Esposito For A Philosophy of The Impersonal PDF

For a Philosophy of the Impersonal
Author(s): Roberto Esposito and Timothy Campbell

Source: CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, New Paths in Political Philosophy
(fall 2010), pp. 121-134
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For a Philosophy
of the Impersonal
Roberto Esposito
Italian Institute for the Human Sciences
Translated by Timothy Campbell
1.
Never more than today is the notion of person the unavoidable reference
for all discourses that assert the value of human life as such, be they philo-
sophical, political, or juridical in nature. Leaving aside differences in ideol-
ogy as well as specifically staked-out theoretical positions, no one doubts
the relevance of the category of person or challenges it as the unexamined
and incontrovertible presupposition of every possible perspective. This tacit
convergence with regard to the category of person is especially obvious in a
hotly debated field like bioethics. Truth be told, the debate between Catho-
lics and secularists turns on the precise moment at which a living being
can be considered a person (for Catholics, at the moment of conception,
for secularists much later), but never on the decisive weight being awarded
this attribution of personhood: whether one becomes a person by divine
decree or naturally, awarding personhood still remains the threshold, the
decisive means by which a biological material lacking in meaning becomes
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 121-134, ISSN 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
• 121
122 • For a Philosophy of the Impersonal
something intangible. What is presupposed here, even before other criteria

and normative principles come into play, is the absolute ontological predom-
inance, which is to say the incommensurable value added to the personal
with respect to what it is not: only life that has passed through this symbolic
door can be sacred or qualitatively significant, and so provides the proper
personal credentials.
Turning to law, we find the same presupposition at work here, but now
reinforced by a more elaborate argumentative apparatus: to be able to assert
legitimately what we call subjective rights (at least in the modern juridical
conception of rights), one needs beforehand to have penetrated the enclosed
space of the person. Thus, to be a person means enjoying these rights in and
of themselves. This thesis, which appears most frequently in the recent work
of Stefano Rodotà (2006) and Luigi Ferrajoli (2001), is that the renewed value
awarded the category of person lies in the fact that only it is able to bridge
the difference that is established between the concept of human being and
that of citizen, one that is formed at the very inception of the Modern State.
This difference- as Hannah Arendt argued in the immediate postwar period
(1994)- is born from the exclusive attachment to nation or territory that char-
acterizes the category of citizen, where " citizen" is understood as a member of
a given national community and therefore not to be extended to every human
being as such. The idea was that only a concept that was potentially universal,
such as that of person, would allow for the strengthening and expanding of
the fundamental rights of every human being. It s on this point, then, that
we find calls in many different cultures to move away from the limited no-
tion of citizen (or individual) to the more general one of person- as Martha
Nussbaum has recently argued (2002). It is a formulation that a large part of
contemporary philosophy has accepted under different guises.
Turning to more theoretical work, we find the same movement of ideas.
Reflections on personal identity, and hence the renewed interest in the cat-
egory of person, constitute one of the rare points of intersection between
Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy and so-called continental philosophy- ac-
cording of course to different typologies, but within the same horizon of
meaning, one that is defined by the privileged reference to the notion of
person. Where the analytic school, in Strawson (1990) and Parfit (1984)»
Roberto Esposito • 123
understands the concept of person to be an indispensable point of departure

for elaborating a complete ontology of subjectivity, Italian authors associ-
ated with phenomenology are in one way or another explicitly proposing a
new philosophy of the person, based in particular on a revival of Edith Steins
phenomenological "personalism" (2005); see especially de Monticelli (2000).
All of this is taking place some years after Paul Ricoeur (1991) attempted to
relaunch a French Catholic personalism thought in a hermeneutic key.
To sum up: in contemporary culture there is an undeniable convergence,
indeed almost a postulate, that acts as the condition of and basis for legitimat-
ing every "philosophically correct" discourse. It is this one: the affirmation
of the person, of its philosophical, religious, ethical, and political value. No
other concept in the Western tradition seems today to be able to garner any-
thing close to such a large and broad consensus. We note as well that the
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations) assumed the
concept of person as the basis for its own formulation: after a catastrophic
war and the defeat of the idea of crushing human identity into mere biology
(which was precisely what the Nazis wanted), it seemed that only the idea of
person could reconstitute the broken link between human being and citizen,
spirit and body, and right and life. Today when the dynamics of globalization
are breaking apart the old world order, philosophical, juridical, and political
thought turns once again, more convinced than before, to the unifying value
of the idea of person, entrusting itself completely to it.
2.
What have been the results? A quick glance at the international scene raises
troubling questions precisely on this point: at no time more than today do
human rights, beginning with the right to live, seem so utterly denied. No
right more than the right to live seems contradicted by the millions of victims
who die because of hunger, sickness, and war. How is this possible? What's
the origin of this drift in meaning of person that is taking place today when
the normative reference to the value of the person is being affirmed in all lan-
guages and its banner raised high? One could respond, as often happens, that
the reason is only because this return to person has been a partial one, or
has been limited, or still remains incomplete. Frankly this seems like a weak
response both historically and conceptually. My own impression, which I
articulated as more of an argument in my recent book, Terza persona : Politica
della vita e filosofia dell'impersonale (2007), is that this kind of reasoning is
to be reversed. It isn't the limited extension, the partiality, or the unfinished
character of the ideology of the person that produces these counterfactual
results. If the fog lifts surrounding the original premise, which has taken on
the features of a true and proper personalist fundamentalism, what we see is
that the category of person cannot, somehow, make up for or fill the gaping
hole between rights and humanity- and in turn make possible something
like human rights- because it is precisely the category of person that pro-
duces and even enlarges this gap. The problem we are facing is the absolute
impracticability of a right of humanity as such, one born therefore not from
the fact that we failed somehow to enter fully into the regime of the person,
but rather that we haven t yet found our way out of it.
I do realize that what I'm saying- a line of inquiry, really- butts up against
all the evidence that a modern tradition has reinforced and that indeed has
constituted modernity itself (in this regard see Bodei 2002). But I believe that
we need to develop a perspective over a broader period of time that will be
capable of registering the subterranean knots and deep junctures that are
perhaps less obvious but certainly at work here, both by looking backward
and from within at the obvious epochal discontinuities. From this point of
view- one that opens onto a double axis, both horizontal and vertical- the
person, rather than being a simple concept, appears as a true and proper per-
formative dispositif, one that has been in operation over a very long period
of time, and who has erased its own proper genealogy and with it its own
very real effects. This genealogy of the person is to be reconstructed in all
of its complexity, beginning with the distinction (but also the relation) that
from the outset is established between two powers (radici), one Christian
and the other Roman, since it is exactly at their intersection that the power
of separation (and selection) will be found, one which constitutes the most
important effect of the dispositif of person.
A first element of splitting is already implicit in the idea of a mask, which
we find in the etymology of the Greek prósopon and the Latin persona. We
note, moreover, that although mask adheres to or is "placed" on the face of

the actor whose task it is to represent the character ( personaggio ), the mask
never coincides with the character. Not even in the ritual of the funerary
mask, where the true spiritual nature of humanity ought to show through
what it covers, is this difference lacking. In this case, in fact, we can see the
originary splitting up close, a splitting that is typical of the Christian concep-
tion, on the basis of which it is precisely the noncoincidence of the person
with respect to the living body (which also encloses it) that allows one to
pass to an other-worldly life. Both the idea of the double nature of Christ and
that of Christ's relation to the Trinity are proof of this internal interval, this
structural split in the dimension of person: the unity- between human and
divine nature or between body and soul within the person- always passes, in
other words, through a separation that cannot somehow be done away with.
3.
The separation that defines the concept of person in Roman juridical experi-
ence is even clearer because it is codified according to a precise doctrinal
mechanism. Despite all the shifts that took place during different phases
of Roman law, what remains always fixed is the initial difference between
the artificial person and a human being as a living being in which the first
inheres (see, above all, Thomas 1998). The most tangible evidence of this
separating dispositif resides in the fact that, as we know, not all men in
Rome (no women, and indeed only a small portion of men, the patres , free
adult males) were defined for all intents and purposes as persons. This was
not the case with slaves, who belonged to the domain of the thing as well
as other categories situated between the thing and the person. I'm unable
to examine here the multiple typologies of men that the Roman juridical
machine foresaw or better produced, but what counts for the purposes of our
discussion is the effect of depersonalization, which is to say being reduced to
a thing, which is implicit in the concept of person: its very definition emerges
in negative fashion from the presumed difference with respect to those men
and women who were not persons or who were only persons in part and
temporarily, ones always exposed to the risk of falling into the domain of the
126# For a Philosophy of the Impersonal
thing. What Roman law practiced with unequalled impositive imagination is

in fact not only the distinction among persons, semipersons, or nonpersons,
but also the elaboration of intermediate situations, of zones of indistinc-
tion, of exceptions that regulate the passage or the oscillation between one
state and another. That every son was, at least in the more archaic period
in Rome, subject to the father s power of life and death (since the father was
authorized to kill the son, sell him, lend him out, or abandon him) means
that no one in Rome, even if born a free man, was defined once and for all
by the statute of person. Anything but a natural gift, the statute of the person
is the artificial extension, the exceptional residue that is separated from a
common servile condition. No one is born a person. Some may become a
person, but precisely by pushing those who surround him into the dimension
of the thing.
This procedure of selection and exclusion by means of the dispositif of
the person, which is typical of Roman law, is handed down (and so naturally
transformed) to modern juridical systems, as some historians of jurispru-
dence have understood- those who are able to see through the most radical
changes, but also who can make out the lines of continuity along which
these changes take place. At this juncture, and without wanting to lessen
in any way the epochal opposition between the objectivist conception of
Roman law and the individualistic subjectivism that is typical of modernity,
the common feature that joins them together in the same semantic orbit
can be traced precisely in the presupposed difference between the designa-
tion of person and the body of the human being in which it appears to have
been implanted. Only a nonperson, which is to say a living material that is
not personal, can provide the place required- as both ground and object of
someone elses sovereignty - for something like a person. Yet, the person is
such only if partially or completely restricted to being a thing of its own body.
Not only does persona not coincide with homo (a term by which Latin mainly
denotes the slave), but persona is defined in its difference from homo . This
is the originary reason- installed as some kind of ancient foundation in our
own contemporaneity- for which the category of the person doesn't allow
us to think a right that is properly human, and what's more that renders
it conceptually impossible. "Person" is the technical term that separates a
human being's juridical capacity from the quality of naturalness and there-
fore that distinguishes each one from his or her own mode of being. It is
the noncoincidence- or perhaps the divergence of humanity from being- of
being with respect to its mode of being.
When Hobbes argues that "the person is he whose words or actions
are considered as his own or as representing the words or the actions of
another man," he does nothing other than decisively push this division to
its completion, to the point that the term "person' can also be used for enti-
ties that aren't human like a church, a hospital, or a bridge (1976, 155). Not
only doesn't the mask stay on the face that it once covered, but now it can
cover- in the technical sense of "to represent"- the face of another. It is true
that, at least from the French Revolution on, all men were declared equal
because they were all equally subjects of rights. But that doesn't change the
fact that attributing subjectivity refers to the noncorporeal (or the more-
than-corporeal) element that inhabits the body, thereby splitting it in two:
one a rational, spiritual, and moral part, which is precisely the personal; and
another, the animal. It isn't an accident that, at the very moment in which
he collaborated in formulating the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the
Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain could claim that the term "person"
indicates the being who is able to exercise mastery over his or her biological
part, which is properly animal: "If a healthy political conception," he writes,
"depends above all upon the consideration of the human person, it must
at the same time keep in mind the fact that this person is that of animal
endowed with reason, and that the part of animality is immense in such a
measure" (1942, 52). Here then we see a double separation: the first within
the very same individual, divided between a personal life and a life of the
animal type. And a second, between "personal" individuals- because they
are capable of dominating their own irrational part- and others who are
unable to muster this kind of self-power and therefore are situated below the
person. We are dealing here with a logical construct, but as is often said, one
productive of powerful impositive effects that really concern the beginning
of our philosophical tradition. As Heidegger intuitively grasped, when one
defines the human being as the "rational animal," according to the Aristote-
lian expression that Maritain uses, one is then forced into choosing between
two possibilities in what is ultimately a self-reflective analysis: either one

crushes the rational part directly into the corporeal as Nazism did, or on
the contrary, one subjects the second to the domination of the first, as the
personalist tradition has always done.
4.
As we can see, this dispositif that separates and excludes traverses as well
as moves beyond the conventional opposition between secular culture and
Catholic culture. It can do so because it originates in a concept like that of
person, which from the very beginning has a double connotation that is both
Christian and Roman, and theological and juridical. The dispositif toàay finds
one of its greatest expressions in liberal bioethics. Whereas for Locke and
Mill, the person is only the one who is proprietor of one's own body, authors
like H. Tristram Engelhardt (1996) and Peter Singer unambiguously accept
the Roman doctrine of the initial distinction between person and nonperson
through the intermediate stages of the quasi person, the semiperson and the
temporary person. Furthermore, they assign to the first, which is to say to
true and proper persons, the power to keep alive or to push toward death
{respingere nella morte) those who belong to the intermediate stages, based
on social and economic considerations. Proof again, as if we needed it, of
the structural connection between seemingly opposite movements of per-
sonalization and depersonalization. Every attribution of the personal always
implicitly contains an operation of reification with respect to the impersonal
biological layer from which it distances itself: only if there are human beings
that can be assimilated to this biological layer is it then necessary to define
others as persons. For some to be awarded the label of person, a difference
needs to be identified from those that are no longer persons, are not yet
persons, or are not persons in any way. The dispositif oí the person, in other
words, is that which at the same time superimposes and juxtaposes human-
ity on human beings and animality on human beings; or that distinguishes
the part of humanity that is truly human from another that is bestial, that
is enslaved to the first. And yet separating life from itself, the dispositif of
the person is also the conceptual instrument through which one can put
some part of the person to death. Singer, who is a liberal, argues that "today s
parents can decide between letting their child live or aborting it in the event
that an eventual anomaly is discovered during pregnancy. There is no logical
reason for limiting the basis on which a decision is made by the parents only
to the kind of anomaly" (2004, 211).
5.
It is with regard to this mechanism of separation and exclusion that I would

like to juxtapose a thought (when not a practice) of the impersonal. I want
to add quickly here, and not in the sense of negating what many continue to
see as noble, just, and worthy in the term "person," but rather to valorize and
make it more effective as a concept. Its only that here- let s call it a project-
we cannot avoid taking up a radical critique of that process of depersonaliza-
tion or of reification that inheres in the same dispositif of the person, at least
as it has functioned or still functions today. On the one hand, this thought
of the impersonal doesn't simply emerge out of nowhere at this moment in
time, even if it is also true that only today does it acquire the urgency of a
task that can no longer be put off for later. It is already virtually or implicitly
present in certain areas, not only in philosophy, but also in contemporary art
(as well as some segments of post-Freudian psychoanalytic practice), which
have now for some time been addressing a radical deconstruction of per-
sonal identity (in this regard, see Montani 2007 and Petřini 2007). Without
even dreaming of being able to reconstruct completely this hidden tradition,
precisely because it is covered over and blocked by the knowledges and pow-
ers of the person, I would like to make reference here to those features (or
some itineraries) that are able to provide us with the coordinates for a work
that is anything but simple or quick.
I will be working within three horizons of meaning or three semantic
areas: these are justice, writing, and life, each of which is associated above all
with three figures from twentieth-century philosophical culture. The first is
that of Simone Weil. At the center of her work is an explicit polemic against
the hierarchical and proscribed relation between right and person, in ways
that recall our earlier discussion:
The notion of rights, by its very mediocrity, leads on naturally to that of per-
son, for rights are related to personal things. They are on that level. It is much
worse if the word "personal" is added to the word "rights," thus implying the
rights of personality to what is called fìlli expression. In that case the tone
that colours the cry of the oppressed would be even meaner than bargaining.
It would be the tone of envy. (1996, 78)
What Weil grasps here when she connects rights so deeply to the dispositif oí
the person, is the exclusionary or biased nature of rights, in both their private
( privato ) and depriving ( privativo ) features. Once understood as the preroga-
tive of established subjects, right excludes in and of itself all the others that
do not belong to the same category. This is the reason that the subjective
right, or even more, the personal right, always concerns, on the one hand,
the economic exchange between measurable goods and on the other, force.
Only force is able to impose the respect for a tendentious right on those that
do not share it.
Weils conclusion? If the person has always constituted the normative

paradigm, the originary figure within which right has expressed its own
selective and excluding power, the only way to think a universal justice, one
that belongs to everyone and is for everyone, cannot lie anywhere except on
the side of the impersonal. "So far from its being his person, what is sacred
in a human being, is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal
in man is sacred, and nothing else" (Weil 1996, 62). If right belongs to the
person, justice is situated in the impersonal. It is that which reverses what
is proper into the improper, the immune into the common. Only by disman-
tling the dispositif of the person will the human being finally be thought of
as such, for what he or she has that is absolutely singular and absolutely
general: "Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is
charged with a responsibility toward all human beings; to safeguard, not
their persons, but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within them for
passing over to the impersonal" (78). As we can see, Weil isn't asking us to
deny the person. She doesn't make the impersonal the opposite of person,
its simple negation. Rather the impersonal is that which, from within the
person, blocks the mechanism of distinction and separation with respect to
those who are not yet persons, who are no longer persons, or who have never
been declared to be persons.
Where Simone Weil situates the impersonal in the horizon of justice,
Maurice Blanchot places it again in relation to the regime of writing: only
writing, which breaks the interlocutionary relation that in the dialogic word
links the first and second person, creates an opening into the impersonal.
When he states that "writing is equivalent to moving from the first to the
third person" (1977, 506), he not only alludes to the refusal on the part of the
writer to any possibility of speaking in the first person, but also argues in
favor of the impersonality of a story interpreted by characters themselves
lacking in identity or qualities, as in Robert Musil's "man without qualities."
But he also is referring to that decentering of the same narrative voice (ef-
fected in the first instance by Kafka) in which impersonality penetrates into
the very structure of the work, forcing it continually to move outside itself.
This implies two further effects that are embedded in the same global move-
ment: on the one side, the lowering of the narrative voice in what is a true
and proper aphonia of itself, masked by the anonymous swarm of events; on
the other hand, the loss of identity of subjects in action that takes place with
respect to themselves. Whats produced in this way is a process of deperson-
alization that invests the entire surface of the text, lifting it up out from its
banks and then making it turn round upon itself. In other places this is what
Blanchot will define as a "relation of the third type," referring to a dislocation
of the entire perspectivai field, comparable to a true and proper shift in the
epistemological paradigm.
What matters even more than this, however, is that, for Blanchot, the
movement of depersonalization experienced by writing doesn't remain lim-

ited to the field of mere theory, and indeed is subjected to a sort of political
experimentation. I am speaking of a whole series of interventions, declara-
tions, staking out of positions, that most often originated in the 1950s and
1960s, in which impersonality, which is to say the exclusion of the proper
name, constitutes not only the form but the very content of the political
act, its nonpersonal dimension, in its collective and common sense: "Intel-
lectuals," Blanchot writes to Sartre in December i960, ". . . experienced a way
of being together, and I'm not thinking only of the collective nature of the
Declaration, but also of its impersonal power, of the fact that all those who
signed did so with their proper name, but without the authorization to speak
of their own proper and particular truth or their own nominal reputation.
The Declaration represented for them a sort of anonymous community of
names" (2004, 51).
The third horizon of sense or semantic orbit associated with the im-
personal is that of life. In contemporary philosophy it is situated from the

outset at the intersection of Michel Foucault with Gilles Deleuze, and even
biographically, with the common deconstruction of the paradigm of the per-

son: "Foucault himselfT Deleuze writes, "one did not grasp him exactly like
a person. Even on insignificant occasions, when he entered a room, it was
rather like a change of atmosphere, a kind of event, an electric or magnetic
field, or what you will. This did not at all exclude gentleness or well-being, but
it wasn't on the order of the person. It was an ensemble of intensities" (1995,
99). What joins Deleuze to Foucault in a relation that goes beyond simple
friendship- precisely because there is nothing personal; there is exactly this
reference to the third person- is what Emile Benveniste rightly defines as
non-person, because it is traversed and made lacking by the power ( potenza )
of the impersonal: "And then there's the emphasis on one,' in Foucault as in
Blanchot: you have to begin by analyzing the third person. One speaks, one
sees, one dies. There are still subjects, of course- but they're specks dancing
in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble" (in
Deleuze 1995, 108).
This anonymous but also multiple babble, impersonal but also singular,
has the form of life in Deleuze, or better a life (as the last of his texts is titled,
Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life [2001]) when that life, despite being com-
mon to all those that live, is never general, but always of someone in particu-
lar, though it doesn't have the exclusive (and excluding) form of the person
because it is one with itself, which counteracts the dispositif that separates.
Before any juridical subjectivization, life constitutes the indivisible point in
which the being of a human perfectly coincides with its mode, in which the
form, precisely of life, is the form of its own content. This is what Deleuze
means when he associates it with what he defines as "level of immanence." It
concerns the always-moving fold or margin on which immanence, the being

life of life ( l'essere vita della vita) folds upon itself, eliding any figure of tran-
scendence, any ulteriority to the being such as it is of the living substance.
In this sense life, when it is understood in all its impersonal power, is that
which contradicts at the root the hierarchical separation of the human type
{genere), and of the same human being, in two superimposed or subjected
substances: the first rational and the second animal. It's no accident that
Deleuze understands the enigmatic figure of "becoming animal" as the cul-

mination of the deconstruction of the idea of person, in all its philosophical,
psychoanalytical, and political tonality. In a tradition that has always defined
humanity in the separation and difference from the animal, only to animalize
again a part of humanity because it wasn't human enough, asserting ani-
mality as our most basic nature to rediscover breaks with the fundamental
prohibition that governs us. Contrary to the presupposed split of the dis-
positif of the person, the animal in the human being, in each and all human
beings, means multiplicity, plurality, metamorphosis: "We do not become
animal," Deleuze affirms, "without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.
A fascination for the outside? Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already
related to a multiplicity dwelling within us?" (1987, 239-40). The "becoming
animal" of and in the human being means and demands the loosening of the
metaphysical knot tightened by the idea and the practice of person in favor
of a mode of being human {uomo) that no longer moves toward the thing,
but ultimately that coincides only with itself."
- >
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For a Philosophy of the Impersonal

Author(s): Roberto Esposito and Timothy Campbell

Translated by Timothy Campbell

something intangible. What is presupposed here, even before other criteria

understands the concept of person to be an indispensable point of departure

note, moreover, that although mask adheres to or is "placed" on the face of

thing. What Roman law practiced with unequalled impositive imagination is

two possibilities in what is ultimately a self-reflective analysis: either one

It is with regard to this mechanism of separation and exclusion that I would

It would be the tone of envy. (1996, 78)

Weils conclusion? If the person has always constituted the normative

movement of depersonalization experienced by writing doesn't remain lim-

personal is that of life. In contemporary philosophy it is situated from the

biographically, with the common deconstruction of the paradigm of the per-

concerns the always-moving fold or margin on which immanence, the being

Deleuze understands the enigmatic figure of "becoming animal" as the cul-

Arendt, Hannah. 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Yo

Bodei, Remo. 2002. Destini personali: L'età della colonizzazione del

De Monticelli, Roberta. 2000. La conoscenza personale : Introduzio

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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