Third person
Subtitle: politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal
By: Roberto Esposito ; translated by Zakiya Hanafi
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge, UK
Language: eng
Number of pages: 177
ISBN-13: 9780745643977; 9780745643984
Subjects: Persons; Italian Philosophy; Individualism
Other titles: Terza persona. engl.
Description: All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life as such whether philosophical, ethical, or political assume the 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 a person and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisive importance: human life is considered to be untouchable only when based on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment of subjective rights continues to be increasingly linked to the qualification of personhood, which appears to be the only one capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, right and life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins of Western civilization.The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is that the notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it is precisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to create a separation in both the human race and the individual between a rational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into the inferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to the performative power of the person, whose dual origins can be traced back to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues his strikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry by inviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the third person, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of the person, points toward the orginary unity of the living being.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [152]-166) and index.

In English; translated from Italian.