°Worlding and immunity
In “Ontology at Present Tense. Community and Immunity in the Global Times”, Esposito writes of the “immunity device”, which he concisely summarises as the “exigency of exemption and protection”:
which originally belonged to the medical and juridical milieus, extended progressively to all the sectors and all the idioms of our life thus having eventually become the real and symbolic coagulation point of the contemporary experience.
He goes on to talk about immunology in medical discourse and practices, as well as the appearance of similar in information technology (the virus, etc). But it’s his linking of this with the theologico-political which I find particularly compelling, but also unsatisfying:
Political monotheism – the idea that there must be a unique king and a unique kingdom to comply with a unique god – expresses the actual essence of the most violent version of the immunization: the closure of the borders which tolerate nothing outside them, that exclude the mere idea of any exterior, that do not accept any otherness that could menace the logic of One-whole. […]
On my opinion, the path that must be followed does not pass through the only apparently contrasting dialectic of the global and the local, to which most of the current political philosophies refer, but rather through the construction of a novel relation between singular and worldwide. In its turn, this relation can be thought only outside – in the fracture line of – the monotheist paradigm and its constitutive immunization logic. Looked upon in its radical terms – the only terms congruent with critical thinking in the present and about the present – the issue is that of growing out of the theological-political vocabulary in which, despite everything, we are still immersed, as the monotheistic syndrome that I have mentioned proves it.
Compelling - because the connections between immunity and the theologico-political (or sovereignty) are complex and difficult questions. Unsatisfying, because I think there is a double-movement in immunisation that has its corrollary in that of the border. That is, borders are not simply closed, but selectively porous. So, I guess I’m reaching for a way to combine this with the discussion of the contract.
Here’s a video of Gil Anidjar’s talk on the link between Christian blood as traversing the boundaries of the sovereign body in late medieval and early modern Europe. He discusses how the conversion of the Jews poses a particular difficulty for this fluid definition of sovereignty. In a nice aside, he makes a comparison between the conventional Hobbesian image of the sovereign as a body-With-organs and boundaries, and the blood as the mark of sovereignty that’s itself an act of circulation.
it’s pity the video has no pause, ffwd or rew. It can only be viewed in one swoop. so get the popcorn ready.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/modernthought/archive/video/anidjar1.php
pomegranade [July 7, 2007 @ 3:06 pm]
Hey, thanks pom.
s0metim3s [July 7, 2007 @ 5:10 pm]
Chapter 4 of A David Napier’s 2003 book _The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World_ is on “Foreign AIDS: Cultural Relations as an Immunological Form”, but this is perhaps too anthropological and not directly related to the issue of borders, refugees and immigrants?
Eva Sallis’s 2006 novel _The Marsh Birds_ is an excellent story of middle-eastern refugees in Australian detention camps, especially good at showing not just the obvious racism but also the social and mental barriers still remaining even among well-meaning families who try to help these refugess.
Mark Crosby [July 24, 2007 @ 4:19 am]
Thanks Mark.
s0metim3s [July 24, 2007 @ 5:45 pm]