Immunpolitika és Covid: Derrida, Esposito, Henry James
Immunity politics and Covid: Derrida, Esposito, Henry James

Summary/Abstract: The essay takes a critical look at two political immunity theories, and examines the possible understandings of the relationship between the political and the biological body in the context of the 21st century coronavirus pandemic. The first part of the essay offers a brief overview of Derrida’s texts on terror and autoimmunity, while the second presents Roberto Esposito’s immunity theory, the paradigm of immunitas/communitas, that has been applied in March 2020 by Esposito on the Covid-19 pandemic. This context, finally, is used as a backdrop for analyzing Henry James’s novella Daisy Miller, where the eponymous protagonist falls victim to the “Roman fever”, malaria (mal-aria – “bad air”). A substantial part of the essay was written after three months of lockdown, towards the end of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

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