THE MEMBRANE AND THE DIAPHRAGM

Abstract

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito.

• community
• Esposito
• Derrida
• immunity

Notes

My warmest thanks to Greg Bird, Jonathan Short, and an anonymous reviewer for Angelaki for their critical and generous suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

1 See, for example, Timothy Campbell's introduction to his translation of Esposito's Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (“Bíos, Immunity, Life” vii–xlii); Vanessa Lemm's introduction to her translation of Esposito's Terms of the Political (“Biopolitics and Community in Roberto Esposito” 1–13); Amendola 102–18; Haddad 173–93; Wolfe 92ff.

2 In “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida refers to a biological auto-immunization that would seem to give rise to a more general logic:

It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the “indemn-ity” of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization, which interests us particularly here, it consists for a living organism, as is well known and in short, of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system. As the phenomenon of these antibodies is extended to a broader zone of pathology and as one resorts increasingly to the positive virtues of immune-depressants destined to limit the mechanisms of rejection and to facilitate tolerance of certain organ transplants, we feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization. (“Faith” 73 n. 27)

But Derrida considers auto-immunity not to arise from a biological context that, by analogy, could then be applied to the political sphere. Rather, “if autoimmunity is physiological, biological, or zoological, it precedes or anticipates all these oppositions” (Rogues 109; my emphasis). Derrida does not take a biological model and apply it more broadly (e.g., to religion, democracy and ethnocentrism); rather, he develops a way of thinking immunity and argues that it would precede and be presupposed by both a biological and political declension. One can similarly place in context the reference in Terms of the Political, where Esposito refers to the biological phenomenon of auto-immunity, likening the way in which the Nazi regime progressively widened its circle of death, “as in so-called auto-immune diseases, where the immune system is strengthened to the point of causing the body's decomposition” (73). For Esposito has also emphasized that “the biological immune is [not] a neutral or original object compared to the derivative or metaphoric nature of other forms of social immunization” (Immunitas 16).

3 In what follows, I discuss several versions of the term “auto-immunity” in Derrida's work. In Immunitas Esposito refers to Derrida's account of auto-immunity, but only to the version discussed in “Faith and Knowledge” (Immunitas 52–56)

4 This is discussed in contexts as varied as the autobiographical impulse, discussed in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” in which immunization through the autobiographical gesture risks becoming autoimmune. Commenting that “nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography” (415), Derrida describes “this terrible (and always possible) perversion by means of which the immune becomes auto-immunizing,” an “immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing” (“The Animal” 415; emphasis mine), as well as the defense of America's “security” (see below).

5 See also Esposito's discussion of 9/11 in terms of an immunitary crisis (Terms 132).

6 See, for example, the account of this as culminating in a global crisis “at the culmination of the biopolitical epoch” (Terms 132–33).

7 See Derrida, Beast 324.

8 Esposito specifically sees Derrida as “not completely register[ing] or […] reject[ing] the paradigmatic shift toward bíos that for some time now has altered the dynamics of knowledge” – this would apply both to the paradigm in which politics is increasingly concerned with the defense of an impossibly immunized life, and the growing epistemological and philosophical importance of theoretical accounts adequate to this phenomenon (“Contemporary French” 112–13).

9 This variant of Derridean auto-immunity emphasizes more strongly the constitutive, as when, in Specters of Marx, Derrida describes the living ego as auto-immune. It must, he argues, necessarily “welcome the other within.” There is no living ego without: “iterability, non-uniqueness, prosthesis, synthetic image, simulacrum,” all, he argues, “so many figures of death” (Specters of Marx 141). There could not be an ego without the alterity that might seem to be the ego's negation and other. Elsewhere he argues that there could not be life without the immanence of death, and the degradation that appears to be its antithesis.

10 In the 1968 interview with Julia Kristeva in Positions, Derrida describes “the conscious and speaking subject” as “not present, nor above all present to itself before différance.” But, he adds, “the subject is constituted” (but, of course, he continues: “only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral” (Positions 29)).

11 Rebentisch associates this account with the conditionality of the liberal tolerance associated with some discourses of multiculturalism. Insofar as we are tolerant of what we tacitly understand to be (sufficiently) like us (insofar as our tolerance is tacitly premised on a degree of likeness), tolerance could be said (according to Rebentisch's reading) to similarly not take place, not to be what it is, to secure itself by restricting itself.

12 See Derrida, Given Time and The Gift of Death.

13 The latter does not, of course, justify the former, and it would be incorrect, also, to settle these coinciding formulae into a decidable version of democracy either “taking place” or “not taking place.” Similarly, just as it is incorrect to suppose Derrida's auto-immunity should be understood as decidably destructive, it is incorrect to assume a decidable distinguishability between its destructive and positive possibilities or effects.

14 See, for example, Monolinguism 28, and his comments on cultural identity in The Other Heading and also in Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell:

take the example of a person or of a culture. We often insist nowadays on cultural identity – for instance, national identity, linguistic identity, and so on. Sometimes the struggles under the banner of cultural identity, national identity, linguistic identity are noble fights. But at the same time the people who fight for their identity must pay attention to the fact that identity is not the self-identity of a thing, this glass, for instance, this microphone, but implies a difference within identity. That is, the identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself; a culture is different from itself; the person is different from itself. Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, egocentrism, and so on. That is what I tried to demonstrate in the book called The Other Heading: in the case of culture, person, nation, language, identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity different from itself, having an opening or a gap within itself. (Deconstruction in a Nutshell 13–14)

This remark must be counter-balanced, however, by comments made about Le Pen and the membrane; see Echographies 19, discussed in section V below.

15 This takes further Foucault's discussion in Society Must Be Defended of Hitler's April 1945 order “to destroy the German people's living conditions” (260), but see nn. 16 and 17.

16 There is room for debate about how closely this follows Foucault's account in Society Must Be Defended of the caesura introduced by biopolitics into the biological continuum. The break described by Foucault emphasizes the emergence of biological inferiority within a population in the form of divisions between races, sub-species, or “inferior” groups. He describes the emergence of rationales for letting these groups die, or be killed, to the ends of the healthy life of the population. Unlike wars between peoples and nations, he stresses that this is a conceptualization of internal elements within a population considered destructive or threatening to the future. Still, he emphasizes: “it is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.” According to his commentary: “the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer” (255). Esposito, in his reference to the parallels made by Nazi biologists between sterilization, genocide and removing the appendix of the population, inclines his analysis towards the extreme version of the immune paradigm: where self-destruction eventually becomes a means of enhancing “life.”

17 It would be just as plausible to argue that some Afghan lives are considered to be collateral damage to the overall “humanitarian ends” of other Afghans or other interests. In other words, Esposito's interpretation can be distinguished, in this emphasis, from that offered by Butler in Frames of War and Precarious Life, and, I have suggested, from that offered by Foucault in Society Must Be Defended.

18 Esposito considers this the extreme logic of the immune paradigm. The element of seeming paradox (though he does not favor this term) is emphasized insofar as he describes the attempt to avoid race “sterility” through mechanisms of “sterilization.” The risk of sterility to the Aryan race was attributed to individuals associated with degeneracy or transmittable racial or biological inferiority. But Esposito cites Nazi medical analogies between Jews and the gangrenous appendix of the German Völkerkörper and the concepts of racial hygiene and demographic politics of Verschuer who defended a “healthy patrimony [through] the elimination of its sick elements” (Bíos 143).

19 See Anne O'Byrne's “Communitas and the Problem of Women” (this issue), for her discussion of Esposito on the “suppression of birth.”

20 At the radical extreme, for Derrida, immunity from the risk of unpredictable transformation could only be accomplished by the most radical stasis: death. Thus any of the attempts to stave off foreignness and difference are bound to fail. They are, therefore, auto-immune, here in the sense of being destructive to their own aspirations.

21 For example, Esposito does acknowledge that “immunity is needed for protecting our life,” provided it does not exceed the threshold beyond which it “winds up negating life” (Terms 61).

22 See Haddad's Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy for its definitive discussion of the status, and multiple meanings, of birth in Derrida's work.

23 He is comfortable with the direct associations of arrivance, future, hospitality and monstrosity, but with some seeming preference for the more oblique association of the child with the monstrous. I add here to the discussion of birth in Derrida's work opened by Haddad, who comments:

On the one hand, [Derrida] identifies [birth] narrowly with nature and necessity, and this identification grounds his resistance to the use of fraternity in political discourse. Birth understood in this sense is thus marked as negative, since it is said to be at work in a discourse whose force Derrida wishes to diminish. On the other hand, Derrida himself has recourse to birth as a figure for the arrivant, as that which comes and exceeds all calculation and determination, precisely in political contexts. Here Derrida imparts a positive value to birth, insofar as he invokes the figure of the child or its substitutes, suggesting he endorses an openness to the arrivant. Derrida's work would thus appear to contain two births, with two meanings and two values. (Haddad, Derrida 122–23)

24 Esposito hopes to add an alternative understanding of community, one offered to counteract the excesses of the immune paradigm and their thanatopolitics. By contrast, in a favored modeling of community we would not attempt to thoroughly immunize ourselves (or community) from risk, threat, death, difference, encroachment, transformation. Such attempts only aggravate, in any case, what they attempt to avert. We would not attempt to protect ourselves from this “no-thing” that is the mode of being of community (Communitas 139).

25 And similarly, see Esposito's interview with Timothy Campbell and Federico Luisetti, “On Contemporary French and Italian Political Philosophy,” in which Esposito again uses an image of the “the internal struggle, which for example, compares and contrasts the fetus's immunitarian system with that of the mother” as an alternative for a biopolitics thought of as a “predetermined thread linking birth to death” (111).

26 Making this point, he draws particularly on a discussion of the fetus and the immune system presented by John Dwyer in The Body at War. Anne O'Byrne's contribution to this special issue offers further reflections on Esposito's interpretation of the paternal chromosomes, and of the fetus as a “semi-allogenic implant in the maternal body, preserved there by paternal difference” (O'Byrne this issue).

27 Esposito refers also to Donna Haraway's account of a semi-permeable self, enfolding within its boundaries the alterity of its environment (Immunitas 165–66).

28 As late as his Death Penalty seminar, Derrida exchanges an articulation of the “right to life” for an account of life as the undecidability of one's own death (Séminaire; see in particular the tenth session, 331–64).

29 But, for important exceptions, see Haddad, “Citizenship” and (for his treatment of Derrida on birth) idem, Derrida; see also O'Byrne's contribution in this special issue of Angelaki. In an earlier work, O'Byrne offers an analysis of the figure of birth by a number of contemporary and twentieth-century Continental philosophers, including Derrida; see her Natality and Finitude.