Biological immunity as we know it does not exist
until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise
that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or
molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years
'immunity', a legal concept invented in ancient Rome,
serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends.
'Self defence' also originates in a juridico-political
context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century,
during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines
it as the first 'natural right'. In the 1880s and 1890s,
biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one,
creating a new vital function, 'immunity-as-defence.' In
''A Body Worth Defending'', Ed Cohen reveals
unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical
assumptions about the human body that biomedicine
incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the
vulnerable living organism. Inspired by Michel
Foucault's writings about biopolitics and biopower,
Cohen traces immunity's migration from politics and law
into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a
genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of
thinking about modern bodies which percolates through
European political, legal, philosophical, economic,
governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from
the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. In so
doing, he shows that by the late nineteenth century,
'the body' literally incarnates modern notions of
personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen
argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defence
so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual
as the privileged focus for identifying and treating
illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to
healing situated within communities or
collectives. |
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