Biopolitica, istituzioni e sovranità in Roberto Esposito

The immunity/community plexus has found an extraordinary and tragic bench test in the recent years of the pandemic. The idea that the community can only survive if it activates a problematic dispositive of immunisation touches, in these years more than ever, the question of democracy. The latter struggles between identity as immediacy and representation as transcendence. Roberto Esposito has tried to envisage a mediation between these two principles by means of the idea of ‘institution’, which serves to counter the furious identification of all in one. But does this idea of immanence and horizontality not risk evoking other forms of spontaneous morphogenesis of political-legal orders? Doesn’t the critique of sovereignty end up resolving itself in the vitalistic exaltation of the unbridledness of those powers that underlie it? Does the institution succeed in standing between these two perspectives (Weberian formalism and Foucauldian biopolitics)?