Congratulations to Professors Gareth Williams and Vincenzo Binetti on their recent translation of Roberto Esposito’s seminal work of political theory The Origin of the Political, out from Fordham University Press this year. Both Williams and Binetti are members of the Romance Language Department an the University.

On The Origin of the Political: In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad–that “great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”–as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.

Praise for The Origin of the Political: “For Esposito, thought does not just fight–it is the fight itself. Esposito moves on the basis of a fundamental ontology of war, which marks what a previous tradition would have called ‘the unity of being.’ The Origin of the Political elaborates implications of this, not only through its masterful conceptual analysis and through its insights into the two thinkers it studies and critiques, but also because, as it makes explicit the stakes of the impolitical approach, it also ruins so many of the foundations of modern political thought and prepares the way for its fundamental renewal.”–Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University