The Immunity Paradigm’s Contradictory / Complementary Facets

Abstract

Immunization, a protocol for hammering identities and national, sexual, racial or class differences, is also a “creative” border-multiplying game. It can, but need not, revert against oneself (as autoimmunity), while it was meant to protect from the other. It is ambiguous. Extreme immunization is suicidal (because murderous), yet immunity is also vital, in a balance or percentage impossible to theorize. It is a matter of cognitive choice as well as, for Agamben, some kind of epistemological and “testimonial” ethics. While forms of immunization against others multiply from within society or from within the “camp” (as the pattern of society in Agamben’s parlance), the citizenship/ representation pattern is depoliticized i.e., subjected to immunity. The present paper argues that such depoliticization has become particularly visible since the “end” of the Cold War. Is immunity equilibrium for the community possible? The paper tests some such models with regard to Asia since 1989, articulated in politics and spelt out by some western philosophers, including Agamben, regardless of whether they actually mention Asia or not: the “with regard to Asia” aspect is here the clue for reading them, that against which they are probed. How much of the other (in this case, Asia) do they miss out? How much is left to the “politics of the people”? How much does “governance’s” democratic empty formalism enforce from above?