The Origin of the Political

In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth centurys most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homers Iliadthat great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendts and Weils voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Espositos notion and practice of the impolitical. In Espositos account Arendt and Weil emerge in the inverse of the others thought, in the shadow of the others light, to think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought. Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the Wests illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.