This article re-conceptualises the ‘constitutive outside’ through Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunity to detach it from Laclau and Mouffe’s political antagonism. It identifies Esposito’s thought as an innovative epistemological perspective to dissolve post-ontological political theories of community from the intertwinement with a foundational self/other dialectic. Esposito shows how a community can sustain its relations through introversive immunisation against a primarily undefined outside. But it is argued that his theory of immunity slips back to a vitalist depth ontology which ultimately de-politicises (...) the construction of the communal outside. This article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s immunity theory to resituate immunisation in the political production of social connectivity. Following Luhmann, politics relies on immunisation through contradictions to reproduce its functional role as a decision-making institution, but is at the same time constantly exposed to potential rupture through the political openness immunity introduces. Through Esposito and Luhmann, this article identifies the relationship between a social inside and its outside as open-ended and secondary to an introversive process of socio-political self-differentiation. It can involve, but does epistemologically necessitate, the construction of an external other. (shrink)

This article re-conceptualises the ‘constitutive outside’ through Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunity to detach it from Laclau and Mouffe’s political antagonism. It identifies Esposito’s thought as an innovative epistemological perspective to dissolve post-ontological political theories of community from the intertwinement with a foundational self/other dialectic. Esposito shows how a community can sustain its relations through introversive immunisation against a primarily undefined outside. But it is argued that his theory of immunity slips back to a vitalist depth ontology which ultimately de-politicises (...) the construction of the communal outside. This article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s immunity theory to resituate immunisation in the political production of social connectivity. Following Luhmann, politics relies on immunisation through contradictions to reproduce its functional role as a decision-making institution, but is at the same time constantly exposed to potential rupture through the political op... (shrink)

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s and Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on the immanent creativity emergent from formal, impersonal life as a pathway for resistance to biopolitics. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explores masochism as the inversion of the sadistic, biopolitical use of the body which can bring forth genuinely new expressions. Agamben dismisses masochistic creativity because it leaves the dialectical ontology of biopower intact to conceptualize his form-of-life as a space of indiscernibility between ontological essence and legal-political actualization. For Agamben, the (...) form-of-life escapes biopolitical capture because it is absolutely detached from its relations. This article argues that the radicalness of this detachment calls into question the political capacity offered by the form-of-life to actively change the relations of biopower. Against this background, Deleuze’s masochistic eroticization of power offers an alternative conceptualization of relationality as external to its terms and productive of expressions which are both thoroughly immanent and genuinely creative. (shrink)

The Politics of Orientation provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on (...) postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. The Politics of Orientation breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right. (shrink)