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In a text dedicated to Kant as interpreter of Enlightenment, Michel Foucault identifies the mission of philosophy in a particular attitude consisting of that intense and trenchant relation with the present that he designates by the expression “ontology of actuality”. How should we understand these words? What does it mean to place philosophy on the point or rather on the line where actuality is revealing the density of its own historical being? What does the ontology of actuality actually mean? Firstly, this expression implies a switch of perspective toward ourselves. To ontologically relate to actuality means to consider modernity not as a period among others but as the attitude, the will to assume one’s own present as task. There is something in this option – a tension, an impulse, what Foucault calls an ethos – which goes beyond the Hegelian definition of philosophy as the present time apprehended through thought. And this is because it transforms the thought into the lever that isolates the present from the linear continuity of time, suspending it in the decision on what we are and what we can be. For Kant already, the bond with Enlightenment meant not only the faithfulness to certain ideas, the assertion of the autonomy of the human being, but also the activation of a permanent critique of one’s contemporary historicity. Not by the refuse or the negation of the present, not by the abandon of present for the sake of an unattainable utopia, but by the reversal of the notion of possibility that the present contains and by its transformation in the starting point of a different reading of reality.
This is the task of philosophy as ontology of actuality. This means, in this line of analysis, the individuation of the difference between what is essential and what is contingent, between the superficial effects and the profound dynamics which set the things into motion, which transform lives and mark out existences. It also means intercepting the moment, the critical threshold starting from which the chronicle acquires the consistency of history. What we must bring to the surface is a fundamental question on the meaning of what we call “nowadays”. What is the significance of “nowadays” when thought through? What does essentially characterize it – that is to say in its effectiveness, in its contradictions, in its potentialities? Still, this interrogation does not deplete the mission of an ontology of actuality. It is nothing more than the condition for another question which, for this time, takes the shape of a choice and of a decision. What exactly should the thought assume as given and what exactly – which latent possibilities – can it arouse and set free? Which is that part of the present to which we must attach ourselves, for which it is worth risking? For the thought should not confine itself to describing what it is, the lines of force that traverse our time, but it must also twig in the actuality the epicentre of a confrontation and of a collision between diverse and even opposed perspectives within which it is placed. The thought places itself, it is always placed on the mobile borderland between inside and outside, between process and event, between real and possible. This borderland, this limit, this front constitutes the proper site of philosophy – its scope of meaning and its contemporary destiny.
It is from this question and from this option that my last years-long efforts stem. They consist of the tentative, not at all easy, to individuate the key-words, the paradigms around which the coordinates of a particular historical moment are structured – even if this is a non-form that is not always visible to the naked eye. This is my starting question, to which I am still trying to answer today: what are the conflicts, the traumas, the nightmares – but also the requirements and the hopes – which profoundly define our times? As far as I am concerned, I thought that I could identify those key-words, that general paradigm in the category of immunity or immunization. What does it mean? We all know that the bio-medical meaning of immunity is means of exemption, or means of protection, related to an infectious disease; whereas, juridically speaking, the term represents a sort of shield that renders an individual untouchable by the common law. Therefore, in both cases, the immunization refers to a particular situation that protects somebody against the risks to which the entire community is still exposed. The profound opposition between community and immunity that emerges from this reflection is at this point revealed. Without going too far into complex etymological issues, we will only mention that it follows that immunity or immunitas, in its Latin expression, would be the contrary, the reversal of communitas. Both vocables derive from the term munus – which means “gift”, “offering”, “obligation” – but one of them, communitas, derives by affirmation while the other, immunitas, derives by negation. Thus, while the members of the community are bound by this obligation of offering, by this law of taking care of the others, the immunity implies the exemption from or the derogation of such a condition: immune is the one protected against the obligations and the dangers that affect all the others, the one that disrupts the track of social circulation by placing himself/herself out of it.
The fundamental theses that I wish to assert are mainly two. The first one is that this immunity device – this exigency of exemption and protection – which originally belonged to the medical and juridical milieus, extended progressively to all the sectors and all the idioms of our life thus having eventually become the real and symbolic coagulation point of the contemporary experience. Certainly, any society has formulated a self-protection requirement. Any collectivity has radically expressed the issue of life preservation. However, my impression is that it is hardly nowadays, at the end of the modern age, that such an exigency has become the axis around which both the actual practice and the imagery of a whole civilization are structured. In order to make an apprehension of this point it suffices to look at the role that the immunology – namely the science concerned with the study and the strengthening of the immune systems – has assumed not only in the medical respect but also concerning the social, juridical, ethical aspects. Let us merely consider the significance of the discovery of AIDS in the terms of the normalization – therefore the compliance to precise (and not only hygienic and sanitary) norms – of the individual and collective experience; let us consider not only the prophylactic but also the socio-cultural barriers, that the nightmare of this disease has brought about in the sphere of all interrelational rapports. If we go on from the field of infectious diseases to the social field of immigration we obtain a first confirmation of our thesis: the fact that the increasing flow of immigrants is completely erroneously considered as one of the greatest dangers to our societies indicates, from this perspective as well, the centrality of the immunity issue. Everywhere new partition walls appear, new restriction areas, new lines of separation from something that menaces or, at least seems to menace the biological, social, environmental identity. It is as if we had paroxistically intensified that fear of being touched – even by mistake – that Elias Canetti already, referring to the origin of our modernity, had identified in a short circuit between tact, contact and contagion. The contact, the relationship, the collective bounds seem to collapse immediately under the risk of contamination.
The same thing can be stated with regards to the information technologies: in this domain as well, the major problem, the real nightmare of all operators is represented by the so-called computer viruses – not the viruses of our small personal computers but the viruses of the great computer sets that control the world financial, political, military relations. All Western governments allot lately enormous sums to the amendment of antiviral programmes able to immunize the computer network against the infiltration of pathogen agents and against possible terrorist attacks. The fact that the juridical battle on the immunity of certain political figures – ranging from Pinochet to Milosevic and many others – lies at the core of the great national and international present controversies constitutes another evidence of what I was mentioning. The object of fears, except particular cases, is the weakening of the sovereign power of the states, the dismantling of the juridical borders of the national order in favour of a certain form of international justice that remains still to be built. In other terms, no matter which is the perspective from which we look at what is nowadays happening in the world, ranging from the individual body to the social body, from the technological to the political body, the issue of immunity lies at the crossroads of all paths. The proliferation of the contagion must be hindered, averted and fought against by any means, everywhere it can be identified.
As I was saying, this self-protective preoccupation is not characteristic only of our time. However, the degree of awareness with regards to the risk has been different in the course of time before reaching its climax at present. This fact is determined by a series of causes not at all alien to the so-called globalization: the more people – but also ideas, idioms and techniques – communicate and intersect, the more the requirement of preventive immunization is generated, as a counter-effect. New localistic re-emergences can be explained as a sort of immunity refusal of that world contamination that globalization represents. The more the “self” tends to become “global”, the more it strives for including what it is outside of it, the more it tries to interiorize any form of negativity, the more it reproduces it. It was precisely the fall of the great, real and symbolical, Berlin Wall that has led to the rearing of smaller walls – up to the point of transforming and perverting the mere idea of community, which is nowadays taking the shape of a besieged citadel. What is important – at the periphery of the world as well as in the centre of Los Angeles – is that excessive circulation, and thus potential contamination, should be impeded. From this point of view, the virus has become the general metaphor of all our nightmares. Actually, in our societies, there was a moment when fear – at least the biological kind – had been attenuated. I here refer to the 50s and 60s, during which the optimist idea that antibiotic medicine could eliminate certain millenary diseases had been proliferating. And so it had been, until AIDS has come along. At that point, the psychological mole collapsed. The symbolic and real viruses have proven to be invincible – to be the real demons able to penetrate inside us and to suck us in their void of meaning. It is then that the immunity exigency has inordinately increased, up to become our fundamental measure, the mere form in which we have shaped our lives.
Nevertheless, it is this aspect that calls for my second thesis – namely, the idea that immunity, while necessary to the protection of our life, eventuates in denying it when it is brought beyond a certain threshold. This means that it hems life in a sort of cage or armour within which we lose not only our freedom but also the mere meaning of our individual and collective existence – that is to say that circulation of the meaning, that unfurlment of existence, which I define by the term “communitas”: the constitutive exposure dimension of existence. That ex in existentia, as the philosophers would put it. Here lies the terrible contradiction to which we must apply ourselves: whatever saves the individual and collective body is also what restricts its development and even what, over a certain limit, eventuates in destroying it. It could be told that – in the idiom used by Walter Benjamin, who actually died because of the closure of a border – the high-dose immunization means the sacrifice of the living being, which is the sacrifice of any qualified life form, for the sake of the simple survival. That is the bringing down of life to its biologic nudity, the reduction of bios to zoé. Consequently, life is constrained to comply with an alien power, which penetrates it and crushes it; life must embody that nothingness that it seeks to avoid, thus being trapped in its void of meaning.
Then again, this contradiction – this antagonistic relation between protection and negation of life – is implicit in the mere procedure of medical immunization: as it is known, in order to inoculate a patient against a specific disease, a controlled and supportable quantity of the causative virus is introduced into his/her body. This leads to the point that, in this case, the medicine is prepared of the same venom against which it should protect us – it is as if in order to keep somebody alive it should be necessary that he/she should get a bit closer to death’s door. As a matter of fact, the vocable pharmakon bears at its origin the double meaning of “medicine” and “poison” – poison as medicine, cure through empoisoning. It is as if the modern immunization procedures had maximally intensified this contradiction: more and more frequently, the medicine prescribed is made of a deadly poison. If we examine this immunization practice when referring to the interior of the social body, we notice the same antinomy, the same contrafactual paradox: the continuous augmentation of the risk-oriented attention threshold – which is what we had got long-ago accustomed to accomplish – leads to the hindering of growth or even to the regression to a primitive stage of development. It is as if, instead of establishing the level of protection according to the effective risk entity, the perception of the risk would fit the increasing protection requirements – it other terms, risks are being artificially created in order to be controlled just as in the way in which the insurance companies usually proceed. All this comes in on the modern experience. However, I have the impression that we are touching that point, that limit beyond which this mechanism of mutual charging made of insurance and risk, protection and negation of life risks to slip out of our hands, to escape our control. In order to make a non-metaphoric apprehension of this aspect, let us consider what is happening with the so-called autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system is intensified to such an extent that it turns against the very mechanism which it should protect, thus destroying it. Certainly, immune systems are necessary. There is no individual or social body that could do without them. However, when they develop intemperately, they eventually provoke the explosion or the implosion of the whole organism.
It is exactly what threats to happen since the tragic events on the 11th of September 2001. For I believe that the current war is twofold connected to the immunity paradigm – by being simultaneously its exasperation and its insanity, the tragic epilogue of what it could be called the “immunity crisis”, if patterned after René Girard’s use of the expression “sacrificial crisis”: the moment when the logic of sacrifice does no longer confine to the sacrificial victim and therefore exposes the whole society to violence. It is at this moment that the blood comes gushing forth everywhere, and the people end up literally dismembered. I want to mention that the current conflict seems to emerge from the combined pressure of two opposed and specular immunity obsessions – the obsession of an Islamic integralism bound to the lifelong protection of its own alleged religious, ethnic and cultural purity against the contamination with Western secularization, on the one hand and the obsession of the West busy with excluding the rest of the planet from the distribution of its own overplus goods, on the other hand. When these two converse impulses have irreducibly combined, the whole world had been disturbed by a convulsion bearing the features of the most ravaging autoimmune disease: the excessive defense against the elements alien to the organism has turned against it, bringing forth potentially lethal consequences. What has blown up, along with the two Manhattan skyscrapers, was the double immune system that up till then had welded the world.
We must not lose sight of the fact that this tragic evolution has token place within the triangle of monotheism – Christianity, Judaism and Islamism, whose real and symbolic epicentre is Jerusalem. All has happened, all has got bound and unbound there, within the fatal circle of monotheism – and not in the Buddhist world or in Hindu galaxy. Why is that? I would say that Islamic and Christian civilizations – through the intermediary of the Jewish civilization – have collided not because they would be different and opposed as the theorists of the clash of civilizations uphold but, conversely, because they are too similar, being connected, at the level of their constitutive categories, by the logic of One, by the monotheist syndrome. Should this take the shape of the unique god, in the East, and the shape of our true god, money as absolute value, in the West, this does not contradict the fact that both logics obey to the principle of Unity, that both are trying to unify the world around its own point of view. It is this aspect – more than the oil, the sand and the bombs – that constitutes what I would call the metaphysical stake of this war: the fierce battle of two partial truths that strive after appearing as global truths, which is in the nature of the monotheist model – or, at least, in the nature of the political, politicized monotheism, since the religious monotheisms cherish thoroughly distinct spirituality treasures.
On the one hand, there is the sound truth of Islamic fundamentalism, for whom Islam is the truth – the truth written in the Koran, and who seeks to conquest the world on this basis. On the other hand, there is the voided truth of Western nihilism, of its secularized Christianity – according to which the truth is that there is no truth since the only thing that matters is only the principle of technical execution, the logic of the profit, the total production. These two truths, one full, the other empty, one self-evident in its own presence, the other secluded in its own absence, but both absolute, exclusive and exclusivistic, are the ones that encounter, within the same immunization obsession, in the attempt to conquest the global world, the globality of a self-reflected world, self-sufficient up to explosion. Political monotheism – the idea that there must be a unique king and a unique kingdom to comply with a unique god – expresses the actual essence of the most violent version of the immunization: the closure of the borders which tolerate nothing outside them, that exclude the mere idea of any exterior, that do not accept any otherness that could menace the logic of One-whole.
Without opening here the discussion on the political, social, cultural responsibilities of such a state of affairs, I would pause upon this indubitable aspect: consigned to a autoimmune regime – obsessively turned towards the identity of its own self – the world, which means human life as a whole, does not have great possibilities of survival. The negative protection of life, intensified to the point of switching to its opposite, will eventuate in destroying, together with the exterior enemy, its own body. The violence of the interiorization – the abolition of the exterior, of the negative – could turn into absolute exteriorization, into pure negativity. And then, what can we do, how can we undermine this logic of death, where can we discern, as required by the ontology of the actuality, that point of transposition of the present into another possible? It is difficult for anyone to give an exhaustive answer to such questions. Only what can no longer be done is sharp-cut. We certainly can not go back to the “Westphalia model”, to the concert of states that are fully sovereign over their interior and unstrained by all the other exterior states, which has constituted the model prevalent on the world scene for at least five centuries. In the same manner, it is not possible to rebuild a balance between opposed blocs, according to the model that has dominated the world, since the end of the World War II until the last decade of the past century. However, a come back to a constellation of ethnically defined places, determined by an exclusive connection between land, blood and language is equally unthinkable. On my opinion, the path that must be followed does not pass through the only apparently contrasting dialectic of the global and the local, to which most of the current political philosophies refer, but rather through the construction of a novel relation between singular and worldwide. In its turn, this relation can be thought only outside – in the fracture line of – the monotheist paradigm and its constitutive immunization logic. Looked upon in its radical terms – the only terms congruent with critical thinking in the present and about the present – the issue is that of growing out of the theological-political vocabulary in which, despite everything, we are still immersed, as the monotheistic syndrome that I have mentioned proves it. It is not to the Islamic world that I refer here – but to the West betoken by a political theology subject to perpetual secularization, as Carl Schmitt explained.
Naturally, breaking up with the theological-political vocabulary that is the source of all our categories, ranging from that of sovereignty to that of legal person, is not easy. But there is no other way. We can not go back – to a world made of interiorly autonomous pieces that are potentially hostile to the exterior. But neither can we continue with this globalization of a “self” incapable of going off itself and of reflecting itself in its own exterior. This would amount to persisting in the destructive and self-destructive logic of the immunitas, exactly when, contrarily, it is time to reverse this way of thinking by turning to its inversion – to the open and plural form of communitas. The world – from now on irreversibly united – should not only be thought of but also “practiced” as unity of differences, as system of distinctions, within which the distinction and the difference should not be just points of resistance against or residues of the globalization processes but their full expression. Of course, I know very well that the transformation of this philosophical formula into real practice, into a political logic implies an effort far from being easy. Still, we must find the means, the forms, the conceptual language able to convert the immunity declination that all the political fundamentalisms have assumed into a singular and plural logic in which the differences become the cement of the world. I believe that the West – if we are to use this category non-defensively or non-offensively directed towards the others – carries the power, the resources, the cultural springs necessary to the endeavour of such an operation of radical conversion – I am using this term in its most intense meaning – despite the recurrent Western temptation to homologate the world according to a unique model. Since Heraclites, the idea that we can be united not through homogeneity, but through distinction and diversity, participate in the tradition that the West has produced without ever rendering it effective. A great part of its violent history bears the mark of this dislodgement and of this oblivion. The tragic paradox that we are nowadays living rests in the fact that those who have declared war to the West have reproduced and paroxistically intensified the same phobic obsession, the same conviction that there could not exist a community, a relation between diverse individualities other than the autoimmune relation, the fatal collision.
In this situation – in which the most destructive tendencies are reflected and doubled in a new recourse to massacre – the only possibility is that of breaking the mirror in which the self reflects without seeing anything else besides itself, that is breaking the spell. The great French linguist Émile Benveniste reminds us that the Latin pronoun “se”, as well as its modern derivatives, bears an Indo-European ancient root word – from which the Latin terms suus and soror and the Greek terms éthos and étes, which means kin, ally, stem. Benveniste concludes that from that root word two distinct semantic lines emerge: one that refers to the individual and private self, expressed by idios (which is proper to the self), and the second one referring to a larger circle, within which more subjects relate one with the other and this is where the terms hetairos and sodalis come from – both terms express a community-specific relation – something common to those that are defined by it, which is also the case of that munus from communitas. This is the source of the complex relation between the reflexive “self” as in “itself” and the distinctive and disjunctive “self” as in sed. This consequently proves the fact that what we call “self” originates in an indissoluble relation between unity and distinction, between identity and alterity. Without bestowing any particular privileges upon etymologies, it is probably in the depths of our linguistic tradition that we could find the keys to the inversion of the lines of the present, as Foucault put it, in order to set free another possibility, which is present even if it has not yet been truly experimented, to give actuality to its history.
Translated by Andreea Lazar
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