Biopolitics : from supplement to immanence : in dialogue with Roberto Esposito's trilogy : Communitas, Immunitas, Bios

Kordela first shows that Esposito's negative dialectic relation between immunity and community—both in “negative” and “affirmative biopolitics”—replicates (Derridian) supplementarity, which, pace Esposito, is not to be conflated with (Spinozian) immanence, the very condition of self-referentiality. Kordela singles out “blood” as the sole element in Esposito's trilogy that, evading any supplementary relation, operates in immanence. She then proposes the incest prohibition—the prohibition of self-referentiality on the level of blood—as the first biopolitical law, thereby revealing biopolitics as a transhistorical phenomenon. Yet this transhistorical injunction is historically modified, depending on the specific historical functions of blood. Due to the capitalist mode of production and the specifically bourgeois self-legitimization on blood, modern biopolitics transforms the prohibition of self-referentiality into the prohibition of the potential of self-actualization.