Categories of the Impolitical

Roberto Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His many books in English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Fordham).

"The limbic Esposito is laid bare by his translator. This luculent rendition of Categories of the Impolitical provides a fluent and accessible introduction to Esposito's most intriguing and challenging work. Here, finally, in incisive and poetic prose, in a properly humanistic and engaged tenor, Esposito's contropiano, his counterplan of the impolitical and non categorial is made available in partibus infidelium, which is to say, in the anglophone world." -- -Peter Goodrich Cardozo School of Law "Categories of the Impolitical is an impressive attempt to think about politics beyond sovereignty and against political theology. Through clear and sophisticated readings of crucial yet often neglected political thinkers of the twentieth century like Weil, Bataille, Voegelin, and Broch, this book prepares the groundwork for Esposito's continuing exploration of the possibility of community outside of representation and of politics without transcendence. An indispensable work for anyone interested in Italian theory." -- -Miguel Vatter University of New South Wales "Categories of the Impolitical is an original and intense meditation on the central void of our historical epoch. The impolitical, beyond any number of misapprehensions, is the always already political refusal to engage in mystification in the face of nihilism. Esposito's book relentlessly traces and names the suspension and withholding of political sonambulism against every kind of political theology. It is a story, unfinished and unfinishable, about the improbable awakening that a certain type of sleepwalker-the intellectual-simultaneously desires and abhors, and for the most part avoids." -- -Alberto Moreiras Texas A&M University

• Contents Preface to the Second Italian Edition 000 Acknowledgments 000 Translator's Note 000 Introduction: An Impolitical Departure 1 1. At the Limits of the Political 000 2. The Unrepresentable Polis 000 3. Power and Silence 000 4. A Politics of Ascesis 000 5. The Community of Death 000 Notes 000 Index 000