Abstract
This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his
trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in
the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and
immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The
article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are
crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s
social contract theory, which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s
thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of
sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally,
Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the
recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and
Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner
that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’.