Esposito, Foucault, and the Commons

This paper examines the relationship between concepts of security and dependency integral to a reworking of the idea of the commons via an analysis of Esposito and Foucault. If Foucault’s account of modernity focuses on the problem of security in the transition from sovereignty to biopower, Esposito shows that that security is underpinned by a suppression of the original sense of community, dependency on otherness. The paper subsequently explores the possibility that Esposito’s discussion of immunity can be enhanced by Foucault’s discussion of a “subject of rights” that construes governmental security as the ongoing formation of popular sovereignty through politics.