Of (Auto-)Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben

Abstract

Why is there such a marked preference for speaking of bio-ethics rather than bio-politics, in traditional Anglophone analytic philosophy? It is as if life were something pure and unscathed, wholly natural and naturally whole, uncontaminated by politics, law, and power. It is the task of this essay to demonstrate that this is not the case and therefore it is not possible simply to address life on the level of the individual and the ethical. For life cannot be thought as whole and unscathed in its individual propriety. Life cannot be wholly immunised against what does not, properly speaking, belong to it. To think otherwise is to “naturalise” life, to think of life as a purely natural entity, which is to fall victim to ideology, since nature is never uncontaminated by culture, and life is never free of politics.