“In the course of man’s mental and socio-cultural evolution, two complementary systems have developed for the pre-emptive processing of injuries: firstly the socio-immunological methods, especially legal and solidaristic ones, but also the military ones by which people resolve their confrontations with distant and foreign aggressors and insulting or harmful neighbours; and secondly the symbolic or psycho-immunological practices on which humans have always have always relied to cope – with varying success – with their vulnerability through fate, including mortality, in the form of imaginary anticipations and mental armour. … it is because a non-naïve approach to symbolic immune systems has itself become vital to the survival of ‘cultures’ today that cultural science is necessary.” (Peter Sloterdijk)

“…certain historical tendencies stand out, indicating that since the early modern period, and especially since the eighteenth century, endeavors to secure a social immunology have intensified.” (Niklas Luhmann)

“My thesis is that the immune system [a potent and polymorphous object of belief, knowledge, and practice] is an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material ‘difference’ in late capitalism. Pre-eminently a twentieth-century object, the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics. That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct realms and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological.” (Donna Haraway)

In the past decades, ‘immunity’ has become an increasingly important notion in the study of crucial features of modernity. Several influential theorists have adopted the term ‘immunity’ to describe the attempts, whether positive or problematic, of a community to protect itself from the displacing and deterritorializing effects of modernity. Niklas Luhmann wrote that modern society became increasingly pervaded with immunity mechanisms. Donna Haraway and Ed Cohen have indicated the transmission of a legal and militaristic view on immunity to the individual and social body as the birth of modern biopolitics, while at the same time arguing for the necessity to rethink immunity as a shared process. Jacques Derrida has analyzed diverse phenomena, from sovereignty to democracy, in terms of autoimmunity, which is both a threat and a chance. Roberto Esposito theorizes the complex and sometimes (self-)destructive relationship between immunity and its etymological counterpart community. Peter Sloterdijk describes the spheres of shared interiority that people develop to protect themselves against a threatening ‘outside’.

The notion ‘immunity’ encompasses the diverse attempts that are made to draw a mark between self and other, communal and ‘foreign’, normal and pathological, order and disorder in times of crisis and anxiety about the coherence of the self and/or the community. Yet, theories of ‘immunity’ will also radically question the ways such divisions are marked and rendered operative. The aim of this conference is to clarify the diverse, and sometimes mutually conflicting, attempts to theorize the problem of ‘immunity’ and their possible relevance for the clarification of modernity as an ongoing project, as well as the tendency towards (self-)destructive excess that has always been a part of it. The way the arts (literature, architecture, visual arts…) have taken up the problem of immunity, from artists who have attempted to picture immunity mechanisms to artists who want to problematize the prevailing immunity discourses, will also be explored.

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