1923-4], as well as the “gift exchange” tradition it inspired. In the second section I turn to immunitas, and examine Esposito’s interpretation of Hobbes’s social contract theory as the antithesis of the gift, and the foundation of the immunization paradigm. The third section covers Esposito’s guarded interpretation of Bataille’s attempt to move beyond Mauss and the gift through a recovery of the sacred, and the problematic ideal of sacrifice. Esposito warily suggests that Bataille’s dangerous stance toward sacrifice gestures towards a positive form of biopolitical community, and I try to cultivate this possibility in the conclusion by examining another important theoretical source for Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy. I concentrate on Nancy’s essay, L’intrus, in which he reflects on living nearly a decade as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. I expand upon the brief interpretation of L’intrus Esposito offers in Immunitas, and bring my discussion of Mauss, Hobbes, and Bataille to bear on Nancy’s experience, further illuminating the positive biopolitical potential Esposito fosters in his work.

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