The Law of the Living: Material for Hypothesizing the Biojuridical

Abstract

This essay attempts to think the relation between Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito’s work on biopolitics and immunity alongside contemporary issues in continental legal studies. Drawing extensively on Esposito’s unpolitical and more recent biopolitical writings, the author finds in the notions of norm and immunity potential areas for constructing a “biojuridical” approach to the law. Glossing Esposito’s reading of immunization as an attempt to construct a possible law of “reciprocal immanence” between norm and life, the author argues that it is possible to glean in Esposito’s more recent work a move beyond the immunitary features of the law to a “law of the living” that is capable of vitalizing norms. Such a law would, by identifying individual potentialities, defend the infinite production of difference and singularity that is bios, paving the way for laws that are immanent to bios.