Politics and Negation - For an Affirmative Philosophy - For an Affirmative Philosophy

For some while we have been witnessing a series of destructive phenomena which seem to indicate a full-fledged return to the negative on the world stage - from terrorism and armed conflict to the threat of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, politics seems increasingly impotent in the face of these threats.
In this book, the leading Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito reconstructs the genealogy of the reciprocal intertwining of politics and negation. He retraces the intensification of negation in the thought of various thinkers, from Schmitt and Freud to Heidegger, and examines the negative slant of some of our fundamental political categories, such as sovereignty, property and freedom. Against the centrality of negation, Esposito proposes an affirmative philosophy that does not negate or repress negation but radically rethinks it in the positive cipher of difference, determination and opposition. The result is a rigorous and original pathway which, in the tension between affirmation and negation, recognizes the disturbing traumas of our time, as well as the harbingers of what awaits at its limits.
This highly original and timely book will be of great value to students and scholars in philosophy, cultural theory and the humanities more generally, and to anyone interested in contemporary European thought.

List of contents

Introduction
Glosses
Chapter One
1. Enemy and Friend
2. Negative Terms
3. Denials
4. Being and nothingness
5. Being-to-death
Glosses
Chapter Two
1. Annihilations
2. Sovereign Negation
3. Not common
4. Negative freedom
5. In the Reverse of the People
Glosses
Chapter Three
1. Difference
2. Determination
3. Opposition
Glosses
Notes
Index of names

About the author

Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.

Product details

• Authors: Esposito, Roberto Esposito, Roberto (University of Naples) Esposito, Zakiya Hanafi
• Assisted by: Zakiya Hanafi (Translation), Hanafi Zakiya (Translation)
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.11.2019
• EAN: 9781509536610
• ISBN: 978-1-5095-3661-0
• No. of pages: 200
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > 20th and 21st centuries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: antiquity to present day; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political theories and the history of ideas; Philosophie, Politikwissenschaft, Politik, Kulturwissenschaften, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Philosophy, Allg. Kulturwissenschaften, Political Philosophy & Theory, Politische Philosophie u. Politiktheorie, Philosophie des 20. Jhd., 20th Century Philosophy