Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century

In this article, Roberto Esposito addresses two opposing modes of philosophical interpretation of the twentieth century: the paradigm of totalitarianism and the paradigm of biopolitics. He argues that the philosophical basis of the paradigm of totalitarianism, as represented in the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacob Talmon, Raymond Aron, François Furet, Marcel Gaucher and Claude Lefort, is historicism, which aims to search for origins and assumes the continuity and directionality of history. The author points out a number of aporias inherent in this paradigm and concludes that the category of totalitarianism is logically inconsistent. As for the paradigm of biopolitics, it goes back to Nietzsche's genealogy, is developed by Foucault and implies the interpretation of history as a history of conflicts and overlaps between different vectors of meaning. Considering this paradigm, the author insists on the theoretical inconsistency of two conceptual fusions: on the one hand, Nazism and communism, on the other hand, liberalism and democracy. Communism belongs to the philosophical tradition of the West, whereas Nazism — not political philosophy but rather political biology - falls out of it. According to Esposito, historically liberal democracy has never existed, and philosophically the concepts of democracy and liberalism are simply incompatible. He argues, firstly, that there is a certain cultural and linguistic affinity between Nazism and liberalism (in both cases, bios as the object and subject of politics is central) and, secondly, that communism should be seen as the paroxysmal completion of democracy. The author points to the impossibility of traditional democracy functioning under the conditions of the biopolitical turn and raises the question of what a new biopolitical democracy — or democratic biopolitics — might be.