Beyond Enmity: An Introduction to Political Ontology

Joseph Turner (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

What kind of beings must we be for politics to take the forms it does? This seminar begins from the premise that every political theory rests on an ontology(an account of what beings are and how they relate) and that the dominant ontology of Western political thought is organized around enmity, self-preservation, and what Roberto Esposito calls immunitas: the exemption of theself from the obligatory gift (munus) that binds and exposes us to one another.

The munus is an obligatory gift that expropriates the self, a debt that can never be fully repaid, a claim the other has on us that undoes our self-possession. For Esposito, the entire tradition of modern political thought can be understood as an attempt to immunize the subject against this expropriation. The Hobbesian social contract, the sovereign, the market, even revolutionary politics are all are devices for securing the self against the vulnerability that genuine interdependence would require. When the forms and values that once organized existence (religious, moral, political) lose their binding force and collapse, the result is nihilism.

The immunitary tradition is one response to this collapse, i.e., an attempt to secure meaning, order, and selfhood through sovereign-enforced forms. But because social forms are themselves groundless (i.e., without permanent form),immunization deepens the very nihilism it was meant to overcome because the attempts to establish ground leads to various inevitable contradictions of identity

Across six weeks, we trace this immunitary logic from its founding myth in Hobbes through its political-theological (Schmitt), political-economic (Polanyi), and biopolitical (Esposito) registers, and then construct an alternative through the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Nishitani Keiji. We move toward an ontology of compassion and what I have theorized as a theory of impermanent institutions, these are political forms grounded not in sovereign self-enclosure but in the lived acceptance of both the munus and impermanence.

The texts in this seminar are difficult. This is partly a matter of vocabulary and partly a consequence of the questions they are asking, which require us to think at a level of abstraction we are not accustomed to. The framing essays are designed to make these texts accessible without oversimplifying them. Readers are encouraged to sit with difficulty rather than resolving it prematurely; the seminar is a space for thinking together, not for arriving at final answers.