Figuren des Immunen - Elemente einer politischen Theorie

If one traces the political history of questions of immunity and immunization and their function in securing dominance, the immune can be considered initially in two figures: juridical immunity and biopolitical immunization. Juridical immunity is characterized by constructions of sovereignty and the legal assurance of property (Hobbes, Rousseau). The privilege of parliamentary immunity stands paradigmatically for this figure of the immune. The manner in which this figure secures dominance focuses on making sovereign order as invulnerable as possible, specifically by preventively excluding what is threatening, dangerous due to revolt and disobedience. The second figure of the immune securing dominance is that of biopolitical immunization, which developed in the modern European context of biopolitical governmentality. It is characterized by the incorporation and normalization of what is constructed as threatening and by the exclusion of what cannot be integrated. The concomitant control through security is unremittingly challenged by means of the threat that is generated along with it. Both figures of immunization are also figures of negating and neutralizing conflict, confrontation, battles. My work is thus framed by the history of a battle, which breaks through the duality of order and disorder, their threatening relationship of mutual negation, and thus revokes the logic of dominance. The historical example that is extensively interpreted in the first section, "Exodus and Constituting", involves the Conflict of the Orders between the patricians and the plebeians at the beginning of the Roman Republic in the 5th century BCE. To begin with, I am interested in the representation of the history of plebeian resistance, in which the figure of the homo sacer assumes a decidedly immunizing function. In historical analysis, this figure is given a completely different function from the one ascribed to it by Giorgio Agamben. Yet the homo sacer is by no means to be understood solely in light of sovereignty. In the history of plebeian resistance it attains a specific significance that leads to a political theory different from that of sovereignty and state of exception. What makes the history of plebeian resistance a special one, so that it also serves at the end of the book as a historical model for a resistive figure of the immune, is the exodus of the plebeians from Rome and their constituent process as a potent power in Rome. This re-interpretation of the conflicts between plebeians and patricians, which has been so influential in political theory from antiquity up to the present, allows me to speak of a concept of the political in critical discussion especially with Jacques Rancière, which I call the plebeian. The plebeian can be understood as a collective political strategy, which breaks through the dynamics of the dominance- securing immune and makes their failure obvious: the plebeian is what eludes these dynamics and intervenes in them.