Co-Immunity. An Ontological Political Paradigm

the aim of this article is, based on Jacques Derrida’s and Roberto Esposito’s reflection, to articulate a philosophical paradigm that would be able to face with what I propose to call the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. Dealing with this logic means, first and foremost, to face “the negative” that runs through our experience without rejecting or absolutizing it. It means to think the relation between life and politics, society and institutions not in a merely oppositive way but rather in a constructive and affirmative manner. Even if in many of his works Esposito criticizes Derrida precisely for his conception of autoimmunity, in this article, I intend to show that both the philosophers orient their analyses towards what I consider the most appropriate ontological political paradigm for reading the actual political events – what they both call “co-immunity”. In the first section, I establish some methodological coordinates useful to define the approach I consider the most appropriate for the purposes of this research, namely political ontology. In section two, from a diagnostic point of view, I analyse the autoimmunitarian logic of nihilism. To investigate this logic, I firstly concentrate on Esposito’s definition of nihilism, and then I refer to his analyses of the relation between community and immunity. In the third section, with the intention of taking a closer look at the political aspects of the question, I focus on the Derridean analysis of the aporias that are inherent in the very concept of democracy. In the last section, I briefly try to test the heuristic capacity of the co-immunity paradigm with respect to the biopolitical problems arising from the management of the pandemic crisis caused by COVID-19 (and discussed in the field of the Italian biopolitical debate).