Liberal Thanatopolitics and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Abstract

The strength of Roberto Esposito’s immunitary reading of biopolitics lies in its ability to bring together biopolitics and thanatopolitics without fully collapsing them into each other. However, although Esposito has carefully elaborated the thanatopolitical tendency within Nazi biopolitics, the very idea of liberal thanatopolitics appears to be foreign to him. Despite the neglect of such a combination in Esposito’s thought, this article considers precisely this possibility. Befitting Esposito’s theory of immunity, this is done by focusing on the liberal efforts to halt the pandemic caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). We discuss the hypothesis that the liberal insistence on the primacy of personified human life in the face of a dehumanizing pandemic systematically places many HIV-positive people in a zone of indistinguishability between full human existence and merely being alive in a thanatopolitical fashion.