(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Roberto Espositos siste bok, Common Immunity: Biopolitics in the Age of the Pandemic, revisits the arguments he presented in his seminal work Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2011), which was originally published in Italian two decades ago. At the time, Esposito reflected on the importance of the immune system in defining the concept of 'biopolitics', thus attempting to fill the void between 'life' and 'politics' that Michel Foucault left behind. In his new book, Esposito revisits the argument about modern society biopoliticale basis in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic.
Immunization
Immunization is a central topic in our time, especially in the wake of two years of global pandemic. From the fusion of medicine and politics to the regulation of individual behavior, and from the implementation of lockdowns to the rollout of mass vaccination campaigns, the term immunity permeated various aspects of our lives. In response to the covid-19 pandemic, many countries implemented a number of measures such as social distancing and extensive vaccinationcampaigns in an attempt to control the spread of the virus and achieve immunity. For Esposito, social distancing is a negative biopolitical measure since it ensures social protection through desocialization. In contrast, the global vaccination, despite the differences between the countries, is a positive biopolitical measure. However, both measures are equally rooted in the immunity paradigm.
Through the global vaccination campaign, we have for the first time in history witnessed the emergence of a shared immunity. Throughout the book, Esposito addresses the problematic relationship between the legal-political and medical-biological aspects of immunity.
For Esposito, social distancing is a negative biopolitical measure.
While immunity has traditionally had a legal-political meaning, vaccination has given the term a medical-biological meaning. The legal-political significance has nevertheless characterized the biomedical field, as an immune body is understood as protected against outside invaders. But as Esposito has touched on, biological immunity has also had political and military historical significance, such as the annihilation of the Native American population with smallpox when they came into contact with European colonizers. Even the discovery of the vaccine, which was made by Edward Jenner before it was further developed by Louis Pasteur, became, according to the author, a battle between national interests and a way of conducting politics through medicine.
A protection system
Esposito continues the discussion of the paradigmatic relationship between concepts such as 'community' and 'immunity'. For him, no society can survive without immunity devices. Like the human body, the social body needs a protective system to endure. But it is also the case that excessive immunization sets communityat risk, in the same way that the body can develop autoimmune diseases.
Esposito goes on to trace the immunity paradigm in Western philosophy, drawing on philosophical, literary, and anthropological sources in an attempt to verify its explicit or implicit presence
Excessive immunization puts the community at risk, in the same way that the body can develop autoimmune diseases.
He does this via a number of authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, René Girard, Niklas Luhmann, Peter Sloterdijk, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Girard argues that violence is diverted from a community to a victim, while the law secularizes this victim mechanism "but does not eliminate it, and uses violence to immunize society against violence" (from the book). In the same way claims luhmann that contradictions in communication "put society on alert and thus save it from unsustainable conflicts" (ibid.). Derrida is directly concerned with immunity when he recognizes autoimmunity as the process by which the immune system attacks "the body politic", and concludes that democracy can protect itself through its own negation.
The authorities
After the preceding historical and conceptual surveys, Esposito concludes the book by addressing the covid-19 event. The author argues that the reductionist and sometimes conspiratorial interpretations have lost sight of the necessary and dangerous nature of the biopolitical measures that were implemented to prevent infection. Their necessary nature is substantiated by the fact that immunization was the only effective response to virusthe disease, but these biopolitical measures were also dangerous to the extent that the authorities were unable to distinguish "between protective and restrictive forms of individual and collective life". Overall, the book offers a compelling argument about how community and immunity merged in times of covid-19, resulting in what Esposito calls "shared immunity."
Translated from English by the editor.