Biopolitics: From Supplement to Immanence: In Dialogue with Roberto Esposito's Trilogy: Communitas, Immunitas, Bíos

English-speaking readers are now fortunate to have access to all three of Roberto Esposito's books—Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Italian 1998/English 2010), Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2002/2011), and Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2004/2008)—whose lucid continuity aligns them as a coherent trilogy, moving toward the thesis that an "affirmative biopolitics" consists in "the reversal of Nazi thanatopolitics" (B, 194).¹ Agreeing in this with Giorgio Agamben, Esposito argues that biopolitics has so far always been, to a lesser or greater extent, intertwined with thanatopolitics, of which Nazism was its most acute manifestation. But by proposing an "affirmative biopolitics" and locating it, as Timothy Campbell writes in his introduction to Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, in "the continuum of immunity and community," Esposito both differentiates himself from other theoreticians of biopolitics and "synthesizes Agamben's negative vision of biopolitics with Hardt and Negri's notion of the common as signaling" precisely "a new affirmative biopolitics" (B, xxix). As in all other cases of conceptual pairings, Esposito establishes the continuum between immunity and community both lexically and historically. Lexically or etymologically, the common element of both immunity and community is "munus," whose meaning is "an office—a task, obligation, duty (also in the sense of a gift to be repaid)." Thus, the "negative or privative term . . . immunis refers to someone who performs no office" or is "exempted . . . from the pensum of paying tributes or performing services for others"; in short, immunitas designates the "exemption from the obligation of the munus" (I, 5). Yet immunitas "is also a privilege" insofar as it indicates a "difference from the condition of others . . . so much so that the true antonym of immunitas may not be the absent munus, but rather the communitas of those who support it by being its bearers" (I, 6). In other words, the continuum between immunity and community is initially set up as a relation of opposition. In Esposito's words:

Compared to a generality . . . immunity is a condition of particularity: whether it refers to an individual or a collective, it is always "proper," in the specific sense of "belonging to someone" and therefore "un-common" or "non-communal."

(I, 6).

The most elementary task Esposito undertakes in this trilogy consists in showing that the relation between immunity and community, as well between the poles of an extensive array of conceptual pairs that range from biology to theology, is in truth not that of opposition but that of, as Esposito occasionally calls it, a "negative dialectic," not in Adorno's sense but in the sense of a "self-contradictory" or "antinomic" relation (B, 55-56). On the basis of this self-contradictory intertwining of community and immunity, Esposito grants absolute primacy to immunity over any other explanatory category regarding modern politics, arguing:

The thesis I would like to advance in this regard is that the category of immunization is so important that it can be taken as the explicative key of the entire modern paradigm, not only in conjunction with but even more than other hermeneutic models, such as those we find in "secularization," "legitimation," and "rationalization," terms that hide or diminish the lexical significance of modernity. The reason is that, yes, there are echoes in these models, distant with respect to the premodern past, but not of the prospective inversion and the negative power [potenza] of the negative that juxtaposes directly immunitas and communitas.

(C, 12)

In other words, Esposito's ambition can be described as an attempt to render established explanatory models of modernity—such as those offered by Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, and others—obsolete, or at best ancillary, insofar as they miss the lexical significance that defines modernity; this consists in the negative power of the negative, or the negative dialectic relation between immunity and community. As I will show below, this relation, which informs Esposito's entire methodology and line of argumentation, reflects the logic of supplementarity.

Given that Campbell's aforementioned introduction offers an extensive...