Beyond the ‘other’ as constitutive outside: The politics of immunity in Roberto Esposito and Niklas Luhmann
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116658391 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Author | Hannah Richter |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(2) 216–237
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116658391
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EJPT
Article
Beyond the ‘other’ as
constitutive outside:
The politics of immunity
in Roberto Esposito
and Niklas Luhmann
Hannah Richter
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK
Abstract
This article re-conceptualises the ‘constitutive outside’ through Roberto Esposito’s
theory of immunity to detach it from Laclau and Mouffe’s political antagonism. It iden-
tifies Esposito’s thought as an innovative epistemological perspective to dissolve post-
ontological political theories of community from the intertwinement with a foundational
self/other dialectic. Esposito shows how a community can sustain its relations through
introversive immunisation against a primarily undefined outside. But it is argued that his
theory of immunity slips back to a vitalist depth ontolog y which ultimately de-politicises
the construction of the communal outside. This article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s
immunity theory to resituate immunisation in the political production of social con-
nectivity. Following Luhmann, politics relies on immunisation through contradictions to
reproduce its functional role as a decision-making institution, but is at the same time
constantly exposed to potential rupture through the political openness immunity intro-
duces. Through Esposito and Luhmann, this article identifies the relationship between a
social inside and its outside as open-ended and secondary to an introversive process of
socio-political self-differentiation. It can involve, but does epistemologically necessitate,
the construction of an external other.
Keywords
Immunity, constitutive outside, self and other, community, autopoiesis, Roberto
Esposito, Niklas Luhmann, biopolitics
Corresponding author:
Hannah Richter, School of Politicsand International Relations, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NZ, UK.
Email: H.C.Richter@kent.ac.uk
Introduction: Roberto Esposito’s incomplete
deconstruction of the constitutive other
The concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ was introduced to political theory by
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
1
Drawing on Henry Staten’s reading of itera-
tive meaning formation in Derrida,
2
Laclau and Mouffe argue that in the absence
of ontological grounding, identity constitution must take place against a ‘radical
outside, without a common measure with the inside’ (Laclau, 1990: 18). The ‘con-
stitutive outside’ has since not only been widely adopted within continental poli-
tical theory (Hall, 2000; Oswell, 2006). But it also increasingly informs
more general social theory and empirical social research in a way which is largely
dissociated from the concept’s theoretical underpinnings, which thus remain
unchallenged (Diez, 2004; Hawkesworth, 2010; Mara, 2003). This article unfolds
its argumentation from the insight that this unquestioned theoretical adoption of
Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘constitutive outside’ is highly problematic because of the
political consequences they infer from its epistemic necessity (Laclau, 1990;
Mouffe, 2000). Intertwined with Carl Schmitt’s (1996: 19–27) assumption of a gen-
eral political antagonism between friend and foe, the fluid, iterative outside
of meaning constitution
3
is turned into a solidified other when applied to the
political realm. Political antagonism becomes both epistemological condition
for, and political consequence of, every process of identity-formation (Mouffe,
2000: 21–29).
This article turns to Roberto Esposito’s political philosophy to re-think the
‘constitutive outside’ in its epistemic formation and its political implications. The
backbone of Esposito’s philosophy is his deconstruction of community as an onto-
logical essence which connects, unifies or delimits its members. Esposito’s commu-
nitas is an ontological ‘no-thing’ (Esposito, 2010: 136). It only exists as the practical
social bonds which form and maintain communal life in the absence of an onto-
logical ground. The absent ground of communal life unfolds the conceptual trias of
community, immunity and biopolitics which runs through Esposito’s work. He
shows how communal relations which paradoxically persist against this founda-
tional lack require a political mechanism of immunisation which conceals the com-
munity’s internal void by displacing it to the outside. However, this political
mechanism at the same time transforms the relational communitas into a biopoli-
tically immunised community which is now politically reproduced against the back-
ground of this displaced other (Bird and Short, 2013: 6–10).
In close connection to the post-ontological community theories of Jean-Luc
Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, Esposito’s powerful deconstruction of communal
essence on the one hand opens recurring communitarian themes within political
theory to the critical investigation of their foundation, their theoretical and ethical
implications (Bird, 2013; Hole, 2013; Tierney, 2016). On the other hand, it provides
a theoretical basis to critically explore how political immunisation, from the Third
Reich’s biologisation of the political lexicon to the governance of health crises,
produces a fictional community-to-be-governed against a foreign threat (Esposito,
2008: 112–117; Jaakko, 2013; Pellizzoni, 2012). This article argues that Esposito’s
Richter 217
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