The Endgames of Sovereignty

Pitched somewhere between essay and conversation, this chapter records an exchange in which the voice of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito merges with that of his interlocutor, Roberto Ciccarelli, to create a third person. The two figures, at once diverging and blending, present a succinct yet comprehensive account of many of the concepts, such as biopolitics, the impersonal, and the unpolitical, that have begun to pervade our political terminology and that inform many of the essays assembled here. The result is more than just a précis of Esposito’s work to date, however (although it is that). It is also an experiment in a common search for, and presentation of, the crisis in our theological, philosophical, and juridical tradition that will activate the philosophy of immanence and affirmative biopolitics lying dormant there, patiently awaiting its vindication in contemporary thought.

This chapter focuses on the conceptual aftershocks stemming from book 3 of Plato’s Laws, where Clinias reveals to his interlocutors that he has been commissioned to settle a new colony. Reading Strauss and Badiou as mutually implicated in a tradition that posits the nonrelation between law and philosophy, the chapter shows how the impossible philosophical activity of inventing a new political order will silently shape the course of exploration in the Laws and in much of colonialist thought after Plato. Suddenly, philosophical nomos acquires a paradigmatic and, if the accusations Badiou levels at the lawgiving apparatuses of late Plato are correct, disastrous name in the emerging discourse of political philosophy, a name born from the immunitarian logic of colonial thinking: to solve the war within the home by constructing the space of a home away from home.