ABSTRACT
What is the concept of immunity? Can this concept be clearly determined and demonstrated, particularly in the light of its frantic mobilisation during the present pandemic? Apart from the fact that even biologists are not sure as to what the “source” of immunity is in relation to its “marks”/“signs”—for example, the mark of antibody present in the human body—we can also initiate a more historical enquiry into the immunitarian question. Isn't it the case that immunity presents itself as a problem in the course of human history when the species encounters a pathogen (like Covid-19) that hitherto it has either not known or not mastered? But no human encounter can ever be grasped without the mediation of something like a historical temporality or consciousness within which this encounter is situated. This is the reason why the problem of immunity is as much a historical problem as a scientific one. And even the scientific status of the problem cannot be separated from its historical articulation—something that we're witnessing with regard to the contemporary efforts of making a vaccine against Covid-19.
In this presentation, I will examine certain dimensions of this unfolding “sense” of the immunitarian question rather than its determined scientific concept so that I am able to clear the ground for asking a somewhat different “economic” question at the end: is the present system of capitalist manufacture and market society able to acknowledge the vacillation and errancy of scientific history? Or does it tend to advertise “the power of the vaccine” as a fetishised and “perfect” commodity that substitutes another kind of collective violence for the initial one brought upon the human species by the virus?
