ABSTRACT
The work of Roberto Esposito arises from the distinctive reflection upon the notions of law, community and the political. The form of reflection is characterised by a critical distance and detachment from modern legal and political thought. The relationship between community and immunity, the inherence of community within immunity, is conceived as an originary bioethics. Immunitas, thus, indicates the outlines of an affirmative biopolitics whose further development will be undertaken in Bios. The notions of law, the political and community are introduced through a sustained critique of the theoretical framework of Foucauldian biopolitics. Esposito identifies two opposed logics, a politics of life and a politics of death, and an absence of the delineation of their relationship. These two logics are reconfigured by situating them within the immunitary paradigm of exclusionary inclusion. Esposito's work is held to offer a distinct conception of juridical analysis beyond the parameters of the predominant self-understanding of jurists.
