Starting from the belief that the political productivity – or, conversely, the impoliticality – of a philosophy is strictly dependent on the image of time and history that we supply ourselves with, the essay singles out two different ways of interpreting a temporality inhabited by the gap. The latter is, in Agamben, a mere void: when life – as bíos or as zoé – enters this blind spot of historicity, it can’t help being annihilated. Antithetically, Esposito imagines a structural articulation between history and life: it’s the very sedimentation into one another that makes something like an instituent praxis possible. However, it is hypothesized that Esposito didn’t delve into the depth of this intuition: in so far as he puts his discourse under the aegis of the post-foundational thought, he refiles all the antinomies, and the risks of impoliticality, that an ontology of lack inevitably entail.

Agamben, Esposito, Merleau-Ponty, Historicity, Institution.

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