“What to Do with the Concept of the Person? Roberto Esposito on the Personal and the Impersonal” by Professor Antonio Calcagno

1 Nov 2014 - 10:30 / 1 Nov 2014 - 12:30

NF205 (Northrop Frye Hall) Victoria College
73 Queen’s Park Circle
U of T

Dr. Antonio Calcagno
Associate Professor of Philosophy, King’s University College at Western University

ABSTRACT
Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito has garnered much international attention with his evolving work on themes like community, risk, immunity and the concepts of the political and the impolitical. His philosophy has had significant impact on diverse disciplines, including law, political science, sociology and literature.  As his books and essays become translated into English, North American scholars and students are slowly but surely beginning to engage his ideas. I wish to focus on his more recent work on the impersonal.  Esposito argues that that our current use and discussion of rights, especially human rights, is deeply rooted in a determined notion of the person and personal identity. He claims that our discourse of rights inevitably ends up violating and doing harm to the individual precisely because of its reliance upon a specific understanding of the person and the personal. He posits the need to shift our rights discourse to include what he calls “the impersonal.” This paper examines Esposito’s claim, arguing that his notion of the impersonal could end up committing the same violence that he wishes to avoid in traditional post World War II rights discourses.  Though Esposito is very attuned to the need to think our fundamental political concepts in a new and vibrant manner, including our notions of human life and the person, the categories he establishes like the impersonal or the third person inevitably run the risk of establishing a new ontology—an ontology that is grounded in human determinations and power. If, however, we do not ontologize Esposito’s categories, ultimately reading them as injunctions, perhaps we can justify the viability of his categories like the impersonal.

BIO
Dr. Calcagno works on questions of community and intersubjectivity, statehood, interiority, consciousness, humanism and post-humanism. Along with Dr. Lofts, he is the Co-Director of the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy (CAREP). His present research focuses on interiority. Drawing from Stoic philosophy (Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) as well as from early realist phenomenology (Husserl, Edith Stein and Max Scheler), he is attempting to develop a philosophical concept of interiority that tries to analyse what it is for us to have and experience meaningfully an interior world. Questions of personal identity, imagination, concept-formation, judgement, meaning and reference, thinking, objectivity, intersubjective relations and community figure prominently.

DR. Calcagno is the author of Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence, The Philosophy of Edith Stein, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, and the forthcoming book: Lived Experience from the Inside Out:  Social and Political Philosophy in Edith Stein.