Abstract
I briefly examine here the concepts of subject, subjectivity, and subjection in the works of three philosophers: Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” Étienne Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” and Roberto Esposito’s Communitas. Before doing so, however, I want to make a few preliminary remarks. While I argue that there exists between the concepts of interpellation and immunization a theoretical kinship so powerful that it may no longer be possible to think about one without at least taking the other into account, my inquiry into this kinship does not take the form of a chronology, as if interpellation, a notion developed by Althusser in the mid-1960s and introduced publically in “Ideology and the Ideological Sate Apparatuses” (1970), were the anticipation or even the pre-emption of a concept first outlined by Esposito nearly thirty years later in Communitas (1998). Such an approach would inevitably lead to the question of whether Esposito developed and advanced or, on the other hand, suppressed or replaced Althusser’s concept, perhaps by means of or against the intervening work of Balibar, published in 1989; such a question might be reduced to whether the thirty-year interval had been the site of progress or regression. Thus my title, “between interpellation and immunization,” should not be read as “from interpellation to immunization.” At the same time, I do not intend to pursue what might be understood as the opposite course: establishing the dialectical unity of the two apparently distinct concepts of interpellation and immunization by means of a mediation that would negate and overcome their difference. Such a procedure might take Balibar’s work on the subject as providing the common denominator or abstract equivalence into which Althusser and Esposito might be translated in order to be made commensurable. Instead, I regard these three texts and three concepts as forming a body in Spinoza’s sense, a composite unity made up of irreducibly distinct parts capable of acting together to be the cause of a single effect—in this case, of a theoretical and perhaps political effect.
I begin by recalling that Althusser’s verb “interpellate” (interpeller) is usually understood by English readers on the basis of Ben Brewster’s translation of it as “to hail someone,” or perhaps to address or call someone, as God, to use Althusser’s own example, calls on or to Moses. Brewster, however, does not quite capture the extent to which Althusser draws on one of the term’s meanings in modern French, a meaning particularly current in the period immediately following the revolt of May 1968. “Interpellate” refers to the action of the police when, as it is said in English, they “stop” or “detain” an individual; this action implies more than simply a hailing or calling out to the individual and instead takes the form of a command, which is to say, of a speech act necessarily grounded not simply in a specific legal context but also in an inequality of forces, to produce proof of the identity already assigned by the very process of interpellation: “it is the Prefecture of the Police which provides the individuals whom policemen interpellate with the identity papers that policemen request (demand) that one show” (“Three Notes” 83n21).
Perhaps even more significantly, none of Althusser’s numberless English-language commentators, to my knowledge, thought to inquire into the term’s use in English prior to its reintroduction into the language precisely by the translation of Althusser’s text. The verb “interpellate,” now listed as obsolete in the Oxford English Dictionary, was used as late as the end of the sixteenth century to signify “to interrupt a person speaking,” and, in a broader sense, to interrupt a process or action. This now unfamiliar use of interpellate was in fact derived directly from the Latin verb interpello, which also means to interrupt or disturb someone who is speaking. There exists a Latin noun, interpellator, to denote the one who interrupts or disrupts. A related term, appello, not only means to make an appeal to or to address someone, but also to accost that person, to call him out of and thus separate him from an assembly of which he is a part. The etymology of “interpellate” thus reminds us that Althusser is himself an “interpellator” in the Latin sense, one who disrupts an ongoing discourse with an unwelcome appeal or application, as if he were owed something, a debt that no one knew remained outstanding, perhaps nothing more than an explanation—the demand for which, however, can only disturb the ongoing discourse whose perpetuation is perhaps organized around the denial of that debt.
That Althusser’s disruptive appeal concerns the category of the subject hardly allows us to separate the disturbance he caused in philosophy and political thought from that of his contemporaries, from Heidegger to Lacan to Foucault. They, too, while never declaring or attempting to bring about the disappearance of the subject—as has been so often claimed—nevertheless in different ways and to different degrees question the status of the concept as a given and as the unquestioned origin and therefore source of explanation for any conceivable human activity. Texts such as Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?” pose difficult and disquieting questions about the historical emergence of the category of the subject that themselves proved disruptive, as if their authors also are interpellators interrupting the assembly of learned discourse.
The disturbance caused by Althusser’s introduction of the notion of interpellation therefore could not simply be attributed to its demand for a theory of the constitution of the subject heretofore regarded as the condition of intelligibility of any social practice. To grasp the singularity of this disturbance, I turn to the specific textual form or, more precisely, forms in which Althusser develops the concept of interpellation through an important but thus far unnoticed revision of his account of what he calls “the duplicate mirror-structure of ideology [la structure spéculaire redoublée]” in the ISAs essay (“Ideology” 180). This essay, dated January-April 1970 and appearing in the Communist journal La Pensée in June 1970, is described in an editorial footnote as consisting of “two extracts from an ongoing study” (127n1). The manuscript from which the essay was “extracted” bears the handwritten title “De la superstructure” and is itself dated one year earlier, January-April 1969; this piece would be posthumously published in a collection edited by Jacques Bidet, entitled Sur la reproduction. The idea of extraction, however, which suggests that the two sections were removed as is from the manuscript, is a bit misleading. Within the extracts themselves, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and, indeed, entire sections were suppressed, in certain cases decisively altering the meaning of the text.
No omission has more decisively changed the philosophical and political significance of Althusser’s analysis than that which shaped the section entitled “The State” in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” The corresponding section in Sur la reproduction (“The State and its Apparatuses”) is not only significantly longer, but represents an attempt, of which there is little trace in the later version, to theorize the process of the reproduction of the relations of production as the simultaneous production/reproduction of antagonism and conflict. From the perspective of the earlier text, the relations of production could never take the form of an order or a system, but rather could only take the form of a perpetual, ever-changing battle; here, even Gramsci’s model of hegemony appears to Althusser to freeze or fix the relationship of class forces as if to abstract it from the contingencies of actual combat. The final sections of the chapter on the State in Sur la reproduction were all omitted in their entirety from the ISAs essay and their titles alone suggest positions at odds with what is now known as Althusser’s theory of ideology: “The Ideological State Apparatuses and the Ideological By-products of Their Practices,” “The Double Functioning of the State Apparatuses and Their ‘Combined Action,’” and “The Fragility and Solidity of the Ideological State Apparatuses” (Reproduction 113-123). In these suppressed parts of his discussion of the state and its apparatuses, Althusser offers an account of the way class struggle, present from the beginning, is constitutive of the apparatuses themselves, which thus arise to counter already existing movements against the reproduction of the relations of production. Class struggle thus deforms the apparatuses, not only inhibiting their functioning but causing them to produce contradictory effects. He argues that while an ideology does not precede and give rise to apparatuses that would correspond to it (an “idealist” error he attributes to Stalin), neither do the apparatuses precede and give rise to the ideology or ideologies proper to them; the second proposition is merely the inverse of the first (113). There is instead, first, an ideology that “exists in,” is immanent in, or is consubstantial with an apparatus and, second, the ideology produced by the practice or practices of this apparatus insofar as it is engaged in and shaped by the struggles outside of which it has no existence or meaning. These “secondary ideologies,” as Althusser calls them, “are produced by a conjunction of complex causes in which figure, along with the practice in question, the effect of other external ideologies and other external practices—and in the last instance, however dissimulated they may be, even the distant (but in reality very near) effects of class struggles” (115).1 The apparatuses, in other words, cannot be understood as inert institutions or mechanisms existing independently of their actual operation, which is to say, independently of their participation in struggles subject to the variability of fortune that characterizes war and especially, as in this case, an interminable war whose ever changing modes and sites of engagement require perpetual adjustment of tactics and strategy. As such, the apparatuses “secrete” (a term always placed in quotation marks by Althusser) “secondary ideological sub-formations [sous-formations]” or “by-products [sous-produits].” The effects of struggle thus cause the ISAs to secrete a by-product that by definition is not only not functional but may even prove “toxic,” as if through a kind of autoimmune reaction. An apparatus can thus be described, depending on the disposition of forces internal and external to it, as more or less “fragile” (120). Often, though, the apparatuses remain “solid,” despite the by-products whose toxicity only occasionally and in the right circumstances (in combination with other by-products of other apparatuses) reaches a level that threatens the very existence of the apparatus itself (119). This description of the apparatuses and their double functioning or their tendency to produce conflict instead of order, and thereby in their totality to destabilize rather than promote the stability of class relations, is notoriously absent from the ISAs essay (with the exception of its postscript, where the primacy of class struggle appears as an afterthought). It also allows Althusser to devote an entire chapter in Sur la reproduction to the very phenomenon critics of the ISAs essay had charged him with excluding a priori: revolution.2
Althusser’s suppression of his own account of the process of the production of irreducible conflict in favor of the rigorously functionalist account of capitalist society offered in the published version of the text is undoubtedly an example of the theoretical bending of the stick that he repeatedly justified until the end of the 1970s, when he recognized that hyperbole in the realm of theory could correct theoretical-political errors only by introducing new and different errors, replacing existing confusion not with clarity but with other and perhaps more powerful, durable forms of confusion. It would be a mistake, however, to allow ourselves to be distracted by what Jacques Rancière (who perfectly represented the intended audience of what he calls Althusser’s theater of the abstract and who knew it when he accused Althusser of employing a philosophical sleight of hand to dupe and amaze his “spectators”) has referred to as Althusser’s “philosophy of Order.” Instead, we should keep in mind that the genesis of the concept shows that the Ideological State Apparatus only has meaning in relation to the resistance that precedes and provokes its emergence and its operation: the ISAs taken together in their tendential and always unstable unity can at best temporarily preserve a certain equilibrium of forces without ever being able to resolve or abolish the conflict itself.
The ISAs essay did not, however, simply consist of extracts shaped and determined by omissions and elisions. Althusser also introduced changes and additions. Of these, none are perhaps more important or decisive than those made to the section described as “an example” of the “central thesis” that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, that is, the section entitled “An Example: Christian Religious Ideology” (“Ideology” 177-183). In both versions of the text, Althusser begins with a justification of the very notion of “an example,” which as an illustration of a generality would seem to commit him to an emanationist logic at odds with his insistence elsewhere on immanence and singularity. He restricts his “analysis to a single example, one accessible to everyone,” because “the formal structure of all ideology is always the same” (177). It is important to note, however, that Althusser offers two different accounts of this formal structure that is everywhere and always the same. In the longer, 1969 manuscript, this formal structure is “a triple system” that ensures or guarantees (he uses the verb assurer) three simultaneous operations: 1) the interpellation of individuals as subjects; 2) the mutual recognition between subjects and the Subject, mutual recognition between subjects, and each subject’s recognition of himself; 3) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so: that God really is God, that Pierre really is Pierre, and that, if the subjection of subjects to the Subject is truly respected, everything will go well for them: they will be “rewarded (récompensé)” (Reproduction 232-233).
In the more familiar, published version of 1970, the triple system had grown into a quadruple system of ideological operations, and the addition is anything but trivial. Between points 1 and 2–between, that is, the interpellation of individuals as subjects, on the one hand, and the three forms of recognition (between subjects and the Subject, between subjects, and each subject’s recognition of himself), on the other–Althusser inserts an additional operation, that of “their subjection to the Subject” (“Ideology” 181). The fact of subjection (assujettisement) is thus situated between, on the one hand, the interpellation of individual as subject, as agent and author of thought, speech, and action, and, on the other hand, the recognition of this fact by the Subject, by other subjects, and by each subject in relation to himself. Althusser will add to the 1970 version an explanation of the link between what we might call subjectivation and subjection. That the subjects produced by this quadruple system “work all by themselves [marchent tout seul]” seems, Althusser admits, a “mystery,” but the mystery is itself an effect of the irreducible “ambiguity” of the term “subject.” In “current usage [l’acception courante],” the term “subject” signifies, in effect, 1) “a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (“Ideology” 182). The order of these definitions is anything but arbitrary; for Althusser, the subject is interpellated as free and as a consenting subject so that it will freely choose or consent to its own subjection (with the word “consent” remaining strategically absent from the entirety of the ISAs essay).
It is difficult not to see in these phrases a more or less direct reference to Hobbes, to whom, moreover, Althusser devoted a course at the École Normale Supérieure in 1971. The only limit—itself perhaps the point of intersection between law and nature—on the individual’s right to self-government is that at which a man is “forbidden” not to act to preserve himself (to use Hobbes’s own ambiguous phrase [189]). This quasi-absolute right of the individual to direct himself and thus to be governed by no power other than that to which he freely consents is accorded him precisely so that he will choose to transfer the right of which he is the sole proprietor to the Sovereign, so as to preserve himself from the dangers of the state of nature. If, once he has consented to the sovereign, he should repent of his actions and attempt to recover the right he had earlier transferred, he will, properly speaking, initiate a war with himself and will consequently be himself the author of any punishment carried out against him. Here the individual is addressed as a free agent and author so that the power to which he consents and to which he thus freely submits will have the greatest possible legitimacy: whatever it does, whether to him or for him, it does with his own authorization.
Is this then Althusser’s interpellatio, his disruption and disturbance of political thought: the argument that the attribution of freedom to a subject is the retroactive effect of a submission whose voluntary acceptance of authority furnishes its absolute ground? To judge the ISAs essay and particularly the substantially revised passages referred to above by their effects, the answer would have to be no. In both versions of the essay, Althusser acknowledges that the interpellated subject does not always heed the call of the Subject. There are those who, once called into existence as subjects, turn away from the vocation of or the call to submission, as if the free will with which they are endowed permits them on occasion to refuse the destiny in relation to which they are inscribed as subjects. These are what Althusser famously called “bad subjects”: criminals, heretics, and rebels. Michel Pêcheux was perhaps correct to worry that the phrase, “they work all by themselves,” could suggest that once interpellated (and every subject is always already interpellated), they become indistinguishable from the “classical subject” (215). It was perhaps to forestall such a reading that Althusser added this italicized sentence to the second version as the penultimate phrase of the inserted paragraph: “There are no subjects except by and for [par et pour] their subjection” (“Ideology” 182). Here Althusser moves beyond the notion that subjects only exist for the subjection that they will freely choose, to the far less familiar statement that subjects exist only by or through their subjection, as if subjection (in a logical if not chronological sense) precedes rather than follows the constitution of subject as author and agent, as the subject’s condition of possibility or sine qua non, that without which it cannot exist.3 Only here in the penultimate sentence of the penultimate paragraph of “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” does Althusser pose a question without a response: what precisely is the relation between the two meanings of the term subject and, more precisely, how does the subject arise from subjection (assujetissement)?
As I now turn to Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” published nearly twenty years after the ISAs essay and in as radically different a historical conjuncture as could be imagined, I want to be clear that I do not read it as a response to or rectification of Althusser’s text, nor even in a strict sense as “following” Althusser’s intervention; rather I read it as another approach different from and in certain ways opposed to that of Althusser. Of the differences, none is more obvious than the absence of any notion of the transhistorical if not the eternal existence of the subject (as in Freud’s dictum: “the unconscious is eternal”) and therefore, to follow Althusser’s argument, of subjection. Balibar begins by examining another critical account of the subject, one which in its own way posits a ground of the being of the subject that is necessarily present to its historical permutations: that of Heidegger, especially in the 1938 text “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” translated into English as “The Age of the World Picture.” For Heidegger, “This word, Subjectum, must certainly be understood as the translation of the Greek ΰποκείμενον. The word names that which lies before [das Vor-liegende], that which as ground gathers everything on itself [das als Grund alles auf sich sammelt]” (“Age” 128; “Zeit” 81). The original of which “subjectum” is a translation and that marks “subjectum,” like all translations, with a certain loss of meaning has, unlike its modern versions, no special relationship “to men [Menschen] and none at all to the I” (“Age” 128; “Zeit” 81). As Heidegger approaches Descartes, with whom he credits the introduction of the anthropological notion of the subject into Western thought, he reminds us that it is “impossible to say that the modern understanding of whatever is, is more correct than that of the Greeks” (“Age” 117; “Zeit” 77). On the contrary, with Descartes (an origin whose function in Heidegger’s discourse Balibar calls into question by simply reading Descartes’s text) comes a contraction of the subject that has as its corollary a reduction of Being to World and a reduction of World to a picture. Man, understood less as species than as the human individual, as if the separation of individuals were the form of its species-being, becomes ground, the “subjectum,” or subject of Being. I would note here that Heidegger has in fact projected the modern sense of subject as that which “as ground, gathers everything on itself” onto the Greek “ΰποκείμενον,” which normally signifies not the agent of an action but precisely that which is acted upon, that which is placed under or in front of, that which is subjected or submitted to something else. It is perhaps more often translated as substrate or substance than as subject, no doubt because of its use in Aristotle’s texts.4 Heidegger’s “ΰποκείμενον” is, in contrast, a strange agent that not only places itself under, but collects together (sammeln) all the things that will be on top of or above it, as if choosing to subject or submit itself in an Opfer or sacrifice to that which is by its own effort and agency made literally higher or superior. Heidegger’s assertion that Descartes carried out an anthropologization of Western Metaphysics by instituting the ego cogito as original ground is thus itself based on or grounded in an already anthropologized or anthropomorphized conception of the ΰποκείμενον as the agent of a gathering or collecting that is also a subjection, as if a certain notion of the subject as agent and author possessed, as Althusser argued, an omni-historical existence.
Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes’s Meditations as introducing into Western thought the anthropological subject (subjectum), an interpretation hardly peculiar to him, is all the more remarkable in that, as Balibar shows, not only is the word subjectum itself missing from the Meditations, but the concept is as well: to follow Descartes’s reasoning to its end is to see that the ego cogito finally discovers the impossibility of its functioning as a ground and that its being a subject at all is predicated on its being subjectus, not the subject of knowledge but subject to a knowledge that originates in something greater, namely God, subjection to whom is the condition of any knowledge including, above all, the subject’s knowledge of itself. It is as if, Balibar tells us, speaking not only of Heidegger or of Heideggerians, but also of a general tendency to accept Heidegger’s reading with or without any reference to Heidegger himself, there has occurred around the concept of the subject a generalized “forgetting” (“Citizen” 33). And what has been forgotten is precisely the irreducible division of the subject. First, there is the subjected subject, the subject of a sovereign, the sovereign’s subject, as opposed to the sovereign subject. At the extreme, of course, since there is no king but God, we are in this sense God’s subjects, subject here being understood as a “subditus,” literally, as he who is subject to the words and commands/commandments of another, not as a slave (servus) who is coerced, but as one who chooses to obey and who therefore possesses or is possessed by a supplement of will or faith in the sense of fide or fidelity. Secondly, alongside the sovereign’s subject is the sovereign subject, the subject subject only to itself and therefore the sole and unconditioned author of thought, speech, and action. However, it is not only the irreducible division of the subject that has been forgotten, but also and perhaps even more importantly the historical and political anteriority of the former over the latter.
For Balibar, the modern notion of the subject as origin and center of initiatives begins with Kant, but paradoxically only in the form of an interpretation of Descartes that attributes to him a “Cartesian subject” that in fact appears for the first time only in the Critique of Pure Reason. Far from overcoming the contradiction tying subjectivity to subjection, the Kantian/”Cartesian” subject only multiplies its effects, dispersing them even more widely than before. It is in the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant first transforms the verb “cogito” or “I think” into a noun, “das Ich denke” or “the I think,” as if the subject is something or someone that exists only through the act of thinking: “the ‘I think’ expresses the act of determining my existence” (169). The subject can thus no longer be conceived as substrate in the classical sense, but is instead an activity, thinking thinking itself as both agent and object of thought. While, as Balibar points out, there is little overtly political or practical in the discussion of the “I think” in the Critique of Pure Reason (except briefly at the conclusion of the discussion of the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason”), Kant insists that my (and we must speak in the first person here) thinking myself thinking constitutes a representation or intuition (as opposed to a rational knowledge) of “my existence as a self-active being” (169), and this opens the way to its “correlate” (“Citizen” 77), the notion of freedom that underlies the very possibility of morality. It does so in a double sense: Kant posits the “spontaneity” of the I think, that is, the fact that it determines itself, while at the same time denying the subject a knowledge of this self-activity that would be anything other than an intuition (Anschauung) or a representation (Vorstellung). Thus, as Balibar notes, “the Kantian ‘subject,’ that is, the Ich or better the Ich denke, is fundamentally caught in a relation of imputation” (“Citizen” 77). Because I can know myself “only as I appear to myself and not as I am to the understanding” (Kant, Critique 167), my intuition or representation of my spontaneity (Critique of Pure Reason) or my freedom in the sense that I am a causa libera (Metaphysics of Morals) “can never aid me in advancing beyond the field of experience” to know myself “as noumenon” (383, 382). Because practical existence, however, “is always directed to objects of experience,” we may apply these intuitions to the problem of how “a subject that is possessed of freedom” should act, that is, how it should legislate for itself and then obey moral law (383). In fact, this very freedom, the ground of any possible morality and that which separates the human from the natural world, cannot be known in the pure sense and thus must be “imputed.” Thus, in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defines the person “as a subject whose actions can be imputed to him” and moral personality as the “freedom of a rational being under moral laws,” which are only those “which he gives himself (alone or with others)” (50).
Imputation, however, is not an unconditioned act of recognition or projection on the part of one subject in regard to another, as if it would grant to the other what it intuits about itself in a kind of spontaneous sociability. On the contrary, there is nothing spontaneous about imputation; it occurs only in the context of a fundamental Ungleichheit: both inequality (and not simply in law, but also an inequality of force) and dissimilarity. Imputation (Zurechnung) is above all a “judgment by which someone is regarded as the author (causa libera) of an action” formulated by a judge or person “authorized to impute with rightful force” (Metaphysics 53). To argue that Kant’s subject, even as it emerges in the Critique of Pure Reason, is a kind of Zurechnungssubjekt or subject of imputation, a subject to whom a freedom not rationally knowable can and perhaps must be ascribed or imputed, is to suggest the primacy of the political dimension. To be a person and to have a moral, legal personality is not to be free, that is, demonstrably the free cause of one’s own actions as an author (Kant’s term is Urheber, which means origin and creator, but also perpetrator), but is rather to have this freedom imputed by one “authorized to impute by rightful force.” The imputation of freedom is thus a violent imposition of causal, moral, and legal responsibility on an individual by an anonymous juridico-political order (note that the judge himself “is authorized” in the passive voice, as if he too were a subject of imputation authorized by yet another subject of imputation in a necessarily endless chain). This order precedes the subject of imputation, and his subjection to it is the condition of the act by which he is imputed freedom, which in turn is necessary to any morality. If he can be said to have given himself either alone or with others the (moral) laws he then freely obeys, this giving or creating is also then imputed and so requires the temporal and logical precedence of the legal over the moral. Thus, Kant too has affirmed in his own way that there are no subjects except by and through their own subjection.
To draw the line of demarcation that will make the hierarchical opposition inscribed in the notion of subject in its historical existence permanently visible, that is, to undo the repression to which it has been “subject,” so to speak, Balibar proposes that after the sovereign subject that itself follows the sovereign’s subject—but only by folding subjection into itself as the condition or result of its freedom—there emerges through a rejection of the subjection/subjectivation antinomy the figure of the citizen, a figure born out the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth-century, particularly the French Revolution. To be precise, the citizen is
a historical figure that is no longer the subjectus and not yet the subjectum. But from the outset, in the way that it is formulated and put into practice, it exceeds its own institution. The citizen is what I have called the statement of a hyperbolic proposition; its developments can only emerge from conflicts whose stakes can be sketched out.
(Citoyen Sujet 53; my translation)
It exceeds its own institution: the citizen is thus a utopian figure not in the sense that its essence lies in a future to be realized, but in the sense that it exists nowhere—neither in the collectivity nor in the individual, neither publicly nor privately, neither as subjectus nor as subjectum—and in the sense that its very identity grows out of these exclusions. Historically it emerges within the development of the subject, dividing it from itself by working to overturn the primacy of a subjection that, even when it originates in the unconditioned will of free and equal subjects, produces inequality and unfreedom. The citizen exists only in and through a struggle that is by definition permanent, a struggle that leads it beyond its own limits, as if to remain within them would reduce the citizen to the very subject against which it has defined itself. The citizen thus exists only through the activity in which its objectives remain immanent.
The work of Roberto Esposito on immunity may well appear to be inscribed in a different register than that of Althusser and Balibar. As a response to some of the theoretical problems engendered by Foucault’s work on biopower, particularly that “interval of meaning which remains open in Foucault’s text between the constitutive poles of the concept of biopolitics, namely biology and politics,” it would seem to address the question of the appropriation of life by politics that in a certain way would allow us to sidestep or circumvent the question of the subject altogether. Reading Esposito in the light of the foregoing discussion, however, we cannot escape the sense that the opposition between communitas and immunitas is another way to think the constitutive aporia of the subject and the irreducible conflict at the heart of the notion of citizen. As Esposito demonstrates, the concept of immunity is political before it is biological. Communitas or community is not only not “a property belonging to subjects that joins them together,” the totality to which they would pertain before their separation into individuals; it is not even a thing (the res publica) that could be substantified as that which individuals “share” or possess (Communitas 8). If we can speak of a sharing, it would be the sharing of a munus, an obligation, a debt, a tax, even the paradox of an obligatory gift, the sharing of which Esposito describes as a lack or void. Communitas is thus not more than the individual, but less; it does not add but subtracts and is finally the experience of destitution and expropriation (depropriazione) (6-7). Such a subject is subject of and to debt and despoliation: an outside that marks its own limit is rediscovered within, as that which separates each subject from itself. It is here, in a gesture whose timing in relation to the argument concerning the subject’s relation to communitas as well as whose content can only remind us of Althusser, that Esposito turns to Scripture and the example not of Moses but of Paul. Even fellowship, κοινότης, in the community of the faithful, the κοινονία, is a “taking part in” that entails a loss and a diminution, a participation in a loss of freedom that is δούλεια or slavery in Christ, in whose death one must participate (11). These, of course, are the images of subjection so total that the subjected subject is threatened with extinction, a destitution that leaves no remainder.
It is in relation to the “unacceptable” as well as “unbearable” munus, in which the subject is lost to itself at the heart of the Christian communitas, that the countermovement of immunization takes place. Immunity emerges as the demand for exemption from debt, obligation, service, and above all from the shared debt of communitas, which is now experienced at the extreme as a claim on one’s life and therefore as the threat of death. Every social tie becomes a threat against which the subject must be immunized by as complete a separation as possible from others whose claims on him can be ignored with impunity (a term closely related to immunity). Immunity evacuates the void of the munus by emptying the common: there is nothing in common. But the subject thus free from obligation and from the movement of alienation and exteriorization represented by the munus, a subject therefore restored to the self-sovereignty and self-proprietorship that community had denied it–the subject, that is, in the modern sense—can only become and remain a subject in this sense by virtue of its subjection to that which will protect or immunize it against the threats to its autonomy. The subject thus can exercise sovereignty over itself (over its life, property, and liberty) only to the extent that it is subjected or subjects itself to the sovereign power capable of assuring its immunity. To translate this into Althusser’s idiom, there is no subject except by and through subjection.
It is, at least in part, on the terrain of Hobbes’s philosophy that the link between interpellation and immunization becomes intelligible: “the Leviathan-state coincides with the breaking [la dissociazione] of every communitarian bond, with the squelching [l’abolizione] of every social relation that is foreign to the vertical exchange of protection-obedience” (14). As Esposito argues, this state is the denial of the very possibility of relation, not only of the cum, as if human beings are originally separated and unite only secondarily, but even of the entire transindividual dimension from which the juridical individual cannot be disentangled and extricated without violence and loss and without being deprived of that part of himself that is in common with others and nevertheless proper to him. In fact, taken to its logical conclusion, which is, as Esposito notes, paradoxically a remnant of irrationality, individuals are “preserved” and “protected” only at the cost of the very sociality that makes their existence in a material as well as cultural sense possible: “they live in and of their refusal to live together [convivere]” (14). Every possible combination, coagulation, and confusion in which the juridical individual might become lost or dispersed – or, on the contrary, might become part of a composite singularity ranging from couples, in particular (the 
or “one flesh” of the first couple–a phrase establishing that their separation could only be a tearing or laceration of the composite but irreducible body they had become), to collectivities of all kinds, whether “natural” or “artificial”-is abolished and replaced by the relation between subject and Subject. In fact, politics itself becomes prevention, not only the prevention of war, but just as importantly a prophylaxis against any exposure to others that would automatically carry the danger of transindividual contagion and a weakening of the vertical relation of subjection. Hence the immunitary practice that both precedes and accompanies interpellation as its simultaneous condition and result.
But Esposito also shows that the Hobbesian model requires a foundation that, if not exactly missing from, nevertheless remains underdeveloped in his texts. The self-mastery that both requires the protection or granting of immunity to the individual by the sovereign (the process by which every social tie is broken except that of the vertical relation to the sovereign) and that simultaneously serves as the guarantee of the legitimacy of the individual’s subjection to the sovereign (the transfer of the right of self-government must itself be grounded in right) is made possible by an original or natural right. As Hobbes explains in the opening of chapter 14 of Leviathan, this jus naturale is “the Liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature, that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own Judgment and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” The assertion of liberty here is of course designed precisely to make it possible for the individual to “divest himself” of that liberty for the sake of self-preservation (190). But what is critical here and regularly overlooked by commentators is that in this brief passage immediately following the account of the state of nature and in which Hobbes states very forcefully that “there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct,” the phrase “his own” (power, nature, life, judgment, and reason) occurs no less than four times (188). While “his own judgment” may appear merely to assign in a descriptive sense the agent or cause of a judgment, “his own life” is clearly more complicated insofar as it is the object of the action of using one’s own liberty: it is that which our natural right enjoins us to “preserve.” To say my own life (or even, to complicate matters further, “myself”) in this context is to assert possession: it is my life by right and no one else’s, and what liberty and power I “possess” or “have” by natural right, I will use in defense of what is “my own.” Here, a certain form of property precedes and makes possible, even as for Hobbes it paradoxically requires, the absolute sovereignty of the Leviathan state.5
For Esposito it is Locke who will “solve” the problem that appears in Hobbes’s version of immunization (that is, by intensifying and multiplying its contradictions).6 In order simply to refer to myself, my own self, what I myself own, the self that is mine and no one else’s,7 the self that is separate from what is common—in order, that is, to declare or establish that which is to be immunized (and interpellated)–“man” must be both “master of himself, and Proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labor of it” (27; ch. 5, sec. 44). Property has now become an attribute or property of life (or at least human life) itself, which means that just as there can be no property without the life that it will (pre)serve, so there can be no life without the property, proprietorship, and appropriation that allow it to exist: Man has “still in himself the great foundation of property; and that, which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being . . . was perfectly his own” (27; ch. 5, sec. 44). The common is that which must be overcome through the labor of a single individual whose proprietorship of his own person insures that his labor remains his and cannot (legitimately or de jure) be mixed or confused with the labor of others. To appropriate through individual labor is thus not simply to remove “out of the state that nature hath provided,” but it also “excludes the common right of other men.” (18; ch. 5, sec. 27). The original separateness of the body confers the status of property on the “fruit or venison” it appropriates from the natural state, so that it must be his who appropriates it and it requires the exclusive right that property brings (“another can no longer have any right to it”) “before it can do him any good for the support of his life” (19; ch. 5, sec.26).
Thus property not only precedes sovereignty as its condition, it also more problematically precedes any form of interhuman existence at all, with the result that it is not simply the common that threatens the existence of the individual proprietor, but also the mere presence of another, separate individual. The threat here is not that of violence and despoliation, as in the case of Hobbes, but instead is the properly biological threat of contagion, infection, and contamination, an invasion of the “mine” by the “thine” at the corporeal level, a mingling whose effects can only deprive the body of what is its own and what is necessary to its preservation. This danger is forestalled in the state of nature where everyone is free (from others; the danger there is that individuals will lose contact with their fellows in the “vast wilderness of the earth,” rather than feel “straightened” by their presence [ch. 5, sec. 36]) and where there exists a rough equality of appropriation and consumption. Both liberty and equality, however, disappear in the social state, or rather persist as that which must be imputed to those who no longer appear to be either free or equal. While everyone theoretically continues to have a property in his own person, the continuum between life, body, work, appropriation, and property is broken and the fruits of one’s labor are immediately the property of another. Immunization becomes the means by which it is possible to say “that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth,” as if declaring the human-individual proprietor of himself only turned him into the thing that he owned, permitting his expropriation, an expropriation that is all the more violent insofar as it results from the individual’s own labor that now drains life instead of preserving and strengthening it (ch. 5, sec. 50). For Locke, the vertical relation of subjection is subordinate to and in fact serves the horizontal separation of individuals understood as proprietors of themselves, their persons, and whatever they, through their labor, “annex” to themselves—an immunity given by both nature and reason and that must itself be protected by the state. The danger lies less in the threat to property posed by the absolute monarch’s taxes on his subjects than in the threat posed by those (in)human predators who ignore the fact that a man’s possessions have been annexed to his person and that an attempt to steal his coat (or occupy his land) represents an attempt on his very being.
Against a line of thought that connects Schmitt, Arendt, and Agamben, both Althusser and Esposito have thus, in different ways, displaced the question of sovereignty from the center of political life, insisting that, if it has any meaning at all in the modern context, sovereignty (and the notion of law that it implies) must be understood to be co-extensive with the specific forms of property and appropriation characteristic of modernity itself. Not only have interpellation and immunization been mobilized (often but not only by the state) to bring about and maintain a regime of absolute private property against all other forms of use and occupation; they also ascribe to the individual a property in his own person and a possession of his own liberty that, in the guise of restoring freedom and equality, actually provides the means of his alienation through the transfer, sale, or forfeiture that in the vast majority of cases has always already taken place. Thus, if there is struggle, it is as much against the merely horizontal relations that, through a universal individualization and separation, produce new and durable forms of subjection and inequality, as it is against the vertical relation of subject/sovereign.
But I cannot conclude without acknowledging the precise point at which Althusser and Esposito diverge from each other. For the former, interpellation remains profoundly functional, serving the reproduction of the system of production (and property) that makes life possible. We have noted that Althusser’s decision to exclude the discussion of resistance and revolt found in Sur la reproduction from the published text of the ISAs essay results in a theory of reproduction in relation to which opposition can only arrive from outside or be deferred to the end or limit (as in the letter of Althusser’s own text, where class struggle appears only after the essay’s conclusion, in a postscript), as if it can never arrive but instead remains irreducibly to come. But can we not see this error, so often identified and criticized, as itself a symptom of another conflict, that which animates what we might call Althusser’s biopolitics? Capitalism appears in his essay as a constantly expanding and optimizing system whose ability to guarantee subsistence to its population is never in doubt, insofar as this subsistence, according to Althusser, is necessary to its functioning. Here too, by imputing a generalized rationality to the capitalist mode of production, Althusser has banished the possibility not only of understanding the tendency to crisis outlined by Marx in the third volume of Capital, but also of grasping the contradictions that set capitalism against itself—of understanding capitalism, in certain circumstances, in a certain conjuncture, and in a certain balance of forces, as a mode of (self) destruction rather than production. Esposito, by contrast, insists on the ever-intensifying contradiction of a society that works to deprive itself of the very relations that allow it to survive, as if “life were sacrificed to its own preservation,” or as if life were destroyed in the process of its own production (14).
It is here, and I give Balibar the last word, that the concept of the citizen intervenes, not as the mediator between interpellation and immunization understood as vertical subjection and horizontal privation, but as a wedge that prevents their convergence. Balibar recalls that which has been subject to a forgetting, precisely the historicity of the citizen, a historicity whose traces remain indelible. Inscribed in the historical reality of the citizen is a refusal to accept a merely formal or symbolic definition of the liberty and equality that constitute it, an imputation of freedom whose function is primarily punitive and penal and an equality that is the retroactive projection of actually existing hierarchy. The citizen represents the unfulfilled demand for a freedom and equality immanent and inseparable from the ability to think and to act. If there is no subject except by and through subjection, there is no subjection except in response to a resistance that it arises to contain. In a sense, the citizen is the deferred effect of that to which subjection is a response, the resistance that is life itself, life resisting that which threatens to weaken and destroy it, the actually existing forms of coercion and privation, the symptoms of the profound autoimmune reaction of a notion of society from which all that is genuinely social must be eliminated. In the figure of the citizen as it emerges in Balibar’s essay, a figure that is less the antithesis of or antidote to the subject than the marking of its limit, we see the insurrection to come, which, like every future, is already inscribed in the present.
Footnotes
1. All translations are my own.
2. See Chapter X, “Reproduction des Rapports de Production et Révolution” (179-195).
3. Judith Butler makes this point in “Althusser’s Subjection,” but in relation to “law” in a psychoanalytic sense: the subject is always already subjected to law.
4. See de Libera.
5. This is of course the classic thesis of C.B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Macpherson overstates the centrality of an explicit concept of property in Hobbes, which is from my perspectiveboth a necessary and necessarily absent concept in Leviathan, in that it is necessary to the foundation of sovereignty even as it would form its (for Hobbes, impossible) limit.
6. In what follows, I refer particularly to the discussion of property in relation to the “paradigm of immunization” in Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (63-69).
7. See Balibar’s “‘My Self’ et ‘My Own:’ variations sur Locke.”
Works Cited
- Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-187. Print.
- ———. “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État.” La Pensée 151 (Juin 1970). Print.
- ———. “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse.” The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967). Trans. G.M. Goshgarian. Verso: London, 2003. Print.
- ———. Sur la reproduction. Ed. J. Bidet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Print.
- Balibar, Étienne. “Citizen Subject.” E. Cadava, P. Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds. Who Comes After the Subject? London: Routledge, 1991. 33-57. Print.
- ———. Citoyen Sujet: et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. Print.
- ———. “‘My Self’ et ‘My Own:’ variations sur Locke.” Citoyen sujet. 121-154. Print.
- Butler, Judith. “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All: Althusser’s Subjection.” The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Print.
- Esposito, Roberto. Communitas. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.
- ———. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.
- Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper, 1977. Print.
- ———. “Die Zeit des Weltbildes.” Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1952. Print.
- Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Middlesex: Pelican, 1968. Print.
- Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965. Print.
- ———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.
- de Libera, Alain. Naissance du sujet. Paris: Vrin, 2007. Print.
- Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. Print.
- Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962. Print.
- Pêcheux, Michel. Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious. Trans. Harbans Nagpal. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Print.
- Rancière, Jacques. Althusser’s Lesson. Trans. E. Battista. London: Continuum, 2011. Print.
