In this essay the author analyses the history of ‘biopolitics’ through the category of ‘person’. Tracing the development of this category from its Roman precursors to its centrality in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, he argues that, while the philosophy of the person evolved in response to the reduction of human life to mere biological being, it ends reifying from another direction the division between the biological and the rational-spiritual. Personalism does not so much resolve the problem of the biologization of life, as offer another ground on which such a reduction might take place. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot, Sigmund Freud and Simone Weil, the author suggests an alternative to the philosophy of the personal, in which rights adhere not to the persons but to bodies which offer their own normativity, one that is immanent to life and its infinite multiplicity.
The person and human life
ESPOSITO, ROBERTO
2011
Abstract
In this essay the author analyses the history of ‘biopolitics’ through the category of ‘person’. Tracing the development of this category from its Roman precursors to its centrality in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, he argues that, while the philosophy of the person evolved in response to the reduction of human life to mere biological being, it ends reifying from another direction the division between the biological and the rational-spiritual. Personalism does not so much resolve the problem of the biologization of life, as offer another ground on which such a reduction might take place. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot, Sigmund Freud and Simone Weil, the author suggests an alternative to the philosophy of the personal, in which rights adhere not to the persons but to bodies which offer their own normativity, one that is immanent to life and its infinite multiplicity.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
