Immunity and Community: A Note of Discord between Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida

Esposito and Derrida agree that immunity is an interpretive-key to the democratic paradigm, but they elaborate on it arriving at divergent results. For Esposito, immunity is the opposite of community. Communitas is the relationship of persons united by an obligation (munus), immunitas is the absent state of this obligation. Both relate to munus, one in a positive fashion and the other in a negative fashion. For Derrida, every co-immunity is an immunitary identity; however, an auto-co-immune drive ruins its principle of self-protection. Esposito and Derrida note the negative character of immune process, which safeguards from a great evil by a minor one, as it appears in the judicial, medical, religious and biopolitical alike; they emphasize the homeopathic logic: excessive immunity leads to death but, to a certain extent, protects the individual or social body. However, Esposito thinks that immunity can reopen the time of communitas, Derrida hopes it opens community to something else.