%0 Journal Article
%T Beyond the ¡®other¡¯ as constitutive outside: The politics of immunity in Roberto Esposito and Niklas Luhmann
%A Hannah Richter
%J European Journal of Political Theory
%@ 1741-2730
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1474885116658391
%X 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 identifies 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 ontology 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 connectivity. 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 introduces. 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
%K Immunity
%K constitutive outside
%K self and other
%K community
%K autopoiesis
%K Roberto Esposito
%K Niklas Luhmann
%K biopolitics
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474885116658391