°Bios, Immunity, Life
Long-awaited, and thanks to the heads up from (and work by) Timothy Campbell, the edition of diacritics: “Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito”. Here are a few excerpts:
Esposito, “The Immunization Paradigm”:
the category of immunization makes it possible for us to take another step forward (or perhaps better, laterally) to the bifurcation that runs between the two principal elaborations of the biopolitical paradigm: one affirmative and productive and the other negative and lethal. We have seen how the two terms tend to constitute themselves in an alternating and reciprocal form that doesn’t allow points of contact. Thus, power negates life and enhances its development; violates life and excludes it; protects and reproduces life; and objectivizes and subjectifies life without any terms that might mediate between them. Now the hermeneutic advantage of the immunitary model lies precisely in the circumstance that these two modalities, these two effects of sense — positive and negative, protecting and destructive — ultimately find an internal articulation, a semantic juncture that organizes them into a causal relation (albeit of a negative kind). This means that the negation doesn’t take the form of the violent subordination that power imposes on life from the outside, but rather is the intrinsically antinomic mode by which life preserves itself through power. From this perspective, we can say that immunization is a negative [form] of the protection of life. It saves, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or collective, but it doesn’t do so directly or immediately; on the contrary it subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand.
Rossella Bonito Oliva, “From the Immune Community to the Communitarian Immunity: On the Recent Reflections of Roberto Esposito”:
The community is put into play, therefore, in the actuality of a power that, when exercised, is extended to defending the lives of its citizens. The presupposition is that if freedom permits man to overcome the biological minus or deficiency that connotes him (thereby emancipating him), it also admits him into the indefinite of what is no longer natural. It places him in front of the abyss of the indeterminate [Kant 55]. The originary defect for which the divine gift of the myth was compensation is translated, therefore, into the immanent lack of human nature [natura dell’uomo]. From this point of view, determining what is human through the merely biological finds in the politically common the site in which the subject is constituted, emancipated from an originary lack, and legitimated in adhering to the universal and impersonal community of equals.
Thus the irreversible and inalienable principle of every law is the safeguarding and the care [tutela] of the body. The body is understood as the permeable foundation, the zōon, from which the political dimension gives form to the body’s domestication with a view to its utilization. The body is given [si dota] instruments, which, freeing it from expending physical energy, allow it to expand into the space of property. Property is the prosthesis par excellence, just as the body is the instrument par excellence. In this space of conquest, the threshold of the inalienability of rights before which every community comes to a halt, is crossed. Otherwise, the reasons for a pact to defend life would no longer be valid. Even before they are abstracted as economic values, the body and property are tied to the image of the earth and constitute the limit in which the law moves. They are also the perimeter of the power of this law, there where only the authority of the State and the value of the community produce the certainties tied to a limit that protects and reassures. They mark what is most one’s own [proprio] and what is most necessary.
Laurent Dubreuil, “Leaving Politics - Bios, ZŌĒ, Life”:
Aristotle the anachronist, as we are reconstructing him, should guard us from the mystical return to the origin; for if there are bios and zōē in these regions, the contemporary bent toward oppression may take equal recourse in them. Might one yet find the adequate tools to invent a new resistance? I would rather make another, final suggestion. In Nicomachean Ethics, it is barely articulated but irreducibly there: this life in excess of the political force that handles it. Against political totality, there might be the impossible possibility of another life despite all. Not the affirmative biopolitics sought by Esposito, nor the Aristotelian dissymmetry of ways of life subordinated in every manner to the orders of the City. I am speaking instead of the utopian affirmation of a life taking leave of politics. Here the familiar notion of retreat will not suffice, for the word implies a return or spiraling back onto oneself. It would be vain to join “those who turn their backs to politics” [Rancière, Disagreement 32/55]: we must depart and look things squarely in the eye. No longer sufficient is the horizontal quota (private here, public there; here I am a citizen, there an autonomous individual). It will always be a matter of leaving politics: recognizing its necessity, its grandeur, its risks — and abandoning it. This movement cannot be completed once and for all but forever begun again. I recognize the political hold, I do not deny it; and I desert it, in the vital contradiction that signifies something. One can hope to combat political tyranny by walking its terrain (the resistance of the exile in Hardt and Negri, Esposito’s renovated biopower, the true politics in Rancière); but some supplementary refusal is needed. Stating that all livable life is political, or that we should only fight politically against the contemporary bio-order, would be the ultimate victory for the totalizing ambition of polis and police. I do not call anyone to inaction. On the contrary, let us redouble the political acts of our unassailable lives; se moquer de la politique c’est aussi faire de la politique. Let us begin by affirming life outside of politics—even today. Politics is not of a concept, of an obscured essence. It is rather a collective, frail, ruined construct of events, words, deeds, thoughts, feelings, forces, powers, knowledges; always old — always new. We sometimes fight for better policies, but politics is not all. Just as our words collide and tell us something, just as significance passes lexical meanings, we ought to speak of the fissures of the political. Far from the totalizing tendency of any bio-politics, we should remember that our life is able to be more. Critical scholarship is a possible way of articulating these ideas. But only one way, among others, such as passionate friendship or poetry. In order not to die as a consequence of my measured, chiseled, programmed, that is, totally political life, I should also strive beyond that field reserved for me. Seek not only political subjectivation against the police, nor the affirmation of a biopower against the death that determines existence. Say and show that there is life in life. Live politics and leave politics.
And, finally, for those who don’t peruse the deli-cuts, a conference at the University of Kent in April, “Italian Thought Today: Biopolitics, Nihilism, Empire”, featuring Esposito among others.
There’s also a piece in this edition of diacritics by Stelarc on his extra ear (which reminds me, I went to see Orlan speak at Goldsmiths - and she is quite something, recombinant cells and all. Beautiful.)
