Community, immunity, biopolitics

The author examins the relationship between the concepts of ‘community’, ‘immunity’ and ‘biopolitics’. Each of these terms takes its fullest sense only in relation to the other two. If ‘communitas’ is what binds its members in a commitment of giving from one to the other, ‘immunitas’, by contrast, is what unburdens from the burden, what exonerates from this responsibility. In the same way the community refers to something general and open, immunity refers to privileged particularity of a situation that is defined by being an exception to a common condition. Since the phenomenon of immunity is inscribed precisely at the point of intersection between low and biology, between medical procedure and legal protection, the politics that it give rise to is a form of ‘biopolitics’, in direct relationship with biological life.