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observation 1:
review:
kicker: esposito's well-studied persons and things is a book thats supposed to be boring but really isnt, dissecting the juridical and philosophical history of biased personification, whilst unfortunately undermining the ambivalence of subjugation in favor of a more critical and less dialectically speculative reading that later in only mainly manages to rehash existing discourses around objectification and corporeality
notes:
1 - 1:
in posession, esposito remarks how roman legal doctrine written from the likes of gaius constructs an absolute division between person and thing. personhood is tied to ownership, which is faciliated by the mechanism of capture and subjugation. he draws on how the concept of goods explains how the posession of things by others is tied in with the good more than the aspiration towards achieving some peak being-hood of objects in the world.
drawing on the point of burial that i will discuss in the next chapter review, it is quite curious at all that we ceremonialize persons and not things, something im hoping esposito remarks on later. its quite possible that we feel burdened by our consciousness, and the ceremony helps prevent any insult taken by it on account of remarking the "specialty" of sentience by denying that objects get priority treatment in existential matters, and only secondary, artifical or incremental value, we even de-animate their meaning into something that purely seems as if its related to the burden of attachment of the possessor of the object.
esposito remarks how the ownership of things gets intentionally structurally associated with the ownership of people, and even agents formally classified as people sometimes dynamically shift into conceptually being considered as things depending on the economic requirements. the obvious point of criticism here ranges from criticizing either the dichotomy altogether as esposito would, or the political function of this dynamic, or of subjugating persons to things, or of questioning the role of things. however, one unlikely canditate for a criticism is the idea that persons consider themselves burdened by their own personhood, or the idea they have to acquire things in their own possession or to form bonds of property, and feel as if they are unable to communicate with other persons, hoping themselves to paradoxically be treated as things (who may be treated more fair than persons) or to possess things in order to open a dynamic path into interaction with thinghood. persons may consider their own life one dimensional, whereas things may actually be allowed (to a limited degree) to work on enhancing their "beinghood" (a dualism esposito himself makes) when finally free from their chains of personhood. persons may feel indebted to a symbolic cult of personhood but deprived of the ability to freely chase maxims outside of it. they also may contradictorily feel enslaved by the money they have both the ability, but also in a certain strict sense, the symbolic necessity of having to acquire, in order to signal their destiny to acquire other things. dominion itself may be a lowly game, one where the signal of dominion often times is the only pleasure or precedents, but the actual reality of it is hardly anything but a symbolically encoded role, something that may show privilidged personhood itself as lacking.
1-2:
in the great division, esposito continues his analysis by pointing to the unstable transfer of status from personhood into thinghood depending on particular circumstances, where slaves, women, kids etc become quasi-things for some extent of time. its also apparent that once this status occurs, its difficult to escape it in generic contexts, sometimes even structurally impossible. furthermore, he shows how theres a hierarchical gradation of personhood, and how the body is the conduit of the subjugation under thinghood due to it lacking a legal status.
the term "subjugation" carries the hard political motif and narrative-point here throughout the text, but what does the subjugator really feel in this role? is it an extasy equal to freedom, that of subjugatory? also, persons with the status of things may often benefit from this status, as for example it signals a protected class, or it enables passivity and reflection due to not posessing the requirement of possession, quite contradictorily. you will see that political outsider or descedents often enjoy symbolic opression more than literal conflict, and that the idea of autonomy is in constant conflict with where its territory ends, and where responsibility is supposed to begin. responsibility is hardly an ability, when in comparison to the ways in which its a burden, but also a requirement. burdens and requirements work perfectly when both of them function as proto-burdens, but not when both function as proto-responsibilities. as esposito himself says on p.27, the personalization of some invariably corresponds to the depersonalization of others who are subjugated to them. its almost as if social structuring creates natural demands for variety, creates holes and fills up roles automatically when it sees fit. invisible forces come in and mark up lines when required, the day of subjugation appears to you most of the time in a non subjugated state and imprints this mark on you, then social responsibility fades as everyone no longer feels inclined to consider your body in a re-transformable state, as even esposito remarks that even the dead body of the creditor is reduced to a thing to the extent that its burial is denied and prevented from being "transferred" as what amounts to a symbolic luxury on the side of the relatives of the person. there is however a conflict in the notion of personalization vs. reification. it is quite likely to view both as interchangable and not strictly devided. that even the highest degree of personalization lends itself to a reificatory counter force, even freedom is abstracted in principle, is it not? the use and abuse of bodies is more a reified standard, a type of labourious torture - a condition one might say - not a degree of labour, but simply one type (labour in the non marxist sense of, so called suffering or being acted on by the world rather than the other way). what follows in the next chapters is a beautiful and cleanly written dissection of subjectivity in ancient rome, which shows that the person sees its origin in the avatar of the mask as a persona, and that the body is divided as a non-person capable of posessing the social role of temporary person, yet the body itself almost certainly would have been subjugated at some point regardless. this paradigm, rather than seeming instantly opressive, shows us the dynamic, scalable, plastic and open nature of this conception, only enclosed by the unfair and brutal dysymmetry and general lack of care that pouissance and opression, debt-power relations and so on actually have, in that they have no updates or reinstatements, that often times if the first crime is forgiven, the rest of the ones following it are forgotten. the first crime is the opposite of the cause of subjugation, its its liberation. the romans allow the first crime as a way to deterritorialize themselves, to escape what we today can find in modernity as increasingly narrow narcassism, in what we can find as a supposed stable base of consistency, but really just another form of capture. this shows the ontological split between static capture and dynamic flow, something that doesn't need ethics but only an aestheticization. it itself can be considered its own ethical paradigm, it doesnt need principles other than axioms. in the next section, esposito shows that maritain declares a person only in the sense of its deanimalization, which i see as a sin of the axiomatic paradigm, reinserting essence where precisely it shouldn't be counted.
1-3: its interesting how soveiregn power is acting power, as in, majesty in power is required as a spiritual prefect to destroying the magesterial body, leaving the natural body in decay over its political essence, and at some point "naturalization" destroys politics itself, it overwhelms it, not as a latent value category or systemic revolution over violence, but in a way of the war of spirits between one another, whole conceptual domains get neutralized, and nature isnt a negative emptiness of latent conceptual density, its a positive power of its own, nature assumes the unconditioned into its own sense of condition, it allows condition, majesty, to that which is supposed to be unconditioned. only from this, the monster of the mundane can come alive, but definitely not otherwise, its more about ability than anything else
1-4: in this chapter esposito traces three figures of modernity, seeing that locke reverses the roman law that seperates the individual from his role, and the christian doctrine where the soul is from the body, or in moanrchy the political from the natural body, and into a relationship of law, where the seperation now sits in defining the agent as moral (aware of the consequences to ones own actions) through the conflict between justification and condemnation.
esposito's kant only further solidifies this split by creating a dilemma of ownership, as in to master oneself but never to own oneself, or to use others but never abuse them, is the way we proliferate as things to ourselves that we must split in order to reconcile by repressing one side of the split (phenomenological to the noumenological). also, instead of allowing full self ownership over ones own rights, kant instead allows mutual co-ownership of one another, thereby co-subjugating the ethical compromise that makes it so that its harder to argue it on a basis of abused or manipulated oppression, maybe only intrinsic to the condition of social mutuality itself. esposito's hegel notices this in kant, primarily that there is still a possession of others, although now no longer an abuse of them per-say, where use is categorically discarded as abusive partially on account of ones own dilemma or ethical split, and criticizes it by positing that all persons are categorically persons in front of the law, but not in civil society. he then says that if personhood is what makes humans capable of owning things, then owning things is the only quality of personhood. hegel ties kants dilemma together by placing the person as the owner of oneself, but sacrifices the condition where this requires viewing oneself as a thing first, the same thing happens in esposito's kant, the self that analyzes (intuits) its own personhood is the self (the soul, political/spiritual body, elite) whereas the self under assession by itself is the object outside it (the thing). the only difference between hegel and kant here is that one views the thingification of the self as the primary nobility of personhood, whereas the other views it as the immoral disgrace required to attain personhood by essentially cancelling it off. self-subjugation is taken in hegel as principle, in kant as compromise.
1-5: near the beginning of the chapter of the author positions locke and the other modernists as reviving roman categories of law, as well as showing how contemporary utilitarianists and liberal bioethicists like singer and endelhardt accidentally perpetuate roman concepts of graded personhood.
but i cant help but feel like locke referred to the man as containing a property in his own person partially because he was estate-pilled and inspired by random monarchies and philosophies of law and whatnot and less because he had heard some divine calling to isolate the person into a thing, or vice versa as well since thats also a point of contention in this work, but yeah, that doesnt make it not-so, but it does make it quite funny that, it shows that the concepts are slightly more reified or abstract in their notions at least stylistically more so than functionally, but maybe im giving these guys too little credence and its all intentional forms of writing, like the word is the law or the word is just a form of expression and so on... (not necessarily a metaphor). in the end of this chapter, esposito goes in great lenghts to wonderfully make fun of analytic utilitarianism, if not for a moment to sadly bring us to have to actually pay attention to it and its horrid nature. that isnt actually what happens in the chapter but thats the appropriate reading we should all carry from it. essentially, it is both ironic how long it took for common sense society (outside of philosophical ascetics, not wise but simply capable of half decent thought) to comprehend the legitimacy of non "human" creatures, firstly by categorizing them and pointing to contradictions in these categorizations (not all humans are persons, some animals are more persons than some humans, and not all beings are or arent deserving of the right to live, but also all of them who are incapable of self defense we should consider extending a hand to, but also, not all of them are even scared of being killed for it, or in fully conscious states, and so fourth...), and then simply figuring out the most fair maxim. but whats missing as esposito notes is the notion that these categorical divides are systematic of the very perspective that as a theme is carried along with every ethical consideration that is in fact built in their own sake or for their own sake, putting ontology back into question. maybe to some extent even ethics itself is only dependant on the aesthetics of morality and on the categorical concepts that build the intuitive structure of the base assemblage of interacting models. however, again as with the locke example, it could be more incidental than it lets on. like when mill is creating a person as posessing mastery over his own body, mind and sense of self, is this about possession or is it about a sense of dutiful inquiry into oneself, or about initializing the intensive power of self-posession as a factor of soveirgn conceptualization or libidinal inquiry rather than some intentionally functional call to posession, and so fourth. in the same way, a lot of utilitarian arguments could be categorically limited by the structure of their language but the thought process behind it could hold laden concepts that dont actually admit themselves to the intuitive or even studied sense that they draw on intiially.