A sense of their own vulnerability sends the city’s elite rushing to find shelter in the Prince’s palace, leaving those outside its walls exposed to the ravages of the plague. Thinking themselves secured against the worst of the contagion, the city’s well-to-do citizens go on to enjoy their exemption from risk in an orgy of music, dance, and drink. But their enjoyment is never free from the anxiety haunting their new intra-mural existence. At the stroke of midnight the revelers become conscious of their mortality and fearful that they have walled themselves in with the plague, and before the Prince or his guests can determine if the palace walls were built high or thick enough to keep contagion out, one after the other, starting with the Prince, they all drop dead: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death: A Fantasy,” 490).
Edgar Allan Poe’s grim fantasy of state immunity is a provocation for readers to think not just about what is at stake for citizens when the state’s reaction to an emergency reproduces the lethal conditions that brought the rationale for immunity into being in the first place, but also, and perhaps more significantly, what can happen when immunity becomes society’s reigning political paradigm. The first of these propositions folds into the more encompassing logic of the second. In the first instance, immunity is conceived as a reaction determined by the contingencies of emergency situations, of which there may be many in the history of any society, as well as effective and ineffective state responses to such situations. In the second, immunity stands in apposite relation to a permanent state of emergency whose now-temporality subsumes the randomness of contingent crises into a chronic condition demanding permanent state intervention. “No pestilence,” the story insists, “had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” Unique in the scope of its devastation, the plague functions in the story as an unabated disaster in search of a countervailing agency capable of addressing the emergency in its totality. As such, Poe’s plague figures not purely as an external threat but as a negation inhabited by its opposite. Death meets its Prince in a zone of indiscernibility where distinctions between inside-outside, culture-nature, life-death, self-nonself, prince-plague are inscribed into one another. Framed this way, the state of emergency (Red Death) and the sovereign state (Prince) stand not just in opposition but in dialectical relation to one another, with the two, if not quite vying for “illimitable dominion,” certainly creating the conditions that give that specific conclusion a sense of inevitability. This is to say that if the story can be read as a dramatization of immunity’s lethal dimension, it can just as well be interpreted—considering the prospect of the plague’s illimitable reach—as an extended metaphor for the state’s justified deployment of its powers of immunization under extreme circumstances. Both of these readings underscore the story’s broader implication that a permanent state of emergency invariably results in immunity becoming society’s common-sense logic. Under such conditions, ordinary democratic protocols for public deliberation and debate are more likely to be preempted by the state’s imperative to preserve life, and what’s left of liberty, justice and politics, at all cost. This is not to say that this line of thought goes unquestioned in American culture, then or now, nor that immunity forecloses democracy tout court. At a time when the boundaries and borders of a nation-state-in-the-making functioned less as impervious walls and more as permeable frontiers, many U.S. writers dramatized the conflicts and contradictions resulting from what they perceived as the defining vulnerabilities of an expanding democracy faced with the prospects and perils of such events as the expansion of territory and commerce beyond the nation’s existing borders, the immigration of peoples with traditions and ideas sometimes at odds with republican and democratic values, and the management of intractable citizens and colonized and enslaved subjects with their own ideas about how best to pursue happiness. Foregrounding immunity’s role in the formation of U.S. political culture allows us to track the development of its capacity to identify and neutralize threats as well as the unintended consequences of its introjection of risk. Taking Poe’s provocation as its point of departure, this book identifies the concept of immunity as constitutive of democratic culture in the U.S. as the newly independent nation struggled to assert its place within the world economy.
By inverting the order of terms in the well-known concept of sovereign immunity I don’t mean to suggest that the success of the American Revolution did away with the juridical doctrine that insulates the crown or the modern state from wrongdoing. State immunity protects modern states from being subjected, without their approval, to the jurisdiction of another. Rather than negate sovereign immunity, immunity’s sovereignty describes a condition whereby the state and its biopolitical apparatuses reproduce themselves and expand their reach in response to the nation’s exposure to internal and external threats imperiling the lives of citizens and the nation’s integrity. This book reexamines flashpoint events in U.S. history in order to analyze the causes and consequences of immunitary responses to some of the nation’s early states of emergency.
Devoid of the protection the British Empire afforded its colonies, the U.S. found itself subject to foreign and domestic threats, constituting a series of emergencies that imperiled its independence. Wars with North African regencies, responses to the Haitian Revolution, reactions to the specter and reality of slave revolt in the antebellum South, and plans to acquire Cuba to ease tensions between the states constituted immunizing responses that helped define the conceptual and aesthetic protocols by which the U.S. represented itself to itself and to the world’s nations as distinct, exemplary, and vulnerable. These events became subjects for early U.S. literature, which framed their impact on American democracy, making these events figure less as exceptions to the myth of American exceptionalism and more as articulated episodes whose attendant risks helped constitute the U.S.’s immunitary logic.1 The transformation of sovereignty ushered in by the American Revolution finds full expression in the language of exceptionalism, which offers a dominant rationale for ideological inoculation against internal and external threats that sharpened the outlines of an inchoate nation-state that, despite its limited diplomatic and military resources, imagines itself, in Alexander Hamilton’s language, “an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” (7). At once distinct and exemplary, the American empire, according to Hamilton, is and is not like others that have come before it.2 Geographically isolated and somewhat exempt from Europe’s tumultuous history, the U.S. is conceived at its inception as immunized from the historical determinants that bound proximate European empires in cycles of violence that charted the rise and fall of states in the continent. The U.S., despite Hamilton’s exceptionalist claim, is not exempt from the history of imperial declension, hence his urgent plea to fellow citizens that the new constitution—the juridical blueprint for a strong centralized state touted capable of dealing with rogue states both at home and abroad—be adopted and ratified, lest the recently independent states disintegrate into singular or confederated sovereignties that, via alliances with European powers, could permanently extend continental conflicts into North America. The same consideration about the states’ vulnerabilities from external threats applies to U.S.’s plans to expand commercially and territorially, which is to say that the exceptionalist fantasy of the yeoman farmer shielded from global contact constitutes only one of the early republic’s many “imagined immunities,” to borrow Priscilla Wald’s apt phrase from another context (29).
Before proceeding I should note with regard to the critical vocabulary informing this study that it is important not to confuse the emergence of concepts and categories with their subsequent self-representation. A term takes on the qualities of a concept when its explanatory capacity transcends the historical moment in which it was produced. Once the concept enters critical discourse and gains currency, the field of inquiry is retroactively realigned and the concept appears always to have been operative even if the terminology was unavailable to historical agents. This is to say that while the term “immunity” (or “exceptionalism,” for that matter) seldom appears on the pages of the primary texts examined here, its ideological and operational force is well in evidence in U.S. culture during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries.
Immunity does not originate as a biomedical term that is then adopted by political philosophers and policymakers. Its story is the other way around, more discursive genealogy than unfolding history. Immunity as a metaphor for the body’s natural defense mechanism is an example of catachresis, the biomedical field’s discursive transposition of a concept from the juridico-political to the biomedical field, a transposition resulting in a dialectical relation between interanimating discourses constituting realpolitik.3 The relation between these two fields is a late nineteenth-century phenomenon that becomes more pronounced in the aftermath of zoologist Élie Metchnikoff ‘s discovery, in 1881, “of immunity as a form of biomedical self-defense” (Cohen 1). For my purposes, immunity will remain immunized, as it were, from biomedicine’s increasingly reductive paradigm, which, as Ed Cohen notes, “restricts the complex, contradictory, and yet entirely necessary intimacy of organism and environment to a single salient type of engagement: aggression/response” (5). Originally conceived as a political category responsive to historical contingencies, nonbiological immunity belongs to a sociopolitical and conceptual landscape of thought and action where exemption from communal obligation initially defines the concept.4
An interdiction against community’s orientation toward the outside, immunity initially appears as an invaginated recoil from contact with the common, producing community’s purported integrity and exceptionality. However, if exemption from such orientation or prior condition defines immunity, then the relation between community and the common is not one defined by the pure externality of opposites but one of embedded immanence. An enclave in the common community relies on immunity to institute and police its internal boundaries and external borders whose function entails managing community’s relation to a dynamic ecosystem whose magnitude is beyond its control. Not surprisingly immunity’s logic is often found in texts calling for the need for more constricted or abbreviated definitions of community against some immeasurable vastness fraught with risks that threaten community’s internal coherence—e.g. the wilderness vis-à-vis the city upon hill, the state of nature of modern philosophy vis-à-vis the commonwealth, or globalization vis-à-vis the nation-state. What do these pairs index if not an opposition indicating the limiting of some vast territoriality’s claim on a particular community’s idea of what constitutes its identity and internal coherence? In each of these pairs we find immunity presupposing an antinomy based not on simple opposition but one where the contrasting terms are co-implicated in their mutual presupposition and constitution. The tension inherent in such relation makes absolute containment notoriously difficult. Borders, barriers, and boundaries, along with ever more sophisticated shibboleths, are not just checkpoints where access is granted or denied but rather constitute immunizing attempts to contain a virtual or chthonic common in relation to which immunity produces the conceptual, political and juridical categories that determine the conditions for being, belonging, and dwelling (or not) in the modern world.
Philosopher Roberto Esposito has arguably provided one of the most rigorous, nuanced, and sustained accounts of immunity in recent history:
Building on Niklas Luhmann’s idea that systems work not by excluding or avoiding conflict but by internalizing it, Esposito sets the concepts of community and immunity in supplemental relation to one another, with immunity operating as community’s self-protective response to its own negative dimension. As such, immunity neutralizes conflicts or threats by making them part of the autopoietic process by which community reproduces itself, which is to say, in immunological terms, that the only way out is in. That is, if what threatens community is not a simple opposition but, as Esposito argues, an “unbearable excess” that is community’s own negative dimension, then the sites characterized earlier as wilderness, state of nature, or globalization, must be understood in each iteration as constitutive of the immunizing strategies that produce community’s idea of itself and its representations. Put another way, wilderness, state of nature, or globalization are not exceptions to their particular counterparts, nor the desert upon which the fortress is superimposed, to borrow Esposito’s metaphor, but an already differentiated outside inhabiting community’s innermost interior....The negative of immunitas (which is another way of saying communitas) doesn’t only disappear from its area of relevance, but constitutes simultaneously its object and motor. What is immunized, in brief, is the same community in a form that both preserves and negates it, or better, preserves it through the negation of its original horizon of sense. From this point of view, one might say that more than the defensive apparatus superimposed on the community, immunization is its internal mechanism [ingranaggio]: the fold that in some way separates community from itself, sheltering it from an unbearable excess. The differential margin that prevents the community from coinciding with itself takes on the deep semantic intensity of its own concept. To survive, the community, every community, is forced to introject the negative modality of its opposite, even if the opposite remains precisely a lacking and contrastive mode of being of the community itself. (Bios, 52)