Incorporating the Gift: The<i>Béant</i>Community of Jean-Luc Nancy's<i>L'Intrus</i>

Blacker, Sarah

doi:10.1080/13534640903478726

Cited by 2 publications

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“…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 subjectivities, 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 supposed 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.…”

Section: Conclusion: Nancy's Heart?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Roberto Esposito’s ‘Affirmative Biopolitics’ and the Gift

Tierney

2015

Theory, Culture & Society

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This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos. 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 modernity’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’.

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Section: Conclusion: Nancy's Heart?mentioning

confidence: 99%