Getting Ahead of One’s Self?: The Common Culture of Immunology and Philosophy

Abstract

During the past thirty years, immunological metaphors, motifs, and models have come to shape much social theory and philosophy. Immunology, so it seems, often has served to naturalize claims about self, identity, and sovereignty--perhaps most prominently in Jacques Derrida's later studies. Yet the immunological science that functions as "nature" in these social and philosophical arguments is derived from interwar and Cold War social theory and philosophy. Theoretical immunologists and social theorists knowingly participated in a common culture. Thus the "naturalistic fallacy" in this case might be reframed as an error of categorization: its conditions of possibility would require ceaseless effort to purify and separate out the categories of nature and culture. The problem--inasmuch as there is a problem-therefore is not so much the making of an appeal to nature as assuming privileged access to an independent, sovereign category called "nature".

The Common Cold, Influenza and Immunity in Post-Pandemic Times: Lay representations of Self and Other among older people in Sweden

“…During the growth of immunological science, several immunological motifs, metaphors, and models have transcended into the language of discourses of philosophy and other branches of social and cultural theory (cf. Martin, 1994;Napier, 2002;Cohen, 2009;Anderson, 2014). The metaphorical transfer has also taken place the other way around.…”

Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth‐century studies

“…Alongside Rhetorical Studies' own immunological turn toward its own traditions of rhetorical training as resistance to pernicious discourse (Paine, 1999), historians of medicine, medical anthropologists, immunologists, and physicians have pursued a related thread of inquiry focused on “immunological metaphysics” or immunology's ongoing use of terms like immune “self,” “nonself,” “other,” and a “system” that mediates their relations (Anderson, 2014, p. 607). As Anne Marie Moulin (1989), Alfred Tauber (1991, 1994, 2013, 2017), A. David Napier (2003, 2012), Warwick Anderson (2014), Pauline Mazumdar (2002, 2008), Thomas Pradeu (2010, 2012, 2019) and Travis Chi Wing Lau (2019) have demonstrated, the conceptual dependence on selfhood as a unifying idiom and principle in immunology, as evidenced in foundational works of cellular immunology like Frank Macfarlane Burnet's Self and Not‐self (1969), raises a series of ethical and philosophical problems that ultimately remain unresolved in the field 12 . Predicated on the fundamental assumption that organisms bear discriminatory immune systems that can “recognize” themselves as separate from invasive non‐selves, “immunology makes a physiological theory of individuality possible” (Pradeu, 2010, p. 264).…”

Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco‐immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care

“…They explain how these imaginaries were co‐produced alongside militaristic approaches to public health and practices of germ warfare. Further work has tracked the persistence of these military models through the Cold War (Anderson ), and their gradual displacement by more “flexible” models of immunity co‐incident with the rise of postmodern and neo‐liberal models of subjectivity in the 1980s (Martin ). Here immunity becomes a story of accommodation and adaptation.…”