Judgment beyond Jurisdiction: Spinoza’s “Freedom to philosophize” and the Politics of Immunity

Abstract

This article turns to Spinoza to shed new light on what Roberto Esposito, among others, has diagnosed as modernity’s “immunitary dialectic,” whereby juridical-political measures taken to safeguard or immunize individual and collective life threaten to debase and even destroy the life in question. I argue that Spinoza’s treatment of the “freedom to philosophize” offers a window onto the plural politics of immunity – that is, the institutions and practices that convert the power to preserve life into tendentially dominative and emancipatory forms.