The Immunization Paradigm

Abstract

In the following excerpt from Bios , Esposito sketches the template of immunity as a response to what he calls a "hermeneutic block" in Foucault's notion of biopolitics. After singling out those moments of greatest tension in Foucault's reading of biopolitics especially as it relates to Nazi thanatopolitics, Esposito sets out in detail the most important features of what he calls the immunization paradigm. Consisting of three dispositifs , namely sovereignty, property, and liberty, the immunitary paradigm has for Esposito a decisively modern inflection. Indeed modern biopolitics cannot be thought apart from the mode by which communities immunize or protect themselves.