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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life as such--whether philosophical, ethical, or political--assume the notion of personhood as their indispensable point of departure. This is all the more true today. In bioethics, for example, Catholic and secular thinkers may disagree on what constitutes a person and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisive importance: human life is considered to be untouchable only when based on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment of subjective rights continues to be increasingly linked to the qualification of personhood, which appears to be the only one capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, right and life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins of Western civilization. The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is that the notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it is precisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to create a separation in both the human race and the individual between a rational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into the inferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to the performative power of the person, whose dual origins can be traced back to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues his strikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry by inviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the third person, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of the person, points toward the orginary unity of the living being.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Introduction
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1 The Double Life The Machine of the Human Sciences
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2 Person, Human, Thing
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3 Third Person
1 Non-Person
2 The Animal
3 The Other
4 He/She
5 The Neuter
6 The Outside
7 The Event
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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e1
Third Person
Politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal
Roberto Esposito
Translated by Zakiya Hanafi
First published in Italian as Terza Persona © Giulio Einaudi s.p.a, 2007
This English edition © Polity Press, 2012
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4397-7ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4398-4(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabonby Toppan Best-set Premedia LimitedPrinted and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall
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Introduction
1
If there is an unquestioned assumption in contemporary debate, it involves the value universally awarded to the category of person. No matter what the discipline – philosophy, theology, or one of the more specialized fields, like law or bioethics – personhood remains the basis for legitimizing every ‘theoretically correct’ discourse. This is not some well-reasoned conceptual choice. It is a given, one that apparently requires no further proof. Regardless of the starting perspective, it is hardly even conceivable today to take a critical look at what Maria Zambrano defined, back in the 1950s, as “the part of human life that is most alive, the living core capable of passing through biological death.”1 Although this assumption has been oriented toward different contexts of understanding and tied to a variety of definitions, it has never lost force, even during the waning of the ‘personalist’ movement. Quite the opposite: during the decline of personalism the paradigm of the person actually attracted renewed interest. As Paul Ricoeur announced some years back: “Death to personalism; long live the person!” While personalism “was not competitive enough to win the conceptual battle,” the concept of person “remains the best candidate for the juridical, political, economic and social battles of our time.”2 The idea of person, whose most sophisticated inspiration came from a specific branch of early nineteenth-century phenomenology,3 was relaunched with ever greater intensity from this point on. But it was an idea that cut across the entire face of contemporary philosophy,4 spanning both analytic and continental philosophy as well as Catholic and secular schools of thought.
This convergence between Catholics and secularists – one that has never been openly declared and is actually often denied, even though the effects of its meaning are clearly at work – is easily recognizable in the often bitterly polemical debate that, for over twenty years, has regularly flared up on the slippery terrain of bioethics. The debate hinges on determining the exact moment when a living being – or on defining what type of living being – can be considered a person, but never on the decisive value that this attribution entails. Whether a life is declared to be personal from the act of conception, at a certain stage of embryonic development, or from the moment of birth, its entrance into the regime of personhood is what lends it unquestionable value. It hardly matters whether one becomes a person by divine decree, through natural means, all at once, or in a series of stages: what counts is the threshold beyond which something generically living takes on a significance that radically changes its legal status. Nowhere to my knowledge, not even in the midst of the most profound disagreement on what may or should be defined as a person (not to mention the equally problematic distinction between a potential and an actual person),5 is what we, by habit or choice, call ‘person’ ever questioned – much less its absolute onto-theological primacy. If a tacit point of tangency exists between the seemingly opposing conceptions of the Christian sacredness of life and the secular notion of its quality, it resides precisely in this assumed superiority of the personal over the impersonal: only a life that can provide the credentials of personhood can be considered sacred or qualitatively significant.
When we turn from the lexicon of philosophy or bioethics to the more defined lexicon of the law, not only do we find the same assumption, we also recognize its conceptual roots. These lie in the association, which the modern legal notion has made for some time now, between the category of person and the subject of law, tying them together in such a way as to make of the former a condition for conceiving of the latter and vice versa. In order to be able to assert what we call subjective rights – to life, to well-being, to dignity – we must first enter into the enclosed space of the person. Conversely, in a similar fashion, to be a person means to enjoy these rights in and of themselves. A recent formulation of this idea, picked up by a wide variety of writers, makes a claim for “the vindication of the right of every human being ‘to have rights,’ that is, to be a legal person, entitled to certain inalienable rights, regardless of the status of their political membership.”6 In these sorts of assertions there is more than the simple truism they appear to contain – namely that every human being must be considered as such. What we have here is the increasingly widespread idea that the category of person has the conceptual (and therefore, sooner or later, also practical) function of bridging the still dramatically gaping chasm between the concept of human being and that of citizen, set out so starkly by Hannah Arendt at the close of the Second World War. While she traced the origin of this gap to the failure to extend citizenship to – or to the willful removal of citizenship from – entire groups of people who were thus driven into the unendurable condition of statelessness, the attitude that takes shape with the 1948 Declaration of Rights is that it can only be filled by a notion endowed with a higher degree of universality than the modern concept of citizenship. From this conviction, one that is so established by now as to be considered implicit, was born the continually repeated call – or desire – to move away from the notion of individual to that of person, as expressed by the title of an influential study by Martha Nussbaum.7
Turning to specialized jurists, this position is further articulated along two apparently divergent vectors of meaning, which nevertheless find common ground in their shared agreement regarding the strategic importance of the person. Because of its universal applicability, personhood is seen as the only semantic field that can possibly overlap the two spheres of law and humanity, separated as they are by the national ideology of citizenship. This means that a concept like that of human rights is only conceivable and viable through the lexicon of personhood. As far as Luigi Ferrajoli is concerned, this does not mean negating the specificity of other types of rights, such as public rights granted only to citizens or political rights reserved only to those among them who are “capable of acting”; rather it means including all rights within a larger circle, constituted by the fundamental rights attributed to all the human beings endowed with the status of person. As the dynamics of globalization are breaking up the confines of national borders, driving legal praxis into increasingly international venues, human rights are no longer extended “to individuals because they are citizens, but rather, because they are persons.”8 This idea is bolstered, albeit in a different theoretical context, by Stefano Rodotà: he infers the renewed importance of the concept of person (which in his opinion, too, is destined to take the place of the more limited one of citizen) on the basis of the centrality of the body in the practical reality of actual conditions of existence. In this case “the shift in attention from the individual to the person, shown by the prevalence of this word in much of recent literature,”9 is not due to its greater degree of abstraction, but rather to the fact that the term adheres more closely to the material situation of the living individual. While in the past practical conditions of life were excluded from the formal conception of the individual subject of law, today “we stand before a connection between humanity and law that takes the form of an interpenetration between person and fundamental rights.”10 To sum up: in this case, too, the category of person appears to be the only one that can unite human beings and citizens, body and soul, law and life.
2
But is this really how things stand? A quick look at the world situation raises a number of doubts on this point: the growing number of deaths from hunger, war, and epidemics is an eloquent testimony to the ineffectiveness of what has come to be called ‘human rights.’ If this phrase was intended to signal the inclusion of all human life within the protective space of the law, we are forced to admit that no right is less guaranteed today than the right to life. How can this be? Considering that the inviolability of the person has become the guiding light of all democratically inspired social theories, where does this widening divergence between the affirmation of the principle and its practical application originate? Was the category of the person not supposed to establish a definitive point of union between law and life, subjectivity and body, form and existence? Of course, one can always answer, as people often do, that the category has not been extended enough to produce the desired results, or that it has been only partially affirmed in terms of quantity, and only approximately in terms of quality. In spite of the idea of person being proclaimed, appealed to, and raised high on every banner, it has not taken firm root at the heart of interhuman relations.
The response offered in the following pages takes a different, even opposite, direction. The hypothesis that arises from this book, a more disturbing one altogether, is that the essential failure of human rights, their inability to restore the broken connection between rights and life, does not take place in spite of the affirmation of the ideology of the person but rather because of it. In other words, the failure of human rights is not to be conceptually traced to the limited extension of the ideology of the person but rather to its expansion; not to the fact that we have yet to enter fully into its regime of meaning, but to the fact that we have never really moved out of it. Of course this overly succinct, even intentionally drastic formulation anticipates a conclusion that will be presented in this book in a far more detailed and dialectical fashion. For one thing, as we shall see, the category of person is so inherently complex that it is not easily reducible to a single order of meaning. This is evident from the start, in its constitutive oscillation between the language of theology and the lexicon of the law – a duality that persists in the two registers through which its meaning is expressed today: the Catholic and the secular. But hermeneutic caution is equally suggested by another, perhaps even more significant consideration, this time of a historical nature. I am referring to the fact that when the category of person was relaunched at the end of the Second World War, it took form as an almost obligatory retort to the out-and-out attack it was subjected to – from a school of thought that was heterogeneous in its expressive modes but had achieved its most intense point of internal unification precisely in the deconstruction of the concept of person.
At its origin, in the early nineteenth century, there was a mixing and mutual influx of the new biological knowledge with philosophical and political thought. The reason why I have given particular attention to this alliance and to the work of the great physiologist Xavier Bichat, in which this mixture began to assume an almost archetypal form, is that – as I will argue throughout the remainder of this book – I am convinced that paradigm shifts (and paradigm leaps to an even greater extent) occur in all the human sciences by incorporating a foreign element, which comes from the lexicon of another discipline. This is the reason for my attempt to trace out the decisive role that linguistics, and then, through it, anthropology, played in the general biologization of politics that has come to be known today as ‘biopolitics.’ The research devoted by August Schleicher and his successors to the organismic theory of language and to an anthropology which, in its turn, incorporated elements from zoology traces out the contours of an increasingly radical challenge to the modern concept of person as the site of legal imputation and as the rational subject of political action. The theory of a double biological layer within every living being – one vegetative and unconscious, and the other cerebral and relational – was first put forward by Bichat in the form of medical knowledge, then ‘translated’ by Schopenhauer into philosophical knowledge and by Comte into sociological knowledge. This theorization initiated a process of desubjectivization, which was destined to drastically change the framework of the modern concept of the political. Once human beings were thought to be internally traversed by the tension between two heterogeneous forces and actually determined, in our passions, and even in our will, by a force more in keeping with simple reproductive life, the very premise on which the modern political paradigm was founded could no longer be sustained. If individuals were immersed in the blind corporeality of their vegetative life, incapable even of governing themselves, how could they intentionally create a political order such as to be able to derive their subjective rights from it? If truth be told – this is the conclusion all these thinkers came to, expressed in different ways – not only did the organization of society depend more on a biological given than on the free will of its citizens and on the sovereignty instituted by that will, but this biological given pre-existed both and was inalterable in its overall structure.
When this biopolitical current, which was initially free of any particular ideological connotations, intersected first with the hierarchical anthropology of the late 1800s and then with the emphatically racist anthropology of the early 1900s, the picture quickly changed. The turning point can be identified in the transfer of the dual-life principle from the sphere of the single living being to that of the human species as a whole, which now appeared to be split into two juxtaposed areas of unequal value, and hence endowed with a different right to survival. This is the outcome of a paradigm shift that went beyond a simple lexical contamination between different disciplines. What is registered in this shift is a sort of retroactive effect, or a ricochet perspective, as a result of which the influx of biology into politics was preventively charged with a political significance that was both aggressive and exclusive in nature. The semantic commutator of this genetic mutation in the modern conception, even more than the old linguistic organicism, was an anthroposociology articulated in its turn in terms of comparative zoology. According to this view, humanity was nothing but the infinitely operable set of human types that were differentiated on the basis of how closely or distantly they are related to animal species. Even more than representing the origin of the human species (as Darwin maintained, in a research program that was later co-opted and turned inside out by social Darwinism), the animal thus became a point of division within humanity, between species of people who were separated by their relation to life – and thus to death, since the easy life of some turned out to be directly proportional to the forced death of others. Any idea whatsoever of a formal equality between individuals endowed with a rational will was clearly shattered by this thanatological hold. In the 1930s, the depersonalization project initiated in the previous century from a different perspective reached a point of no return: the notion of person was immediately crushed into its mere biological referent and, rather than philosophically deconstructed, it appeared to be literally devastated.
3
But in this case, too, do appearances entirely reflect reality? Without denying the obvious elements of a conflict between the culture of the person and the forms of power/knowledge that have sought to eliminate it at its source, this book adopts a transversal perspective, which makes an entirely affirmative response problematic. When continuities and ruptures are observed from this point of view, rather than appearing in a simple, head-on collision, they arrange themselves in a more complex picture, which defies the linearity of a model based on dichotomy. The idea here is to see double – or rather to displace the phenomena onto two superimposed planes – in a form that does not separate the cracks on the surface from the geological stratum in which they open up. From this perspective, which is of an archaeological or topological slant, what appears to be a negation of principle can take shape as a contrasting complementarity – in other words, as a fold inside the larger figure it is intended to oppose. This different perspectival mode must be applied both to the overt, frontal attack against the category of person, along the line we have just reconstructed, and equally to the response that was mounted in its name at the end of the Second World War. We have seen how Nazism, by fulfilling and at the same time overturning the biopolitical critique of the modern tradition, crushed the person into the individual and the collective body that is its bearer. As demonstrated early on by Emmanuel Levinas,11 what actually lay at the heart of this deadly project was the elimination from human life of any transcendence with respect to its immediate biological given. No wonder, then, that the great revival of the concept of person, launched on the still smoldering ashes of the Nazi regime, was intended to reopen a gap – a transcendental, if not ontological, difference – between the subject and the biological substrate underlying it. On the other hand, some difference from the body was already implicitly at the core of the notion of person – taken in its original meaning of mask that adheres to the face of the actor, but without being identified with it. The Christian tradition, which soon took possession of the concept, even making it central to the figure of the Trinity, tended to widen that gap by also charging it with a specific metaphysical significance. No matter how inextricably personhood is linked to a living body, the two are not wholly coextensive; and indeed what is most intrinsic to the person, that which allows it to pass into the afterlife, is precisely the fact that it is not coextensive with the body. This defining trait is so fundamental that it recurs, secularized of course, in the Cartesian dualism between res extensa and res cogitans and, through it, in modern culture as a whole.
The most enduring trait to be associated with the meaning and fate of the concept of person, however, is that established by Roman law. In this case – especially in this case, actually – the discontinuities, sometimes even radical ones, that mark the internal history of the concept and, to an even greater degree, separate it from the modern legal conception cannot be smoothed over. In no way am I proposing some forward projection of a conceptual apparatus that is tied to its time and thus, clearly, cannot be compared with the subjectivist lexicon that after a certain point left its mark on all subsequent legal history, as has been widely discussed in the literature. Still, there is no denying its subterraneous persistence, like that of some sort of unconscious anachronism that resurfaces at various points in our legal philosophy, setting it at odds with itself. One of these antinomic nodes between the archaic and the contemporary, and by far the most relevant, is what I will from now on refer to as the ‘dispositif’ of the person, in order to highlight its performative role – I mean a role productive of real effects. It is based on the assumed, continuously recurring separation between person as an artificial entity and the human as a natural being, whom the status of person may or may not befit.12 This systematic difference is simply the first, the original distinction between abstract categories set up by Roman law, which, in practice, led to some very concrete procedures of exclusion. However, the terrifying constitutive power of this dispositif lies not so much in the normative demarcation it carves out between the different categories as in the zones of indistinguishability it creates at their boundaries – starting with what is, in all senses of the word, the most decisive distinction: the one that characterizes the condition of the slave, situated as he is right in the middle, or in the passage, between person and thing, and thus definable both as a living thing and a reified person.
In reality, the condition of the slave is only the most visible tip of an entire mechanism of social discipline, which works specifically by continuously shifting the categorial thresholds that define, or create, the status of all living beings. Whence the perpetual oscillatory movement between the extremes of person and thing that makes each of them at the same time the opposite and the horizon of the other – not only in the general sense that the definition of the human-as-person emerges negatively out of that of the human-as-thing, but in the more meaningful sense that to experience personhood fully means to keep, or push, other living individuals to the edge of thingness.13 As I argue in the following pages, this extraordinary performative attitude of Roman legal formalism is particularly recognizable in the two opposite, mirror-image figures of manumission (manumissio) and emancipation (mancipatio), which, through specific rituals, served to regulate the double cross-flow of personalization and depersonalization. In them, the passage from slavery to freedom and from freedom to slavery, no matter how temporary and reversible, testifies to the always exceptional character of the condition of freedom. Freedom is only an interlude, a sort of unnatural pause on the servile horizon that included within its larger compass all human beings – with the exception of adult male Roman citizens, who themselves only entered into the regime of personhood after a long internship in the entirely subordinate realm of sonship. Whether or not the son’s subjection to the power vitae ac necis [of giving and taking life] of the pater foreshadows a specifically biopolitical type of dominion, one based solely on blood relationship, is still being debated. What is certain, however, is that even in this case – which was generalizable to all citizens of ancient Rome – the process of personification still passed via the status of thingness, where it could very well remain indefinitely.
4
The ancient Roman separation between homo and persona penetrates like a deep wedge into the philosophical, legal, and political conceptions of the modern era. The reason why this contiguity may not be perceptible to the naked eye is partly that the relations of implication hidden in the semantic upheavals – and even reversals – that run through these conceptions are not easily discernible. Also, the sharp subjectivist turn taken by legal theory, starting at least from the time of natural law, tends to wipe out the footprints of the Roman tradition. In reality, under the thick crust of a strikingly evident lexical transformation, one can glimpse the deeply etched signs of a presence that was never entirely negated by the great jurists. What we are talking about here is not continuity – or, even less, analogy. If anything, the circular figure that this book attempts to retrace is one that unites the opposites at the furthest edge of their contrast: like the points of a circumference, the further away they move from each other, the more they end up joining up again, in the other direction. This is what happened to the idea of person during the epochal transition from the objectivist formalism of Roman law to the individualistic subjectivism of modern rights. The moment these were awarded – at least since the French Revolution, but already by the time of Hobbes – to all humans, who were thus made equal by their common status as subjects, and then as citizens, at that moment the Roman separation between distinct human categories is said to have collapsed, along with the original distance between mask and face: not only because every individual now had its own mask, as it were, but because the mask adhered to the face so intrinsically that it became an integral part of it.
Except that this is not exactly how things went. This story leaves out a fairly major part of reality, which is shown not only by the fact that Hobbes himself separates the person from the body – and does so to the point of making the former the representative of other human, or even non-human, subjects; it is shown by the modern definition itself – the definition of the person, which is now extended, at least in law if not in fact, to all living beings, but only with respect to their moral or rational part. Personhood, it might be said, is that which, in the body, is more than body. Thus the original gap, implicit in the notion that was already formulated by Christian dogma and later reconverted into legal terms, is made to return. In opposition to the biopolitical, and afterwards thanatopolitical line, which tended to unify person and body by crushing the former into the biological matter of the latter, modern personalism, in all its expressions, re-establishes in every individual the separation between personal subject and human being. In this way subjective right, rather than being inherent to the entirety of the human being, applies only to the upper part, which is rational or spiritual in nature, exercising its dominion over the remaining area, which is devoid of these characteristics and therefore thrust into the regime of objecthood. Having rights, from this point of view, really means being subjected to one’s own objectification. This is precisely the definition of the person proposed by Jacques Maritain while he was actively engaged in drafting the Universal Declaration of 1948: personhood is qualified as the sovereignty that each human being exercises over his or her animal being. The contrastive symmetry with the two lives that Bichat talked about is hard to ignore, even though the relation of dominance between them is clearly inverted: Bichat assigns it to the vegetative and irrational part, while Maritain assigns it to the rational and voluntary part. What remains common, however, is the placement, inside the human being, of a non-human aspect, which in the first case is destined to overcome us and in the second to be mastered by us. Whether you choose to view the philosophy of the person as an unconscious (or even denied) form of biopolitics, or anti-personalist biopolitics as an inner fold of the dispositif of the person, either way we are defined by our relationship with the animal that both dwells inside us and alters us. At the root of this convergence lies, of course, the Aristotelian definition of the human being as a rational animal, adopted in the first case from the point of view of our animality and, in the second, from that of our rationality. Because of this shared assumption, contrary to first appearances perhaps, biopolitical corporealization of the person and spiritualistic personalization of the body are inscribed inside the same theoretical circle.
The avenue for breaking open this circle lies in a comprehensive revision of the relations of contiguity and opposition established by the interpretive tradition. We have talked about the relationship between ancient Roman law and the modern legal conception of the person. Something similar has to be said about the relationship between biopolitics and liberalism, one that is oppositional only in appearance. It might even be posited that liberalism is in fact the antinomic juncture between the ancient – and recent – philosophy of the person and its opposing school, reproducing its assumptions in an inverted form. In question, once again, is the differentiating nexus between person and body. For the liberal view, as represented by Locke or Mill, the body is owned by the person who dwells inside it. This aspect alone underscores the radical distance and fundamental difference of liberalism from Nazi biocracy: while the latter works on the human species as a whole, the former pertains only to the individual. Moreover, while Nazism assigned ownership of the body to state sovereignty, the liberal conception assigned ownership to the person implanted inside the body. But this basic heterogeneity also provides a measure of the trait of symmetry, defined, for both, by a productivist view of life – a life made to serve in one case the superior destiny of the chosen race and, in the other, the maximum expansion of individual freedom. Only that this freedom comes by way of a potential reduction of the body to an appropriated thing. The point of suture between these opposites is always relative to the definition of person. To be the owner of a body, the person cannot be coextensive with it; in fact, the person is specifically defined by the distance that separates it from the body. If you look at the bioethics developed as part of the liberal tradition, you find, in its ultimate form, the ancient Roman separation between persona and homo: both for Hugo Engelhardt and for Peter Singer, while not all human beings are persons, neither are all persons human beings. Hence the resulting gradation – or degradation – from full person to semi-person, non-person, and anti-person, represented respectively by the adult, the infant or disabled adult, the incurably ill, and the insane. Hence to each level of personalization – or depersonalization – there corresponds a different right to determination, and even preservation of one’s life. Here, too, in formulations that closely recall the sovereign power of the paterfamilias over his children and over anyone whose condition is a reified reproduction of that state, the personhood-deciding machine marks the final difference between what must live and what can be legitimately cast to death.
5
As far-reaching and widespread as the logic of the person is in its genealogy and effects, it does not occupy the entire contemporary horizon. Opposed to it, in ways that are not always recognizable and sometimes are only barely sketched out, is thought on the impersonal. The third chapter of this book examines some of its figures, or segments, drawn mainly from twentieth-century philosophy. I could have chosen other references – from contemporary art, especially from painting, music and film, which have long aimed at a deconstruction of the personal subject.14 I have preferred to focus on philosophy for this discussion in order to provide a preliminary theoretical grid for an object that is elusive practically by definition, precisely because it has always been emarginated, or overwhelmed, by the various forms of power/knowledge of the person. Which is why this part of my inquiry cannot be developed in a linear or coherent fashion. Its heterogeneity, even fragmentariness, is structural, not contingent; in the sense that, rather than having to do with the tonal diversity of the texts and authors involved, it relates to the negative nature of a category that takes on meaning only through contrast with another category, which is assumed to be prior to it or superimposed on it. Some immediate clarification needs to be provided about this as well. Of course the impersonal lies outside the horizon of the person, but not in a place that is unrelated to it: the impersonal is situated, rather, at the confines of the personal; on the lines of resistance, to be exact, which cut through its territory, thus preventing, or at least opposing, the functioning of its exclusionary dispositif. The impersonal is a shifting border: that critical margin, one might say, that separates the semantics of the person from its natural effect of separation; that blocks its reifying outcome. The impersonal does not negate the personal frontally, as a philosophy of the anti-person would; rather, the impersonal is its alteration, or its extroversion into an exteriority that calls it into question and overturns its prevailing meaning.
This complex – rather than merely oppositional – relation of the impersonal to the person is what explains the ‘third’ figure that lends its name to this entire inquiry. Rather than destroying the person – as the thanatopolitics of the twentieth century claimed to do, although it ended up reinforcing it instead – to do conceptual work on the ‘third person’ means creating an opening to a set of forces that push it beyond its logical, and even grammatical boundaries. This strategy of estrangement or outflanking responds perfectly to what is effectively the founding text: Émile Benveniste’s study of personal pronouns, which opens the third chapter. If there is anything that surpasses its natural relevance to linguistic issues, something invested with so much meaning that it illuminates the entire set of questions raised, it is Benveniste’s insistence on the difference of the third person, in both its pronominal and verbal forms, from the first and second person. Unlike them, it is the only one that does not have personal connotations, to the point where it can be defined as a ‘non-person’: not only because it refers to something or someone that cannot be circumscribed within a specific subject – in the sense that it can relate to everyone and no one – but, more profoundly, because it completely evades the dialogical regime of interlocution inside of which the other two remain fixed. This absolute specificity (the third person is the only one to be both singular and plural) stands out all the more in the unbreakable, even specular, connection that binds the first person to the second: in the discursive context, whether implicitly or explicitly, the I always addresses a you, just as a you always presupposes an I that designates it as such, before being substituted to it in the role of subject of the utterance. This is a necessity, one that reveals the rhetorical character of all philosophies of the second person (from Martin Buber to Vladimir Jankélévitch and beyond), whose logics always remain within the status of the first person, despite their claims of surpassing it. In fact, regardless of the mode of relationship said to exist between the two – direct or reversed, frontal or oblique, horizontal or vertical – the you only takes on meaning from the I that interpellates it, whether in the form of a command, an invocation, or a prayer. The ‘two’ is necessarily inscribed in the logic of the ‘one,’ just as ‘one’ always tends to split into ‘two’ in order to be able to mirror and recognize itself in its human or divine interlocutor.
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But, once this essential difference between the third person and the others has been established, the question arises as to how it is figured in the various philosophies of the impersonal. Firstly, it is figured as justice, understood in a form that is opposed both to the objective law of Roman origin and to the subjective law of the modern sort. This radical option lies at the heart of Simone Weil’s thought. The direct line that Weil, in opposition to the personalist tradition of Maritain, draws between the privative, exclusive character of the law and the generalization of the idea of person casts a bright beam of light onto the scene we are exploring. To counter the nihilistic effects of this connection, one that seems to stretch like a sinister shadow all the way from Rome to the Nazi regime, Weil asserts the truth of the impersonal with unprecedented clarity. What is sacred in humans is not their persona; it is that which is not covered by their mask. Only this has a chance of reforging the relationship between humanity and rights that was interrupted by the immunitary machine of the person, and of making possible something as seemingly contradictory as a ‘a common right’ or a ‘right in common.’ Everyone, from Alexandre Kojève and Vladimir Jankélévitch to Emmanuel Levinas, who insists on the essential – rather than simply functional – impartiality or neutrality of the law, on its condition of being a third party with respect to prosecution and defense, merely repeats from differing points of view the need first articulated by Weil. In each of them, the third person is what hails the advent of a law that can finally be translated into justice. If, for Kojève, this lies at the end of history, when human beings will reimmerse themselves in their animal nature, Jankélévitch both affirms and denies this fact, by placing it after the face-to-face relationship of love. Situated between the two thinkers, Levinas traces out a more complex position, attempting to reconcile the exclusive responsibility of the relationship between two persons with the requirement for universal justice toward the third by making them overlap.
