ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connection between the immunological paradigm, systems theory, deconstruction and pragmatism more deeply. It explains that these connections open up avenues to think anew several important questions to which Roberto Esposito's work has drawn people's attention, including the relationship between community, melancholy, guilt and lack. The chapter discusses the central question that both Esposito and Jacques Derrida quite brilliantly raise: namely, as Esposito puts it, that autoimmunity expresses 'the logic of the immune system in its pure state, so that it is not so much pathological as 'non-pathological or normally pathological'. A crucial problem for politics is the problem of controlling autoimmunity. Problems such as what investments to choose, deciding on a course of treatment for an illness, and choosing which college to attend 'have no directly political content, and may be regulated respectively in the systems of economics, medicine, art, or law'.
