ABSTRACT
C ommunity, immunity, andbiopolitics:whatis the relation between these three terms through which my recent work has wound its
way? Can they be connected together in a relation-
ship that is more than just a simple series of con-
cepts or lexicons? Not only is this possible, in my
view, it is also necessary. Indeed, each of these
terms takes on its fullest sense only in relation
to the other two. But let us start from a historical
given, by briefly recalling the transition that the
two semantic categories – first community and
then biopolitics – went through in contemporary
philosophical debate. In the late 1980s in France
and Italy, a discourse on the concept of commu-
nity took form that was radically deconstructive
toward the way the concept-term had been used
in twentieth-century philosophy as a whole –
first by the German organicist sociology on
Gemeinschaft (community), then by the various
ethics of communication, and finally, by Ameri-
can neocommunitarianism. Despite significant
differences, what linked these three conceptions
was a tendency – which could be defined as meta-
physical – to conceive of community in a substan-
tialist, subjective sense. Community was
understood as a substance that connected certain
individuals to each other through the sharing of
a common identity. Based on this understanding,
community seemed to be conceptually linked to
the figure of the “proper”: whether it was a
matter of appropriating what is in common or
communicating what is proper, the community
was still defined by a mutual belonging. What
its members had in common was what was
proper to them – that of being proprietors of
their commonality.
