Greg Bird

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in common. This problematic is traced through a wide array of fields from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, to social theory.

“In this book, Greg Bird identifies and radically conceptualizes being-with as the problematic node that connects thinkers who in other respects are quite diverse such as Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy. His interpretation, acute and rigorous, illuminates in an admirable fashion a decisive passage of contemporary thought.” — Roberto Esposito, author of Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community

“In this exceptional book, Greg Bird offers for the first time in English a rigorous account of the common philosophical origins of Nancy, Agamben and Esposito’s work on community. By emphasizing the centrality of the proper in the ontology of being in common and tracing it back to Heidegger, Bird places Nancy, Agamben, and Esposito at the center of contemporary economico-political philosophical debates.” — María del Rosario Acosta López, DePaul University

“In Containing Community Greg Bird asks how we might imagine community in such a way that ‘being’ and not ‘having’ comes to the fore. His answer, contained across some truly marvelous readings of Proudhon, Marx, Heidegger, and then Nancy, Agamben, and Esposito surprises and delights especially for his take-down of the proprietary prejudice featured so frequently in how we conceive of community. It also happens to be one of the best books to appear in recent memory on Italian thought.” — Timothy C. Campbell, author of Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben.

On the second weekend of March 2020, just before the Canada-wide lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic was made official, we realized that we needed to take a snapshot of rapid changes that were unfolding around us. The biopolitical dimensions of public health and governmental responses to the pandemic were already clear, so we contacted Canadian-based scholars working in field of biopolitics to contribute short, rapid-response essays on the first, early stage of the pandemic. The editors at TOPIA and the University of Toronto Press graciously agreed to publish the essays online (Bird and Ironstone, 2020). In less than a week, 10 essays covering various biopolitical dimensions of the first week of the lockdown in Canada were published. The first volume, COVID-19 Essays, was written in the middle of March 2020, at exactly the moment when pandemic measures were being operationalized and the new pandemic discourse took on dramatic intensity in Canada. The short essays published then reflect the pandemic moment in which they appeared. On the one hand, critical engagement was tempered by pessimistic premonitions, much like Agamben's (2020a, 2020b), as our contributors recognized that our pandemic moment would be shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring and would provide the justification of further extensions of governmental power into the everyday lives of people. On the other hand, our contributors expressed hope for new or renewed forms of social solidarity in which the stakes of life and death revealed during a public health crisis might inspire care, community and con-viviality. Even with the incursion of complex social processes of pandemicization, the contributors argued, profound transformation and an ethos of care was also possible. Attention could be directed not simply to self-protection and preservation , but also to social transformation and enhancement where the conditions of life and living-captured, controlled, regulated and, as the pandemic made clear, unequally distributed-might be reconfigured. There were two paths that might be travelled, and which would win out was not clear. Months into the pandemic, it is still unclear.

This paper uses the three main etymological sources of quarantine (the 14th-century Venetian practice of isolating ships, Moses's Law Concerning Leprosy, and the Temptation of Christ) as heuristic devices to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the division of life between vital lives and biological labourers. I trace this phenomenon through the first two stages of this pandemic. The first stage took place roughly from early February to mid-March. The central figure during this stage was the cruise ship, including the division between passengers (vital lives) and seafarers (biological labourers). The second stage ran roughly from mid-March until the protests against the division of life erupted in late May. I focus on the broader distinction between essential workers and remote professional workers. I use the biblical references to examine how each group experienced quarantine measures during this second stage.

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our bio-political era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these bio-political entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?

This paper explores the role played by the dispositif of the proper in the collapse of the economic, social, and political spheres that many are now calling the impolitical crisis of neoliberalism. By turning to this dispositif, I provide an alternative account of the processes that have given rise to the collapse of these spheres. I begin by examining how theorists working within the paradigm of political economy set the theoretical terrain for this confusion. In the second section, I discuss the main features and provide a brief genealogical account of this dispositif. Finally, I end with a discussion of how this dispositif is central to contemporary identity politics through the example of the debate about gender neutral pronouns.

This chapter draws from Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunity to provide an alternative reading of guest worker programs. It focuses on the treatment of low-skilled migrant workers in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program to highlight how guest worker programs operate in a biopolitical economy that distinguishes between  “biological workers” and “biological citizens”. These categories enable the state to legally immunize itself from bearing responsibility for the vitality of the lives of low-skilled temporary foreign workers and they legitimate a whole series of segregation measures that are employed to immunize the nation from potentially lethal levels of contamination.

Chapter 5 in "Biopolitical Governance: Race, Gender and Economy," H. Richter (ed.), London: Roman & Littlefield, pp. 99-120.

In the following paper, we draw from Roberto Esposito's and Donna Haraway's theories of immunity to examine immigration apparatuses. The immunization perspective provides new ways of examining how immigration apparatuses function. In particular, we explore how they serve the purpose of biologically and culturally immunizing a nation from being contaminated by "dangerous" populations. We begin by briefly outlining Esposito's and Haraway's theories of immunity. Then for the remainder of the paper we provide a genealogical sketch of the demographics of immunization in Canadian immigration policies. In the Canadian case, there are two stages of immunization that roughly correspond to Esposito's historical account of the development of immunization apparatuses. First, we explore what we call the "crude immunization stage" (1867–1967), where various discriminatory criteria and measures were erected to safeguard the nation from being contaminated by populations designated as "dangerous." The second "sophisticated immunization stage" began when Canada adopted a more liberal notion of multiculturalism (1967–present). Despite making substantial changes to immigration policies in the late 1960s, which were supposed to drop all discriminatory criteria on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin, we demonstrate how the same categories were reasserted by streaming potential (im)migrants into two pools: valuable, high-skilled immigrant workers and disposable, low-skilled migrant laborers. In this second stage, Canada has increasingly relied upon "guest" workers over permanent immigrants to supply its labor market. This distinction between permanent immigrants and temporary migrants has become a new mechanism for discriminating on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin.

This article underlines and draws attention to critical insights Esposito makes regarding the prospects of rethinking community in a globalized world. Alongside Agamben and Nancy, Esposito challenges the property prejudice found in mainstream models of community. In identity politics, collective identity is converted into a form of communal property. Borders, sovereign territories, and exclusive rights are fiercely defended in the name of communal property. Esposito responds to this problem by developing what I call a “deontological communal contract” where being and ethics are prioritized over having and economics. I examine this new perspective on community in relation to mainstream models found in contemporary and classical social theory.

In this paper, I seek to caution the increasing number of contemporary sociologists who are engaging with continental phenomenological sociology without looking at the Anglo-American tradition. I look at a particular debate that took place during the formative period in the Anglo-American tradition. My focus is on the way participants sought to negotiate the disciplinary division between philosophy and sociology. I outline various ways that these disciplinary exigencies, especially the institutional struggles with the sociological establishment, shaped how participants defined phenomenological sociology. I argue that despite the supposed theoretical, methodological, and substantial differences between these waves of phenomenological sociology, the contemporary wave could benefit from some of the lessons that were learned by their predecessors.

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay – simul – outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the “un”- limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination. This volume suggests how it is possible to think both inside and outside of borders, combining the ‘foreign’ forces of promiscuity, exchange, latency, expectancy and hope, with a ‘domestic’ circulation of thought and knowledge, in the interest of a defense of all cultures and of an egalitarian recognition of the right to dignity.

The international graduate conference Biopolitics: In Many Ways brings together a plurality of innovative and engaging views on the various ways in which biopolitics remains a significant issue in the 21st century.

Conference Website: https://biopolitics2019.wordpress.com/

Call: Biopolitics is a predominant paradigm in the social sciences and humanities, which begins from the premise that life is central to modern politics. In the early nineteenth century, biopolitics emerged alongside concerns with overpopulation, public hygiene, pseudo-scientific theories of 'race,' and into state institutions such as the socio-biological regime of the Nazis. More recently, contemporary issues such as combating climate change, prevention of the global spread of infectious diseases,

This paper provides an introduction to Roberto Esposito’s political theory. We engage in a thought exercise by drawing a comparison between his radical form of republicanism and the mainstream political debate between liberals and communitarians. By focusing on the relationship between community, freedom, and the proper we argue that Esposito radically reformulates some of the longstanding tenets animating mainstream political theory.