Description
Book SynopsisWhat 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 ty
Trade Review
Continuing his elaboration of the dispositive of person first set out in Third Person, philosopher Roberto Esposito turns his attention in this new book to the often troubled relation between human being and thing. The result is not only a wondrous reading of the semantics of the person and thing. but also an invitation to consider ?the living body? of multitudes as a possible response. Working across the fields of political philosophy and law, Persons and Things offers the reader dazzling perspectives on person as thing and thing as person. This, quite simply, is a brilliant book.
Timothy Campbell, Cornell University
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
