7 (Auto)Immunity In Esposito And Derrida

No two thinkers have done more to push the paradigm of (auto)immunity to the forefront of biopolitical discourse than Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. While neither can be said to have invented the concept and its relevance for biopolitical thought – Esposito, for example, freely acknowledges pathbreaking earlier work in this area by Donna Haraway and Niklas Luhmann (Esposito 2008: 49–50) – both make it central to a fundamental shift in their thinking of the political. Esposito doesn’t just devote an entire study to it in Immunitas (2002), he also mounts his central critique of Foucault’s thinking of the biopolitical on the strength of the immunitary paradigm in Bíos (2004), where it opens the book and has an entire chapter dedicated to it (2008: 45–77). In Derrida, the logic of autoimmunity moves to centre stage after 9/11, though he had deployed the concept in his earlier work, and his rendering of autoimmunity follows, in many respects, the same logic as much earlier concepts in his work such as the pharmakon. Contemporaneously (roughly) with volume one in Esposito’s ambitious trilogy (Communitas, which dates in Italian from 1998), Derrida begins to deploy the concept of (auto)immunity as well, first briefly in Specters of Marx (1993), then in Politics of Friendship (1994), and in a much more detailed way in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1996), the long interview ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides’ (2003), and in Rogues (2003). In this essay, I will compare the use of the (auto)immune paradigm in Esposito and Derrida in a way that moves beyond the critical commonplace that autoimmunity for Esposito is essentially negative while for Derrida it is a positive or at least creative force that opens onto the ‘to come’, which may include both ‘the best’ and/or ‘the worst’ (Derrida 1998: 56).¹

To begin with, it’s worth noting that Esposito and Derrida share (in concert with the course of development in immune system discourse itself in biology) what I will call an ‘ecologised’ understanding of the immune system, though this fact is thematised more clearly in Esposito’s handling of the concept, while in Derrida it remains tacit in (auto)immunity’s theoretical infrastructure, as I explain in more detail below. Eventually, I will want to argue that if we pay serious attention to the biological understanding of the immune system and how it operates, then the alterity of temporality that is operative in the organism/environment relationship is crucial to the logic of (auto)immunity in ways that Derrida formalises more rigorously than 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. To put this telegraphically, the missing link (not supplied by Derrida very clearly, by the way) 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 technicity 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 deconstruction of the difference between the organic (or biological) and the technical (or mechanical), and eventually to his own reconceptualisation of ‘Life’, all of which, I will argue, is key to a non-reductionist and non-vitalist concept of (auto)immunity. My point here is not that Derrida’s concept of (auto)immunity is stronger because it more accurately reflects or is otherwise ‘grounded’ in the theoretical structure of biology’s discourse on the immune system, but rather that the biological discourse itself forces us to adopt an essentially posthumanist understanding of (auto)immunity (if indeed we take the concept seriously), which Derrida then frames out for us in more philosophical terms, unpacking its political ramifications for biopolitical thought.

It is therefore incumbent upon us to explore, at least in cursory fashion, the biological discourse of (auto)immunity and how it has changed over the years. At the bottom of the immunitary paradigm in biology is, as Margrit Shildrick notes, the supposedly unique and stable signature of each individual cell, which determines the exact composition of the human leucocyte antigens (the HLA system) that undergirds the immune system. (That signature is nearly unique, because while two individuals can have the same HLA profile, it is exceedingly rare.) All the body’s cells incorporate the HLA antigens that mark them as ‘self’, and when the immune system encounters cells that don’t have this signature, it sets about mounting an immune response to neutralise the ‘foreign’ cells (Shildrik 2015: 95). As David Napier points out, though immunology as a defined discipline can clearly be traced back to the nineteenth century, the notion of an immune ‘self’ emerged only formally in the 1940s from the work of Australian virologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet on ‘self-tolerance’ (cf. Jamieson 2017: 12; Cohen 2017: 34–8); but it is only in the 1960s that the notion of an ‘immune system’ really takes hold, designating an ‘orchestrated response’ of an ‘autonomous self’ against foreign invaders (qtd. in Herbrechter 2017: 2). It is this discourse that Donna Haraway famously critiques in her seminal essay ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self and Other in Immune System Discourse’, originally published in 1989, where she writes that ‘the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics … It is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological’ (1991: 204).

As Michelle Jamieson notes, ‘the boundedness of the immune organism has, historically, been mirrored in the discipline’s [immunology’s] own guardedness against ideas that threaten the coherence of its defended view of life’ (2017: 11–12), but that slowly began to change in the 1960s, in no small part because of the rise of systems theory discourse itself, which could point in either of the two opposite directions that are characteristic of the history of cybernetics and systems theory in general: toward the informatics of command and control analysed by Haraway and others; or in the opposite direction, as a powerful tool for understanding dynamic complexity and its creativity and unpredictability as it unfolds in real time, as evidenced in the work on self-organisation and emergence by figures such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute, who (along with biologists such as Denis Noble and Scott Gilbert) have led a growing pushback against the neo-Darwinian reductionist paradigm. That pushback has gained traction from the clinical rather than the engineering side of medicine and biology – and in particular from the explosion of work in epigenetics and in the area of autoimmune disorders (such as Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia) and allergies (especially food allergies in children). And that is why, as Napier notes, ‘immunologists have gradually grown dissatisfied with the general self-nonself construct as they grapple with the disjunction between what they evidence experimentally, and received ideas about organic preservation and the effects of “foreign” bodies on a self that is otherwise sovereign’ (qtd. in Herbrechter 2017: 2–3).

Immunology as a field went through a second renaissance in the mid 1980s, as Ed Cohen notes, in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, which led to huge increases in research funding and mountains of new immunological data. And while this led to new understandings and therapies such as retroviral treatments, it also led to ‘server farms full of digitized information that fostered increasingly dense entanglements between immunology and genomics’ (Cohen 2017: 29). This only intensified the growing dissatisfaction with the idea of ‘effects of “foreign” bodies on a self that is otherwise sovereign’, and that dissatisfaction was intensified all the more by increasing appreciation of the microbiome and its role in human well-being. As Shildrik summarises it, ‘what constitutes the proper “me” is already shot through with otherness. We already know that all human bodies swarm with a multitude of putatively alien others such as the countless bacteria that inhabit our gut; while current research on the microbiome indicates that the microbial communities that cohabit in and on our bodies immeasurably exceed the strictly human cell components’ (2015: 94).

All of the complexities around thinking the immune system and the challenges it poses to immunology are increased considerably when we consider the phenomenon of autoimmunity, which may be defined as ‘an immunological phenomenon whereby an organism mounts an immune response against its own tissues; a paradoxical situation in which self-defence (immunity, protection) manifests itself as self-harm (pathology)’ (Sampson 2017: 62). As Cohen notes, the concept of autoimmunity is at present used to characterise between sixty and eighty different conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis, Myasthenia, Lupus, Type 1 Diabetes, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ulcerative Colitis and many others, and some estimates suggest that autoimmune disorders may affect up to 5 per cent of the population in the industrialised West (2017: 28). But what is most immediately striking about autoimmunity is its constitutively and irreducibly paradoxical nature, that the self appears to itself as both self and non-self at the same time. Now this is already the case in normal immune response, where we find many anomalies, such as the apparently natural tolerance between a pregnant woman and her foetus, where the body, we might say, has an immunitary response to its own immunitary response – an important trope, of course, for Esposito’s attempt to ground an affirmative biopolitics in the immunitary paradigm (Campbell 2008: xxxi–xxxiii). But if autoimmunity is undeniably real, it is little understood as a general phenomenon. As Cohen notes, even though Big Pharma has invested huge sums in developing immunosuppressing drugs, ‘no treatments yet exist that can mitigate either whatever triggers autoimmune etiologies in the first place, or whatever enables them to persist thereafter’. And in this, he continues, ‘autoimmunity actually names a known unknown whose (un)knowability continues to befuddle even the best funded attempts to contain it’ (2017: 29).

Part of the reason for the mystery is that with autoimmunity we are forced to think a kind of ‘ecologisation’ of the immune system and the so-called ‘self’ of the ‘self/not-self’ distinction at immunology’s core. Rather than ‘the simple dichotomy of self versus other and its logic of a linear cause and effect relation between discrete entities, organism and antigen’, Jamieson writes, what we find here is a dynamic and ongoing process in which ‘the identities of organism and antigen emerge and are negotiated continuously in and across moments of encounter’, where ‘self and non self are ecologically constituted’ (2017: 22). From this perspective, ‘there can be no circumscribed, self-defined entity that is designated as the self’, and indeed ‘identity’ is a function of the larger ‘economy of nature’ where normal immune function entails above all openness to change and difference. This has profound implications for how we think about the normal and the pathological, and it also permanently unsettles the idea that ‘the agency responsible for disease can be confidently confined within a specific body’ (Jamieson 2017: 23).

But even this perspective, as Vicky Kirby notes, does not go far enough. For while it is true that without the microbiome to enable our digestion and health, we are ‘dead meat’ (to use Ed Cohen’s phrase), the problem is that ‘such representations posit a self and a supplement, a self whose very being requires an additional bacterial ecology in order to further its survival chances’. But if we ask what, exactly, pre-exists and is enhanced by this ‘parasitic support’, then (as Kirby puts it) ‘things get murky’ (Kirby 2017: 52). The issue is not just that ‘the two million unique bacterial genes found in each human microbiome … make the 23,000 genes in our cells seem paltry, almost negligible, by comparison’. The issue is that the problematic of immunity and autoimmunity ‘is poorly understood when its riddle is reduced to the logic of the supplement, that is, to one plus one, or indeed, one plus many (others)’ (Kirby 2017: 53).

Now in a longer engagement, I would note, along with theoretical biologists such as Stuart Kauffman and Denis Noble, that it is possible to address the question of ‘what pre-exists’ this environmental entanglement without falling into the trap of which Kirby is rightly suspicious. As we will see, it is perfectly possible – indeed, necessary – to describe the relationship between the constraints that operate at different levels of a biological system (and at different points in time) and the qualitatively different kinds of causation that obtain within those domains without ever venturing into the discourse of ‘agency’, ‘self-presence’, and so on. To put it another way, there are multiple forms and levels of closure and constraint that operate in multicellular organisms, not just one and not just none, which is why the ‘same’ material element can trigger radically different responses (immune vs. autoimmune) at different points in time, which means that in an autopoietic organism, we are not dealing with a pre-given form of self-presence which then later partakes of the logic of the supplement, even though we are dealing with closure and constraint.

To put it differently, immunity and, even more so, autoimmunity only dramatise what is true of all biological systems: the fundamentally irreducible alterity of temporality that is at the core of complex adaptive systems, the ‘there’ that is not there against which all forms of reductionism bridle. To unpack the Derridean perspective invoked by Kirby above in a bit more detail, ‘life’ or ‘nature’ – rather than being a site of fullness, positivity and identity (that is to say, non-supplementarity) – is importantly in a relationship of différance, asynchronicity and ‘spacing’ to itself because of the fundamental circularity and recursivity that takes place in an ever-changing environment for biological life forms – a point radicalised and, as it were, three-dimensionalised, by theoretical biology, as we will see. This enables, in turn, what we might call a ‘topological’ rather than ‘topographical’ way of thinking the ecological embeddedness of (auto)immunity. Russell Winslow and Denis Noble (among many others) have noted that a host of well-known biological phenomena such as ‘horizontal inheritance’, epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, ‘adaptability drivers’, and so on make it clear that the understanding ‘in which identities are fundamentally tied to family lineages of vertical inheritance must be replaced by something far more ecological’ (Winslow 2017: xiv).

But that ecology itself does not evolve independently of the performativity or iterability (to use Derridean language) of the individual organism; it is recursively related to it so that a topographical, ‘view from nowhere’ account of the environment as something that stands over and against the organism must be replaced by a topological one in which the autopoietic self-reference of the organism cannot be separated from the environment that it shapes even as it is shaped by it. In niche construction, for example, organisms ‘inscribe themselves into the environment phenotypically’, as Winslow notes; ‘they carve the history of their capabilities into the hieroglyphic cave-walls of organismic space and time’. This means that ‘spaces are not substances, they are not present things … insofar as the ecosystem contains the trace of former, past activity and already gestures toward a future’ (2017: 123). This is anything but a generic process, of course, and what makes it even less generic is that in the ‘mereological’ relations that obtain in an individual organism, the relationship between the part and the whole is radically changed, and so are the qualitatively different forms of causality that obtain at different biological levels.

We typically think of causation in the scientific domain as bottom-up (as we do in the ‘Central Dogma’ of neo-Darwinian reductionism, where the lines of causality run from the gene to the biomorphology of the organism, for example). But in the dynamic, self-organising, autopoietic forms we find in the biosphere, we encounter a much more complex relationship between component (or element) and system, because causality often operates in top-down fashion as well. As Alicia Juarrero notes, these mereological relationships (part-to-whole or whole-to-part) have ‘bedeviled philosophers of science for centuries’, but what we now see is that ‘the unpleasant whiff of paradox’ that ‘remains in any mention of recursive causality’ in living systems is unavoidable, and indeed productive (2015: 510–11). What we find in autopoietic biological systems, in fact, is what she calls a ‘decoupling in the locus of control: the components’ behavior suddenly originate in and are under the control, regulation, and modulation of the emergent properties of the macro level, as such’, which in turn ‘loosens the one-to-one strict determinism from micro to macro levels’ (2015: 519). In contrast to physical systems that show emergent self-organisation (dust devils, tornadoes, Bénard cells, and so on) where ‘external agents or circumstances are responsible for the conditions within which physical self-organization takes place’, in autopoietic systems, those conditions and constraints are introduced and maintained by the system itself, resulting in a strong ‘downward causation’ in which systemic closure becomes ‘a closure of constraint production, not just a closure of processes’ (Juarrero 2015: 512–13).

What this means – and here I think a strong return to deconstruction is unavoidable – is (as Juarrero notes, quoting Stuart Kauffman) that ‘it is impossible to predict emergent properties even in principle because the “categories necessary to frame them do not exist until after the fact” ’ (Juarrero 2015: 518). And it follows, of course, that if this is true of biological organisms, is also true of us; it is, in fact, all the more the case with us, and for the reasons Juarrero notes: the more complex the autopoietic life form, the more we find a ‘dynamic decoupling’ of the causative relationships between the micro and macro levels. Or as she puts it:

System and environment co-evolve over time in such a way that the identification between macro-property and specific configuration becomes irrelevant; as we go up the evolutionary ladder, the go of things issues more and more from higher and higher levels and according to criteria established at progressively emergent levels. Just as living things are autonomous and self-directed in a way that physical dissipative structures are not, sentient, conscious, and self-conscious beings are even more autonomous and self-directed. (Juarrero 2015: 520)

But precisely here, I think, is where we need Derrida’s critique of the ‘auto-’ of autonomy, auto-affection, autobiography, and the like that he undertakes in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002) and in Rogues (among other places) – in short, his critique of intentionality, ‘ipseity’ and related concepts such as ‘agency’ toward which we saw Kirby cast a sceptical eye earlier (Derrida 2008: 47, 56, 67; 2005: 45). It’s not that autonomy and self-directedness don’t increase, as Juarrero suggests, with the increasing decoupling of micro and macro structures and the growing importance of downward causality. It’s just that the picture that autonomy gives to itself of its situation (as Derrida puts it) is unavoidably partial, reductive and blind to its full infrastructural conditions of possibility for emergence (or what we have already called its ‘ecological’ embeddedness). Two points are worth stressing here, one that reaches in the direction of ontology, and one that reaches in the direction of epistemology (a distinction whose sovereignty will itself be subject to deconstruction, of course, in Derrida’s work).

First, as Michael Naas notes in his gloss on Derrida’s enigmatic invocation of ‘One+n’ and ‘n+One’ in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, ‘what this then means is that the One of ontotheology is never one with itself, that it begins already from the beginning to breach or broach itself’ (Naas 2012: 236). Because of the ecological embeddedness of the organism, and because of the ‘dynamic decoupling’ of its levels of organisation, and because it is impossible to predict the emergent properties that arise from their interaction because the categories necessary to frame them only come into being retrospectively, ‘the number of supplements to the One’, as Naas puts it, ‘to what would remain safe and sound, intact and unscathed, is incalculable’ (2012: 237). Secondly, when the ‘auto-’ of autonomy, agency and ipseity – Juarrero’s ‘autonomous and self-directed’ organism – does attempt to give itself a non-reductive or complete picture of this situation, it is unavoidably subject to the phenomenon of recursivity that is at the core not just of deconstruction but also of theoretical biology. As Kirby reminds us, in deconstruction, ‘the purported gap that secures and separates the analytical instrument from the subject who uses it and the object scrutinised is confounded’, and this means that we are always already in ‘an ecology that is so intricately enmeshed and all-encompassing that even those expressions (of itself) that appear circumscribed, isolated, and autonomous, are “themselves” generated by this generality’ (Kirby 2017: 55–6).

I am going out of my way to parse these different levels of a topological versus topographical (or holistic) understanding of the ecological embeddedness of immunity because, in my view, what may seem anti-reductionist in contemporary theoretical pushbacks against the Central Dogma may not, in fact, be anti-reductionist at all (or to put it more charitably, may be insufficiently rigorous in their anti-reductionism). It is not simply (or even at all) a matter, in other words, of everything on the side of ‘flows’ and viroid contagions being ‘good’ and ‘creative’, and everything on the side of closure, purposiveness and autopoiesis being ‘bad’ and ‘conservative’, nor is it a matter of fudging the challenges posed by autopoiesis, closure, self-reference and constraint production with an appeal to ‘folds’ (as in Esposito’s borrowing from Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty) as a way to recuperate them for immanence (Esposito 2008: 159–63; 2012: 19–20). It is rather about taking seriously the radical discontinuities between different levels of biological process, which are reflected in qualitatively different kinds of causality that must be handled in their own way, in their own terms. And any immune system that did not ‘recognise’ these discontinuities would, of course, be dysfunctional.

We might say, then – to put it telegraphically – that Derrida gives us something like a theory of the relationship between the genetic (or systemic, formally code-bound) and the epigenetic (the environmental or contextual setting in which the code is deployed) that we will see developed in theoretical biology by figures such as Stuart Kauffman. In his 2015 book Humanity in a Creative Universe, for example, Kauffman forces us to rethink not just the evolution of the biosphere but the entire concept of ecology. ‘At least part of why the universe has become complex is due to an easy-to-understand, but not well-recognized, “antientropic” process that does not vitiate the second law [of thermodynamics]. Briefly’, he continues,

as more complex things and linked processes are created, and can combine with one another in ever more new ways to make yet more complex amalgams of things and processes, the space of possible things and linked processes becomes vastly larger and the universe has not had time to make all the possibilities. The universe will not make all possible complex molecules, organisms, organs, dust grains, mineral deposits, volcanoes, rivers, geologies, hydrogen clouds, stars, or galaxies, automobiles, or skyscrapers that are possible given the 10⁸⁰ particles in the universe. There is an indefinitely expanding, ever more open space of possibilities ever more sparsely sampled, as the complexity of things and linked processes increases … [T]here is a deep sense in which the universe becomes complex in its exploration of these ever more sparsely sampled spaces of what is possible because ‘it can’.

(Kauffman 2015: 42)

One of the more compelling examples Kauffman gives of this principle obtains even at the level of organic chemistry, before we even arrive at the domain of autopoietic organisms (or what he calls ‘Kantian wholes’) where we would more likely expect to find such forms of complexity. In a key passage in the book, he writes, ‘Proteins are linear strings of amino acids bound together by peptide bonds. There are twenty types of amino acids in evolved biology. A typical protein is perhaps 300 amino acids long, and some are several thousand amino acids long. Now’, he continues,

how many possible proteins are there with 200 amino acids? Well, there are 20 choices for each of the 200 positions, so 20²⁰⁰ or 10²⁶⁰ possible proteins with the length of 200 amino acids. This is a tiny subset of the molecular species of CHNOPS [Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Sulfur] with 100,000 atoms per molecule. Now the universe is 13.7 billion years old and has about 10⁸⁰ particles. The fastest time scale in the universe is the Planck time scale of 10–⁴³ seconds. If the universe were doing nothing but using all 10⁸⁰ particles in parallel to make proteins the length of 200 amino acids, each in a single Planck moment, it would take 10³⁹ repetitions of the history of the universe to make all the possible proteins the length of 200 amino acids just once! … [A]s we consider proteins the length of 200 amino acids and all possible CHNOPS molecules with 100,000 atoms or less per molecule, it is obvious that the universe will never make them all. History enters when the space of what is possible is vastly larger than what can actually happen … A next point simple and clear: Consider all the CHNOPS molecules that can be made with 1, with 2, with 3, with 4, with n, with 100,000 atoms per molecule. Call the space of possible molecules with n atoms of CHNOPS the phase space for CHNOPS molecules of n atoms. That phase space increases enormously as n increases. Consequently, in the lifetime of the universe, as n increases, that phase space will be sampled ever more sparsely.

(Kauffman 2015: 43)

As Kauffman shows, this ‘non-ergodic’ principle obtains even more radically and obviously at the level of the biosphere, whose ‘becoming cannot be prestated, is not “governed” by entailing laws, in which what becomes constitutes ever-new Actuals that are “enabling constraints” that do not cause, but enable ever-new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities into which the evolving biosphere becomes’ (2015: 64). When we reach the level of autopoietic organisms (‘Kantian wholes’), this process is even more striking (Kauffman 2015: 67). If we think about the concept of biological function, for example, it is clear that while ‘in classical physics there are only “happenings” ’ – ‘[t]he ball rolls down the hill, bumps a rock, veers’, and so on – in biology we have to distinguish function from mere physical causation. ‘The function of the heart is to pump blood’, Kauffman notes, but the heart ‘causally also makes heart sounds, jiggles water in the pericardial sac’, and so on (2015: 65). Classical physics will not help us here, because ‘the function of the part is its causal consequences that help sustain the whole’ (2015: 66); ‘function’ is causal, in other words, but causal in a qualitatively different way from classical physics. As Kauffman notes, another nail in the coffin for the reductionist approach is the fact that ‘this capacity to define a function as a subset of causal consequences that can be improved in evolution further separates biology from physics, which cannot make the distinction among all causal consequences into a subset which are functions’ (2015: 67).

Having established the importance of the concept of function, Kauffman hypothesises that

we cannot prestate the evolution of new functions in the biosphere, hence cannot prestate the ever-changing phase space of biological evolution … [I]f we cannot know ahead of time what new functions will arise, we cannot write differential equations of motion for the evolving biosphere: we have no idea what new entities or processes may arise and become relevant to that evolution … Thus, we can have no entailing laws at all for biological evolution. (2015: 70)

He concludes by way of summary:

the organism lives in its world. Causal consequences (in classical physics) pass from organism to world and back to the organism, and the functional closure or sufficiency of the organism in its world is what succeeds or fails at the level of that organism in its world. There is, therefore, no noncircular way to define the ‘niche’ of the organism separately from the organism. But that niche is the boundary condition on selection. The ‘niche’ is only revealed after the fact, by what succeeds in evolution. (2015: 75)

It is hard to imagine a clearer articulation, in robust, naturalistic, biological terms, of what Derrida calls ‘the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space’, the ‘will have been’ of that which is ‘to come’, unprestatable and unanticipatible – with Kauffman’s ‘what succeeds in evolution’ and Darwinian ‘exaptations’ being precisely the material substrate, the trace, on which retentions of the past and protentions of the future are inscribed. Here, what Martin Hägglund calls the fundamental ‘negativity’ of time is crucial, and helps to underscore and indeed clarify an aspect of Kauffman’s argument that is often only implicit or tacit. The negativity of time ‘undermines both the idea of a discrete moment and the idea of an absolute continuity. Only if something is no longer – that is, only if there is negativity – can there be a difference between before and after. This negativity must be at work in presence itself for there to be succession. If the moment is not negated in being succeeded by another moment, their relation is not one of temporal succession but of spatial co-existence’ (Hägglund 2016: 43). It is precisely the combination of this negativity of time with the materiality of the trace as its site of inscription – figured on a larger biological canvas as the dynamic complexity of the system/ environment relationship – that makes Kauffman’s non-entailed, non-ergodic evolution of the biosphere thinkable. No negativity of time, no evolution; but also: nomateriality of inscription in the trace, no evolution. Indeed, we find here the site of a double inscription, not just on the material substrate of the living being, but also in the dynamic contingency of the system/environment relation in which that ontogenetic inscription happens, which can make the ‘same’ inscription function differently at different points in time, under different circumstances.

In rethinking the biopolitical, it is precisely this dynamic, ecological perspective on immunity that Esposito adopts in his attempt to move beyond the paradigm of sovereignty, and with it the ideologeme of the ‘person’, the discourse of ‘rights’, and so on. Esposito takes up the immunitary paradigm in many places in his work, and he argues that while Foucault recognises in his lectures from 1976 that ‘the very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more’, Foucault is unable to see that the affirmative and thanatological dimensions of biopolitics – either ‘a politics of life or a politics over life’, as Esposito puts it – are joined in a single mechanism (Esposito 2008: 32, emphasis added). Moreover, he insists that a turn away from the thanatological and toward the ‘affirmative’ in biopolitics can only take place if life as such – not just any particular form of life – becomes the subject of immunitary protection. This is so, Esposito argues, because ‘there is never a moment in which the individual can be enclosed in himself or be blocked in a closed system, and so removed from the movement that binds him to his own biological matrix’ (2008: 188).

The issue, then – as I have already suggested above – will be to ask what precisely is the relationship between ‘closed system’ and ‘biological matrix’ as the theoretical infrastructure within which the immunitary paradigm is conjugated. And that, in turn, will have major implications for Esposito’s thinking of the relationship between immunity, community and ‘Life’. Esposito’s most detailed development of the immunitary concept may be found (not surprisingly) in the book Immunitas, where he writes,

life combats what negates it through immunitary protection, not a strategy of frontal opposition but of outflanking and neutralizing. Evil must be thwarted, but not by keeping it at a distance from one’s borders; rather, it is included inside them. The dialectical figure that thus emerges is that of exclusionary inclusion or exclusion by inclusion. The body defeats a poison not by expelling it outside the organism, but by making it somehow part of the body … The immunitary logic is based more on a non-negation, on the negation of a negation, than on an affirmation.

(Esposito 2011: 8)

It is this ‘deep genealogy’, he argues, that can be traced through different disciplines – law, theology, anthropology, politics and biology – where ‘immunity, as a privative category, only takes on relief as a negative mode of community … Immunity, in short, is the internal limit which cuts across community, folding it back on itself in a form that is both constitutive and deprivative: immunity constitutes or reconstitutes community precisely by negating it’ (2011: 9). When Esposito asks, ‘is there a point at which the dialectical circuit between the protection and negation of life can be interrupted, or at least be problematized? Can life be preserved in some other form than that of its negative protection?’ (2011: 16), the answer is an ‘ecologised’ concept of immunity. As he notes, following Donna Haraway’s classic essay on immune system discourse to which we have already made reference, more recent studies in immunology situate ‘immunity in a nonexcluding relation with its common opposite’, with ‘a conception of individual identity that is distinctly different from the closed, monolithic one’ we have already examined in immune system discourse. ‘[R]ather than an immutable and definitive given’, he continues, ‘the body is understood as a functioning construct that is open to continuous exchange with its surrounding environment … [O]nce its negative power has been removed, the immune is not the enemy of the common, but rather something more complex that implicates and stimulates the common’ (2011: 17–18).

Like Derrida (and this is not surprising, given that Esposito freely acknowledges the indebtedness of his concept of immunity to Derrida’s exploration of the pharmakon), Esposito realises that ‘the idea of immunity, which is needed for protecting our life, if carried past a certain threshold, winds up negating life’, so that ‘not only is our freedom but also the very meaning of our individual and collective existence lost: that flow of meaning, that encounter with existence outside of itself that I define with the term communitas’ (Esposito 2013: 61). What Esposito wants out of immunity and autoimmunity is, in short, co-mmunity, but one that depends, as it were, on its own ongoing deconstructive movement. As he characterises it, we must not think of community as ‘an external injunction, that addresses us from elsewhere but of something more inherent. We need community because it is the very locus or, better, the transcendental condition of our existence, given that we have always existed in common’ (2013: 15). But Esposito complicates this formulation by claiming that community is at the same time ‘both necessary and impossible’, because it is ‘[s]omething that determines us at a distance and in difference from our very selves, in the rupture of our subjectivity, in an infinite lack, in an unpayable debt, an irremediable fault … We are lacking that which constitutes us a community, so much so that we must conclude that what we have in common is precisely this lack of community’ (2013: 15).

If the Derridean resonances of this formulation are clear enough, they become even clearer when Esposito asks:

What else is community if not the lack of ‘one’s own’? … This is the meaning that is etymologically inscribed within the very munus from which communitas is derived and that it carries within itself as its own nonbelonging to itself, as a not belonging, or an impropriety, of all the members that make up community through a reciprocal distortion, which is the distortion of community itself … If community is nothing but the relation – the ‘with’ or the ‘between’ – that joins multiple subjects, this means that it cannot be a subject, individual or collective.

(Esposito 2013: 29)

If community is impossible, however – if indeed it is nothing but the conjunctive and, as it were, formal semiotic relation of difference of the ‘with’ or the ‘between’ – then it is not at all clear how the question of community countenances the entire semantic nexus of ‘lack’, ‘guilt’, ‘fault’, ‘debt’, ‘perversion’, and so on that eventuates in Esposito’s key claim that ‘melancholy is not something that community contains along with other attitudes, postures, or possibilities but something by which community itself is contained and determined’, resembling ‘a fault and a wound that community experiences not as a temporary or partial condition but as community’s only way of being’ (2013: 28). The problem is not just that such a formulation would seem to thrust us back into the domain of ‘the person’ and ‘the individual’ (isn’t it only persons that experience melancholy?) that Esposito has already declared inadequate for thinking questions of biopolitics – an especially acute problem for a thinker who wants to argue that, in this day and age, ‘a single destiny binds the world, the whole world, and its life. Either the world will find a way to survive together, or it will perish as one’ (2013: 76).

The primary problem here can be brought into sharper focus, I think, by remembering the distinction Derrida makes in many places in his early work between the lack and the absence of Being, centre, presence, arché and telos – including the being in common that is community – an absence generated by the force of iterability, the trace and différance, and one that must be thought ‘without nostalgia’, as he puts it in ‘Différance’ (1972). Indeed, he writes, ‘we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance’ (Derrida 1986: 27). What is central to this process is, of course, the alterity of temporality, or more precisely the temporalisation and spacing that Derrida connotes in his evocation of ‘differing’ as ‘deferring’ in the neologism ‘Différance’. As Matthias Fritsch puts it in his able summary, ‘Différance names the empty gap, the differential relation, between elements without which they cannot function. Secondly, however, the deferral aspect of différance also signals that the differentiation process never comes to a close, but is begun anew with each new instance of an element’s use or occurrence’ (as in, for example, the immune system’s response, in which the same discrete element can have very different effects or ‘meanings’ at different points in time, thus changing the co-implicated relationship of element and system in an open-ended and ‘non-entailed’ way, to use Kauffman’s vocabulary). Crucially, then, if we follow Derrida in ‘denying the boundary between the structure and its use … a necessary infinity of distinguishing references enters the system, which is not a quasi-system in the sense that its structurality consists in nothing other than its use or its event’ (Fritsch 2008: 179–80). What this means – and it is why Derridean ‘différance’ cannot be assimilated to or used to read Carl Schmitt’s friend/ enemy distinction, as Chantal Mouffe wishes – is that ‘the relation between identity and its other is not exclusionary of a clearly demarcated “outside”, as for Derrida identity is not so much marked by excluding defined others, but by the infinite porosity of a supposed inside and outside, and hence its constant re-negotiation’ (Fritsch 2008: 181). And it is precisely in these terms that we have to rethink what Esposito calls ‘the movement that binds him to his own biological matrix’ (2008: 188, emphasis added).

A few crucial points follow from this. First, time is thus constitutive of the problem of the system/environment relationship for Derrida as it is for systems theory, which is why Derrida writes that the play of différance designates ‘the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end’ (1986: 7) – precisely as described earlier by Kauffman’s ‘non-entailed’ and ‘non-ergodic’ evolution of the biosphere. For Derrida, this constitutive role of what he calls ‘the becoming-space of time or becoming-time of space’ mitigates against all forms of sovereignty, conceived as what he calls ‘ipseity’ or the ‘self-same’, which are fatefully imbricated in this dynamic twice over once they performatively attempt to enact or declare themselves sovereign as such – the ‘auto-’ of their ‘autonomy’. As he writes in Rogues, sovereignty ‘always contracts duration into the timeless instant … Sovereignty neither gives nor gives itself the time, it does not take time’ (2005: 46, 109).

Secondly, a related point that derives from this first one: Esposito may be right that our ‘mortal finitude’ assumes the form of ‘reciprocal “care” ’, and that ‘care, rather than interest, lies at the basis of community. Community is determined by care, and care by community’ (2013: 25–6). But what Esposito seems to both invite and ignore – invite by his seemingly Derridean insistence that community is nothing but the spacing of the ‘with’ and ‘between’ of individual subjects, and ignore by his reinscription of what Derrida would call a phantasmatic ‘being-able’ that sets up such finitude as a ‘fault’, ‘wound’ or ‘perversion’ (Derrida 2008: 28) – is a more profound understanding of what I have elsewhere called ‘double finitude’ (Wolfe 2010). By this I understand our finitude not just as embodied and vulnerable beings who need care, but also as ones who, to enter into communicative relations and social bonds with others at all, are by necessity subjected to the ‘not me’ and ‘not ours’ of semiotic systems characterised by différance and the trace that, as Derrida puts it, must ‘be extended to the entire field of the living, or rather to the life/death relation, beyond the anthropological limits of “spoken” language’ (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 63).

Indeed, this second form of finitude and its radical inappropriability for any ‘auto-’, any ‘being able’, is the crucial point pressed, as David Wills and Michael Naas (among others) have insisted, by Derrida’s emphasis on the denaturalisation and technologisation of ‘life’, what he sometimes calls ‘lifedeath’. As Wills puts it in his gloss on Francois Jacob’s seminal text in theoretical biology, The Logic of Life (which Derrida engages in both Of Grammatology [1966], in the early section called ‘The Program’ [Derrida 1974: 6–10], and in the seminars entitled ‘La vie la mort’ from 1975–6): ‘what lives reproduces and what reproduces lives … It is not only a life-form itself that is reproduced but the program that enables that reproduction. Indeed, one could argue that it is therefore the automatic reproduction of a program that constitutes the life that is then able to reproduce itself’ (Wills 2016: 6). And what this means is that there can be no secure partitioning – no sovereign or immunitary partitioning – of ‘life’ from ‘death’, of a ‘life’ that then strengthens and activates itself, at a later date, through an immunitary taking in of its opposite via the logic of the supplement (as we saw Kirby suggesting earlier). As Michael Naas puts it, for Derrida ‘life itself’ is autoimmune, ‘life in its supposedly indemnified presence and purity. In order for life itself to continue to be vital, to live on, it must at once appropriate the machine (in the forms of repetition, the prosthesis, supplementarity, and so on) and reject it’ (2012: 202).

Third – and crucially – this has profound implications for Esposito’s rendering of the immunitary paradigm of biopolitics and its relationship to community, which in this light seems to reify the inside/outside relation in arguing that ‘whereas communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves, encloses them once again in their own skin. Immunitas brings the outside inside, eliminating whatever part of the individual that lies outside’ (Esposito 2013: 49). What such a characterisation misses is not just the ‘infinite porosity’ and ‘constant re-negotiation’ of the inside/outside relation noted by Fritsch above, but also what I have elsewhere called the ‘second-order’ turn of systems theory, which holds that – contrary to the understanding of autopoietic systems as solipsistic (that is, as yet another form of the ‘auto-’ critiqued by Derrida) – the operational closure of systems and the self-reference based upon it arise as a practical and adaptive necessity precisely because systems are not closed: that is, precisely because they find themselves in an environment of overwhelmingly and exponentially greater complexity than is possible for any single system (Wolfe 2010: xx–xxv).

From this vantage, we can now see more clearly the cascade of problems that eventuates from Esposito’s seemingly innocent and common-sensical assertion that ‘we have always existed in common’ – an assertion that seems counterfactual in light of our earlier discussion of theoretical biology, constraint closure and downward causality. For what would this ‘common’ be other than an appeal to the sheer material elements that are, as we have seen, increasingly decoupled at the micro and macro levels in autopoietic biological organisms? What if we begin instead not with commonality but with difference and alterity, the finitude and situatedness from which we all blindly and partially set out, and, with Donna Haraway, see that ‘immune system discourse is about constraint and possibility for engaging in a world full of “difference”, replete with non-self’? In that case, as she writes, ‘immunity can also be conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the semi-permeable self able to engage with others (human and non-human, inner and outer), but always with finite consequences; of situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial fusions and dangers’ (Haraway 1991: 214, 225). This is a more sanguine way, perhaps, of putting what Naas calls Derrida’s ‘profound suspicion of community’ – not in the sense of having a bad attitude about being with others, but in the service of what he calls ‘another community’ (qtd. in Naas 2012: 184), one secured, Naas writes, ‘not by a repetition of the same, by an attempt to keep safe and sound, by an indemnification that would react against the machine in order to return to the original community, to the lived body’, but rather by ‘the repetition that opens it to the future – that is, to death as well as living on’ that performatively and iteratively divides any ‘community’, and ‘life’, against itself and its selfsame indemnification, thus opening it to the future and the other in the ‘non-entailed’ alterity of time (2012: 184, 195–6). In this light, we can appreciate the more-than-metaphorical resonance of Derrida’s assertion that ‘Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything in us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom’ (1986: 22).

So in the end, the issue, it seems to me, is a certain vitalism that animates Esposito’s rendering of ‘Life’, and the need to put more pressure on his assertion that ‘human beings cannot be other than what they have always been’. In more philosophical terms, we might simply observe that the relationships between ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘immunity’ and ‘autoimmunity’, are rendered far too pure in their opposition by Esposito, even if they are then later, as Kirby has noted, brought into dialectical relation via the logic of the supplement. For Derrida, the promise and peril of autoimmunity is the not-now and not-there of that which is ‘to come’ – in a sense, the radical alterity of temporality itself – versus the ‘there’ or ‘place’ of Esposito’s ‘life’ and ‘community’. As Kirby puts it, ‘the riddle of autoimmunity will not secure the status of an absence – the gap of the “in-between” – by bookending either side of this break with something’, including Esposito’s ‘life’ or ‘community’. This is why, she continues, ‘with/in the “illogical logic” of autoimmunity we can appreciate why Derrida might insist that deconstruction is not a method, or model of anything’ (Kirby 2017: 55). Accordingly, what we have in Derrida’s rendering of immunity and autoimmunity is not just the ‘ecologisation’ of the immunitary mechanism, but a non-representationalist and denaturalised ecologisation of it that is ‘heterogeneous’ (as Derrida would put it) to the logic we find in Esposito, where ‘Life’ is the privileged term that expresses itself ever more fully through dialectical differentiation and folding.

In the end, though, my point is not to say that Derrida is ‘right’ and Esposito is ‘wrong’, but rather that we need to (continue to) meditate upon what philosophy can learn (or not) from interdisciplinary exchange with theoretical biology and the thinking of ‘life’ (and vice versa, of course) in what can be, I hope, a broadly shared anti-reductionist undertaking. On the one hand, it would be a mistake, I think, to see autoimmunity as simply bad; we need to understand, with Derrida, the inescapable intrication of immunity and autoimmunity and how the alterity of temporality for dynamic, complex, adaptive systems is at the root of that intrication as the ‘there’ that is not ‘there’, the very possibility of a future that is a future because it is not ‘ours’. To combine the terms of Derrida’s deconstruction and Kauffman’s theoretical biology, that is the inescapable, possible, ‘best’ and ‘worst’ for any particular form of life in a universe of ‘non-entailed’ evolution with radically discontinuous qualitative forms of causation. At the same time, Derrida and Esposito converge, in their very different ways, on the understanding that that statement is itself ‘a view from nowhere’, as it were, a general infrastructural principle at the ecological level of evolution, one that does not in the least vitiate my own desire to live, to survive, in all my finitude. Esposito’s work would remind us, and rightfully so, that autoimmunity will always be resisted on behalf of the organism’s desire to live and flourish, even though it can only do so by taking into itself and not negating something radically other than itself. And in this light, one of the values and challenges of Esposito’s work is to ask us to confront (from the ground up, as it were) this very real fact, without falling back into the discourse of the ‘person’ and its attendant mechanism of ‘rights’. Derrida would agree wholeheartedly of course, in his radicalisation of the question, ‘what is this nonpower at the heart of power?’ (Derrida 2008: 28) – a question that, for both Derrida and Esposito, opens onto the vast terrain of non-human life and our (non-)place in it.