Against the ‘person’. Robert Esposito's postulate for the elimination of the category of ‘person’ from the discourse on human being

Abstract

This article is a reconstruction of the views of the contemporary Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, concerning his position on the use of the term ‘person’ in discourse about the human being, and a preliminary critical discussion of his position. His main thesis is that the non-functionality of human rights is due not so much to the insufficient development of thought using the term ‘persona’ (thus mainly Stoicism, Roman law, Augustinian and Thomistic Christianity, modern philosophy and, above all, personalism) and the failure of ethical and legal discourses to include all human beings, but rather to the unreflective insistence in its use by these discourses. The awkwardness of the term stems from its linguistic specificity: it is not a mere dictionary term with a purely informative function, but a kind of performative. Esposito juxtaposes its nature with Michel Foucault's dispositif - describing with it the mechanisms of simultaneous ‘empowerment’ and ‘subjugation’.

According to Esposito, the identity offered by the concept of the ‘person’ (etymologically prosopon - actor's ‘mask’), in a manner specific to the dispositif, introduces within human existence a division between the natural (‘actor’) and the ‘artificial’ (‘mask’), i.e. a historically and socially constructed ‘content’, often oppressive for the individual described by this concept. The reconstruction undertaken in the article follows Esposito's intention, considering the threefold heritage of ‘person’ in the theological (persona cristiana), legal (persona romana) and philosophical (persona moderna) discourse, influencing in turn the anthropological-ethical discourse. In the conclusion, the author makes a preliminary assessment of the postulate to eliminate the concept of ‘person’ from the discourse on human being, pointing out its theoretical weaknesses (the derivation of normative facts from etymology, the vagueness of the concept of ‘dispositive’, as well as its potential ethical harm. A more detailed assessment, however, calls for further research.