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greg bird
jonathan short
COMMUNITY, IMMUNITY, AND THE PROPER
an introduction to the political theory of roberto esposito
introduction
It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. Intimately bound up with this sense of crisis is its apparent multiplicity and lack of isomorphism, as increasingly no single crisis can be seen to function independently of others. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation, be it wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, or political and economic turmoil. There is, accordingly, nothing that can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. In this light the globalized world appears as the sustained crisis of the proper and simultaneously as the endgame of the project of modernization as manifested in ever more intensified, crisis-ridden forms. Even the very framework of crisis theory is itself starting to implode, thus becoming a crisis of second-order proportion.
The centrality of the concept of the proper to systemic crisis is similarly evident. For if the proper would indicate those items that are suitably, correctly, or even essentially joined together, it is precisely this obviousness of connection that is most troubled by the interlinked contemporary form of crisis. In this respect, if as Marx and Engels wrote more than a century ago, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” to describe the globalizing dynamics of the capitalism of their day, they were simply identifying the crisis of the proper on which Western modernization was being built. The paradox of the proper is that the modality of crisis is essential to it. Internal to the associative matrix that links one element properly to another is that spacing Esposito inherits from Derrida and is further elaborated by Nancy – in turn radicalizing the analysis of temporization performed by Husserl – as the underlying structure of temporality in which what appears to be naturally related comes to be opened up, made subject to spacing, and thus exposed to an essential and necessary dissociation and dislocation.
Just as the proper implies an internally necessary connection to crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that politics today revolves around the dissociation and crisis of the proper. The more categorical the exposure of the proper to its essential contingency, the more violent are the political forms seeking to deny any such thing, to carry on with “business as usual” or to reassert the alleged naturalness of its associations in ever more apocalyptic terms. Today we are witnessing ever more drastic assertions of the essentiality of propriety (in the form of religious or socially conservative resurgence), property (in the form of highly concentrated but unstable regimes of capitalist accumulation), and/or authenticity (in the form of competing claims of idiomatic identity or questions of autonomous decision-making powers). Frantic attempts to reassert or bolster propriety, property, and authenticity, in short, the fields of the proper, are but a symptom of the latter’s ineluctable crisis and decline.
It is amidst this background of uncertainty and the crisis of received forms that Roberto Esposito’s political thought takes on an extreme relevance in the present. Esposito’s work excavates and examines in a singularly powerful way how the dominant Western philosophical-political idealization of an immunized and proper community is becoming increasingly untenable in our current geo-political circumstances. Esposito’s critique is not simply a nihilistic gesture, but is instead a prelude to a perhaps inevitable, but in any case long-overdue, rethinking of the basis of political and social relations. From his perspective, community is anything but a common essence or a shared property. The immunized models of community, where members are protected against foreign substances, external threats, and internal contagions, so common in our times, are imploding at a frightening pace. Rather than search for new material to mend the breaches of the communal borders and shield community against the nihilism of expropriation, Esposito searches for the original link between community and expropriation. Community does not shelter, contain, and protect us; rather, community is the very inauguration of an expropriation process. In community, so-called proprietary subjects are mutually exposed and suspended in a common munus, which never forms a stable property or furnishes an essential identity. The much-heralded crisis of community today, he contends, is merely the crisis of the project of community conceived under the banner of immunization. Community can no longer be conceived as an archi-original border that shelters the proper from being expropriated in its various senses. If the exigency of community is to be addressed in our times, then we are left with the seemingly impossible task of deconstructing the proper.1
This task has not been without its detractors. In the burgeoning English literature on Esposito, a single question is constantly being raised about his work: what kind of politics can come from such an approach? Most recognize that he is coming from somewhere on the left – his revision of community is grounded in a notion of communism – but his lack of concrete statements, his insistence that he is more committed to deconstructing core categories in modern political thought than prescribing practical political solutions, and his tendency to present his opinion while working through an interpretation of other theorists, have left many wondering if a concrete politics can be drawn out of his political theory.2 This question appears to haunt Esposito himself, who has responded with slightly more practical statements in his recent Terms of the Political and in his article “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” published in this special issue of Angelaki. The latter provides more fodder for those of us who are looking to situate his thought, but for those who want to see what they can do with his theory beyond applying it to concrete case studies – a strain of literature which is surely going to take off over the next decade – we are still left wanting.
The question itself is cumbersome. Where is the question coming from and what is being asked of Esposito? Is he expected to appeal to a prefabricated political roadmap à la Alain Badiou? Bosteels has argued that without such a gesture Esposito’s notion of the “impolitical” leads into the apolitical terrain of the post-political. But is this a fair characterization? He is neither a vanguardist nor an avowed Maoist. Esposito fits within a clear trajectory of critical European political philosophers who prefer to search for new openings for rethinking radical politics by criticizing contemporary political formations rather than provide ready-made prescriptions. Other contemporary thinkers here include Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. Each has been asked the same question. Some have provided clear answers, some elliptical ones, others have deconstructed the question itself.
Esposito has provided hints about his position, more so in recent years. We do not intend to speak for him; rather, we want to further situate his theory of community. In this article, we use his response in “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics” as a hermeneutical guide to examine his position on community in his trilogy (Communitas, Immunitas, and Bíos), in Terms of the Political, and in Third Person. We cannot possibly cover all the political ramifications of Esposito’s work in a short paper. Instead, we want to engage in a thought exercise by drawing a comparison between his radical form of republicanism and the civic republican strains in the Anglo-American communitarian movement. We have chosen this route because we believe it helps to situate Esposito’s theory in relation to mainstream politics. In other words, given Esposito’s relative obscurity in mainstream political theory circles (particularly in North America), it is not only useful to situate his thought in relation to the dominant communitarian strands (and correlatively, to the liberalism to which it is inevitably connected). There is another reason as well: today in mainstream political discourse one cannot be taken seriously unless one acknowledges in advance that only some variety of liberal or communitarian thought is the basis for conversation. While Esposito brings in an element that (much like Nancy) is inevitably connected to the notion of communism, he does so in a way that establishes a filial connection to the mainstream liberal-communitarian tradition precisely by demonstrating that the latter “debate” shares the same premises, and that each fails in characteristic ways to go to the root (i.e., “radical” in the etymological sense) of the concept of association which they each presuppose. We thus also intend to demonstrate how his work radically reformulates some of the key tenets in mainstream political theory. We primarily focus on the relationship between community, freedom, and the proper. In the first section we examine how community is problematized in mainstream political theory. In the second section we begin with Esposito’s critique of the mainstream framing of community, then we turn to his alternative solution of “affirmative freedom.”
I the problem of community in mainstream political theory
A core presumption in the liberal approach is that the group is oppressive and individuals need to become autonomous agents to determine their own identity (see Esposito, Third Person; “The Dispositif”). Thus, liberalism, despite significant variations, takes as its fundamental value the autonomy of the individual. Berlin’s now-famous distinction between two competing conceptions of liberty articulates how this autonomy has been conceptualized. The first of these, so-called negative liberty, holds that the necessary conditions of autonomy and freedom have been met when there is no external impingement on individual choice and action. The basic political thrust of negative liberty is to remove impediments to the sphere of individual human action. The second concept, positive liberty, holds that the mere absence of external impingement is not enough to assure conditions of autonomy and freedom. There are certain capacities, the possession of which is necessary (although perhaps not sufficient) for autonomy to be realized, such as equality of opportunity; this is something that mere formal equality under the law often cannot deliver. Accordingly, we might say that while negative liberty focuses on the formal or procedural conditions of freedom, trying to ensure that all are as free as far as possible from external constraints, positive liberty seeks to stipulate certain kinds of substantive freedoms the possession of which is needed for freedom and autonomy to prevail.
As is evident, and as Berlin argues in his preference for negative liberty, the realization of positive liberty for some will often require a diminishment of the liberty of others. Even though positive liberty might be desirable, it would seem that the only way to secure it would be to impinge on the sphere of freedom and autonomy enjoyed by others (for instance, requiring universal access to education means some would have to pay higher taxes, so that the loss of income would restrict their options, to some extent). Liberals have difficulty with such choices, since they would seem to require a clear criterion for making the necessary claim that some choices or values are more important than others, since this would clearly violate the necessary equation of freedom with autonomy of (individual) choice on which liberalism rests. For this reason liberals have often been charged by communitarians with espousing an inadequate and abstract concept of the subject and of the good (Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”).
Yet, far from being an admission of relativism or failure to reach consensus on the good (MacIntyre), liberalism can be seen as an epistemology containing a moral doctrine. In espousing individual autonomy and the equal value of the autonomy of each person, liberals are not simply giving in to relativism because they also believe (and here is their Enlightenment heritage), that in conditions of freedom, the truth will be attained. In other words, the corollary of individual autonomy is that this is the only way to attain an adequate conception of the good. The influence of bad or corrupt institutions that impose an obligation to obey established authority, individuals’ dependence on a social order in which benefits are very unevenly distributed, and the undue power of received opinion backed by oppressive custom, are for liberals the great fetter to understanding, let alone attaining, the good. Nineteenth-century liberals, such as Mill, were doubtless far too optimistic in their assumption that the removal of oppressive custom would lead automatically to progress, truth, and the good, but were correct in believing that the latter could not be achieved if disagreement as to its nature or form was stifled in advance. Liberals of the classical era could also be faulted for their optimism with respect to the market and capitalism.
Under present conditions, this optimism with respect to the market also appears to be liberalism’s Achilles heel. Indeed, if classical liberals could once imagine that the market would automatically harmonize the atomistic choices of free individuals in a manner productive of an optimal or even common good, the events of the last century and the beginnin...
