Autoimmunities

Stefan Herbrechter, Michelle Jamieson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367536022
• eBook ISBN: 9781351009188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Autoimmunity refers to the phenomenon whereby an organism or body mounts an immune response against its own tissues. As a medical term, autoimmunity is today used to account for any instance in which the body fails to recognise its own constituents as 'self', an error that results in the paradoxical situation in which self-defense (immunity, protection) manifests as self-harm (pathology). As a result, the very possibility of autoimmunity poses a problem for the notion of immunity and the concept of identity that underpins it: if self-protection can just as readily take the form of self-destruction, then it seems that the very identity of the self, and thus the boundary between self and other, is in question. Conceptually, autoimmunity thus challenges us to think critically about the nature of any sovereign entity or identity, be they human or nonhuman, cells, nations, or other forms of community.

This volume reflects and engages with different disciplinary approaches to autoimmunity in the theoretical, medical or posthumanities, social and political theory, and critical science studies. It aims to provide a topical intervention within the current discussion on biopolitical thought and critical posthumanist futures.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Parallax.

Fortress

Stefan Herbrechter

Today immunity informs us deeply:

as organisms, as individuals, as citizens, and as a species.²

The price of an ‘auto-’ is an ‘alter-’ – there is no need for a notion of ‘self’ without a notion of ‘other’. Thus far, things seem pretty ‘safe’: consciousness, knowledge, agency, in short: metaphysics, arises from this systemic (re)distribution. It was Emmanuel Levinas who saw the need for a ‘desensitization’ therapy for (Western) metaphysics through a revaluation of alterity and its ‘precedence’ over any self and identity:

Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other – with an insurmountable allergy.³

In his epitaph on Levinas, Jacques Derrida turns the question of allergy into one of the guiding threads for reading Levinas’ and his own work. For example, with regard to the hospitality of the other:

The closing of the door, inhospitality, war, and allergy already imply, as their possibility, a hospitality offered or received: an original or, more precisely, pre-originary declaration of peace […] For Levinas, on the contrary, allergy, the refusal or forgetting of the face, comes to inscribe its secondary negativity against a backdrop of peace, against the backdrop of a hospitality that does not belong to the order of the political, or at least not simply to a political space […] the phenomena of allergy, rejection, xenophobia, even war itself would still exhibit everything that Levinas explicitly attributes to or allies with hospitality.⁴

Both Levinas and Derrida are aware that there is nothing reassuring in this insight of a necessary ‘pre-originary hospitality’. This knowledge cannot prevent allergy, war or rejection of the other, but at least it forces one to open up or to disentangle and show possible ethical and political alternatives:

War or allergy, the inhospitable rejection, is still derived from hospitality […] In any event […] allergy, the inhospitable forgetting of the transcendence of the Other […] is still a testimony, an unconscious testimony […] to the very thing it forgets […]⁵

Allergies are thus something that ‘we’ have to learn to live with.

In his medical history of humanity, Roy Porter writes of a great surge in the interest in immunology in the late 1980s due to the discovery of AIDS.⁶ David Napier presents the long term view of modernity as an ‘age of immunology’ and ‘self-awareness’, culminating in what he calls ‘identity stasis’. He aims to provide ‘an analysis of the ways in which “self” and an internalized “nonself” function: culturally, medically, scientifically’.⁷ He sees immunology as a ‘cultural paradigm’ in which ‘immunological ideas now provide the primary conceptual framework in which human relations take place in the contemporary world’, which leads to an ‘increasing internalization of difference within a presumably autonomous self’, so that ‘immunology – the attempted elimination of the internalized “other” – is projected everywhere’.⁸ How does allergy and autoimmunity as the ‘modern malady’ par excellence⁹ fit into this? Michelle Jamieson’s contribution to this special issue provides some very helpful clarification in this respect and also offers a brief medical history of the concept of allergy.

By way of further explanation, in an introduction to a special issue of Cultural Anthropology on this issue, Napier explains:

The origins of immunology as a medical discipline can easily be traced to the 19^th century. But in the late 1960s the notion of an “immune system” first appeared, marking a conceptual shift in which immunity involved not only sensitive reactions to allergies and pathogens, but an orchestrated cellular defense in which complex responses protected an autonomous self. Since then, immunity has in broad terms come to be understood primarily as a dynamic process of recognizing and eliminating so-called “nonself.” However, over the same period, immunologists have gradually grown dissatisfied with the general self-nonself construct as they grapple with the disjunction between what they evidence experimentally, and received ideas about organic preservation and the effects of “foreign” bodies on a self that is otherwise sovereign.¹⁰

This dissatisfaction resulting from a too simplistic view of the self-nonself binary opposition clinically but also culturally, politically, ethically and philosophically is prompted and exacerbated by the ‘problem’, question and phenomenon of autoimmunity. It is also the conundrum or aporia that, due to the ubiquity and power that the ‘immunological’ model of the ‘sovereign self’ has achieved, preoccupies, according to Napier, ‘social constructions of personhood […] and prevailing neoliberal ideas about individual autonomy’.¹¹ The counterintuitive notion of (self-)intolerant bodies, as Warwick Anderson and Ian Mackay explain, is ‘still emerging, still to gain broad cultural acceptance’.¹²

That the immune system, so much part of us, so necessary to survival, can go amiss and cause disease is counterintuitive. The body’s failure to recognize itself, its capacity to treat itself as foreign, seems both sinister and bizarre.¹³

The associated ‘immunological turn’ that Anderson and Mackay identify is produced by the fact that ‘autoimmunity has growing appeal to philosophers and social theorists as a guiding metaphor in understanding the perils of life and identity in the twenty-first century’.¹⁴ A long list of influential contemporary thinkers (Sloterdijk, Derrida, Agamben, Esposito to name only the most prominent) have been extending the currency of notions of (auto)immunity and have been building bridges between medical science and cultural and political theory. According to Andrey Goffey, ‘it is the aggressively imagistic language of security and warfare, which runs throughout the historical development of immunology, that has proved of most interest to critical researchers’.¹⁵ He further relates this to the rise of the life sciences during the time of the Cold War and the contemporary return to questions of biopolitics.

Roberto Esposito, for example, claims that the ‘demand for exemption or protection’ the autoimmunity paradigm stands for has been ‘extended to all those other sectors and languages of our life, until it becomes the coagulating point, both real and symbolic, of the entire contemporary experience’.¹⁶ Likewise, Peter Sloterdijk understands modernity, globalization and the age of terror as ‘the struggle to create […] metaphorical space suits, immunitary regimes […] that will protect Europeans from dangerous and life-threatening contact with the outside’.¹⁷ Sloterdijk sees the process of ‘hominization’ precisely in this development of immunizing ‘anthropotechnics’, which, today, has reached the demand for ‘global co-immunity’ in the face of climate change and the advent of the ‘posthuman’.

What remains unclear is the constant slippage from immunity to autoimmunity and back again in these contexts. An awareness of the inevitability of this slippage is probably Jacques Derrida’s most important contribution within the emergence of the autoimmunitarian ‘paradigm’ in contemporary thought. Nicole Anderson, in her contribution to this issue, provides a recapitulation and a critique of the role of autoimmun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Fortress
• 2. Allergy and Autoimmunity: Rethinking the Normal and the Pathological
• 3. Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self But Not Self, or The Knotty Paradoxes of ‘Autoimmunity’: A Genealogical Rumination
• 4. Autoimmunity: the political state of nature
• 5. Cosmic Topologies of Imitation: From the Horror of Digital Autotoxicus to the Auto-Toxicity of the Social
• 6. Contagion, Virology, Autoimmunity: Derrida’s Rhetoric of Contamination
• 7. Auto (Immunity): Evolutions of Otherness
• 8. (Auto)immunity, Social Theory, and the ‘Political’
• Index