In October 2021, the UK government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, was interviewed about the relationship between science and politics. Discussing the challenges of managing emergent coronavirus variants, Vallance said: “You’ve got to go sooner than you want to, in terms of taking interventions. You’ve got to go harder than you want to, and you’ve got to go more geographically broad than you want to.”[1]
Vallance’s remarks illustrate three claims central to the analysis of democratic citizenship and state power in Donatella Di Cesare’s book Immunodemocracy. First, measures against COVID-19 require citizens to become literate in a particular way of thinking about time: How many days until symptoms show? How long are we locked down for? Secondly, these same citizens live in a new geography of disease, one shaped by social distancing and color-coded maps of infection rates. Finally, and most importantly for Di Cesare, the state has reasserted itself by deploying furlough schemes, a measure of economic planning, lockdowns, and mandated mask wearing. These are Vallance’s so-called “interventions,” moments when the state directly and obviously acts in the lives of its citizens.
Beyond these three claims, Di Cesare argues that COVID has challenged a fundamental (if implicit) covenant between the state and its citizens: protection from the alien other. Evading border checks and immigration controls, the disease at once betrays the state’s inability to secure its borders and reveals the fundamental vulnerability of its citizens. The core argument of the book is that COVID introduced a new crisis of sovereignty for liberal democracies; the apparatus of epidemiological control instituted in response to the disease shows both the contours of this crisis and opportunities for its resolution.
In Di Cesare’s view, interventions like those mentioned by Vallance should be understood as manifesting a particular kind of sovereignty. Di Cesare defines sovereignty as “the right to dispose of others’ lives—even to the point of having them killed” (33). Following the path laid by Giorgio Agamben and others, she contends that the legal frameworks that define and enshrine the human and civil rights of citizens rest on a hidden and monstrous sovereignty that rules by decree. The caprice and violence of this rule becomes visible when the law is suspended by emergency powers. In this context, mandates on social distancing, curfews, and the other epidemiological responses are the sovereign suspending the normal operation of the law.
The important thing to note, Di Cesare argues, is that the sovereign appears here precisely because COVID challenges the fundamental relationship by which the sovereign and the citizen co-exist. In her analysis, the sovereignty of liberal democracies has become defined by its capacity to offer what she terms “immunity.” The word “immunity” has its roots in ancient Rome, where society was bound together by citizens’ obligations to one another. To be immunis placed one beyond this complex web of obligation, duty, and gift-giving. Analogously, citizens of contemporary democracies understand themselves as free from responsibility for the other. The sovereign assumes the duty of managing the vulnerable, the outsider, the suspect. In Di Cesare’s analysis, this is why migration has become such an important part of the politics of liberal democracies: the migrant demands a response from the citizens at their destination. In a polis defined by immunity, such a claim is a threat to the body politic, and so the sovereign defines itself in its capacity to insulate the citizen from the migrant’s perceived threat. The citizen of an “immunodemocratic” state is insulated from the needs of other people–be they destitute, sick, or migrant. Such citizens can live as if they themselves were invulnerable. This promised protection is what justifies the sovereign before the citizen, and it is this immunity that COVID has stripped away.
The coronavirus may pose a challenge to the sovereignty of the immunodemocratic state, but Di Cesare argues it also provides the state with a laboratory to develop new models of political immunity and governance. The introduction of epidemiological controls brings new ways for the sovereign to assert itself: the suspension of the normal operation of the law and the arrival of the medical expert, for example, present opportunities for new or accelerated techniques of governing and control. The medical expert becomes the decision maker, the one who suspends the normal operation of law, the sovereign. The violence of the sovereign—usually enacted upon non-citizens such as the migrant—comes down on citizens, and so the promise of immunity that binds the state to its citizens is voided. Di Cesare finds the clearest instance of this violence in restrictions on congregating and in social distancing requirements. In the late 2010s, in places as diverse as Lebanon, Santiago, and Hong Kong, popular protests had focused on the collective occupation of space. Social distancing decrees disarm this challenge to the state by breaking the crowd and enclosing its members in their homes. These restrictions change how citizens relate to each other: under COVID, our peers are terrifying potential sources of contagion.
Di Cesare insists, however, that the coronavirus is also an opportunity to redraw how we live together. If immunity is the suspension of obligation and the imposition of a kind of detached invulnerability, then recognizing our shared responsibilities brings us closer to fellowship—that is, to genuine community. Understanding this requires new ways of thinking about collectively inhabited time and space.
For example, coronavirus restrictions control how we navigate the shared places outside our homes, highlighting the spatial nature of our lives. As Di Cesare says, “this event must inspire us to rethink how we inhabit the earth. Inhabiting is not a synonym for having or possessing, but rather for being and existing. It does not mean being rooted in the soil but, rather, breathing the air” (29). Attending to the breath gives us a different grasp on the political world. Instead of imagining the self as sovereign and absolute, Di Cesare presents it as a mode of being constituted through the ethereal vulnerability of living with responsibility for the other. Selfhood becomes an emergent thing, growing out of precisely those spaces of uncertain encounter that the sovereign seeks to close off. COVID brought a crisis for the immunodemocratic state because it betrayed the fiction of immunity. In the book’s conclusion, Di Cesare points out that the virus cannot be governed away; it’s here with us now. Citizens will live with it, and if they are not to be confined forever by the sovereign, they must rethink what it means to move vulnerably through the air. “This must take place under the sign of a shared vulnerability” (117).
Di Cesare proposes that one way citizens might escape the confining state is by reframing their relationship to time. “You’ve got to go sooner,” said Vallance. For the immunodemocratic state, urgency is the watchword, and in responding to the challenge of the virus, it enacts new temporal regimes. A better politics will require different ways of thinking about time. To do this, Di Cesare suggests, citizens should begin by thinking about how the dead are remembered and mourned. One of the recurring moments of the pandemic—particularly in the earlier days—was the separation of the dead and dying from their loved ones. In the crisis of sovereignty caused by the virus, the immunodemocratic state asserted itself by denying both our vulnerability to grief and our obligations to the dead and dying. Di Cesare argues that we need to come back to this mourning work or we will be trapped in a repeating “spectral grief” that will bring a melancholic political paralysis (108–109). Memory is key here, but critically, a memory that is attuned to the past as history, that is, as something collective and shared. The immunodemocratic state presents itself as a necessary thing, as the most realistic option given human nature. It wants to appear as part of the natural order of the world rather than as what it is: the accidental product of a long and complicated history. Citizens of such democracies are therefore closed off from any sense of a wider historical human struggle, and their relationship to time is defined by their own biography. This, she says, is a “privatization of the future” (18). Grieving confronts citizens with the reality of human history, drawing them back to a common humanity outside the enclosed temporality of the immunodemocratic state. It is a rediscovery of time-as-commons that requires rethinking both the past and the future.
This diagnosis of temporal enclosure is elegant and effective, but Di Cesare missteps when she discusses the historical emergence of immunodemocracies. She suggests that the convergence of the medical and the political that defines such states was pioneered by the Nazis (48–49). More generally, she sees the twentieth century as a watershed for human breathing, for it is then that the breathing human is gassed with chlorine and cyanide and threatened with poisoned air after a nuclear holocaust. A historical analysis of breath and the medicalized state is important for this book, but Di Cesare’s account is incomplete. As Aimé Césaire observed, the exceptionalism of Hitler is limited to “the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”[2] For example, in 1845 the French military in Algeria used smoke to attack members of the Ouled Riah tribe hiding in caves. Hundreds were suffocated. This military action was part of a wider French occupation in Algeria that was often justified as bringing new medicine and better health to the Algerians.[3] The medical state that Di Cesare identifies was not a creation of Nazi Germany or of the twentieth century more generally but was born in European colonies. It was there that breath and breathing were drawn into the apparatus of governance that she identifies so well.
This is more than a mere oversight of historical narration. Without sustained attention to these histories of European colonialism and transatlantic slavery, the book misses key components of how race has conditioned new experiments in biopolitical governance. For Di Cesare, racism is a product of the immunitarian tendencies of the liberal democratic state, merely one example of a general “affective tetany” (44). It’s rather the case, however, that the immunitarian impulse that constituted the liberal democratic state was always racialized. Di Cesare’s work is not a history but a critique of the contemporary viral emergency. Nevertheless, part of her analysis requires a careful understanding of the processes by which the state’s management of breath emerged. Reckoning with the ways in which the modern state built itself through the violence of colonialism and antiblackness—violence that was often hygienic in language and intent—would allow a more effective critique and more reliable hope.
We have to look elsewhere, then, to see how attending to the vulnerability of breath might bring different ways of being in the world. For example, as Ashon Crawley has shown, the backwards-and-forwards of respiration and whooping that occurs during Black Pentecostal worship is a resistance to the antiblack economies of enclosure that emerge in modernity.[4] Such practices of breathing open onto a sociality outside of or otherwise to the world made by the juridical violence of liberal democracies. Crawley’s analysis offers precisely the kind of vulnerability and refusal of sovereign models of the self that Di Cesare holds as our hope for the future. Crawley also shows, however, that such models of selfhood must come from reckoning with the ways in which breathing people are racialized.
Towards the end of his 2021 interview, Vallance remarks that “the big change that we’ve got now, of course, is vaccines.”[5] Di Cesare’s book was written in 2020. It’s punctuated by descriptions of everyday life in Italy during the earlier days of COVID, and it self-consciously speaks to that situation. Subsequent events have challenged some of the claims in the book, and the arrival of vaccines has changed the politics of the pandemic. Nevertheless, in naming the immunitarian sovereign, the book insightfully distills the complicated mixture of forces and anxieties that pertains across many different ongoing COVID responses. It is here, and in the perceptive analysis of COVID’s time and space, that the book remains a relevant resource.
Notes:
[1] Patrick Vallance, “The Patrick Vallance Interview,” interview by Jim Al-Khalili, The Life Scientific, BBC Radio 4, October 12, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09ydn63.
[2] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 14.
[3] William Gallois, The Administration of Sickness: Medicine and Ethics in Nineteenth Century Algeria (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93–94.
[4] Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
[5] Vallance and Al-Khalili, “The Patrick Vallance Interview”.