(Auto)Immunity In Esposito And Derrida

This essay compares the paradigm of (auto)immunity and its centrality to the reconceptualization of biopolitical thought in the work of Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito. While Esposito and Derrida share an ‘ecologised’ understanding of the immune system, the alterity of temporality that is operative in the organism/environment relationship (as emphasized in immune system discourse itself in biology) is formalized more rigorously in Derrida than in Esposito – and this has serious consequences for the concept of ‘community’ and more generally for the attempt to craft an ‘affirmative’ biopolitics, in which Esposito is quite invested. The missing link between Derrida’s more creative or productive sense of (auto)immunity and its underpinnings in theoretical biology is the radical alterity of temporality at work in the tech[1]nicity or machinalité of iterability (specifically, the iterability of the organism/ environment relationship and its non-linear character, as it unfolds in real time). This, in turn, is central to his own denaturalisation and deconstruc[1]tion of the difference between the organic (or biological) and the technical (or mechanical), and eventually to his own reconceptualisation of ‘Life’, all of which is key to a non-reductionist and non-vitalist concept of (auto)immunity for biopolitical thought.