"Non-Political Categories" Author: [Italy] Roberto Esposito Publisher: Baideya | Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House Translator: Zhang Kai

-Editor's Recommendation-

○ For any reader who is not satisfied with the various political thought categories of the 20th century, who hopes to transcend the complex picture of modern political philosophy, and who desires to gain a new perspective of understanding, the concept of "non-politics" proposed in this book provides him or her with a critical perspective.

● This book was written in the 1980s. As an early work of Roberto Esposito, it is a must-read for understanding the roots of the "immunity paradigm" and "community" advocated by the author in his later years.

○ This book is also essential for understanding the "Italian theory" of biopolitics that follows from Foucault and Agamben.

-Content Introduction-

This book is the author's creative reinterpretation of the boundaries of several political categories in the 20th century. In the perspective of "non-politics", the author has launched a series of ideological confrontations with Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti, Simone Weil, Georges Bataille, Ernst Junger and others. Standing on the border of politics, he thinks about politics in a negative way, deconstructs and creatively reinterprets several important political categories in the 20th century, and then proposes the possibility of "non-politics", another political dimension outside of political theology and modern depoliticization. The non-political stance shows the ambiguity and deadlock of political concepts and binary oppositional thinking patterns, subverts the political concepts of modernity, and shows the void at its center.

"Non-politics" enters the core of politics by staying at the edge of politics. It is neither "anti-politics" that is hostile to politics and operates politics with a negative attitude, nor "no politics" that withdraws from politics, remains neutral and is indifferent to politics. "Non-politics" does not abandon politics, but thinks about politics outside the boundaries of political categories; it is not a separation from politics, but a politics of sharing; it is wary of all dualistic tendencies and attempts to speak of the impossibility of politics in a transcendent critical perspective: what politics "is not" and what politics "can never be".

About the Author · · · · · ·