A phrase that sounds like freedom
“You do you, I’ll do me.” You have heard some version of this — in conversations about masking, about vaccine mandates, about whether a community should maintain shared standards during a pandemic. The phrase presents itself as mutual respect: I will not impose on you, and you will not impose on me.
Consider what happens when this principle governs a shared space. A meeting is held indoors. Some attendees are immunocompromised. Others have decided that COVID precautions are a personal choice. Under “you do you,” each person manages their own risk. Those who can afford high-quality masks, air purifiers, and testing wear them. Those who cannot — because of cost, because their disability makes masking difficult, because they lack information — absorb whatever risk the room produces. The phrase distributes freedom equally in words and risk unequally in practice.
This is not a new dynamic. Roberto Esposito described its structure in the 1990s, using two Latin concepts that share a root and name opposed orientations toward obligation.
The root: munus
Both concepts derive from the Latin munus, which means obligation, gift, or duty — specifically a gift that one is obligated to give, not one given freely. The munus is what you owe to others by virtue of being in relation with them. It is not optional generosity. It is what community demands.
From this single root, Esposito derives two opposed concepts:
- Communitas (com-munus): the condition of being bound together by shared obligation. The com- prefix means “together” or “with.” Communitas names the exposure, vulnerability, and debt that constitute community. It is not what a community has in common but what it owes.
- Immunitas (in-munus): the condition of being exempt from that obligation. The im- prefix negates. Immunitas names the protection that exempts individuals from the claims of the common — dispensation from the munus.
Notice the etymological link to biological immunity. This is not a coincidence Esposito exploits for rhetorical effect — he argues that political immunity and biological immunity express the same structural logic. Both protect by negating exposure.
Communitas: community as obligation
The modern political tradition tends to understand community as a collection of individuals who share something: shared identity, shared values, shared property, shared culture. On this view, community is a possession — something a group has.
Esposito argues that this gets the concept backward. Communitas names not what a community possesses but what it owes. To be in community is to be exposed to obligations one did not choose — to be constituted by debts to others that cannot be fully discharged. Community, in this sense, is a dispossession: it names the condition of being claimed by others, of owing something that is never entirely one’s own.
This is uncomfortable. Most accounts of community emphasize warmth, belonging, and shared purpose. Esposito’s account emphasizes exposure, risk, and the impossibility of full self-sufficiency. Communitas is not a shelter. It is the condition of being unsheltered together.
Example. Disability justice organizers build collective care infrastructure — shared ride networks, community masking norms, mutual aid funds — not because the participants share an identity but because they share an obligation to make survival possible for everyone present. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha documents this in Care Work (2018): the infrastructure exists because people recognize the munus — the obligation that relation itself creates.
Immunitas: protection as negation
If communitas is the condition of shared obligation, immunitas is the mechanism that dissolves it. To be immunized is to be exempt from the munus — relieved of the debts and exposures that community imposes.
Esposito argues that modern liberal governance is organized around immunization. The liberal subject is defined precisely by what it is protected from: the demands of others, the risks of exposure, the obligations of the common. Rights, in the liberal tradition, function as immunitary devices — they protect the individual from the claims of the collective.
This immunitary logic extends into medicine, law, and everyday life. The body politic, like the biological body, is understood as something that must be defended against intrusion. Borders immunize the nation against foreign bodies. Property immunizes the individual against communal claims. Privacy immunizes the self against exposure.
The paradox is that immunization, pushed to its extreme, destroys what it protects. Esposito uses the figure of autoimmune disease: when the body’s defense system attacks the body itself. A community that immunizes itself against all obligation, all exposure, all vulnerability ceases to be a community. It becomes a collection of defended individuals with nothing binding them together — no munus, no communitas.
Example. Dean Spade describes in Mutual Aid (2020) how government aid programs immunize recipients from mutual dependence by routing care through bureaucratic institutions — but in doing so, they sever the relationships of obligation and reciprocity that mutual aid builds. The institutional mechanism protects individuals from needing each other, and in the process dissolves the communal infrastructure that could sustain them.
The concepts at work: COVID discourse
Return to the opening scenario. “You do you, I’ll do me” is an immunitarian statement. It exempts each individual from obligation to the others in the room. It sounds like freedom because immunitas always sounds like freedom — it is the freedom from being claimed by others.
What it dismantles is communitas: the shared standards, collective practices, and mutual obligations that would distribute risk across the group rather than concentrating it on those least able to protect themselves individually. Mask norms, ventilation standards, testing protocols — these are communal obligations. Framing them as personal choices is the immunitarian move.
emsenn argues in “On white-supremacist covid-eugenicist queers” (2025-09-23) that this immunitarian logic produces eugenic effects. Those who cannot immunize themselves individually — because of poverty, disability, chronic illness, or structural abandonment — absorb the risks that others refuse to mitigate communally. The “freedom” to make one’s own choices about masking is a freedom available in proportion to one’s access to individual protection. For those without such access, it is not freedom but abandonment.
Self-check
1. A neighborhood association votes to end its communal snow-clearing arrangement. Each household will now clear its own sidewalk. A resident who uses a wheelchair can no longer leave their home after snowfall. Which concept names the logic behind the vote, and which names what the vote dissolved?
The vote operates through immunitas: it exempts each household from obligation to the others. What it dissolves is communitas — the shared obligation to maintain accessible passage for everyone in the neighborhood. The wheelchair user bears the cost of the community’s self-immunization.
2. Why does Esposito ground both concepts in the Latin munus rather than treating them as independent ideas?
Because the concepts are structurally inseparable. Immunitas is not simply the absence of community — it is the active negation of the specific obligation (munus) that constitutes communitas. You cannot understand what immunization exempts you from without understanding what communitas demands. The shared root makes this dependency visible: every act of immunization is an act against a specific communal obligation.
3. A mutual aid network provides groceries to immunocompromised members during a COVID surge. Is this an example of communitas, immunitas, or both?
It is primarily communitas: the network members accept shared obligation to those who are exposed to risk. But it also has an immunitary dimension — the groceries protect immunocompromised members from the exposure of going to the store. The key distinction is who bears the obligation. In communitas, the community shares it. In immunitas, the individual manages it alone. Here, the community shares it, so the dominant logic is communitas even though the practical effect includes a form of protection.
What comes next
This lesson introduces the two concepts and their structural relationship. Further study leads in several directions:
- Biopolitics — the broader framework within which Esposito’s work operates, extending Michel Foucault’s analysis of how political power governs life itself
- Disability justice — a political framework that insists on communitas as infrastructure, not charity
- Harm reduction — a practice with communitarian origins that immunitarian logic has co-opted
- Access intimacy — the relational trust that sustains communitas in practice