BEYOND ENMITY:
An Introduction to Political Ontology
With Joseph Turner
A Six-Week Online Seminar
⏱️ Mondays, 8 PM Eastern US Time Zone. (See TimeZone Converter for your location.)
📅 July 6 – August 17, 2026 (break August 10)
🔗 A Zoom link will be provided on registration.
💰 Three options (registration at bottom of this page.):
(i) $95 for non-members (become a member).
(ii) $80 for members.
(iii) Solidarity. We are happy to make our offerings available at reduced or no-cost if you can not otherwise join. If you would like to request this option, please email us at inciteseminarsphila@gmail.com with the following information: (1) your current country of residence; (2) reason for requesting this option; (3) amount you can pay: $30, $40, $50 or more (we will send you the payment link); (4) if you are requesting no-cost, are you reasonably certain that you will attend the entire session(s)?
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION
What kind of beings must we be for politics to take the forms it does? This seminar begins from the premise that every political theory rests on an ontology(an account of what beings are and how they relate) and that the dominant ontology of Western political thought is organized around enmity, self-preservation, and what Roberto Esposito calls immunitas: the exemption of theself from the obligatory gift (munus) that binds and exposes us to one another.
The munus is an obligatory gift that expropriates the self, a debt that can never be fully repaid, a claim the other has on us that undoes our self-possession. For Esposito, the entire tradition of modern political thought can be understood as an attempt to immunize the subject against this expropriation. The Hobbesian social contract, the sovereign, the market, even revolutionary politics are all are devices for securing the self against the vulnerability that genuine interdependence would require. When the forms and values that once organized existence (religious, moral, political) lose their binding force and collapse, the result is nihilism.
The immunitary tradition is one response to this collapse, i.e., an attempt to secure meaning, order, and selfhood through sovereign-enforced forms. But because social forms are themselves groundless (i.e., without permanent form),immunization deepens the very nihilism it was meant to overcome because the attempts to establish ground leads to various inevitable contradictions of identity
Across six weeks, we trace this immunitary logic from its founding myth in Hobbes through its political-theological (Schmitt), political-economic (Polanyi), and biopolitical (Esposito) registers, and then construct an alternative through the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Nishitani Keiji. We move toward an ontology of compassion and what I have theorized as a theory of impermanent institutions, these are political forms grounded not in sovereign self-enclosure but in the lived acceptance of both the munus and impermanence.
The texts in this seminar are difficult. This is partly a matter of vocabulary and partly a consequence of the questions they are asking, which require us to think at a level of abstraction we are not accustomed to. The framing essays are designed to make these texts accessible without oversimplifying them. Readers are encouraged to sit with difficulty rather than resolving it prematurely; the seminar is a space for thinking together, not for arriving at final answers.
Facilitator: Joseph Turner is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his research is focused on establishing dialogues between Continental Philosophy and Japanese Philosophy. His current project is to build a political ontology between Nishitani Keiji’s use of the Buddhist concept of Sunyata (emptiness) and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of “being with” as a critical response to Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being.” His project aims to imagine a different political ontology that is not rooted in Hobbesian imaginations of “human nature” nor conflictual categories of the pre-determined “political.” Joseph’s early research was centered around the work of Jean Baudrillard and his theory of reversal, which is rooted in cybernetic discourse, mainly happening in France in the 1970s. Joseph has studied the history of technology and the foundational philosophies of cybernetics for the first five years of his graduate school career. Outside of academia, Joseph has engaged with various projects in his region to build community power, such as mutual aid groups experimenting with communal forms and various collective writing projects. The combination of these experiences has revealed the very real difficulties that misunderstanding our relationship to technology poses for developing political ideas and how we relate to one another.
Reading List (so far):
Week one
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, (pgs. 1-12 and 107-122)
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (100-116, 131-150)
Week Two
John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (267-282, 380-384, 406-423)
Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (109-119, 243-255)
Week Three
Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political (pgs. 19-79)
Week Four (Page numbers soon)
Roberto Esposito: Immunitas, Communitas, Instituting Thought
Karl Polyani: The Great Transformation
C.B. Macpherson: The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
Week Five (Page Numbers Soon)
Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural
Week Six (Page Numbers Soon)
Nishitani Keiji: The Self Overcoming of Nihilism, Religion and Nothingness
Gianni Vattimo: Nihilism and Emancipation
A Note on Readings and Framing Essays
All primary readings will be provided as PDFs.
Each week includes a framing essay written by the instructor. These essays are not summaries of the assigned readings; they are guides to the argument the seminar is building. They introduce the key concepts, explain why the readings are paired as they are, and make explicit the connections that the primary texts leave implicit. In particular, the concept of the munus—the obligatory gift that expropriates the self—serves as one through-line across all six weeks, and the framing essays trace its presence and its refusal across each thinker we encounter. Nihilism serves as the other, the experiential and civilizational consequence of immunization carried to completion, diagnosed independently by Esposito, Nishitani, Nancy and given historical form by Polanyi and others. Participants who find the primary readings difficult are encouraged to read the framing essay first and use it as a map.
Primary readings are required. Recommended readings are optional and provided for participants who wish to go deeper into a particular thread.
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