OPPPOSITION DA. Their framing of an evil other to be excluded is the will to a pure community which kills solvency and reifies self protection.

Derrida sees every community as inhabited by something like the human or animal body’s immune system. The immune system repels foreign invaders but then, sometimes, disastrously turns its immune system against itself in what is called autoimmunity. Derrida makes a brilliant exploitation of this figure in “Foi et Savoir” (“Faith and Knowledge”) and elsewhere. I owe to Tom Mitchell, however, the recognition that there is something strange about this figure, namely, that it is a figure of a figure, whichever way you look at it.36 The stem mun in immune system is the same as the mun in community. It comes from Latin munus, meaning the obligation owed within the group, as the price of my citizenship, and also as a gift I may give to the community. Immune was originally a social term applying to those, for instance the clergy, who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen’s obligations. They were immune, indemnified, just as those who took sanctuary in a church were immune from arrest or just as legislators in some democracies today are immune from prosecution for some crimes. Biologists appropriated an entire social and political vocabulary, including the notion of aliens to the community or foreign invaders who must be repelled, to name the operation of the body’s immune system and the catastrophe of autoimmunity. When foreign cells or antigens invade the body, the immune system cleverly assesses those cells and then creates and multiplies antibodies designed to destroy the antigens, thereby securing the body’s immunity. Flu shots create antibodies that are supposed to make a person immune to flu viruses, safe, protected, indemnified, invulnerable. In autoimmunity something goes wrong with the immune system. It starts creating antibodies that attack the body’s own cells, as in diabetes, Crohn’s disease (experts assume), rheumatoid arthritis, or some even more deadly forms of autoimmunity in which a whole organ is attacked and destroyed. Derrida takes this already metaphorical system of terms back from biology and applies it again to the social body, the body of the community and its members. As Mitchell observes, whichever side you look at is the metaphor of the other. Derrida’s strikingly original insight, made with the exuberance and even wildness characteristic of the late Derrida, is the claim that both immunity and autoimmunity are in one way or another characteristics of every community. Therefore community cannot be understood except by way of this structure. “We feel ourselves,” says Derrida, “authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general.”37 Derrida emphasizes that immunity and autoimmunity operate in any community mechanically, spontaneously, inevitably, willy-nilly, not as a result of choices members of the community make or that the community collectively makes. Every community strives to keep itself pure, safe, sacrosanct, uncontaminated by aliens. At the same time, every community is inhabited by a tendency to shoot itself in the foot, as we say, in the act of trying to shoot the invader. Here is Derrida’s careful formulation of the way every community generates its own autoimmune reaction, as well as using its immune system to repel foreign invaders: But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. . . . This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself— this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily “phallic”), to technics, the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of the auto-immune and selfsacrificial supplementarity, to this death drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival. This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism. It is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond (scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of life, its absolute “dignity,” and the theological machine, the “machine for making gods.”38 This dense passage could be the object of virtually endless meditation, commentary, and interrogation. Several different figurative, semantic, or lexical systems are superimposed in a characteristically late-Derridean punning or etymologically echoing way. Multiple references to other works, Derrida’s own or that of others, are obliquely made: to the concept of messianicity without messianism and that of spectrality from his own Specters of Marx; to Kant’s work entitled Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason and his notion of the priceless price of human life; to Bergson’s definition of human society as a machine for making gods in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; to Freud and anthropologists for the role of the phallic in all religions; to the whole vocabulary, crisscrossing biology and human society, of words with mun or mon: common, community, immunity, autoimmunity; to the concept of the machinal as a fundamental feature of teletechno- mediatic-capitalism. The notion of the machinal is here applied to the religious concept of self-sacrificing autoimmunity. It is a feature of the body’s immune system, as of the endocrine system, that it works automatically, on its own, machinelike, without any control by consciousness. Derrida affirms that the self-destructive autoimmunity of any community works in the same way. The words heilig, holy, and sacrificial connect Derrida’s concept of the autoimmunitary to his earlier thinking about religion and about sacrifice as an essential feature of the three “religions of the Book.” Reflections about sacrifice are central in Glas and in The Gift of Death. The essay about autoimmunitary communities is, after all, called “Faith and Knowledge” and is included in a book called La Religion (Acts of Religion in English). The word sacrifice comes from sacer, holy, sacred, and facere, to do, to make. To sacrifice is to do something holy, that is, something in some way related to what Derrida, echoing Jan Patocka, calls in The Gift of Death the mysterium tremendum. The self-sacrificial impulse in any community derives from its exposure to something secret, supernatural, wholly other and from its desire to be saved by being transported to that place, to survive after its self-sacrifice. Central in the passage, therefore, is a definition of a viable community as committed to preserving itself uncontaminated, safe and sound, pure, sequestered, hale and holy, while at the same time inhabited by an irresistible tendency to turn its self-protective mechanisms against itself, to sacrifice itself in an attempt to protect itself against itself and in order to preserve its relation to the holy and to achieve “spectral sur-vival.” Derrida takes for granted here, and throughout the whole essay or collection of fifty two segments that make up “Foi et savoir,” that every community, in spite of its desire for safe self-enclosure, is open to some limitless other, to which he gives various contradictory names, including death and the future, though he, for the most part, scrupulously avoids calling it God or heaven. Every community, whether it wants to be or not, however much it tries to enclose itself in itself, is open to “the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.” A more recent work by Derrida, the interview in Le “Concept” du 11 septembre, would add the word terror to this list of names for the spectral outside/inside other. The title of the interview conducted by Giovanna Borradori shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center, but before the invasion of Iraq, is “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” As this name suggests, it is an analysis of the post-9/11 so-called War on Terror. It appropriates from “Foi et savoir” the notion that autoimmunity is a characteristic of every community, for example, the community of so called terrorists and the community of those who call the United States their homeland, in an inextricable interpenetration of the two, terrorists and terrorized. Both, for example, share an interest in having the images of the Twin Towers falling broadcast throughout the world as often as possible and for as long as possible. Osama bin Laden must have rejoiced every time he saw those videos, but our government authorities also rejoiced. They rejoiced because they needed the effect of those images to justify the repressive measures they wanted to put in place. Terror is not stark fear for what has happened but, as Derrida recognizes, for what is certain to happen again at some indefinite time in the future. What is certain to happen, sooner or later, is another “terrorist attack,” as our government authorities, for example the director of homeland security or the director of the CIA, keep periodically telling us, just in case we might start forgetting to live in a state of constant abject terror and so begin wondering where our civil liberties have gone. What is most terrifying is the conviction that the terrorists are not outside, but within, secretly present as antigens, “terrorist cells,” against which it is extremely difficult, in the end impossible, to develop effective antibodies. The other is not outside, but inside, as an uncanny ghostly presence within the house. These terrorists might be anybody: the family next door, someone we see at the grocery store, and, perhaps, even unbeknownst to us, our own selves. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Derrida uses the concept of autoimmunity to describe, for example, the way every attempt to repress or forget the posttraumatic terror just brings it back more violently: It follows that all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (in order to deny, repress, forget, to enact its mourning, etc.), these are, these too, so many desperate attempts. And so many auto-immunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and nourish the monstrosity they attempt to bury. What should never be forgotten, therefore, is the perverse effect of the auto-immunitary itself. Repression, in the psychoanalytic sense and in the politico-policing, politico-military, politico-economic sense, we know now that it produces, reproduces, regenerates the very thing that it attempts to disarm.39 This double, self-defeating effort can be seen at work in the war on terror. We spend billions on “homeland security,” while at the same time we sacrifice the lives of thousands of our citizens in the Iraq war, not to speak of the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens we have killed. We often direct our immunity army—the FBI, the CIA, and the more hidden security forces—against our own citizens or against refugees or immigrants or victims of repressive regimes to whom we ought to owe hospitality. We do this under the authority of the Patriot Act, an Orwellian name if there ever was one, since it is designed to take away the civil liberties of all patriotic United States citizens as well as of the alien terrorists we must be harboring in our midst, like ghosts who have invaded the homeland. The Patriot Act does the “homeland” serious harm and makes it less secure, as in the exclusion of foreign students, scientists, and scholars on whom the successful working of American capitalism depends or as in the failure to prepare adequately for the possibility of Hurricane Katrina because the Department of Homeland Security was so focused on a potential terrorist attack.