"Talent development" is a concept that is prominent in the discourses of multiple fields, including gifted education and sport.  In these fields, talent development typically targets specific individuals with exceptional domain-specific skills, knowledge, interest, and/or motivation.  In recent decades, however, talent development has emerged as a central concept in human resource development, where it has been applied more broadly to all employees. 

     The neoliberal disciplinary regime increasingly expects that each person must engage in his or her own talent development throughout the life course.  Increasingly, the global marketplace expects individuals not only to be "lifelong learners" (i.e., "the talent" who keeps learning and developing) but also to be users and developers of their own unique set of talents.  Lifelong learners must be willing (a) to develop their own knowledge, skills, interests, and motivations and (b) to put them to "good use" in alignment with the general will of larger bodies (e.g., the state, an organization, an athletic team).  The individual wills of the parts must be coordinated in ways that extend the line of the whole (see Ahmed, 2014). 

     Despite expectations that individuals must develop their talents (see., e.g., Subotnik, Kubelius-Olszewski, & Worrell, 2013) and despite expectations that coordinated networks of organizations in communities should be engaged in talent support (see, e.g., Fuszak, 2014), talent development as a concept has lacked critical examination.  Even the few scholars who have strived to articulate the assumptions of talent development in gifted education (e.g., Dai & Chen, 2013) have failed to examine talent development’s language of individualistic learning or its ontological dependency on an observing subject. 

My intent in this paper is to question the ontological assumptions and value of the conceptual category of "talent development" and to examine how the dominant conception of talent development interacts with and in the conditions of the twenty-first century.  Thinking with ideas from the affirmative biopolitics of Roberto Esposito (2008, 2011, 2012, 2013), I examine the dominant conception of talent development from the perspective of its location within a modern, biopolitical immunitary paradigm.  In describing how talent development has been framed in terms of the modern immune individual and the in-common community of which that individual is a part, I also discuss ideas of some of the thinkers to whom Esposito owes a debt, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze.  Furthermore, I examine how the dominant conception of talent development relates to Biesta’s (2010) model of education and Biesta's (2006) critique of the “learnification” of educational discourses.

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