Community, Immunity, Alterity: an Affirmative, Beyond-Human Biopolitics?

Abstract

Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity dispositive. Im-munity is the negation of the munus which animates and builds com-munity: inside the immunitarian paradigm, thinking politics and ontology is considering men as absolute beings, without any kind of engagement to each other, inhabited by a vacuum to deny. Esposito believes this means shaping an anthropological paradigm (systematized by philosophical anthropology in the 20th century) in which man is thought to be distinct from the animal since he is capable of denying his own nature and, more generally, his relationship with the world and the other beings – that is, a paradigm in which community has no ‘positive’ place. In order to overcome the immunitarian paradigm, we need to define the outlines of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics ‘of ’ life and not ‘on’ life. This biopolitical shift requires the understanding of the ‘flow of life,’ of its everlasting and unprotected openness: Esposito claims that life is impersonal and intrinsically normative, over-human and perpetually exposed to the ‘outside.’ Finally, this perspective leaves open a crucial question: can over-man exist without man?