Roberto Esposito’s Political Biology and Corporate Forms of Life

Abstract

Roberto Esposito has suggested a fracture structures the concept of “the person” that is related to the convergence of biology and law in Western thought. He also suggests that Nazism’s rendering of this intersection is instructive for understanding the biopolitics of liberal globalization. This essay expands Esposito’s argument by considering corporate personhood. I suggest that while the dynamics of personalism and depersonalization are central to corporate power, Nazi political biology is not particularly useful for understanding its origins or development. Instead, I draw attention to the spatiality of the legal concepts grounding capitalism, including the corporate person.