What is the relationship between persons and things? And how
does the body transform this relationship? In this highly original
new book, Roberto Esposito – one of Italy’s leading political
philosophers – considers these questions and shows that starting
from the body, rather than from the thing or the person, can help
us to reconsider the status of both.
Ever since its beginnings, our civilization has been based on a
strict, unequivocal distinction between persons and things, founded
on the instrumental domination of persons over things. This
opposition arose out of ancient Roman law and persisted throughout
modernity, to take its place in our current global market, where it
continues to generate growing contradictions. Although the
distinction seems to appear clear and necessary to us, what we are
continually witnessing in legal, economic, and technological
practice is a reversal of perspectives: some categories of persons
are becoming assimilated with things, while some types of things
are taking on a personal profile.
With his customary rigour, Roberto Esposito argues that there
exists an escape route out of this paradox, constituted by a new
point of view founded in the body. Neither a person nor a thing,
the human body becomes the decisive element in rethinking the
concepts and values that govern our philosophical, legal, and
political lexicons.
Table of Content
Introduction
I. Persons
Possession
The Great Division
Two in One
Use and Abuse
Non-persons
II. Things
The Nothing of the Thing
Res
Words and Things
The Value of Things
Das Ding
III. Bodies
The Status of the Body
The Power of the Body
To Exist the Body
The Soul of Things
Political Bodies
About the author
Roberto Esposito is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Naples
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