The Paradigm of Immunization

By updating and expanding the generative links between biopower and modernity, Timothy Campbell’s translation of Roberto Esposito’s Bíos injects into the contested intersection of politics and biology a renewed search for an affirmative biopolitics. Esposito consciously moves beyond Michel Foucault’s ambivalence in elaborating the biopolitical valences of sovereignty; Foucault refuses to fully integrate biopower into his thought, Esposito argues, because he does not recognize how the logic of immunization operates in modern sovereignty. Instead, for Esposito, biopolitics founds modernity at the moment when sovereign power becomes concerned with immunizing its communal body from external threats. Indeed, immunity is the rationale for the institutionalization of modern sovereign power; such power is an ongoing immunization against the many internal debts and conflicts inherent in the logic of the community. This rethinking of Foucault—and of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s own attempt at a positive bio-politics—allows Esposito to theorize bíos as an alternative term that names life as such, life derived not from membership in a communal body but from “the flesh of the world” (xxxiii). Because for Esposito community necessarily implies inscribing the body within a horizon of immunization, any theory of biopolitics that does not free the individual from the dispositifs of biopolitical sovereignty will disintegrate in the face of its genocidal culmination. In this sense, all modern politics is to a certain extent a biopolitics or—at worst—a thanatopolitics.

That the coupling of politics with biology, of sovereignty with life, seems to inevitably descend into an economy of death prompts Esposito to ask the foundational question of Bíos: “Why does bio-politics continually threaten to be reversed into thanatopolitics?” (39). The central paradox of Bíos—that modern life exists only in an intimate relationship with and active creation of death—pivots on what Esposito calls the “paradigm of immunization.” This paradigm, Esposito’s primary contribution to the biopolitical lexicon, describes a process that protects life not through an affirmation but through the introduction of an external threat that “subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand” (46). Thus, immunization belongs to a distinctly negative register, and it is this negative delineation of the protection of life that constitutes the inverse of community: immunity not only derives from but is “internally inhabited by its opposite” (51). Through political and cultural means, the paradigm of immunization makes the political body secure by representing itself with and against the other. This “self-immunization” means the individual willingly submits to outside power and leads Esposito to Friedrich Nietzsche, a move that fundamentally changes the stakes of immunization. In Esposito’s reading, Nietzsche reduces all modern political categories to those which “[confront] the problem of life from the perspective of the human species and of the mobile thresholds that define it, by contiguity or difference, with respect to other living species” (83). The shifting alignment of humanity and animality defines a “threshold beyond which what is called ‘man’ enters into a different relationship with his own species” (109). The turning point is when man becomes other to his own species and thus eligible for incorporation into the immunization paradigm. For Esposito, the turn to death pivots on the animalization of man.

Nietzsche identifies the point at which the biology and body of man each become subject and object of the immunization paradigm; this broadens the reach of biopolitics because it can operate “in relation not only to human life, but what is outside life, to its other, to its after” (109). Thus, the atomic political unit of modernity is only life as such, life either within the human body or outside it—that is to say, the animalization of life. This is the crucial point at which institutions and laws begin to shift towards the material and biological such that “no politics exists other than that of bodies, conducted on bodies, through bodies” (84). By animalizing both...