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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
After two years of global pandemic, it is no surprise that immunization is now at the center of our experience. From the medicalization of politics to the disciplining of individuals, from lockdowns to mass vaccination programs, contemporary societies seem to be firmly embedded in a syndrome of immunity. To understand the ambivalent effects of this development, it is necessary to go back to its modern genesis, when the languages of law, politics, and medicine began to merge into the biopolitical regime we have been living under for some time. This regime places a high priority on immunization and security: no security is more important than health security. The Covid-19 pandemic has taken the dynamic of immunization to a new level: for the first time in history, we see societies seeking to achieve generalized immunity in their entire populations through vaccination. This allows us to glimpse the possibility of a "common immunity" that strengthens the relation between community and immunity. The dramatic tensions we have experienced in recent years between security and freedom, norm and exception, power and existence, all refer to the complex relationship between community and immunity, the decisive features of which are reconstructed in this book. Building on the prescient argument originally developed two decades ago in Immunitas, Roberto Esposito demonstrates in this new book how the pandemic and our responses to it have brought into sharp relief the fundamental biopolitical conditions of our contemporary societies.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgment
Introduction
Notes
1. Contaminations
Notes
2. Autoimmunitarian Democracy
Notes
3. In the Time of Biopolitics
Notes
4. Philosophies of Immunity
Notes
5. Pandemic Policies
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Common Immunity
Biopolitics in the Age of the Pandemic
Roberto Esposito
Translated by Zakiya Hanafi
polity
First published in Italian as Immunità comune. Biopolitica all’epoca della pandemia © 2022 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
This book has been translated thanks to a translation grant awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation / Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo alla traduzione assegnato dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5566-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948118
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgment
The English edition of this book was prepared with remarkable alacrity and accuracy thanks, in part, to the keen eye and dedication of researcher and copyeditor Manuela Tecusan.
Introduction
1
The Great Barrington Declaration, named after the town in Massachusetts where it was drafted, was published on October 5, 2020. Promoted by a think tank that defines itself as “libertarian,” the Declaration is actually part of a right-wing American network that has gone so far as to deny the climate emergency, in line with the politics of the former president, Donald Trump (who lost no time in endorsing it). In the Declaration, several virologists take a stand in favor of “herd immunity,” in opposition to the policies adopted by most European governments during the pandemic phase. Arguing that these policies produce devastating effects on public health – a decrease in childhood vaccinations and cancer screenings, an increase in cardiovascular diseases, and a deterioration of mental health – the Declaration intends “to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”1 The supposed advantage of this approach would be that young people and adults in good health are allowed to live normally, while those who are most vulnerable by reason of age and state of health are isolated. The approach is premised on the belief that society as a whole will be protected because, as the rate of natural immunity from infection rises, the virus will eventually die out, having nowhere left to spread. This strategy of “focused protection” intends to keep schools, universities, businesses, and cultural centers open, relying on the rapid spread of infection to reach the kind of immunization that would protect even the frailest.
Defined as “ridiculous” by Anthony Fauci, the doyen of American epidemiologists, in a matter of days the Declaration was harshly criticized in the John Snow Memorandum – an open letter published in the Lancet by eighty specialists in infectious diseases and health systems. In their view, the Great Barrington Declaration is nothing but “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence,” since “any pandemic management strategy relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed.”2 Not only would it have lethal effects on the entire population, it would also worsen the inequalities already laid bare by the pandemic – and with negative medical and social consequences. The John Snow Memorandum categorically denies the idea that an immunity produced through infection instead of vaccination can end the pandemic. Immunity from infection would not only fail to achieve this result, but it would also create a huge number of victims. Furthermore, compulsory confinement of the most vulnerable swathes of population “is practically impossible and highly unethical,” because it would condemn one section of the population to forced isolation while exposing the other to unpredictable consequences for health. The only acceptable way forward is to extend protection to the whole society by interrupting the chain of infection through general measures of confinement and distancing. Restriction of movements, mass testing, and contact tracing are the only adequate strategy for stopping the progress of the virus, or at least slowing it down, while waiting for the vaccine to weaken it. These are the exact measures adopted, sometimes after rapid policy reversals, by almost all the countries touched by the pandemic.
As we know, this alternative was implemented in dramatic fashion during the first phase but was later superseded by the production and distribution of vaccines on a vast scale. The aim was to achieve a generalized immunity, which would be due this time to vaccine prevention rather than to infection. We know that this third response – the only one that is scientifically reliable and, until proven otherwise, effective – has also met with uneven success. Competition between vaccines, the shortage of available supplies in the face of demand, miscommunications regarding their different safety and efficacy – not to mention resistance from significant segments of the population that are hostile to vaccination – have complicated and delayed the immunization process. Without stopping it, though. Despite the explosion of successive variants with different degrees of vaccine resistance, no other avenue for fighting the disease has appeared, except to ramp up vaccine production as much as possible, through more and more advanced technologies. The number of doses that will be needed, who will be eligible for them, and at what price remains uncertain for the time being. Equally uncertain is how the battle will play out to waive patent protections and to liberalize vaccine licensure, actions to which big pharma is naturally opposed. The business these strategies seek to control is not related solely to healthcare: the industry also holds a strategic role in globally reshaping a new geopolitical balance of power.
We will discuss all this in the final pages of the book. But, before we get to that, let us pause over a more general consideration, which concerns its object and overall perspective. It can hardly escape notice that all three proposed solutions – natural herd immunity, social confinement, and generalized vaccination – are different modes of the immune paradigm, in which they all partake. The necessity for immunization, taken for granted by all parties in this dispute, is never in question; only its interpretation and implementation are. Should immunity be natural or induced, individual or collective, temporary or definitive? In a field that has become dominated entirely by the lexicon of immunization, these are the only open questions that remain. If the dynamics of immunization were already set into motion by the biopolitical regime under which we have lived for a long time, the arrival of the coronavirus simply picked up their pace to an extraordinary degree. All the proposals for combatting it that were made during the last year are simply different shades of the same immune syndrome, at once biological, legal, political, and technological. The measures taken by the various governments stand at the intersection of law and medicine, according to the bivalent meaning assumed by the concept of “security.” During a pandemic, no security is more important than health security. But health security hinges on compliance with legally sanctioned norms. This is why biology and legal practice have become two sides of the same demand for security, which makes one the precondition of the other.
2
These ideas, which I presented in a book called Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life,3 have been validated, down to their details, some twenty years later. This is hardly a source of personal satisfaction, given that the validation coincides with the most serious planetary crisis since the end of World War II. But contemporary society’s propensity to immunize itself has certainly exceeded all imagination, becoming the most significant phenomenon of our time. For this very reason, then, it should not be examined en bloc, but rather broken down into types of different intensity and outcome. As regards, for example, the three alternatives mentioned earlier, their different statuses and effects must be acknowledged. Even though all three lie on the same immune horizon, they depart considerably from one another, both through their scientific premises and in their ethical protocols. The herd immunity advanced at the beginning of the pandemic in the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States, and Brazil is based on thanatopolitical principles that foresee, if not the elimination, at least the marginalization of “less adapted” individuals, to the benefit of the more productive segments of the population. Conversely, protection through distancing, implemented by most governments before vaccination was available, is a negative biopolitical choice, because it ensures social protection through desocialization. Despite obvious difficulties in getting it off the ground and disseminating it, the third approach, if extended to the global community, is the only one that offers an affirmative biopolitics – one in which, for the first time in history, we can glimpse the unprecedented silhouette of a common immunity.
To arrive at it we must go through a few different but interrelated steps. The first concerns the paradigmatic relationship between the notions of community and immunity. They appear inseparable from the outset, both logically – since one is carved out of the other’s negative space – and historically. There is no such thing as a community that lacks immune dispositifs. Without some sort of protective system to ensure permanence in time, no social body can withstand the conflicts that course through it over time, just as no human body can. Everything hinges on preserving an equilibrium that contains the social body within boundaries compatible with the society that the protective system seeks to preserve. Overstepping those boundaries, like a sort of autoimmune disease, risks provoking its collapse. In Covid-19, as we know, the immune system itself is responsible for the body’s destructive inflammation, caused by an excessive response to the attack of the virus, a response destined to reproduce that attack in amplified form. But if this case is, like others, one of limiting an otherwise necessary device, how does one go about identifying it? On what does its preservation depend? And why is it so difficult to keep it under control?
The answers that this book provides concern the problematic relationship between the two sides of immunity: the legal–political and the medical–biological. Today immunity belongs to both vocabularies, converging in an idea of security that is at once medical and social. However, the semantic plexus that appears to us now as a single thing is the effect of an articulation between two meanings that for a long time remained distinct. Only in the last two centuries – since the discovery of such a thing as biological immunity – have they overlapped. Before then, for at least two thousand years, the largely prevalent side of immunity was the legal–political, in a sense not all that different from the meaning it holds today for diplomats and people whose professional dealings are protected from the general law. Apart from a few early literary metaphors, the biological meaning of the immune system, at least in a scientific understanding, remained muted for a long time. Such a delay explains why, when it appeared, it was immediately influenced by the legal–political interpretation of the term. This conditioned its definition, orienting it toward a meaning related to defense of the body – political, and even military – against external invaders. This conceptual shift from politics to medicine had two significant effects on how the immune system was understood, overshadowing its complex structure in favor of a more schematic picture that, in some ways, still holds the field, having been called into question only in the past fifty years.
The prevalence of the legal–political over the biomedical side applies to the theoretical level of the concepts but not to the historical reality, of course: the functioning of biological immunity is as old as humans, and in some way even predates them. From this point of view, the relations between the two sides are inverted. It was biological immunity, stronger or weaker depending on physiological and environmental circumstances, that conditioned political and military history. Right from the first wars of humankind and up to World War I, immune resistance, the ability, that is, to withstand destructive epidemics, played a decisive role in power relations between civilizations when they came into contact at certain points. The history of the conquest of America, which I examine in the first chapter, is a striking example of the importance that immunity – or lack of it – has played in the political and military balances of human history. Immunity has made it possible for a handful of determined men to take possession of vast empires. But there is something else this book sheds light on in the relationship between immunity and war: the fact that the discovery of vaccines, from Jenner’s primitive variety to Pasteur’s specific one, was itself a battle between national interests – a way of doing politics by means of medicine. “Pasteurism,” the formidable healthcare machine that spread from the Pasteur Institute throughout France and then to the colonies – played a major role in this dialectic. The movement unfolded as a zero-sum clash between humans and bacteria, fought at the crossroads between healthcare practice and colonial expansion. The culmination of this twofold process of politicizing medicine and medicalizing politics took place in the no-holds-barred conflict that made adversaries of the two great “microbe hunters”: Pasteur and Koch. Their confrontation in the scientific domain mirrored the hegemonic clash between France and Germany, along a thread that connects the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to World War I.
3
The current biopolitical – or, more accurately perhaps, immuno-political – turn is examined in this book from two different but ultimately converging angles. The first concerns democracy, rightly defined as “immunitarian” by reason of the self-protective and at times exclusionary form it takes in relation to those whose equality it presupposes and yet does not recognize. The growing gap between segments unequal in terms of social and civil rights gives shape to a post-democratic regime that bears little more than the name of democracy. Such a discrepancy, now visible to the naked eye, is actually the result of a contradiction in the concept that has permeated democracy from the beginning, putting it at odds with itself. In democracy it would seem that freedom and equality, representation and identity, power and participation never come into balance, moving further and further apart. This is the source of the disbandment – highlighted by classical and contemporary interpreters – between the internally contradictory poles of an aristocratic democracy and a democratic despotism. By now it is clear that this contention cannot be resolved through mere formal adjustments: it calls for an institutional change that goes beyond the sphere of the sovereign state and engages more deeply with the social dynamic and its conflicts. From this point of view, contemporary democracy appears to be at a fork in the road that it can no longer avoid. Either it resigns itself to the autoimmune syndrome that some have predicted as a sort of destiny, or it must rethink all its institutions – and itself as an institution – in a form that puts the political battle, currently suffocated by the double incumbrance of the economy and technology, back into play.
The other issue this book explores is the interpretation of biopolitics itself. The jumble of criticisms devoid of argumentative substance that target this concept may come as a surprise – although not a big one to those who are familiar with these reactive dynamics – especially at a time when biopolitics has been irrefutably validated by the pandemic and the response to it in healthcare and other sectors. Events have substantiated and even surpassed Foucault’s insights with disconcerting punctuality: medicalization of society, control over individuals and populations, deployment of governments’ pastoral power – not to mention the generalization of the immune dispositifs mentioned earlier. Of course, we cannot embrace Foucault’s biopolitics in totality: it was developed in a period different from our own, and it is not without its uncertainties and contradictions. Our task – to which these pages seek to contribute – is to integrate his biopolitics and adapt it to a contemporary condition that he could not foresee, but to do it from an adequate understanding of his work. Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding that Foucault’s critics fall into is that of accusing him of a naturalist or biologist reading, that is, of an ahistorical interpretation of “life” – which, on the contrary, he always intended in a deeply historical way. His 1976 course at the Collège de France, “Society Must Be Defended,” is absolutely explicit on this point. True, the two later courses, “Security, Territory, Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics,” are oriented in a slightly different direction, focused as they are on the notion of economic government, which does not lend an affirmative character to the paradigm of biopolitics. One almost gets the impression that Foucault’s discourse, in default of answers to its own questions, at a certain point folds in on itself. Here again, one of the reasons for this hermeneutic block could be that the concept of institution was not adequately developed. Although Foucault paid constant attention to it, his efforts were directed to bringing out its repressive side more than its potentially innovative aspects. From this perspective, too, the pandemic has given the theory a push forward, by shining a spotlight on the irreplaceable role of institutions and the need to transform them. What emerges from this is the necessity to rebuild a relationship between biopolitics and institutionalism that has thus far been impeded by an inadequate interpretation of both.
4
For now, let us turn our attention to the relationship between immunity and philosophy. The fact that it has only recently become an established scholarly focus should not cast its genealogy into oblivion. Even when twentieth-century thinkers do not address the immune paradigm directly – as in the case of Heidegger and Freud – the boldness with which its silhouette appears between the lines places it at the heart of modernization itself, and thus not as an alternative to the great interpretations of modernity (Max Weber’s rationalization, Karl Löwith’s secularization, Hans Blumenberg’s self-legitimization), but in productive tension with them. My impression – to be verified, of course, by a longue durée study of the philosophical, literary, and anthropological sources – is that the founding texts of modernity, if read in a certain light, attest to the more or less recognizable presence of the immune dispositif as their general horizon of meaning. If this is true – if immunization turns out to be the secret name of civilization – it would mean that political ontology should not be understood as one particular rubric of knowledge or western power but as the deep web in which knowledge and power are embedded and that alone makes them recognizable.
Other authors, whom I also discuss in chapter 4, deal more openly with the issue of immunity, generally without referring to one another. My aim is to reconnect these threads by recovering their links in texts from varied lexical fields, which range from philosophy to psychoanalysis, sociology, and anthropology. From Nietzsche to Girard, from Luhmann to Sloterdijk, and up to Derrida, the immune paradigm is probed from different perspectives that appear to intersect at a point that gets concealed, and sometimes effaced, by the specialized languages these authors use. Without distorting their paths, I have sought to retrace the immune paradigm in a complex interplay with the concept of negativity. Already recognizable in Heidegger, especially in what he calls the reduction of the modern world to a picture and in the reassuring sense of “securedness” that the subject derives from it, the immune paradigm is presented by Freud in all the possible shades that, taken together, evoke the “discontents” of civilization. Civilization, required to dominate the hostile forces of nature, creates a malaise proportional to the inhibition of the erotic and aggressive drives of the subjects who experience it. But the negative, in the form of a lesser evil destined to protect us from a greater one, is the focal point of all the authors examined here. For Nietzsche, who interprets all modern institutions of knowledge and power as cogs in a single immune machine, life, which coincides with the will to power, requires a restraint capable of saving it from its own excess. From this point of view, immunization reveals itself as a negation of life that is necessary for life’s facilitated survival. Like the Pauline figure of the katechon, it protects from evil by incorporating rather than excluding it.
According to René Girard and going along a path that follows and simultaneously criticizes the Freudian analytical framework, communities can protect themselves from the violence that courses through them only by directing it onto a sacrificial victim that draws all violence onto itself – until a messiah offers himself spontaneously to death, revealing, and thereby deactivating, the sacrificial mechanism. Central to this mechanism is the law, which secularizes the sacrificial paradigm but does not eliminate it, using violence to immunize society from violence, on which it claims a monopoly. It is striking that Niklas Luhmann, while adopting a less radical theoretical position, nevertheless identifies the law as the immune subsystem of social systems. Moreover, from the perspective of a communication identified with immunization, he acknowledges that the system functions only through the use of “noes” – contradictions, that is, that put society in a state of alert, thus saving it from unsustainable conflicts. But it is Jacques Derrida and Peter Sloterdijk who, from different directions, engage directly with the issue of immunity. Derrida does so through autoimmune words that express the suicidal process of the immune system against the body politic that this system nevertheless defends, contradictorily. Democracy can therefore safeguard itself only by negating itself, or at least by suspending itself in a form that goes against its own values. Sloterdijk creates a true social immunology, constructed along vertical lines that follow the passage of time and along horizontal lines in the globalized dimension of space. What is even more striking is that both philosophers, albeit starting from very distant premises, search in the autoimmunization of immunity for the future profile of an unprecedented “co-immunity.”
5
The last chapter of the book connects these historical and conceptual investigations to the frightful yet illuminating years of our current period. When not intended to create panic, the terrifying predictions of novels, films, and pandemic scenarios, but also the catastrophic forecasts of some scientists, all of which seemed exaggerated, proved to be largely realistic and even understated by comparison with what took place between 2020 and 2021. Reductionist, if not conspiratorial interpretations of the ongoing pandemic quickly crumbled in the face of millions of deaths worldwide. Already in the spring of last year it became apparent to anyone with a grain of commonsense that these ideas were simply wrong – not because they highlighted potential deviations of the immune paradigm, which has since entered the distinctive lexicon of our time, but because they lost sight of its inner complexity, its simultaneously necessary and dangerous character. “Necessary” because, more than ever before, the only possible prospect of defense for a devastating viral disease such as this one is immunization, in its various forms. “Dangerous” because its escalation can give rise to the perverse effects that we have experienced on more than one occasion. What governments have often missed in their pandemic policies – putting aside assessment and implementation errors, delays, failures to act, and contradictions – is the ability to discern and distinguish between protective and constrictive modes of individual and collective life.
In this book, all the issues at stake – the relationship between the right to life and the right to freedom, between state of exception and state of emergency, between science, technology, and politics, between competition and disparity in vaccine acquisition – are grouped under the immune paradigm, which one way or another forms the horizon of their meaning. The pandemic accelerated the connection between technization and immunization that has been underway for some time, objectively weakening the political sphere. The figure of the expert – not always coincident with that of the scientist – has assumed a somewhat disturbing prominence in this context, often predetermining the space for political decision-making, which is inevitably depoliticized as a result. Despite a pervasive formulaic image, technocracy is not the opposite of populism but rather one of its equally insidious faces, to which the only non-regressive response is an affirmative biopolitics. This, of course, is a narrow passage to navigate, made even more difficult by the pandemic, although – and this thesis underlies the entire book and its title – the pandemic has also opened an unprecedented path for immunization itself. To begin with, in a metaphorical sense: the most recent studies of the body’s immune system have abandoned the timeworn defensive image of invading germs. This is not to say that it has faded away: the defense function is more critical than ever in combatting the virus. But it must be placed in a wider and more complex biological scenario, in which the immune system is not so much a rigid barrier that protects individual identity as a dialectical filter vis-à-vis the external environment, which inhabits it from the beginning. In the continual lexical transit between the political and the biological, the biological can stop being the natural cage of the political and become instead its symbolic referent – in other words, the immune system’s opening to otherness can symbolize political systems’ opening to the other. Our immune system shows better than anything how we can and must welcome the external inside ourselves, making our bodies into a place of continual exchange and passage between the inside and the outside.
But this metaphorical allusion, drawn from the immune paradigm, has been replaced recently by another, which is explicitly political. I am referring to the relationship between immunity and community. We know that they are opposites, both logically and etymologically. But this does not preclude their mutual co-belonging. In reality, one cannot exist without the other. Up until now, though, throughout modern history at least, immunization has cut through community, separating it into inversely proportional zones: the protection, or privilege, of one part of humanity has always been countered by the extreme vulnerability and exposure of another. Even in medicine, a process of universal immunization, intended for the whole world, has never been conceived of, or even imagined. For the first time in history, this is exactly what is being proposed today: vaccination for the entire human race. No one is more aware than me of the historical, political, and economic difficulties that this project presents, not to mention the tensions, disagreements, and conflicts it is bound to provoke. While the production and the distribution of the vaccine erase certain geopolitical boundaries, they carve out others, perhaps even deeper ones, between those who possess the means of production and those who have little chance of acquiring them. We shall see how this plays out, how effectively political forces are able to assert their liberating demands – if they still have any – against narrower but no less tenacious established interests. The fact remains, however, that this demand for universal immunization arises not only from individuals but also from governments and political forces. For the first time, I repeat, we glimpse the emergence – at least in some people’s intentions – of a possible overlap of community and immunity that could well receive the paradoxical name of “common immunity.”
Notes
1.
Visit
https://gbdeclaration.org
.
2.
Visit
https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html
.
3.
Roberto Esposito,
Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life
, trans. by Z. Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
1Contaminations
1
My research on this topic began with the assumption that “community” and “immunity” are so tightly bound together that they can never be thought of separately. Although I wrote individual books on each concept – titled respectively Communitas1 and Immunitas2 – I approached them from the perspective of their original relationship. In reality, even to speak of a “relationship” may be reductive of a more intrinsic connection, which points instead to a kind of contradictory copresence. Community and immunity are two sides of a single semantic block, which acquires meaning precisely from their tension. This semantic inextricability is made evident, on the etymological plane as well, by their shared lemma – the Latin polysemous noun munus, with its meanings “obligation,” “burden,” and “duty,” but also “gift.” From it derive both communitas and immunitas – the former directly and affirmatively, the latter in a negative or privative form. While members of a communitas – which, in its broadest application, embraces all human beings – share a donative obligation toward others, those who declare themselves, or are declared, immunes (“free from”) are exempt from it. Their only relationship with communitas is through exemption: as Latin dictionaries tell us, the immune are those who are exempt a muneribus – from the obligations (munera) that others take on. But, rather than focusing on exemption from munus in order to grasp the most distinctive meaning of immunitas, we do better to look at the fundamental contrast between it and communitas: according to the same dictionaries, he who does not perform the offices that omnibus communia sunt – “are common to everyone” – is said to be immune. So, more than being free from the burden of munus, immune signifies not being common: someone who is immune breaks the donative circuit implicit in communitas, relating to it as a negative relates to a positive. Immunitas is expressed only in relation to that which it negates or from which it removes itself. If there were no pre-existing, common munus to honor – no collective commitment to fulfil – there would be no possibility of exoneration either. To place oneself in a situation of distinction or privilege, one must necessarily presuppose a general condition from which to detach oneself. If there were no common bond to be released from, the very meaning of immunity would be lost.
When we emphasize immunity’s negative character, however, we should not attribute it solely to the fundamental contrast with community but also, as noted earlier, to its negative mode of action. From this point of view, alongside the juridical meaning of exemption from a particular law, we must also turn to the biomedical sense of the word, namely protection from an infectious disease. As we know, in the phenomenon of natural or acquired immunity, the practice of vaccination involves incorporating a fragment of the illness that we want to protect ourselves from: the presence of the antigen is what activates the biological organism’s protective antibodies. Recalling the ambivalent meaning of the ancient pharmakon, we might say that the medicine is mixed with the poison, consumed in a dosage compatible with the body’s health. Here again we see the productive role of negation, used sustainably to confront a greater negative: death. The western philosophical tradition has invented countless variations of the negative, of which Hegel’s dialectic is the best known. But perhaps none has a richer semantic profile than the enigmatic figure of the katechon, which is used by Paul the Apostle in his letters and, not surprisingly, reappears with various meanings throughout modern and contemporary political theology. Like the immune process, the katechon is the shield, the brake that resists the supreme evil – the apocalypse – not by directly opposing it but, on the contrary, by incorporating and holding it in itself. This explains its intrinsic connection with the immune dispositif. Like the katechon, the latter, too, has a negative mode of action. Actually it is doubly negative: posited already as the reverse of communitas, it cares for the community not directly but by using a portion of the evil from which it seeks to save it. This is how immunity turns out to be inextricably bound to its opposite. It exists only in relation to the community, which it protects and contradicts at the same time.
But this is only the first side of the issue; it must be completed by the other, inverse and complementary side. Just as, logically, there can be no immunity without community, in the same way, historically, there can be no community without immunity. To understand this interdependence, we must return to the original meaning of communitas as a reciprocal gift. As a purely donative relationship, it is formed not by subjects united through the same belonging but, on the contrary, by what puts their respective identities at risk. From this point of view, understood in its most universal mode, communitas is different from, and actually opposite to, the identity-making communities associated with today’s neocommunitarianism. Unlike them, it relates not so much to something owned – a property – as to an expropriation, a lack of what is one’s own or “proper.” This makes it elusive theoretically – and even more so historically: a community of this sort is incapable of existing, hence the need to relate it to an immune dispositif that, by denying an unlimited opening for it, makes it historically possible and recognizable. For this lack of substance, this “nothing in common,” to manifest itself in reality, it must be partially filled up by its opposite. This means that, once the concept of communitas, in itself undifferentiated, is plunged into historical reality, it always requires some form of immunization that allows it to endure in time. Without an immune system to defend it, no body politic could survive any more than a human body the dangers that threaten it from within and from without.
When Ferdinand Tönnies opposed community to society3 as ideal types of social groups, in reality he inferred community from society, as its negative form. That kind of community was simply a society conceived of in reverse. In the historical reality, all societies are immunized to a greater or lesser degree. For good reason, the community he described had all the closed and defensive characteristics of immunity. In effect there is no such thing as communities without immune mechanisms; without them they would not survive the test of time. In this sense, far from being a simple opposite, immunization is the destiny or precondition of every community. Whatever one may wish for, historical communities are always determined by boundaries, external and internal: external, to distinguish them from other communities, and internal, to structure their population in groups based on different ranks, power, and wealth. No society, even the most homogeneous, has known absolute parity between its members, which is why immunization is not a subjective option for any body politic but rather a structural given. It cuts through the community along lines of inclusion and exclusion that, by qualifying its members socially and politically, make them different from one another.
For this reason, the copresence of community and immunity is essentially problematic. In essence it contradicts the meaning of each, understood in its purity. The idea that immunization constitutes the historical mode of every community is at odds with the original meaning of community as an undifferentiated opening, pressing it hard against its opposite. To this inevitable antinomy we owe the tension that courses through every community, exposing it to continuous conflict over the ways and forms of its immunization. Immunization takes on different gradations, which distinguish different societies. No society, except a totalitarian one, is ever entirely immunized. Their degree of immunization depends on external events and internal power relations. Politics can also be defined as the activity that regulates – intensifies or mitigates – the immunization processes in various social environments. To be realistic, it must assume that the immune process is inevitable; and it must seek to mitigate it as much as possible. Only by knowing the limit that runs through a community can politics limit that limit still further, thereby preventing the immune dispositif from breaking the common bond and drifting toward an autoimmune tendency. There is always a limit point, a threshold, beyond which the immune process, inward- and outward-facing, tends to grow until it disrupts the equilibrium with its own common measure, giving rise to something similar to an autoimmune disease. When viewed from this angle, community and immunity are impossible to conceive of outside the aporetic node that their copresence creates.
2
In the first book I wrote on immunity, which the present one develops, I highlighted the fruitfulness of the immune paradigm in defining biopolitics. It fills in the gap between the words “life” and “politics” that Foucault had left open to some extent – a point emphasized by subsequent interpreters. When it comes to the oscillation between a hypernegative conception, in which power ravages life, and another, markedly affirmative, in which life absorbs power into its own ontological flow, the immunization paradigm offers the advantage of creating a connection capable of integrating them into a single semantic block. What makes this possible is a non-absolute characterization of the negative. In “immunitary” logic, the negative is not the oppressive or exclusionary force that power exerts over life, as much as the way in which life survives, taking distance from its own internal energy, which could be disintegrative. When we define immunity as a negative protection of life, we mean that immunity does not protect life directly – in an immediate, frontal fashion – but by subjecting it to a constraint that diminishes its vital potency, channeling that power within certain borders.
That said, we can also look at the matter by flipping the coin to the other side. Just as the immune paradigm permits a more adequate definition of biopolitics than Foucault’s paradigm, biopolitics, too, has a bearing on how the immune paradigm is interpreted.4 What is in question here is not the two constitutive poles of biopolitics but rather the two sides of immunity: the legal–political and the biomedical. The former, as we have seen, regards the exemption of certain individual or collective subjects from common duties, while the latter concerns someone’s natural or induced protection from an infectious disease. From our point of observation, the two elements seem to coexist naturally within the concept of immunity. Whether we refer to one or the other of its meanings depends on the context of one’s discussion. But what looks like natural coexistence to our contemporary gaze is in reality the product of a long history, in which the two meanings of the word followed each other in time and were integrated into a single lemma, only much later. What appears to us as synchrony, almost as coexistence, is the optical effect of a clear-cut chronological distance: the legal–political side of immunity precedes the biomedical side by at least two thousand years.5 Although references to biological immunity appear quite early in texts – for example in Lucan’s Pharsalia, on the occasion of describing an African tribe’s resistance to snake venom – the legal–political meaning becomes specialized long before the biomedical one and influences it quite markedly. When biological immunity is represented as a form of defense, or even counterattack, of a given body against foreign invaders – as microbes and virus germs are defined – a political–military jargon is being introduced into the language of medicine.6 Similarly, the definition of the immunological “self” as a solid entity, differentiated from other living bodies and the surrounding environment, transcribes into medical language the idea of modern individualism. The entire lexicon with which the science of immunology was born at the end of the nineteenth century is drawn almost entirely from the language of politics. It was not Hobbes and Locke – with their respective ideas of protecting life and personal identity – who, in an anticipatory fashion, adopted the language of immunology, which did not exist in their time. It happened the other way round: it was rather immunology that absorbed from these authors the concept of a self that defends itself from external attacks and of a personal entity endowed with a memory capable of preserving its identity over time. On the side of philosophical and political models, one can hardly underestimate the importance of this semantic transfer for a medical science destined to assume greater importance over time. But the striking thing is the lack of questioning, on the side of immunological science, about the effects of this metaphorical incorporation. For more than half a century, and to some extent still today, almost no commentator seems to be aware of the performative effects of this lexical slippage. A quick look through the most widely read immunology textbooks suffices for us to see this blind spot behind the definitions.7 Thinking of the immune system as a battery of soldiers engaged in no-holds-barred combat against external invaders halted immunological science in an immature phase, which it has managed to surpass only in recent decades, not without difficulties and setbacks.
It is true, as we will see in more detail, that this was not a one-way direction, from politics to biology, since the biological side of immunity reacted to the political side in reverse, influencing it in its turn. To recall the most notorious and extreme example, consider how the Nazis used the jargon of infectology against the Jewish people – depicting them as germs, bacteria, and viruses to be exterminated. And they were exterminated, in fact. Over the course of modern history, the performative power of the metaphor acted in both directions – from politics to biology and from biology to politics. But, in terms of genealogy, there remains an almost two-thousand-year distance that separates the two meanings of the concept of immunity. For more than two thousand years, that is, until the late nineteenth century, the only meaning of immunity in use was the legal–political one, of safe conduct conferred on certain subjects who were exempt from current laws. This sense of the word was so prevalent that it remained almost unchanged for millennia. Whatever name it took, a kind of legal immunity was in practice as far back as the earliest Mediterranean civilizations, in a form not that different from what the diplomatic corps still enjoys today in international law. Politicians, heads of state, and members of parliament are also still protected from the general justice system through various kinds of immunity.8 As for ecclesiastical immunity, which the very existence of the Vatican state confirms, its age-old role has never been challenged.
In chronological perspective, to see when the concept of legal immunity became established, we must go back to the ancient republic of Rome. In the legal system it developed – which no civilization, past and present, rivals in complexity and power of transmission – immunitas designated the particular status of certain segments of the population, or even towns, vis-à-vis the general rules.9 We should not lose sight of the literally antinomic character – simultaneously intra legem (within the law) and extra legem (outside the law) – of the legal immunity dispositif. It is an exemption from the law that the law itself established. When the law declares someone to be immune, it places that individual in a space outside its circle, yet without giving up on
