Contingency, Immunity and Risk: Modalities of the Biopolitical

My aim is to analyze risk as a negative modal construction, and in doing so, to reconceive of contingency as a way to think risk and its relationship to community. To do this, I will define risk in two ways, and will show that the interrelation between these two is revealing for thinking a contemporary, post-identitarian community. The first view defines risk as a partial and negative representation of contingency, in which the word’s connotation, as negative exposure, is a modal construct that circumscribes our thinking of the contemporary world (all this in relation to the ubiquitous sense of an “end times”). The second way I will look at risk is again as a generally negative construct, but this time relating to the immunitary paradigm as elaborated in the work of Roberto Esposito. In placing these two notions of risk alongside each other, I intend to show that in the prevailing immunitary tendency toward risk aversion, there is a fundamental asymmetry, and this binary can be fruitfully re-rendered in a broader paradigm of contingency. Because risk must, in the case of a modal logic, always be viewed in opposition to necessity, by reassessing the concept of risk in its broader form of contingency, I will show that the standard schema may be disrupted to interrogate the traditional view of risk as something for the individual or community to immunize against, and see it rather as the foundation of communal life.