Abstract
Why is there such a marked preference for speaking of bio-ethics rather than bio-politics, in traditional Anglophone analytic philosophy? It is as if life were something pure and unscathed, wholly natural and naturally whole, uncontaminated by politics, law, and power. It is the task of this essay to demonstrate that this is not the case and therefore it is not possible simply to address life on the level of the individual and the ethical. For life cannot be thought as whole and unscathed in its individual propriety. Life cannot be wholly immunised against what does not, properly speaking, belong to it. To think otherwise is to “naturalise” life, to think of life as a purely natural entity, which is to fall victim to ideology, since nature is never uncontaminated by culture, and life is never free of politics.
Some of the ideas contained in this essay were first presented at the University of Brighton (28th March 2011), the University of Warwick (January 18th 2011), and—albeit obliquely—at Manchester Metropolitan University (26th February 2009). I must thank Darian Meacham for his help with the final version.
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Notes
- 1.
The way in which a biological affair extends its relevance to ontology (and that is to say, philosophy) is captured by Esposito as follows, in relation to the most extreme disease of immune deficiency: “What is affected by AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome] is not only a health protocol but an entire ontological scheme: the identity of the individual as the form and content of its subjectivity. […] [T]he disease destroys the very idea of an identity-making border: the difference between self and other, internal and external, inside and outside” (2011 [2002], p. 162).
- 2.
At least two important works in English have in recent years made the notion of autoimmunity their central focus: Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism and Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine.
- 3.
Derrida gives a succinct account of this part of “Faith and Knowledge” in Rogues: “The formalisation of this autoimmune law was there carried out around the community as auto-co-immunity (the common of community having in common the same duty or charge [munus] as the immune), as well as the auto-co-immunity of humanity” (2005 [2003], p. 35).
- 4.
Here Derrida is perhaps abbreviating the full scope of “auto-immunity” in the biological sense: it refers not only to the immune system’s attacking itself, but also to the immune system’s attacking other parts of the organism and other processes that are taking place within it. That said, later in the same passage, Derrida might be seen as gesturing towards this when he speaks of the rejection of transplants, which at least seems to imply that an organism’s immunity to itself can extend to parts other than the immune system itself. I am here indebted to Darian Meacham for his clarification of the biological sense of “auto-immunity”.
- 5.
This hesitation between a new direction and an explicitation reflects an ambivalence in Esposito’s own position: “the category of immunisation that Derrida only hints at or takes in another direction is ushered back into the foreground, but in a new light” (Esposito 2011 [2002], p. 55, translation modified, emphasis added).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
I take this term from Miguel de Beistegui (2004, p. 36). It refers to the identification of being with presence or substance (ousia, in Greek) which Heidegger and others associate with the beginning of philosophy as metaphysics and which they locate in the work of Aristotle, if not Plato, or even Parmenides .
- 9.
If there is a philosophy of history in Esposito as distinct from a mere narration, it is perhaps to be found in embryo in his notion of technology. History would therefore be a history of technology, as if technology had brought us to the ambivalent moment in which we stand, between two interpretations of immunity. We have already seen Esposito suggesting that the second, “hospitable” interpretation “has been made possible, even inevitable, by advances in genetic and bionic technologies” (2011 [2002], p. 17).
The relation between politics and life would thus be given a particular historical form by the level of technology that has been attained and the kind of technology that has been developed: “the connection between politics and life is radically redefined by the unstoppable proliferation of technology” (2011 [2002], p. 146). We might interpret this as saying that the ways in which power can directly act upon bare life without mediation are greatly enhanced by the manner in which technological systems have now infiltrated the most intimate interiors of our bodies and our relation to those bodies.
Once again, Esposito credits Nancy with the link between community and technology, or more precisely, technē (2011 [2002], p. 150–53). Technē may indeed be identified with the exposure to the other governed by the immune system, since technē is precisely the moment at which the supposedly proper, natural body of the self opens onto the non-natural other (2011 [2002], p. 151).
- 10.
Speaking of Derrida’s theory of fundamentalist religious movements as reactions to the globalisation that religion has embraced in recent times, Esposito says the following: “this is hardly sufficient to resolve the question of religious immunity. The entropic dialectic we have just described would itself appear to be the final outcome of a much more ancient process, one whose beginnings have been preserved in the original semantic stratification of the religious phenomenon” (2011 [2002], p. 53, emphasis added). These he discovers in a text by the linguist, Emile Benveniste , which Derrida cites, but the implications of which, according to Esposito, he does not fully explore.
To begin an adequate defence of Derrida on this point, one would have to examine his last two seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign, which do deal with a history, albeit a history of texts, which coincide to a large extent with those addressed by Esposito. One would also need to examine the way in which “Faith and Knowledge” in particular, and indeed all of the texts on immunity, are unquestionably driven by “contemporary” concerns—at least in their deployment of this vocabulary. And more fundamentally, as Derrida points out in his dazzling interview, “Politics and Friendship,” one would need to examine his early work on historicism from a Husserlian point of view (Derrida 2002 [1989], pp. 156–57).
- 11.
“Derrida, rather, gives it a much less optimistic, even tragic characterisation. More than immunity or immunisation, he always speaks of ‘autoimmunity’ […]. The contemporary political situation can indeed be interpreted in the light of a similar destructive and self-destructive process. On this point I am in complete agreement with him. […] [/] Nevertheless, certain relevant differences remain in relation to the formation of the category of immunity that in Derrida emerges as somewhat extemporaneous, in the sense that immunity is linked neither with the theme of community [Derrida in fact does indicate this connection, as we have seen—M.L.] (which Derrida rejects in favour of the weaker concept, from my point of view, of friendship), nor with that of biopolitics, which is utterly extraneous to his thought [in fact, the final seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign demonstrate this to be false, at least up to a point—M.L.]. This isolation of the category of immunity […] impedes Derrida from fully grasping the dialectical character of immunity […]. In fact, Derrida doesn’t treat the long-standing modern character of the immunitary paradigm, which emerges as crushed in the contemporary period. On the other hand, it is precisely the indissoluble, albeit negative, relation with communitas that opens for me the possibility of a positive, communitary reconversion of the same immunitary dispositif” (Esposito 2006, pp. 53–55, translation modified).
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Lewis, M. (2015). Of (Auto-)Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben. In: Meacham, D. (eds) Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 120. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9870-9_13
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