Immunitarian Democracy

Does "community" refer to democracy? If not, could it or is it too deeply embedded in the conceptual lexicon of the Romantic, authoritarian and racist Right? This is the question, one already asked by American neo-communitarianism, that is emerging again in Europe at the precise moment when, some, especially in France and in Italy, are risking thinking community anew. At issue is not only a legitimate question, but in some ways even an inevitable one, in which democractic culture deeply examines its own theoretical precepts and future. This doesn't change the fact though that it's the wrong question or that it's badly put. Wrong or badly put because it takes as its term of comparison -- in order to be related to the category of community - a concept, that of democracy that is utterly incapable of "understanding" it, not only because its modern meaning at least, arrives much later, but also because it is flatter and increasingly overwhelmed in a dimension that is entirely political and institutional.

With respect to this lack of depth and substance of the politicological notion of democracy, community has a very different semantic width, both on the vertical level of history and on the synchronic one of meaning. This isn't the place to attempt a complete reconstruction, though my recent research beginning with the etymological origins of the term communitas and even more before that of munus in Latin does confirm the historical and semantic richness of the concept (R. Esposito, 1998). What we can infer from the above discussion, however, is that the correct question isn't whether the community can become a part of the democratic lexicon, but whether even democracy can be a part or at a minimum acquire some of its meaning in the lexicon of community. Without wanting to show my hand too quickly, a first step is required, which focuses more on the second term. Here we aren't helped at all by the conceptual dichotomies with which 20th century philosophy has tried to define community, one that lost along the way the original meaning of community. I'm not talking only of the one constructed by the so-called American communitarians with respect to their presumed adversaries, the liberals, who constitute rather their exact interface in the specific sense that they unconsciously share the same subjectivist as well as exclusively partisan lexicon, applied not to the community but to the individual (where communities like individuals are distinguished between them, one from the other). But also in the more entrenched juxtaposition between "community" and "society," a juxtaposition that reaches its greatest point of typological elaboration in Fedinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. And this because here too, despite being better elaborated than the first, community remains completely inscribed within one of the two terms -- that of society -- such that it emerges as completely produced by it. This idea of community not only is born with modern society, but doesn't acquire meaning except in contrast to it. It is the Gesellschaft that "constructs" its own proper and ideal-typical reversal so as to be able to found itself -- in apologetic or slanderous terms depending on the point of the one who observing and judging. The fact is that the organic Gemeinschaft of which Tönnies and his many (and some less judicious) 20th century imitators speak has never existed as such is seen both as the sign and the confirmation of the mythological character of the dichotomy that founds it: it is nothing other than a figure of the self-interpretation of society in the phase of its maximum development, which coincides with it and its incipient crises.

Does this mean that one can't really say anything about community, that it doesn't have a logical or historical opposite that is capable of defining it categorically? As I have tried to show elsewhere, the situation is somewhat different, only that what is at issue refers to a meaning which has the same diachronic profundity and the same semantic power of the concept to that which it refers by way of contrast. Rather than being opposed to it from the outside as happens with the modern ideas of "individual," "society," and "freedom, it corresponds to it in a sort of originary co-belonging. This is why it shares, even if by way of contrast, the same etymological and conceptual foundation. Such a meaning I believe I've linked to the idea of "immunization," derived by way of extension from the Latin term immunitas, which is precisely tied to that of communitas from the relation, in the former negative and in the latter positive, with the lemma munus. If the members of the communitas are joined together by the same law, by the duties or gift [dono] that they have to give -- which is what precisely munus means-- immunis is instead he who is exempt or exonerated from them: he who does not have obligations with respect to the other and who can therefore conserve entirely his own proper essence [sostanza] as subject who is owner of himself (cfr. R. Esposito, 2002). What are the advantages of such an etymological-paradigmatic choice? Above all, there is the fact that the perfect co-implication of the two concepts means that one can line them up in a historical succession, in which one would follow the other, substituting it according to the optimistic (or pessimistic) modalities of any philosophy of history. Any individual, society, or kind of freedom that is based on the "progressive" or "regressive" attitude of the interpreter -- would prevail or would leave behind the ancient community. Furthermore it also opens up a larger horizon with which to see the same dynamic of democracy, understood not only in a politological key, but also and above all in a socio-anthropological one. This is because if there is something in the endless contemporary debate on democracy it is precisely this long gaze on the constitution of the homo democraticus that Tocqueville had launched with incomparable forcefulness (cfr. for one of the few exceptions, M. Cacciari, 1997).

Yet the category of "immunization" is able to restore to the analysis of democracy the same breadth and the same interdisciplinary transversality with which the great social philosophy of the 1930s and 1950s surveyed the anthropology of the homo totalitarius -- I'm thinking here, in addition to the Frankfurt School, of the work associated with the Collége de sociologie in Paris and in particular of the monumental essay of Bataille's on fascism (G. Bataille, 1981). With one perspective there clearly comes into view the profound relation that joins in a single aporetic knot community and democracy: modern democracy speaks a language that is opposed to that of community to the degree to which it has introjected ever more into it a demand for immunization.

2. That the category of immunization, in direct opposition with that of community, was the most fruitful interpretive key for reading modern political systems was already apparent to the important negative anthropology of the last century (cfr. B. Accarino, 1991): from Plessner to Gehlen to Luhmann, through the systemic reconversion of the "Hobbesian paradigm of order" undertaken by Parsons (cfr. M. Bortolini, 2005). In an essay titled precisely The Limits of Community, Plessner will juxtapose the immunitary logic of the "democratic game" to community (H. Plessner, 2001): in a world in which individuals who are naturally put at risk face off against each other in a competition whose stakes are power and prestige, the only way to avoid catastrophe is that of instituting between them enough distance to immunize everyone from everyone else. Against every communitarian temptation, the public sphere is that site in which men enter into relation with each other in the form of their dissociation. Here arises the need for strategy and control apparatuses that allow them to "live nearby" without coming into contact, and therefore to increase the sphere of individual self-sufficiency through the use of "masks" or "armor" that protect them from undesirable and insidious contact with the other. As Canetti reminds us, nothing frightens the individual quite like a being touched by what threatens to penetrate his own proper individual borders (E. Canetti, 1981, pp. 17-19). In this anthropological framework, one dominated by the principle of fear and the persistence of insecurity -- the very same politics winds up being identified with an art of diplomacy that conceals the relation of natural enmity in the civil forms of ceremony, tact, and conduct.