International Conference Immunity and Modernity: Picturing Threat and Protection (27-29 May 2015 Leuven, Belgium) (original) (raw)
Related papers
pp. 7–24, in: Critical and Clinical Cartographies International Conference Proceedings, edited by Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas. TU Delft/Japsam, 2015
Introduction: Architecture has a long tradition to be thought in relation to the human body. But saying for example that architecture 'has a body' and a body 'has an architecture' historically separated forms from their internal relationships. Secondly, both are usually held as static things. Often falling back on reducing the (changes of) built environment to a representation of (a changing) social reality, this representational mode of thinking deteriorates problems of transformation, as for example the process of modernization. Against those representational models of thougt the following will assume the built environment as explicitly productive. Poststructuralist thinkers have initiated a widespread refraction of these separate realms of bodies and relations, form and meaning, while connecting the processes how bodies take form, and how relations come to matter. More than tooling this concept of morphogenesis for architectural design, form-taking crucially affects architecture theory and history in its conceptualization of the formation of bodies and their ability to change. In this line of thinking the essay approaches both architecture and humans as bodies, and reposes their changes as a matter of becoming. Such a post-human and new materialist take would theorize from-taking on the same plane of composition: Bodies, more than static delimited objects, are dynamic material configurations. Their material configurations constantly re-configure in performances describing all phenomena called life. Be it viral, human, architectural, political, or cosmic, all bodies manifest ecologies that constantly reconfigure matter (in the processing of matter organic and mineral compounds, liquids, solids and suspensions, signals and information) that affords change. In an environment that shapes forms of life that in return shape their environment, bodies 'change' in a twofold adaption to, and of, a likewise changing environment.
What is Auto-immunity?: Seven Theses on Derrida and Bio-politics
Deconstruction is not immune. Rather, deconstruction deconstructs it-self, by an auto-deconstruction formalized through the logic of auto-immunity. Where auto-immunity vacillates between protection and destruction, it can’t differentiate between the two. Auto-immunity threatens it-self. Auto-immunity is not immune. It chaotically and dangerously oscillates without resolution. Derrida wishes to immunize his own discourse by an antiseptic undecideability. Auto-immunity is, thus, like a poison pill, which in attempting to mask Derrida’s the escape hatch which encases his discourse has revealed its necessarily authoritative symptom and propensity. And yet, and yet… Derrida must decide.
Contemporary Political Theory
What are the (violent) roots of the modern state, and how are we to make sense of it today? Both Epstein and Cerella aim to answer this paramount question by offering interpretations of modernity that enlighten its critical dark spots. Cerella's book is a genealogical reflection on the loss of the sacred and its function in ancient times. In his view, the sacred continues to haunt, albeit unrecognized, our modern political order, which is ripe with the contradictions of this denial. Epstein, by contrast, is focused on the political implications of the epistemological revolution that occurs at the end of the Renaissance. She illuminates how a new understanding of the human body in space helps craft the modern state. She also shows how this process led to the exclusion of women, criminals, slaves, and the poor. Hobbes is interestingly central to both Cerella and Epstein, but in opposite ways: as a witness of centennial religious wars, he proposes to found a new political order that ignores altogether religion, the soul, and conscience. Leviathan knows only bodies as res extensa, as moving bodies in the newly conceptualized perspectival space. Hobbes therefore eschews most of the pitfalls of later political philosophy that Epstein pinpoints in Locke's exclusionary logics. But Hobbes also, Cerella argues, radically changes the meaning of representation, which becomes understood as the mechanical aggregation of the many, devoid of the transcendence that unified the religious community. Hobbesian modernity thus marks a loss of meaning for Cerella or, for Epstein, an alternative to religious symbolic representation that allows to create new, mundane symbols. Cerella's Genealogy of Political Modernity aims to give sense to our current postmodern globalized predicament, which he sees as the latest stage in the immanentization and secularization of the political. The text consists of eight independent chapters, united by the notion of representation as a guiding thread.
Are we all looking for immunity? About the material content of sociotechnical imagineries
Politique Africaine Pensées post coroniales, 2021
The debate on herd immunity has strongly marked the political and scientific management of Sars-Cov2, as has been widely reported in the media. The language of immunity between gambling and speculation for a time, was tempered by oracles, when Imperial College models predicted the disaster in Britain. However, the wager on natural herd immunity did not disappear from scientific and political discourse. It was in a way the starting point of what is at stake today in the quest for a vaccine, as well as in the counter current of anti-quests and what it brings into play in terms of narratives in the global North and South. The quest for herd immunity through non-confinement was widely advocated at the beginning of March, as a viable preventive strategy that could curb the predicted fallout of the virus. Boris Johnson in the UK and Donald Trump in the US largely relied on rapid spreading throughout working class people to pacify the virus. On the 4 th October, the Great Barrington Declaration translated into 43 languages and signed by researchers from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard Universities argued in favour of slackening the restrictions in order to expose people to the virus in the attempt to build up immunity and ultimately save jobs and the American economy. In Senegal, a report entitled « The Senegalese Miracle of Magal », signed by a parasitologist and clinician from the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD), stated that the religious pilgrimage to Mourides 1 of Touba did not cause any extra cases of Covid-19. On the contrary, there was a decline in Sars-Cov in Senegal, which could be attributed to herd immunity among other factors. This is what the political scientist Ariel Colonomos described as the "strategy of states that pay with lives as opposed to states that pay for lives". The argument for natural immunity existed before the birth of bacteriology at the beginning of the 18th century 2 , its revival today puzzled and even shocked epidemiologists who do not wish to think about immunology outside of its medicalisation. Various percentages have been circulated concerning the required infection rate to achieve herd immunity, in particular by those who have taken risky gambles, like in Sweden, to not confine its population. Herd immunity, whether natural and/or vaccinated, is a metaphor for governance, the most familiar demonstration today being the one being played out by the
Homo Munitus Desires: Walling states as a mechanism of (Auto-)Immunity and as a drive towards Death
2016
Over the last years and, especially, during the last months, the building of new walls around the states, as well as the reinforcement and control of the borders, have had an enormous political and social presence. Wendy Brown (2010) defends that the phenomenon of building new walls all around the world can be understood as an icon of nation-state sovereignty's erosion. In this way, the loss of the theological sovereignty promised by the nation-states has several consequences for the subjects that fantasize with the protection and containment of walls. Using the category of Homo munitus as the modern subject that both constructs walls and is constructed by them, " making securitization a way of life " and defining a distinction between an "external they" and a "reactionary we" (Brown, 2010 pag.42), I frame these new walls within Roberto Esposito's (2015) immunitarian paradigm. This paradigm is useful to analyse the tensions between community and its opposite, immunity, namely, between the self-preservation and the disintegrative forces of the munus which constitutes the community and poses a menace for the self and the identity. In this sense, I focus on the other side of the tension, on the excessive defensive mechanism that turns into an auto-immunitarian disease that, as Derrida (2003) and Esposito (2010, 2015) proposed, threats to destroy the community. This paper explores the tensions between community and auto-immunity, between Eros forces that constitute the community and the self-preservation and culture as protective measures or immunitarian mechanisms. My aim is not to draw a parallel between current philosophical theories and analysis, and Sigmund Freud’s (2011) dual instinct’s theories, but to notice some suggestive meeting points as well as some particular insights that can feedback each other and open up new possibilities for their understanding. Beyond the current desire for walling and protection, this article stresses the disintegrative forces for the community and the drive to death implied in this struggle which has so many material, psychological and political consequences in our everyday life.
Since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 essay “Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority,” Carl Schmitt has been a perennial subject of Derrida’s political critique. I will argue that Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is uniquely applicable to Derrida’s interpretation of Schmitt’s political philosophy. Therefore, my argument will consist of two interrelated but equally divergent parts; the digressive structure will attempt to mimic Derrida’s complex style of weaving opposed concepts into a coherent whole. First, I will demonstrate the many forms of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity. Second, I will exhibit how this schema uniquely applies to Derrida’s criticisms of Schmitt and the contemporary state of politics.
Transparency and the Logic of Auto-Immunity
Lebenswelt. Aesthetics and philosophy of experience, 2011
Abstract: In Voyous, Jacques Derrida develops his argument starting from the presupposition that democracy as such is the entity whose integrity and immunity are at stake and, therefore, under investigation. This gesture reflects the setting in which ten years before, in Foi et savoir, he had cast his reasoning about the logic of immunity. There, it was one of the sources of religion, the immunity of the sacred, that operated according to this logic. The hyphen between these two essays, beside Derrida’s own crossed references, is the genealogical reasoning on the meaning and essence of the concept of democracy: contrary to what Derrida claims, it will be maintained that Athenian democracy had a clear immune matrix, whose constant exercise is clearly defined, in spite of himself, by Vernant, and it will be shown how modern democracy has been forced to change policy. Modern democracy is an entity characterized by an immune deficiency. In order to save Derrida’s intuition from both the collapse of different vantage points and from a quite bizarre reticence in taking into account of the immune value of rituals, our starting point will be René Girard’s œuvre and his reading of the role of immune logic in sacred systems and, more generally, in modernity. The threshold between the auto-immune reaction, immune deficiency and auto-immune disease, between the sacrifice who delimits and constitutes the self and the holocauste du peuple en détail, is the space where, constantly exposed to the risk of auto-denial, democracy lives.