Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself Challenging the contemporary notion of "self-care" and the Western mania for "self-possession," The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the "care of the self," from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours? The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy-engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.

Carlo Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the "eventic form." On Diano's reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life. A stunning interpretation of Greek antiquity that continues to resonate since its publication in 1952, Form and Event anticipates the work of such French and Italian post-war thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben.

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive "Improper Life," Timothy C. Campbell's dexterous inquiry-as-intervention.

Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics--including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk--have been substantively influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in "Improper Life" he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault (especially his late work regarding the care and technologies of the self), Freud (notably his writings on the drives and negation), and Gilles Deleuze (particularly in the relation of attention to aesthetics).

Throughout "Improper Life," Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmative "technē" not thought through thanatos but rather practiced through "bios."

Carlo Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the "eventic form." On Diano's reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life. A stunning interpretation of Greek antiquity that continues to resonate since its publication in 1952, Form and Event anticipates the work of such French and Italian post-war thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben.

No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas's ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community's original etymological meaning: "cum munus." In "Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community," Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Holderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.

Over the last five years, corporations and individuals have given more money, more often, to charitable organizations than ever before. What could possibly be the downside to inhabiting a golden age of gift-giving? That question lies at the heart of Timothy Campbell's account of contemporary giving and its social forms. In a milieu where gift-giving dominates, nearly everything given and received becomes the subject of a calculus-gifts from God, from benefactors, from those who have. Is there another way to conceive of generosity? What would giving and receiving without gifts look like? A lucid and imaginative intervention in both European philosophy and film theory, The Techne of Giving investigates how we hold the objects of daily life-indeed, how we hold ourselves-in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Even as instrumentalism permeates giving, Campbell articulates a resistant techne locatable in forms of generosity that fail to coincide with biopower's assertion that the only gifts that count are those given and received. Moving between visual studies, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian biopower, and apparatus theory, Campbell makes a case for how to give and receive without giving gifts. In the conversation between political philosophy and classic Italian films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, the potential emerges of a generous form of life that can cross between the visible and invisible, the fated and the free.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself   Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care� and the Western mania for “self-possession,� The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,� from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours? The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.

Over the last five years, corporations and individuals have given more money, more often, to charitable organizations than ever before. What could possibly be the downside to inhabiting a golden age of gift-giving? That question lies at the heart of Timothy Campbell's account of contemporary giving and its social forms. In a milieu where gift-giving dominates, nearly everything given and received becomes the subject of a calculus-gifts from God, from benefactors, from those who have. Is there another way to conceive of generosity? What would giving and receiving without gifts look like? A lucid and imaginative intervention in both European philosophy and film theory, The Techne of Giving investigates how we hold the objects of daily life-indeed, how we hold ourselves-in relation to neoliberal forms of gift-giving. Even as instrumentalism permeates giving, Campbell articulates a resistant techne locatable in forms of generosity that fail to coincide with biopower's assertion that the only gifts that count are those given and received. Moving between visual studies, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian biopower, and apparatus theory, Campbell makes a case for how to give and receive without giving gifts. In the conversation between political philosophy and classic Italian films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, the potential emerges of a generous form of life that can cross between the visible and invisible, the fated and the free.