Epidemic Notions: Immunity – Care – Lockdown – Toxicity – Vulnerability – Contagion

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has granted Roberto Esposito's political philosophy and its emphasis on immunity renewed purchase. Esposito's Immunitas. The Protection and Negation of Life (originally published in 2002 and translated into English in 2011) puts the allegory of the body politic to the test of modern biopolitics. The structural paradigms of his essay-among which "common immunity"-are the very ones that have been imported into our understanding of the pandemic and of our collective body. As literature inspired by the pandemic also shows, immunity functions as a complex notion, capturing the ambiguity of the body politic in its physical fragility and ideological dynamics. Turning to Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, this article aims at exploring literature's reading of immunity as also rearticulating the possibility of "a shared individuality" (Esposito), or, in the terms of Donna J. Haraway, of a "response-ability."