Article

Theory, Culture & Society

2016, Vol. 33(2) 53–76
Roberto Esposito’s ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276414561096

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Thomas F. Tierney
The College of Wooster

Abstract
This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his
trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı́os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in
the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and
immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The
article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are
crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s
social contract theory, which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded mod-
ernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of
sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally,
Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the
recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and
Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner
that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’.

Keywords
Bataille, biopolitics, Esposito, gift, Hobbes, Mauss, Nancy

Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ has flourished in contemporary Italian

social theory, although in quite distinct ways, with the writings of
Giorgio Agamben at one end of the spectrum and those of Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt at the other (Campbell, 2008: viii, xx, xxiii;
Esposito, 2013: 85–6; Lemke, 2005: 4; Pozorov, 2010: 1056). For
Agamben, biopolitics ultimately led to the thanatopolitics of Nazism,
and the concentration camp was ‘the biopolitical paradigm of the
modern’, ‘the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space . . . of
modernity’ (Agamben, 1998: 117, 123). Despite this rather bleak account
of biopolitics, Agamben nevertheless holds out hope for ‘the coming

Corresponding author: Thomas F. Tierney. Email: [email protected]

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
54 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

community’ in which a ‘post-biopolitical form-of-life’ may flourish

(Pozorov, 2010: 1061, also 1058). Hardt and Negri, on the other hand,
celebrate a ‘radically affirmative biopolitics’ (Campbell, 2008: xx) in
which the ‘multitude’ will generate new forms of subjectivity as the dis-
tinctions between material and immaterial labor, production and repro-
duction, work and leisure, human and machine are swept away by
advanced techniques. Rather than joining Agamben’s call for the tran-
scendence of biopolitics, Hardt and Negri (2000: 388) instead proclaim
that ‘the political has to yield to love and desire, and that is to the fun-
damental forces of biopolitical production’. Somewhere between
Agamben’s thanatopolitical suspicion and Hardt and Negri’s biopolitical
enthusiasm lies the cautiously positive biopolitical perspective of Roberto
Esposito (Campbell, 2008: viii; Lemke, 2011: 169), which I will engage in
this article.
In a series of three books – Communitas (2010), Immunitas (2011) and
Bı´os (2008; first published in Italian in 1998, 2002 and 2004 respectively)
– Esposito attempts to glimpse an ‘originary and intense sense of com-
munitas’ that will make it ‘possible to trace the initial features of a bio-
politics that is finally affirmative. No longer over life but of life’
(Esposito, 2008: 157).1 The key to Esposito’s affirmative community
lies with a particular form of gift, the munus, which is the root of com-
munitas and immunitas. His understanding of the relationship between
the munus and community is deeply influenced by two key texts, each of
which he alludes to once in the opening pages of Communitas, but never
discusses in the trilogy. The first of these is The Gift (Mauss, 1990, first
published in 1923–4), which he simply refers to in Communitas as
‘Mauss’s famous essay’ (Esposito, 2010: 4, also 192 n. 15). Esposito dis-
cussed The Gift a few years earlier in an essay titled ‘Donner la technique’
(‘Given technology’; Esposito, 1995: 190–4), which I will use to clarify
Mauss’s influence on his conception of the munus. The second text that
influenced Esposito’s trilogy is Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative
Community (1991 [1982]), which he praises in a note at the end of the
very first sentence of Communitas as an ‘unexpected gift’ for which he
owes an ‘unpayable debt’ (Esposito, 2010: 151 n. 1, also 175 n. 13). What
he owes to Nancy is the fundamental insight that ‘“loss” is constitutive of
“community” itself’ (Nancy, 1991 [1982]: 12), which attuned Esposito to
the techniques and practices that immunize individuals from the obliga-
tions of communitas.
After taking its initial bearings from Mauss and Nancy, Esposito’s
trilogy presents a sweeping genealogy of the relation between communitas
and immunitas, which culminates in the uniquely modern biopolitical
stage that he describes as the ‘immunization paradigm’. His analysis of
this paradigm supplements Agamben’s perspective by further uncovering
sources of the thanatopolitical declension of modernity that resulted in,
but did not end with, Nazism (Esposito, 2008: 146). While this
Tierney 55

immunological analysis is certainly important for heightening awareness

of the ongoing dangers presented by biopolitical developments, an over-
emphasis on this dimension of Esposito’s work has led some to mis-
takenly dismiss it as excessively thanatopolitical (see e.g. Meloni, 2010:
561–3; see also Farneti, 2011: 959–61). I am not going to focus on this
lingering thanatopolitical threat in this article, however, and will instead
try to cultivate the affirmative biopolitical potential that Esposito intim-
ates in the trilogy. Others have, of course, already engaged Esposito’s
affirmative biopolitics. For instance, a recent issue of Angelaki
(September 2013) concentrated on the primarily positive implications
of Esposito’s conception of community for contemporary political
theory. And Timothy Campbell (2011), the leading English translator
and disseminator of Esposito’s writing,2 has envisioned a ‘playful’ con-
ception of biopolitics that develops the Deleuzean line that runs through-
out Esposito’s work (see note 1), leading away from Agamben toward
Hardt and Negri.
These political and playful dimensions of Esposito’s affirmative bio-
political vision are certainly crucial, and I embrace the efforts that have
been made to explore them. However, I am going to approach this vision
from a different direction; rather than viewing Esposito’s work from the
perspective of contemporary communitarian theory, or the Deleuzean
plane of immanence, I am instead going to concentrate on its relationship
to the protean concept of the gift. While the significance of Esposito’s
work ultimately lies with its contribution to our understanding of the
21st century’s bio-political-ethical-economic ordering of life and death,
I am suggesting that, to fully appreciate that contribution, we must rec-
ognize that his munificent biopolitical inclination is oriented by the gift
discourse that flourished in the preceding century.3 Consequently, from
the impressive range of theoretical sources Esposito invokes in his careful
thinking about biopolitics, I will only discuss four here – Mauss, Hobbes,
Bataille and Nancy – each of whom brings out an important dimension
of Esposito’s unique perspective on the gift.
I begin this four-part essay by positioning Esposito’s trilogy in relation
to Mauss’s famous essay, and the tradition that this little book spawned.
I supplement the trilogy with Esposito’s earlier essay, ‘Donner la tech-
nique’, in which he described The Gift as ‘l’architexte’ (1995: 193, also
196) of an anti-utilitarian, gift-exchange perspective that developed over
the course of the 20th century, primarily in France (1995: 190–4). In fact,
Esposito’s essay appeared in French in La revue du MAUSS,4 the mouth-
piece of the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (Anti-
utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences). After positioning Esposito’s
munus-based conception of communitas in relation to Mauss and this
Maussean tradition (which I argue are indeed different), I turn to immu-
nitas in the second section and examine the role he attributes to Hobbes’
classical liberal theory in establishing the foundation of the
56 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

immunization paradigm. Esposito interprets Hobbes’ contract as the

antithesis of the munus, and his potent combination of the fear of
death and the imperative of self-preservation as a catalyst for the biopo-
litical transformation of immunitas in modernity. In the third section
I take up Bataille’s troubling conception of sacrifice, which Esposito
interprets as an anti-Hobbesian stance that barely avoids the thanatopo-
litical declension of the immunization paradigm, yet hints at an affirma-
tive biopolitical community. In the conclusion I turn to Nancy, in an
attempt to kindle the glimmers of a positive biopolitical communitas that
Esposito finds in Bataille. Here I concentrate on L’Intrus (2008 [1999]), a
short essay in which Nancy reflects on the near-decade he had lived as a
recipient of the uncanny gift of a transplanted heart. Esposito briefly
discusses L’Intrus at the end of Immunitas, but focuses on the way
Nancy’s body became inextricably entangled with technology through
his transplant experience (Esposito, 2011: 150–3). I expand upon
Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus, and view Nancy’s unusual biopoli-
tical experience in light of my discussion of the relation between
Esposito’s munus and Mauss’s, Hobbes’ and Bataille’s perspectives on
the gift. I conclude by suggesting that Nancy’s reflections on his trans-
plant experience illuminate that initial gift he gave to Esposito, the inop-
erative conception of community as loss. This alternative interpretation
of L’Intrus is presented not as a critique of Esposito, but rather as a
donation to his offering of the gift as the foundation of a potentially
affirmative biopolitical community.

Communitas, Mauss and the Munus

Esposito (2010: 1) begins Communitas, the first book in the trilogy, by
criticizing the proprietary conception of community assumed by ‘com-
munal, communitarian, [and] communicative’ variants of contemporary
political philosophy. Despite their differences, each of these perspectives
understands community in terms of the distinction between that which is
held in common and that which is proper to those individuals who com-
prise the community, what most properly belongs to them as individuals.
Whether they identify that common property as an ethnic trait, a set of
shared values or the ability to play by Habermas’ discursive rules, these
diverse perspectives ‘are united by the unacknowledged assumption that
community is a ‘property’ belonging to subjects that join together
(accomuna): an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as
belonging to the same totality (insieme), or as a ‘substance’ that is pro-
duced by their union’ (Esposito, 2010: 2). Bearing Nancy’s influence,
Esposito argues that any conception of community that begins with
what individuals possess prior to, or acquire through, membership
occludes the risks and losses that members face. The neglect of these
costly dimensions, in turn, renders invisible the immunological response
Tierney 57

to them, leading to what Esposito (2010: 1) describes as the ‘unthinkabil-

ity of community’. His ‘first intention in’ Communitas, therefore, ‘lies in
distancing [himself] from this dialectic’ in which ‘the “common” is
defined exactly through its most obvious antonym’, the ‘proper’
(Esposito, 2010: 3).
To gain critical distance from this proprietary conception of commu-
nity, Esposito performs an etymological analysis of communitas that
uncovers its origin in munus, the Latin root it shares with immunitas.
The concept munus is ‘completely traceable to the idea of “obligation”
[dovere]’, Esposito (2010: 4) explains, and its meaning ‘oscillates’ among
three different ideas: ‘onus, officium, and donum’ (obligation, office and
gift). This oscillation results from the tension between the first two terms
on this list, which clearly evoke a sense of duty, and the last term, donum
or gift, which implies a very different sense of gratuity. ‘In what sense
would gift [dono] be a duty?’ Esposito (2010: 4) asks rhetorically: ‘Doesn’t
there appear, on the contrary, something spontaneous and therefore emi-
nently voluntary in the notion of gift?’ Here Esposito is invoking the
specter of the ‘free’ or ‘pure’ gift, one given in a perfectly gratuitous
manner without any expectation of return. This concept is a fraught
one in both anthropological and philosophical discourse, but I will never-
theless use the idea of the pure gift throughout this article as an
ordinal point to orient Esposito’s munus in relation to other perspectives
on the gift.
Esposito (2010: 4, 5) explicitly mentions the pure gift at the outset of
the trilogy, when he characterizes the munus in terms of its relationship to
the ‘eminently voluntary’ and ‘potentially unilateral’ nature of the
donum. ‘The munus in fact is to donum as “species is to genus,”’ he
claims, ‘because, yes, it means “gift,” but a particular gift, “distinguished
by its obligatory character”’ (Esposito, 2010: 4). Far from voluntary,
Esposito (2010: 5) describes the munus as ‘the gift that one gives because
one must give and because one cannot not give’. And though the purely
gratuitous nature of the free gift is often cited as the source of its special
intensity, as in Simmel’s ‘exemplary excursus on gratitude’ (Esposito,
2010: 155 n. 43; see Simmel, 1950: 392), Esposito (2010: 5) claims that
the ‘unrelenting compulsion’ of the munus actually renders it more
intense than the pure gift. The overwhelmingly deontological nature
of the munus challenges the ‘canonical’ proprietary conception of com-
munity as ‘what belongs to more than one, to many or to everyone’,
and reveals a ‘less obvious’ sense of community as what members
properly owe, rather than own, in common (Esposito, 2010: 3–4; see
also Bird, 2013).
Mauss, of course, also examined such obligatory gifts in The Gift, the
most famous of which is the potlatch. According to Mauss, the primary
form of integration in pre-modern societies was a compulsory, self-
interested form of gift-exchange, such as the potlatch of the Kwakiutl
58 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

of Northwest America, in which status was determined by the ability to

return even greater gifts than those received (Mauss, 1990: 3). Though
the potlatch was governed by a ‘principle of rivalry and hostility that. . .
takes on an extremely marked agonistic character’ (Mauss, 1990: 6),
Mauss nevertheless explained that the three fundamental obligations of
the potlatch – ‘to give, to receive, to reciprocate’ (1990: 39–43) – provided
the primary social bond of such communities. He ended his essay by
identifying hopeful signs of a recovery of such gift-based integration
(Mauss, 1990: 76–8),5 and those who have maintained the Maussean
legacy use the tripartite obligations of the potlatch to ground a theory
of ‘gift-exchange’ which they offer as a critique of the alienating, utili-
tarian nature of the commodity-exchange that characterizes late-modern
societies (e.g. Caillé, n.d.; Douglas, 1990; Godbout with Caillé, 1998;
Gregory, 1997).
While Esposito does not explicitly discuss the relationship between the
munus and Mauss’s potlatch in the trilogy, he does address those
Mausseans who insist that reciprocity, rather than gratuity, is ‘the defin-
ing characteristic of a gift’ (Gregory, 1997: 64; also Sahlins, 1972). He
rejects those interpretations that claim the gift is necessarily linked with
exchange, precisely because they deny the possibility of a pure or free
gift. In Communitas he argues that such readings actually ‘[undo] the
principle of the gift itself, which is to say its gratuity’ (Esposito, 2010:
29); he is even more emphatic in ‘Donner la technique’, where he
describes the ‘authentic gift’ (don authentique) (Esposito, 1995: 194)
and the ‘true gift’ (vrai don) (1995: 196) as ‘totally gratuitous’ (pleinement
gratuit) (1995: 194), and uses this standard to point out the limitations of
the full range of gift-exchange theories spawned by The Gift (1995: 196).
While those who insist on the essential reciprocity of the gift are appro-
priately subject to Esposito’s critique, the important question of whether
Mauss acknowledged the possibility of the pure, non-reciprocal gift is
never explicitly addressed by Esposito (see Esposito, 2010: 29). Others
who have written about the gift have, of course, weighed in on this
hotly contested question. Mary Douglas, for instance, claims in her
Foreword to The Gift that Mauss regarded the very idea of a pure gift
as ‘nonsense’ and dismisses it as a ‘contradiction’ (1990: vii–viii; see also
Gregory, 1997: 64). Jacques Derrida also argues that the pure gift is impos-
sible, but rather than dismissing the idea like Douglas, he instead dwells
upon it as a transgressive thought that can break the cyclicality of eco-
nomic rationality (Derrida, 1992: 7); indeed, Derrida criticizes Mauss for
embracing the ‘happy medium’ of the calculating, counterfeit gift of the
potlatch rather than the impossible pure gift (1992: 82–3; cf. Esposito,
1995: 197–9). However, some anthropologists argue that Mauss implicitly
relied on the moral ideal of the free gift, even if he did not explicitly endorse
it, in order for his claims about the potlatch to resonate in a culture of
commodity-exchange (Laidlaw, 2000: 626–8; also Parry, 1986: 466–9).
Tierney 59

I concur with those interpretations that claim Mauss recognized the pos-
sibility of a free gift, since Mauss himself described the potlatch model of
exchange as ‘neither that of the free, purely gratuitous rendering of total
services, nor that of production and exchange purely interested in what is
useful. It is a sort of hybrid that flourished’ (1990: 73).
The reason I dwell on Mauss’s relation to the pure gift is because I
think Esposito similarly relies on this ideal, although more explicitly than
Mauss, to support the affirmative, biopolitical inclination he derives from
the munus. But while Mauss’s potlatch was positioned between the free
gift and commodity-exchange, I want to suggest that Esposito’s munus
lies somewhere between the free gift and the potlatch. For there is a
crucial difference between these two obligatory gifts, which renders the
munus closer than the potlatch to the free gift, and this difference turns on
the issue of reciprocity. With the exception of some extreme cases (which
will be discussed in the section on Bataille), potlatch gifts are given with
the expectation that a return gift will eventually follow; it is this expect-
ation of reciprocity that fosters the exchange. In contrast, Esposito insists
that the munus involves no such expectation:

Although produced by a benefit that was previously received, the

munus indicates only the gift that one gives, not what one receives.
All of the munus is projected onto the transitive act of giving. It
doesn’t by any means imply the stability of a possession and even
less the acquisitive dynamic of something earned. (2010: 5; also
2013: 84)

On my interpretation, the munus involves the first two obligations of the

Maussean gift-exchange, although in inverse order – ‘to receive’ and ‘to
give’ – but does not encompass the third obligation, which closed the
circuit of exchange – ‘to reciprocate’. Lorna Weir offers a fundamentally
different interpretation of the munus, however, in the special issue of
Angelaki dedicated to Esposito. Weir (2013: 155) addresses the ‘incon-
sistencies in Esposito’s treatment of the gift’ and argues that the munus
must contain both a horizontal dimension that is governed by the tripar-
tite obligations of the Maussean potlatch, which she ‘provisionally’ calls
the communal (Weir, 2013: 163), as well as a vertical dimension that
involves the often-overlooked fourth Maussean obligation of a non-
reciprocal gift to the gods (or in Esposito’s case, communitas). As an
example of such a fourth obligation, she cites Durkheim’s classic account
of the sacrifice of a totem (Weir, 2013: 163). From my perspective, this
insistence on the need for a symbolic sacrifice to generate a ‘political we’,
and reciprocal exchange to establish horizontal bonds within the com-
munal, is a peculiarly proper reading of the munus. For, as Esposito
(2013: 84) remarked in his contribution to the same issue of Angelaki,
the munus is a ‘unilateral gift to others’ that is fundamentally
60 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

expropriating, and involves no return. To render the munus a Mauss-plus

form of gift-exchange – the tripartite reciprocal obligations plus the non-
reciprocal gift to the community – undermines the challenge the munus
presents to proprietary conceptions of community.
The non-reciprocal sense of communitas evoked by the munus is fun-
damentally different from the proprietary nature of both commodity-
and gift-exchange. The fulfillment of obligations in either of these
forms of exchange ostensibly leads to the acquisition of property and/
or status, but Esposito insists ‘the munus that the communitas shares’ is
‘a debt . . . an “obligation”, in the sense that we say “I owe you some-
thing,” but not “you owe me something”’ (2010: 6). And what individuals
owe most fundamentally to the community, in both senses of owe, is their
identities. Individuals owe their identities to the community in the sense
that it is their source (as in ‘I owe my sense of humor to my mother’), and
in the sense of a debt that must be repaid to the community, but again
without any expectation of return. So rather than grounding identities in
some form of reciprocal exchange, the obligation of the munus instead
‘expropriates them of their initial property (in part or completely), of the
most proper property, namely, their very subjectivity’ (Esposito, 2010: 7).
Even more risky than the grounding of individuals’ identities in the
agonistic exchange of potlatch gifts, the munus ‘threatens their
identity, exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing
them to the contagion of the relation with others’ (Esposito, 2010: 13;
also 2008: 107).
All communities pose such dangers, according to Esposito, but they
also provide exemptions or immunizations from the obligations of the
munus, at least for some members. As Esposito explains this comple-
mentary relationship: ‘If communitas is that relation, which in binding
its members to an obligation of [mutual]6 donation, jeopardizes indi-
vidual identity, immunitas is the condition of dispensation from such an
obligation and therefore the defense against the expropriating features
of communitas’ (2008: 50). In the following section I will examine
Esposito’s account of the historical transformation of immunitas into
the modern immunization paradigm, and the crucial role Hobbes
played in laying its foundation, and setting its thanatopolitical
orientation.

Hobbes and Immunitas

While the interplay between communitas and immunitas has taken a var-
iety of historical forms, Esposito (2008: 45–77) argues that immunization
became a conscious, reflexive project in modernity. He actually considers
his analysis of this immunization paradigm, not the munus-based con-
ception of communitas that I stressed in the previous section, as his most
valuable contribution to contemporary social thought in general, and
Tierney 61

biopolitical discourse in particular. ‘[T]the category of immunization is so

important’, he announces in Communitas, ‘that it can be taken as the
explicative key of the entire modern paradigm, not only in conjunction
with but even more than other hermeneutic models, such as those we find
in “secularization,” “legitimation,” and “rationalization”’ (Esposito,
2010: 12; also Meloni, 2010: 554). And in Bı´os he proclaims that his
theory of immunization is the ‘interpretive key’ that fills ‘that semantic
void, that interval of meaning which remains open in Foucault’s text
between the constitutive poles of the concept of biopolitics, namely, biol-
ogy and politics’ (Esposito, 2008: 45). At the center of Esposito’s analysis
of the modern immunization paradigm lies Hobbes, whom he
identifies in each book of the trilogy as a seminal figure (2010: 13;
2011: 86; 2008: 46).
Wisely avoiding Foucault’s mistaken dismissal of Hobbes as a
‘false paternity’ who is of little help in understanding the contemporary
biopolitical condition (Foucault, 2003: 270; cf. Tierney, 2006: 609–17),
Esposito instead presents Hobbes as revealing the biopolitical nature of
the immunization paradigm, and its thanatopolitical declension, more
clearly than any other liberal theorist. To begin with, Hobbes explicitly
linked biology and politics when he described the transition from the
state of nature to civil society in terms of human mortality.
As Esposito paraphrases Hobbes, ‘what men have in common, what
makes them more like each other than anything else, is their
generalized capacity to be killed: the fact that anyone can be killed by
anyone else’ (2010: 13). But rather than responding to ‘our mortal
finiteness’ (Esposito, 2010: 8) with the traditional exhortation to
courage, Hobbes instead embraced the fear of death evoked by this
common finitude and turned it into the foundation of civil society, or
in Esposito’s terms, the immunization paradigm. Esposito appreciates
the ‘glacial clarity’ of Hobbes’ insight that ‘the fear that traverses us or
rather constitutes us is essentially the fear of death; fear of no longer
being what we are: alive’ (2010: 21). And he quite appropriately notes the
historical significance of Hobbes’ moral inversion: ‘Hobbes raised
what was unanimously considered the most disreputable of the states
of mind [i.e. the fear of death] to the primary motor of political activity’
(2010: 21).
While Hobbes proclaimed death as ‘the chiefest of natural evils’ (1839,
vol. II: 8, also 25) and ‘the terrible enemy of nature’ (1839, vol. IV: 83),
and identified the fear of death as the most powerful passion (1962: 100),
this revaluation alone could not found civil society and had to be sup-
plemented by the fundamental law of nature – self-preservation.
Although Esposito does not discuss self-preservation in terms of the
natural law tradition, most classical liberals identified self-preservation
as the first law of nature, and none was clearer than Hobbes in articulat-
ing what I have described as the uniquely corporeal form this law took in
62 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

modernity (Tierney, 1993: 167–81; also 1999, 2006: 612–17). The

self that was to be preserved, Hobbes claimed, was one’s physical
existence:

A LAW OF NATURE, (Lex Naturalis,) is a Precept or general

Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do,
that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of
preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may
be best preserved. (1962: 103; see also Esposito, 2008: 31)

Although Esposito does not distinguish the traditional, decidedly non-

corporeal, conception of self-preservation from the modern variant, he
does recognize that the reflexive invocation of corporeal preservation
marks the birth of modernity:

On a typological level the demand for self-preservation, strictly

speaking, is far older than the modern epoch. Indeed one could
plausibly claim that it is coextensive with the entire history of civ-
ilization . . .. What changes, however, is the moment that one
becomes aware of the question, and therefore of the kind of
responses generated. . . . [I]t wasn’t modernity that raised the ques-
tion of the self-preservation of life, but that self-preservation is
raised in modernity’s own being [essere], which is to say, it invents
modernity as a historical and categorical apparatus able to cope
with it. (Esposito, 2008: 30, also 2010: 21)

The modern method of coping with the issue of self-preservation is, of

course, ‘the juridically “privatistic” and logically “privative” figure of the
contract’ (Esposito, 2010: 13), which Esposito insists is fundamentally
different from the gift. In contradiction of those who read the gift as a
pre-modern form of social contract (e.g. Sahlins, 1972: 169), Esposito
argues that ‘above all, the contract is that which is not a gift; it is the
absence of munus, the neutralization of its poisonous fruits’ (2010: 14,
also 29). While this distinction may be lost on those Mausseans (but not
Mauss) who mistakenly interpret the gift as essentially reciprocal, the
fundamental difference between the gift and the contract is revealed,
once again, by the idea of the pure gift, but here Esposito draws the
lesson from Hobbes himself.

Hobbes avoids committing this error when he juxtaposes the free

and unilateral logic of the gift to that of the bilateral and self-inter-
ested contract: ‘When a man transfereth any right of his to another,
without consideration of reciprocal benefit, past, present, or to
come; this is called free gift. . . . When a man transfereth his right,
Tierney 63

upon consideration of reciprocal benefit, this is not a free gift

but . . .7 is called contract. (2010: 29)

While Hobbes presents his social contract as the threshold between the
state of nature and civil society, Esposito interprets this contract as
separating the ‘originary munus that had still characterized the precon-
tractual social relation’ (2010: 29), with its variety of limited immuno-
logical practices and patterns, and the modern reflexive project of
immunizing all individuals from this obligation.
Although the thanatopolitical declension of the immunization para-
digm reached its nadir (thus far) in Nazism, Esposito (2010: 30) locates
the roots of this deadly trajectory in ‘a series of difficulties, inconsisten-
cies, and real contradictions’ that plagued Hobbes’ theory. To begin
with, Hobbes ended up sacrificing any sense of community in his attempt
to immunize all individuals from the obligations of the munus. Hobbesian
subjects only obligate themselves to the sovereign through the social
contract, and incur no substantive obligation to others. In the atomistic
society Hobbes envisioned, individuals ‘are associated in the modality of
reciprocal dissociation’, Esposito (2010: 27) claims, ‘unified in the elim-
ination of every interest that is not purely individual, artificially united in
their subtraction from community’. But beyond sacrificing relations
among members of the community, Hobbes’ theory also ended up para-
doxically sacrificing life itself in order to preserve life. His conception of a
seemingly irresistible sovereign to which subjects must submit themselves
is the ‘apex’ of Hobbes’ contradiction, revealing what Esposito (2010: 31)
describes as ‘the unmistakably sacrificial character of the Hobbesian
paradigm’.
While I generally agree quite extensively with Esposito’s reading of
Hobbes, I think he pushes a bit too hard to reach this peak of contra-
diction. Certainly, the Hobbesian sovereign retained that traditional
right to kill subjects that Foucault (1980: 136–7) famously claimed was
eclipsed by biopower, but Esposito goes further and maintains that
Hobbes denied subjects the right to resist the sovereign. In Communitas
he claims that Hobbes not only denied the right of individuals to defend
another who has been wrongly condemned by the sovereign: ‘[n]either is
one free, moreover, to defend oneself without breaking that pact that
binds one to an unconditional obedience’ (Esposito, 2010: 31). And in
Bı´os he asserts that ‘once [sovereignty] has been instituted, they cannot
resist it . . . otherwise they would be resisting themselves’ (Esposito, 2008:
59–60). But along with the sovereign’s immunization against any charge
of injustice, Hobbes also immunized subjects from sovereign authority by
explicitly recognizing an inalienable right to resist the sovereign, an
important point that Esposito follows Foucault in overlooking. In
Leviathan Hobbes argued that some rights could never be transferred
to another individual or the sovereign, and the first of these was ‘the
64 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life’
(1962: 105). In fact, Hobbes was so insistent on the inalienability of the
right of self-defense that he began the chapter ‘Of punishment and
rewards’ with the surprising claim that ‘no man is supposed bound by
covenant, not to resist violence; and consequently it cannot be intended,
that he gave any right to another to lay violent hands upon his person’
(1962: 229; see also 110).
So while Esposito is correct that Hobbes did not recognize the right of
anyone to help criminals, whether rightly or wrongly condemned, he did
recognize the right of those criminals (and everyone else) to resist the
sovereign (or anyone else) who laid violent hands upon them. Although
neither Foucault nor Esposito acknowledge it, Hobbes took a crucial
step beyond the traditional model of sovereignty, toward biopower, by
grounding the right to resist the sovereign in the corporeal conception of
self-preservation. My point here is not that Hobbes’ individualistic right
to resist could ever check the thanatopolitical tendency of the immuniza-
tion paradigm his theory helped establish, but only that this impotent
right to resist reveals that Hobbes’ fearsome sovereign was not absolute.
Like all subjects, the sovereign was limited by the natural law of corpor-
eal preservation; indeed, Hobbes claimed that the sovereign could not
compel even a ‘justly condemned’ subject ‘to kill, wound, or maim him-
self . . . or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other
thing, without which he cannot live’ (1962: 164).
This criticism really is a minor quibble with Esposito, however,8 since
we agree that the fundamental issue for modernity is corporeal preser-
vation, and that this was heralded most clearly by Hobbes. More import-
antly, I fully concur with Esposito’s judgment that the affirmative
biopolitical inclination he seeks to cultivate requires an inherently risky
revaluation of this Hobbesian imperative of self-preservation. I will now
turn to the cautionary figure of Bataille, who reveals to Esposito the
thanatopolitical risks, and the affirmative biopolitical possibilities, asso-
ciated with any such revaluation.

Bataille, the Sacrifice and Affirmative Biopolitics

Bataille explicitly struggled to move beyond Mauss and the gift tradition,
and in ‘Donner la technique’ Esposito (1995: 196–7) treats him as a
precursor to Derrida’s deconstructive stance toward the gift. However,
in the trilogy he presents Bataille as ‘the most radical anti-Hobbesian’
(Esposito, 2010: 124), and distinguishes their perspectives in terms of
‘two metaphysics’. Hobbes’ metaphysics conceived of humanity as
weak and vulnerable, and in need of a ‘prosthesis or form of artificial
protection’, while Bataille’s metaphysics celebrated ‘a superabundance of
energy that is universal and specifically human, which is destined to be
unproductively consumed and to be wasted without any limits
Tierney 65

whatsoever’ (Esposito, 2010: 124). This dichotomy of lack and excess,

scarcity and surplus, is also reflected in Bataille’s own distinction between
‘restrictive’ and ‘general’ economies. For Bataille, the restrictive economy
involves the production and circulation of commodities that serve utili-
tarian ends, where the prime motives for exchange are acquisition and
saving. In contrast to the proprietary nature of the restrictive economy,
the aim of the general economy ‘is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury”’
(Bataille, 1989: 12), and the primary aim of circulation is ‘the “expend-
iture” (the “consumption”) of wealth, rather than the production’ (1989:
9). According to Esposito (2010: 124–5), ‘those who are inspired by the
Hobbesian model emerge as confined to the “restrictive economy” of the
contract’, whereas the Bataillean model ‘refers to a “munificence” purged
of any mercantile remnants’, which leads to a general economy based on
‘the gift par excellence’.
Bataille’s sense of profundity and excess was primarily derived from
his reading of Nietzsche, as Esposito duly notes (2010: 114, 125), but
Bataille also drew inspiration in this regard from Mauss (Bataille, 1989:
63–77; see also Jenkins, 1998: 86–7; Marcel, 2003; Riley, 2005: 286). Like
Mauss, Bataille recognized that ‘a good many of our behaviors are redu-
cible to the laws of potlatch’ (1989: 69), but he did not focus on the
reciprocal gift-giving championed by most Mausseans (for an exception,
see Godbout, 2000: 40–41). Prefiguring Derrida, Bataille criticized the
reciprocity of the traditional potlatch for turning the apparent loss of the
gift into a gain for the donor (1989: 70, 72; also Esposito, 1995: 196–7).
What most intrigued Bataille were the more extreme forms of potlatch
mentioned in passing by Mauss, which involved the ‘gratuitous, unlim-
ited destruction of accumulated wealth’ (Marcel, 2003: 143; also Derrida,
1992: 45). Mauss identified these destructive potlatches as ‘a kind of
monstrous product of the system of presents’ (1990: 42), and described
them as follows:

In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and

returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint
of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen
(candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands
of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and
thrown into the water, in order to put down and to ‘flatten’ one’s
rival. (1990: 37)

It was not the extremely agonistic nature of these destructive

potlatches that drew Bataille’s attention. In fact, he downplayed this
hierarchical dimension and instead emphasized the potential of these
potlatches to shatter the restrictive economy’s cycle of reciprocal
exchange (Frow, 1997: 117). Bataille recognized in these monstrous
potlatches a disruptive force similar to ritualistic sacrifices (Bataille,
66 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

1985: 121), and was far more comfortable than Mauss in considering
such dangerous gifts. Bataille appreciated the power of sacrifice to call
forth a community based on a joyous sense of loss:

Men assembling for a sacrifice and for a festival, satisfy their need
to expend a vital excess. The sacrificial laceration that opens the
festival is a liberating laceration. The individual who participates in
loss is obscurely aware that this loss engenders the community that
supports him. (1985: 251; see also Marcel, 2003: 145)

However, Bataille thought that this transformative sense of sacrifice had

been reduced to an instrumental form in modernity, a ‘project’ in which
‘the result alone counts’, and committed himself to recovering a purer
form of sacrifice where ‘value is concentrated’ in the act itself. ‘Nothing
in sacrifice is put off until later’, he insisted; ‘it has the power to contest
everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon everything,
to render everything present’ (Bataille, 1988: 137, also 1990: 26;
Esposito, 2010: 126).
So unlike those non-reciprocal potlatches in which property was des-
troyed in order to humiliate a rival, the sacrifice endorsed by Bataille is
closer to the pure gift, in that it is an expenditure of excess, a celebration
of the fecundity of life, given out of a sense of gratitude, without the
instrumental expectation of a return. While this anti-utilitarian concep-
tion of sacrifice intrigued many of Bataille’s contemporaries who were
influenced by Mauss’s gift, they also often became uncomfortable with
the extent to which Bataille carried his fascination with sacrifice. This
obsession reached its most extreme form in the late 1930s, when Bataille
was actively involved with a quasi-secret society of avant-garde Parisian
intellectuals, Acéphale (1936–9), as well as the Collège de sociologie
(1937–9), a more public group formed by Bataille and two of Mauss’s
students, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. Among those who attended
the Collège’s lectures were Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Lévi-Strauss
and Sartre (Bataille, 1985: xix–xxiii; Marcel, 2003: 151 n. 3; Pearce, 2003:
2; Ramp, 2008: 220–4; Riley, 2005: 284–5). Bataille was the intellectual
force behind both groups, which commonly aimed at recovering ‘the
subversive power of the sacred’ (Ramp, 2008: 222–3). In order ‘[t]o pro-
vide the initial kindling for the irresistible expansion of the sacred’,
Caillois claimed Bataille actually planned a voluntary human sacrifice.
He confided to Caillois that he had identified a willing victim, and
obtained immunity for the one who would perform the ‘irrevocable
ritual gesture’, but thankfully the sacrifice never took place (Caillois,
1975: 63; see also Nancy, 1991 [1982]: 17; Pearce, 2003: 5; Riley,
2005: 285).
This early attempt to create a ‘sacred sociology’ went too far for
Mauss (Marcel, 2003), Callois, and many others who were familiar
Tierney 67

with Bataille’s efforts, such as Benjamin, who ‘stigmatized the Acéphale

group’s research with the peremptory phrase “You are working for fas-
cism”’ (Agamben, 1998: 113, recounting Klossowski’s recollections). In
fact, Bataille himself later abandoned the transgressive nature of sacrifice
as essentially ‘comedic’ (Bataille, 1990: 19). But as Nancy notes, ‘this
abandonment, doubtless always fragile and ambiguous, never ends’
(2003: 54), and Bataille’s idea of a non-instrumental, non-reciprocal sac-
rifice continues to haunt those who are trying to conceive a community
beyond neoliberal biopolitics, particularly those who worry about the
thanatopolitical risks that attend any such effort. For his part, Nancy
takes up this Bataillian theme in ‘The unsacrificeable’, and attempts to
sever the link between sacrifice and community ‘once and for all’ by
proclaiming ‘the truth of existence is to be unsacrificeable’ (2003: 77).
Agamben praises Nancy’s effort (1998: 113), but claims that ‘the principle
of the sacredness of life [has already been] completely emancipated from
sacrificial ideology’, yet this emancipation has only increased the number
potentially categorized as homo sacer, ‘an unsacrificeable life that has
nevertheless become capable of being killed to an unprecedented
degree’ (1998: 114).
Esposito, in turn, takes up the Bataillian concept of sacrifice, which he
acknowledges is a tempting counter-strategy to the immunization para-
digm’s Hobbesian imperative of self-preservation. Ultimately, however,
he recognizes that such a strategy amounts to nothing more than an
inversion of Hobbes’ worldly sacrifice to the sovereign into an other-
worldly sacrifice to the sacred. ‘Didn’t that [Hobbesian] paradigm
already achieve the sacrificial destruction of the community through
the compulsory sacrifice of its members?’ Esposito asks. ‘Why, then,
put it [i.e. sacrifice] forward again on behalf of the “anti-Hobbes” as
“the final question” and the “key of human existence”?’ (2010: 126; see
also Bataille, 1985: 251).
Esposito follows Nancy and Agamben in rejecting sacrifice because of
its thanatopolitical tendency (Nancy, 2003: 67–71; Agamben, 1998:
112–15), and would therefore be disinclined to follow Weir’s addition
of a vertical sacrifice to the gods or the community. At a less extreme
level than sacrifice, though, Esposito endorses Bataille’s willingness to
expose individuals to the losses and risks that accompany community,
and applauds that Bataille ‘finds the community in a contagion caused by
the breakdown of individual borders and the mutual infection of
wounds’ (Esposito, 2010: 124). In contrast to Hobbes’ attempt to immun-
ize individuals from exposure to others, in Bataille’s final presentation to
the Collège de sociologie he ‘propose[d] to admit, as a law, that human
beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds’. He even
explained ‘the certain logical force’ of this law in what might best be
described as anti-immunological terms: ‘If elements are put together to
form a whole . . . when each one loses, though a rip in its integrity, a part
68 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

of its own being, [this] goes to benefit the communal being’ (Bataille,
1985: 251; see also Esposito, 2010: 124; Marcel, 2003: 145).
When he delivered this presentation in 1939, Bataille imagined such
contagion primarily in terms of the passion of heterosexual lovers (1985:
249–50), but by the end of the 20th century the restrictive economy
produced an expansive, if less passionate, flow among the bodies of indi-
viduals. Biomedical techniques such as organ transplantation, in vitro
fertilization (IVF), reproductive surrogacy, stem-cell research, tissue-
culture and genomic research have contributed to a global exchange of
bits of human bodies in what Nikolas Rose (2007: 6, 8, 32–40), following
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, calls the
‘bioeconomy’. ‘Never before have we had such an accurate perception of
this community of bodies’, Esposito observes, ‘the endless contagion that
combines, overlaps, soaks, coagulates, blends, and clones them’ (2011:
151). The trilogy does not focus on the potential of these bioeconomic
techniques to generate an affirmative biopolitical community, and
Esposito instead concentrates almost exclusively on early 20th-century
biomedical contributions to Nazi thanatopolitics (see 2008: 110–45). He
does, however, acknowledge the positive potential of these later bio-
technologies in a passing remark in Bı´os:

[T]he notion of flesh needs to be rethought outside of Christian

language, namely as the biopolitical possibility of the ontological
and technological transmutation of the human body. One could say
that biotechnology is a non-Christian form of incarnation. What in
the experience of prosthesis (of the transplant or the implant) pene-
trates into the human organism is no longer the divine, but the
organ of another person [uomo]; or something that doesn’t live,
that ‘divinely’ allows the person to live and improve the quality of
his or her life. (2008: 168)

I will explore the affirmative biopolitical potential of this transmutation

of the body in the conclusion, by examining the one instance in the
trilogy where Esposito does focus on contemporary biotechniques –
Nancy’s heart transplant.

Conclusion: Nancy’s Heart?

In 1991, at the age of 51, Nancy received an anonymously donated heart,
and in 1997 he was diagnosed with lymphoma, a side-effect of his
immunosuppressant regimen. As part of the cancer treatment, stem
cells were extracted from Nancy’s white blood cells, frozen, and then
returned to his body to regenerate his intentionally destroyed immune
system. In 1999 he published his reflections on these admittedly atypical
medical experiences as L’Intrus (The Intruder),9 which Esposito briefly
Tierney 69

discusses in the last chapter of Immunitas, titled ‘The implant’. Esposito

takes up L’Intrus in the midst of a broader discussion of his debt to
Donna Haraway, who not only presented immunology as ‘the heart of
biopolitics’ (Esposito, 2011: 149; see Haraway 1993: 365–6), but also
challenged Foucault’s reliance upon an anachronistic image of the
body as a discrete entity with a clearly demarcated border (Esposito,
2011: 146). He uses Nancy’s essay to illustrate Haraway’s claim that
postmodern bodies have been disaggregated and dispersed in a biotech-
nical network, citing L’Intrus as ‘probably . . . the most radical and at the
same time the most sobering state of awareness regarding the meaning of
the technicity of one’s body’ (2011: 151–2). While Nancy’s transplant
experience clearly illuminates Haraway’s claims about cyborg subjectiv-
ities, I would like to focus on another dimension of his account that
Esposito, surprisingly, does not discuss; for Nancy explicitly framed
L’Intrus in terms of the imagined gift-community to which he was sup-
posed to belong as a recipient of this ‘gift of life’ (see also Blacker, 2010).
Considering Nancy’s reflections in light of the gift tradition complements
Esposito’s perspective on the technicity of the body, and supports his
efforts to conceive a biopolitical community that avoids thanatopolitics,
and remains of, not over, life.
Looking back on his transplant and cancer experience, Nancy appre-
ciates the donation that saved his life, and claims ‘no one can doubt that
this gift is now a basic obligation of humanity’ (2008: 166). However, his
experience with this gift was not at all like the essentially reciprocal
relationship described by organ transplant professionals, or Maussean
gift-exchange theorists. Far from experiencing the ‘solidarity, and even
the fraternity, of “donors” and recipients’ emphasized in the bio-medical-
ethical discussions about his graft, Nancy claims that after receiving the
transplant

the whole dubious symbolism of the gift of the other – a secret,

ghostly complicity or intimacy between the other and me – wears
out very quickly. In any event, its use, still wide-spread when I was
grafted, seems to be disappearing bit by bit from the minds of the
graftees. (2008 [1999]: 166, also 1997: 198 n.158)

Though Esposito never says so, Nancy’s transplant experience is actually

closer to the munus, and the sense of ‘community as loss’ it supports, than
it is to the Maussean gift-exchange model.
Though there is no binding reciprocity between donors and recipients
in Nancy’s account, the two obligations of the munus – to receive and to
give – appear to have been fulfilled in his transplant experience. This is
particularly clear among those who anonymously donate their blood,
organs, gametes or other tissues to unknown recipients, as Nancy’s
donor apparently did; such donors abide by the munus’ obligation to
70 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

give that which they have received, without expectation of return.

Donors are not the focus of L’Intrus, however; in fact, all Nancy says
of the person who donated ‘his’ transplanted heart is that it could have
been anyone in his blood type, without regard to sex or ethnicity (2008
[1999]: 166). Esposito does mention ‘the unilateral gift of blood, or
organs’ in ‘Donner la technique’, but locates them even farther from
Maussean gift-exchange than I do, citing them as examples of ‘authentic,
totally gratuitous’ gifts (1995: 194). In deference to Nancy’s perhaps
hopeful claim that such gifts have become ‘a basic obligation of human-
ity’, and with apologies to Esposito, I think such donated tissues are
actually better examples of the munus than the ‘true gift’ (Esposito,
1995: 196). But whether such donations are interpreted as pure gifts or
obligatory ones, they display the Bataillean/Nancian sense of community
as expenditure, rather than the acquisition or accumulation promised by
the proprietary conceptions of community Esposito tries to move past in
his trilogy. So I agree with Esposito’s characterization of such donated
tissues as a ‘disinterested transfer of a part of the self’, but am still a bit
wary when he describes them as ‘a pure loss’ (Esposito, 1995: 196, empha-
sis added; see also Godbout with Caillé, 1998: 178).
While the loss experienced by tissue donors is only implied in L’Intrus,
Nancy’s reflections on receiving such a momentous gift reveal an even
more pervasive sense of loss among those who apparently gain through
the relationship. Interpreted in terms of the immunization paradigm,
Nancy’s extended life could be presented as a testament to the success
of biopolitical techniques in fulfilling the Hobbesian promise of corporeal
self-preservation. However, throughout L’Intrus Nancy describes his
experiences as a recipient not in terms of temporal accumulation, but
in the very terms Esposito uses to express the sense of community evoked
by the munus – as a loss of the ‘proper’ (see Esposito, 2011: 152; see also
Blacker, 2010: 37, 39, 41). Beginning with the recognition that his heart
had weakened to the point where it ‘had to’ be replaced, Nancy experi-
enced a sense that ‘something broke away from me, or this thing surged
up inside me, where nothing had been before: nothing but the “proper”
immersion inside me of a “myself” never identified as this body, still less
as this heart, suddenly watching itself’ (2008: 163, emphasis added). His
physicians’ biomedical view of his body as a collection of exchangeable
parts further disrupted Nancy’s sense of ownership of ‘his’ body: ‘My
own heart (you will have understood that this is the whole question of the
“proper” – or else it is nothing of the sort, and then there is properly
nothing to understand, no mystery, not even question: just the mere
evidence of a transplant, as the doctors prefer to call it’ (2008 [1999]:
162, emphasis added). Ultimately, the propriety of the Hobbesian
imperative of self-preservation was itself challenged by Nancy’s experi-
ence. ‘What, “properly,” is this life whose “saving” is at stake?’
Nancy asks. ‘A “proper” life, not to be found in any organ, and nothing
Tierney 71

without them. A life that not only lives on, but continues to live properly’
(2008 [1999]: 166, emphasis added).
Given the loss of the proper Nancy experienced, as well as Esposito’s
effort to move past ‘the proper/common dialectic’ that governs contem-
porary discussions of community, it is important to consider the specific
sense in which Nancy’s extended life could be considered proper, and
how such a life properly relates to community. I want to suggest that
Nancy’s post-transplant life is proper in a sense that is fundamentally
improper for the immunization paradigm, and the proprietary concep-
tions of community that developed within that paradigm. Nancy’s trans-
plant experience challenges, or reframes, the immunological strategy of
preserving life, as that which is most properly one’s own, against death.
Prior to his transplant, Nancy was already aware that death was not
excluded from community. In The Inoperative Community, that gift
Esposito cannot repay, he proclaimed:

Community does not sublate the finitude it exposes. Community itself,

in sum, is nothing but this exposition. It is the community of finite
beings . . . a community of finitude. (Nancy, 1991 [1982]: 26–7)

His subsequent experience with transplant and cancer techniques con-

firmed and deepened this understanding of the community of finitude.
Rather than characterizing the community to which he ‘owes’ his
ongoing life immunologically, as one that preserved his corporeal self
from death as an intruder, he instead experienced a community in
which life and death, or finitude, are bound together indiscriminately.
‘[N]o one can doubt’, Nancy reflects, ‘that this gift institutes the possi-
bility of a network where life/death is shared by everyone, where life is
connected with death, where the incommunicable is in communication’
(2008 [1999]: 166).
The biomedical gifts Nancy received are undeniably extreme, but his
unique insight into the biopolitical nexus of life, death, gift, community is
relevant to growing numbers of people in the burgeoning bioeconomy;
‘this type of condition concerns more and more other bodies’, he notes,
‘the sick, the aged, compromised, handicapped, assisted, pieced-together
bodies’ (1997 [1993]: 198 n.158, also 149; and Wynn, 2009: 8). There
certainly are thanatopolitical risks posed by the conception of a biopo-
litical community Nancy presents in L’Intrus, which fulfills the obliga-
tions of the munus through a contagion in which life and death intrude
upon each other. These risks are heightened by the temptation to inter-
pret through the logic of sacrifice those donated tissues that preserve and
extend the lives of Nancy and others, and to see them as gifts that redeem
the deaths of donors. Esposito’s inclination to describe such donations as
pure gifts flirts with this temptation, by intimating (intentionally or not)
that donors are perhaps purified through the selfless act. To avoid these
72 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

risks we should refrain from interpreting the gifts that circulate in the
bioeconomy as transforming the loss of death into a gain, or accumula-
tion, and keep in mind Nancy’s dictum from The Inoperative Community:
‘Community occurs in order to acknowledge . . . the impossibility of
making a work out of death’ (1991 [1982]: 15). It is safer to think
of gifts like Nancy’s heart in terms of expenditures of excess or surplus,
as in Bataille’s later concept of the general economy, rather than in terms
of his earlier thoughts about sacrifice.
Esposito is not overly optimistic about the chances of avoiding the
thanatopolitical declension of the immunization paradigm, and closes the
trilogy with a warning: ‘Whether [biopolitics’] meaning will again be
disowned in a politics of death or affirmed in a politics of life will
depend on the mode in which contemporary thought will follow its
traces’ (2008: 194). As I read Esposito’s warning, if we follow the fearful
Hobbesian trace that seeks to compensate for human finitude, we will
continue trying to make a work out of death in some biotechnical form of
immortality, and maintain the immunization paradigm. But rather than
redeeming, or worse, defeating death,10 an affirmative biopolitical stance
ought to embrace death as it does life, as a gift, and celebrate the essential
imbrication of life and death without expectation of compensation or
return. For this is the fundamental lesson Nancy learned from his experi-
ence as a biomedically extended life: ‘Isolating death from life – without
leaving one intimately entwined with the other, and each intruding upon
the heart of the other – this we must never do’ (2008: 165).

Notes
1. In American culture the phrase ‘biopolitics of life’ immediately raises
suspicions about the issue of abortion, and the impact any such biopolitics
would have on reproductive rights. Melinda Cooper poses such questions
about the relationship between Agamben’s conception of life and the
Catholic Church’s 19th-century shift from quickening to conception as the
point at which life begins (Cooper, 2009). She does not draw Esposito’s
biopolitics of life into her critique, and I think this is appropriate. For
Cooper offers Deleuze’s conception of immanence as an alternative to
Agamben’s troubling conception of life, and Esposito also relies heavily on
this Deleuzean concept. Indeed, Esposito claims that Deleuze’s Pure
Immanence ‘contain[s] all the threads that we have woven to this point
under the sign of an affirmative biopolitics’ (2010: 191). However, I will
not be able to explore the Deleuzean dimension of Esposito’s affirmative
biopolitics in this article.
2. Campbell translated Communitas and Bı´os; edited a special issue of Diacritics
dedicated to Esposito’s work, titled ‘Bios’, Immunity, Life: The Thought of
Roberto Esposito (34, 2 [summer 2006]); and co-edited with Adam Sitze a
symposium in Law, Culture, and the Humanities on Esposito’s post-trilogy
work on the dispositif of the person (February 2012).
Tierney 73

3. Lorna Weir (2013) also focuses on Esposito’s relation to the gift in her
contribution to the special issue of Angelaki mentioned above, but, as I
will show below, my interpretation of this relationship is quite different
from Weir’s.
4. I have been unable to identify an original Italian version of ‘Donner la
technique’, and assume that it was first published in this Maussean journal.
5. Grégoire Mallard examines Mauss’s futile efforts to shape the post-First
World War reparation program on the gift-model, rather than the imperi-
alistic arrangement that was ultimately imposed by the Treaty of Versailles
(Mallard, 2011).
6. Here I have substituted the word ‘mutual’ for Campbell’s ‘reciprocal’. From
my interpretation of Esposito’s concept of the munus, the term ‘reciprocal
donation’ implies a form of gift-giving in which there is an expectation of
return, while the term ‘mutual donation’ refers to a gift-giving that occurs in
common, but without the promise of return. There is some warrant for this
substitution. In the original Italian edition of Bı´os the phrase is ‘di dona-
zione reciproca’ (Esposito, 2004: 47), and this same phrase appeared in the
Italian edition of Communitas (Esposito, 1998: xvii). While Campbell ren-
dered this as ‘reciprocal donation’ in his 2008 translation of Bı´os, he trans-
lated it as ‘mutual gift-giving’ in his 2010 translation of Communitas
(Esposito, 2010: 7). So in making this substitution I am following
Campbell’s most recent translation. However, in the even more recent trans-
lation of Immunitas by Zakiya Hanafi, the term ‘della donazione reciproca’
(2002: 9) is translated as ‘reciprocal gift-giving’ (2011: 6).
7. Here I have omitted Hobbes’ phrase ‘mutual donation; and’, which is trou-
bling for two reasons. First, Hobbes’ claim that ‘donation’ is synonymous
with ‘contract’ seems to support Sahlins’ interpretation of Mauss’s gift-
exchange as a form of contract. But Hobbes’ main point in this quote is
precisely to distinguish the free gift from ‘contracts’ that produce reciprocal
benefits for those involved. Hobbes’ equivalence of donation and contract
muddles this distinction, but not enough to cause Esposito to elide the
phrase ‘mutual donation’. The second trouble lies with the first word in
the phrase, ‘mutual’, which Hobbes seems to use synonymously with recip-
rocal – that is, transfers that lead to ‘reciprocal benefits’ are ‘mutual dona-
tions’. This equivalency runs against the distinction I drew earlier between
the reciprocally beneficial potlatch and the mutual, non-reciprocating gift of
the munus.
8. This is a more serious quarrel with Foucault, however, since he was par-
ticularly dismissive of Hobbes precisely during that period in which he
developed his thoughts about biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality.
I have argued that Foucault was mistaken in his dismissal of Hobbes, and
that Hobbes’ political theory actually helps illuminate Foucault’s work on
the affirmative form of power he famously described as biopower (see
Tierney, 2006).
9. L’Intrus was first published in the journal De´dale, no. 9–10 (1999), and in
2000 it was published as a book (Paris: Galilée). In 2004 Claire Denis dir-
ected a film of the same name, which was loosely inspired by Nancy’s essay.
10. The 30 September 2013 cover of Time magazine asks, ‘Can Google solve
death?’
74 Theory, Culture & Society 33(2)

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Thomas F. Tierney is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the College

of Wooster (Ohio), and formerly taught at Illinois Wesleyan University
and Concord University. He has served as a National Endowment for the
Humanities (US) Visiting Scholar at Otterbein University, and a Visiting
Fellow at the Center for Biomedicine and Society, King’s College,
London. He is the author of The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of
Technical Culture (State University of New York Press, 1993), and
numerous theoretical articles on advanced biomedical techniques. His
current research focuses on the biopolitical implications of the ‘bioec-
onomy’ of human tissues.