Getting Ahead of One's Self?

: The Common Culture of Immunology and Philosophy

Author(s): Warwick Anderson
Source: Isis, Vol. 105, No. 3 (September 2014), pp. 606-616
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 Getting Ahead of One’s Self?
The Common Culture of Immunology and
Philosophy

By Warwick Anderson*

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 partic-
ipated 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.”

“I MMUNOLOGY HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME,” asserted F. Macfarlane Burnet

in 1965, “more a problem in philosophy than a practical science.” The Australian
scientist was reflecting on his career studying the body’s defense mechanisms, in partic-
ular its production of antibodies. Burnet agreed with Alfred North Whitehead, who
warned that “if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must
become philosophical.” Philosophy and social theory infused Burnet’s immunology,
strengthening the cognitive foundations of his research on self-tolerance—the body’s
recognition and memory of itself—which earned him the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine.1 Since Burnet, however, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have

* Department of History, University of Sydney, SOPHI, Quadrangle A14, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia;
wanderson@usyd.edu.au.
I am grateful to Ian R. Mackay, Erika Milam, and Bernie Lightman for helping me to formulate and express
these thoughts. Cecily Hunter assisted with the research. The essay benefited from discussions at the “Topologies
of Immunity” workshop at the University of Exeter and in a seminar in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Chicago. A different version of this argument is contextualized in Warwick Anderson and Ian R.
Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014).
1 F. Macfarlane Burnet, “The Darwinian Approach to Immunity,” in Molecular and Cellular Basis of Antibody

Isis, 2014, 105:606 – 616

©2014 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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come to make their philosophy and social theory more immunological. As a putative S
science of the “self,” immunology late in the twentieth century offered a rich vocabulary
and an attractive conceptual framework for an elevated discussion of human identity. The
concept of immunity—returning, in a sense, from whence it came—would gain even more
power as an organizing principle and an abundant source of metaphor for social theory
with the advent of the new millennium.
During the past thirty years or so, many Western intellectuals have found it hard to
consider life and death without invoking the immunological self and its deconstructive
autoimmunity—the process whereby the body’s immune system fails to recognize and
tolerate self, attacking its own tissues, causing disease. The philosopher Jacques Derrida
thus “granted to this autoimmune schema a range without limits.” Derrida especially
appreciated the “undecidability” and internal contradiction of autoimmune processes. The
way in which autoimmunity naturally deconstructed supposedly sovereign bodies and
commanding identities fascinated him. “We feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of
general logic of autoimmunization,” wrote Derrida in 1996. “It seems indispensable to us
today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well
as the duplicity of sources in general.”2 At the end of the twentieth century, a number of
other social theorists would claim that we are all constitutively autoimmune, both bodily
and socially. Their immunological enthusiasm perhaps exemplifies Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
observation that “work in philosophy is . . . a kind of work on oneself,” that the treatment
of a philosophical problem is “like the treatment of an illness.”3
But I am getting ahead of myself. In my contribution to this focus group I want to
consider the emergence in the late twentieth century of what might be called “immuno-
logical metaphysics”— but to do so I need additionally to sketch the philosophical roots
of modern immunology. That is, I suggest that in this case a sort of “sociological fallacy”
anticipated and rendered possible the “naturalistic fallacy,” that social thought has autho-
rized the science of immunology as much as the humanities and social sciences recently
have sought validation in immunological research, in the already socialized natural.
Therefore I am interested in the traffic of metaphor and model between social theory and
the biological sciences—traffic so dense and intricate that it sometimes obscures any
division between these domains. Indeed, that really is my point. Notions of an appeal to
nature or a resort to culture are useful fantasies, figments of a convenient bipolar
imaginary. Nature and culture, as critics such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour tell us,
are hopelessly entangled no matter how assiduously we try to unravel them— hence the
plausibility of mixed terms like “sociobiology,” “biosociality,” and “biopolitics.” The

Formation, ed. J. Sterzl (New York: Academic, 1965), pp. 17–20, on p. 17; and Alfred North Whitehead, Science
and the Modern World (1925; New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 17. On Burnet see Warwick Anderson and Ian
R. Mackay, “Fashioning the Immunological Self: The Biological Individuality of F. Macfarlane Burnet,” Journal
of the History of Biology, 2014, 47:147–175. See also Burnet, Changing Patterns: An Atypical Autobiography
(Melbourne: Heinemann, 1968); and Christopher Sexton, The Seeds of Time: The Life of Sir Macfarlane Burnet
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).
2 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford,

Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), p. 124; and Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at
the Limits of Reason Alone” (1996), in Religion, ed. Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp.
1–78, on p. 73n. See also Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of
Autoimmunity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2014).
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophy [from The Big Typescript, 1936],” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical

Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 158 –199, on p. 161;
and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958),
p. 255. It is likely that Wittgenstein would have regarded immunological philosophy as a form of bewitchment
rather than therapy.

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ceaseless and always futile attempt to split the messy concatenation into separate bundles
makes us modern—so we are told—and thus, as Lorraine Daston claims, the appeal to an
autonomous nature essentially is a modern issue, a strategy of the moderns.4
What I mean to say is that the ideas we keep trying to track from one pole to another
may actually be mixing promiscuously in a common tropical setting, under the palm trees.
The geographical metaphor may sound exotic, and perhaps redundant, but the argument
is an old one in the history of science. At a meeting in 1957 in Madison, Wisconsin,
lamentably far from the tropics, John C. Greene described how nineteenth-century social
theorists claimed “the sanction of science for their philosophies of history,” explaining the
ways in which “social prophets assumed the pose of the scientist.” That is, he observed
their appeal to nature. Meanwhile, he concluded dramatically, “science went on her own
way, a prolific but cruel mother, forever spawning scientisms and forever abandoning her
illegitimate offspring.” It is the modern drama. And yet, Richard H. Shryock, in his
commentary on Greene’s paper, wondered whether “both biologic and social evolutionary
concepts arose independently out of a common background.” Similarly, Robert M. Young
in the late 1960s mused on the “common context” of biological and social theory. He
hoped “an approach might be developed which routinely considers social and political
factors in scientific research and scientific factors in social, economic, and political
history.”5 The reference to separate “factors” may date this proposal, but I think Young
was on to something—something that makes the so-called naturalistic fallacy, the appeal
to an independent, unsociable nature, into less of a fallacy and more of a category error,
or at least an error in categorization. Nonetheless, this category error can work strategi-
cally, mostly for natural scientists but sometimes for social scientists too, to advance a
case, to authorize a politics.
* * *
Once conventionally used to designate exemption from political obligations, distinguish-
ing individuals within a society, “immunity” in the late nineteenth century came to imply
a set of biological contrivances defending the body against pathogenic microorganisms.6
From the beginning, immunology was structured primarily as a sort of communal politics,
a strategy of defense against invasion, a military operation. This is so well known that to
go over it again in detail here would try the reader’s patience. But the dependence of
immunology on military metaphors and models is just part of the story. An alternative
tradition developed in immunology, growing strong in places like Vienna and Paris, that
emphasized human reactivity and sensitivity and coined words like “allergy” and “ana-

4 See Donna J. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System

Discourse,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Bruno
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993);
Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. L. R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982); and Lorraine
Daston, “The Naturalistic Fallacy Is Modern,” in this Focus section. See also Erika Lorraine Milam, “A Field
Study of Con Games,” in this Focus section.
5 John C. Greene, “Biology and Social Theory in the Nineteenth Century: Auguste Comte and Herbert

Spencer,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Claggett (Madison: Univ. Wisconsin
Press, 1959), pp. 419 – 446, on p. 442; Richard H. Shryock, “Commentary,” ibid., pp. 447– 453, on pp. 452– 453;
and Robert M. Young, “Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory”
(1969), in Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985),
pp. 23–78, on p. 23.
6 Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body

(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2009).

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phylaxis.”7 This thought style concentrated on biological individuality and idiosyncra- S
sy—in immunological terms, on variations in avidity rather than rigid specificity. It helped
to make thinkable heterodox concepts such as autoimmunity, where the normal immu-
nological response goes awry. “Autoimmunity,” a word invented only in the late 1950s,
is really an auto-allergy, of course. It implies a failure to recognize and tolerate “self.”
Since the 1940s, thanks to Burnet, immunology has been concerned as much with
mechanisms of self-tolerance as with defense against pathogens. But what might be the
origins of the immunological “self”?
“The essence of allergic disease,” Burnet wrote in 1948, “is its individuality.” The
excessive reactivity and sensitivity of the immune response intrigued the Australian
microbiologist. He wondered whether in some diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, the
body became allergic to its own cells. “It is simply that in certain individuals the normal
scavenging process, by which damaged cells are eliminated, is switched into an inappro-
priately immunological process—an antibody directed against some specific component
of, say, damaged nerve cells is produced.” This mistake fortunately is rare, but why does
it not occur more often? The longer Burnet thought about it, the more convinced he
became that “recognition of ‘self’ from ‘not-self’ . . . is probably the basis of immunol-
ogy.”8
I want to focus briefly here on why Burnet ultimately chose to reframe immunology as
the science of the self, rather than individuality. For years, the amateur naturalist had
admired the popular tracts of Julian Huxley, who helped him to think biologically. Huxley
certainly sensitized his Australian acolyte to the problem of biological individuality.9 Yet
Burnet decided in the 1940s to emphasize self. At the time, he was reading the ruminations
of Alfred North Whitehead on the processual and embodied self. He revered Whitehead
as the “greatest living philosopher.” Whitehead’s recondite thought enthralled Burnet’s
friend and zoologist colleague Wilfred E. Agar, who attempted its biological explication
in his Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism, which Burnet also read in 1943.
The small biology circle at the University of Melbourne was abuzz with Whitehead. Agar
described the self as “a unity of activity or process; and the constituents, or elements, of
a process are events. . . . The unity of the self is also a unity of temporally successive
events. The character of the self at the moment is the outcome of the whole of its past
experiences. The activities, or processes, of the living organism constitute, therefore, a
nexus of events.” His book was “based on the premise that cells are subjects, and that the
animal as a whole is a subject.”10 Like Whitehead, he believed that the self is always in
flux or becoming; the nature of self, or actual entity, is to prehend or feel, to appropriate
data from its environment to build itself up. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) is
full of “self-experience” and “self-identity, “self-creation” and “self-formation.” For
Whitehead, the self is a “complex unity . . . restricted under the limitation of its pattern of

7 Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies (cit. n. 2). See also Mark Jackson, Allergy: The History of a

Modern Malady (London: Reaktion, 2006).

8 F. M. Burnet, “The Basis of Allergic Diseases,” Medical Journal of Australia, 1948, 1(2):29 –35, on pp. 33,

29, 34, 30.

9 Julian Huxley, “The Biological Basis of Individuality,” Philosophy, 1926, 1:305–319, esp. pp. 318, 310. In

Essays of a Biologist (New York: Knopf, 1923), Huxley frequently refers to individuality (e.g., pp. 108, 247).
10 Burnet, Changing Patterns (cit. n. 1), p. 77; and W. E. Agar, A Contribution to the Theory of the Living

Organism (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press with Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 8, 11. Burnet probably also
had read Agar, “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: An Introduction for Biologists,” Quarterly Review of
Biology, 1936, 11:16 –34.

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aspects.” “What endures,” he wrote, “is identity of pattern, self-inherited.”11 Burnet seems
to have appropriated much of this philosophy in his immunological thinking.
Inasmuch as immunology after World War II became a science of the self, it therefore
was predicated on process philosophy and engaged promiscuously in the philosophical
marketplace. So when our contemporary social theorists and philosophers appeal to the
science of immunology, what sort of naturalistic fallacy could they possibly be commit-
ting?
* * *
In the 1980s, many humanities scholars felt dissatisfied with older preoccupations con-
cerning the disembodied self. They were searching the horizon for some fully corporeal
alternative. Conventionally, philosophers had tended to associate personal identity with
the mind: long ago, John Locke had emptied the self from the body, thus separating it from
later thoughts of immunity, which ensures corporeal integrity.12 In the twentieth century,
the more materialist philosophers came to locate human individuality in the brain, the
mysterious province of neuroscientists. Consigned now to the brain, the self returned to
just one part of the body. Historians of the neurosciences frequently observed the
“reduction of self to consciousness as a function of soul or brain.”13 But fresh speculations
on the immune system toward the end of the century postulated a fully embodied self, a
body politic—a biopolitical individuality—available to intellectuals critically concerned
with the human condition.14 “For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated into the
language of general immunology,” claimed the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk,
“because human beings, due to their openness to the world, are extremely vulnerable—
from a biological level, to the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and ritual levels.
. . . The task of building convincing immune systems is so broad and all-encompassing
that there is no space left for nostalgic longings.”15
“The immune system,” declared Donna Haraway in 1989, “is both an iconic myth
object in high-technology culture and a subject of research and clinical practice of the first
importance.” She claimed that modern immunology draws a map “to guide recognition
and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics.” Immunology
texts and research reports published in the 1980s demonstrated that the “immune system
is unambiguously a postmodern object,” a coded system—a coding “trickster,” even—for
recognition of self and other. Haraway pondered how distinctions between the normal and

11 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected ed., ed. D. Griffin

and D. Sherborne (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 57, 85, 108, 187, 241.
12 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Claren-

don, 1979). Locke emphasized the capacity of the self for detachment and independence—that is, its relational
qualities.
13 Fernando Vidal, “Brains, Bodies, Selves, and Science: Anthropologies of Identity and the Resurrection of

the Body,” Critical Inquiry, 2002, 28:930 –974, on p. 939.

14 As Emily Martin points out, the emergence of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the

1980s brought immunology to prominence in philosophical discussions of embodiment and self; see Emily
Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS
(Boston: Beacon, 1994).
15 Erik Morse, “Something in the Air: Interview with Peter Sloterdijk,” Frieze, 2009, 129, www.frieze.com/

issue/something_in_the_air (accessed 29 Mar. 2013). Sloterdijk argues that human culture depends on immu-
nizing spheres, which modernization and globalization have disrupted or destroyed— giving rise to the need for
pluralistic co-immunizing strategies. See Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III: Plurale Sphärologie: Schäume (Frank-
furt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 2004); and Sloterdijk and H.-J. Heinrichs, Die Sonne und der Tod (Frankfurt-am-
Main: Suhrkamp, 2006).

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the pathological work when the biological body is defined as a “coded text, organized as S
an engineering system, ordered by a fluid and dispersed command-control network.” We
no longer possess the hierarchical, organic, modern body; now it is a matter of codes,
dispersal, and networking—a semiotic system. “Disease is a subspecies of information
malfunction or communications pathology,” Haraway observed; “disease is a process of
misrecognition or transgression of the boundaries of a strategic assemblage called self. . . .
Individuality is a strategic defense problem.” Once simply a modernist immunological
battlefield, the “hierarchical body of old has given way to a network-body of truly amazing
complexity and specificity.”16 For Haraway and her followers, immunology was creating
an exciting postmodern body, reanimating human identity, writing a new constitution.
Around this time, the anthropologist Emily Martin argued that “the science of immu-
nology is helping to render a kind of aesthetic or architecture for our bodies that captures
some of the essential features of flexible accumulation [in capitalism].” Exploring the
images dominating popular and scientific discussions of the immune system, Martin tried
to understand what sort of social world immunologists were conjuring. She believed that
immunology excelled at rendering “natural” certain social arrangements and cultural
assumptions. In popular accounts, the metaphor of warfare against an external enemy still
prevails; the body resembles a police state, protecting against foreign intruders. The
boundary between self and other is rigid and absolute. These images of immunity make
“violent destruction seem ordinary and part of the necessity of daily life.”17 In contrast,
immunologists increasingly were inclined to depict the body as a “whole, interconnected
system complete unto itself,” as a “homeostatic, self-regulating system.” Martin saw older
militaristic models of the body, “organized around nationhood, warfare, gender, race, and
class,” contending with a new immunological body “organized as a global system with no
internal boundaries and characterized by rapid flexible response.” It was, for her, a new
body transformed for “late capitalism.” Martin was convinced that immunologists did not
“ignore the world outside the lab in devising their models of the body.” Therefore the
cultural anthropologist recorded how the language of immunity increasingly “crashed into
contemporary descriptions of the economy of the late-twentieth century with a focus on
flexible specialization, flexible production, and flexible rapid response to an ever-changing
market with specific, tailor-made products.”18
The cultural anthropology of immunology has continued to prove alluring. According
to A. David Napier, “immunological ideas now provide the primary conceptual frame-
work in which human relations take place in the contemporary world.” In the immunology
of the day, the anthropologist discerned “the increasing internalization of difference within
a presumably autonomous self.” Immunology at the turn of the century appeared to
contribute to the denial of difference— or its assimilation—and to connive in the avoid-
ance of self-transformation. “Immunology’s recognition and elimination of ‘not-self,’”
Napier wrote, “embodies at the emotional level the deferred human contact that we have
come to live with and, alas, accept.” And yet, “how complicated both self-knowledge and
sensory experience become,” he wrote, “when the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘not-self’
becomes formally expressed in the somatic process known as autoimmunity.” Napier was

16 Haraway, “Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” (cit. n. 4), pp. 205, 211, 207, 211, 212, 218.
17 Emily Martin, “The End of the Body?” American Ethnologist, 1989, 16:121–140, on p. 126; and Martin,
“Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as a Nation State,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly,
1990, 4:410 – 426, on p. 417.
18 Martin, “End of the Body?” pp. 123, 129; and Martin, Flexible Bodies (cit. n. 14), pp. 111, 93.

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unsure what to make of autoimmunity, and the notion unsettled him. “In autoimmunity
one gets so viciously close to the mirror of otherness that no room is left for reflection.”19
He did not seem to know what to do with the concept.
Napier soon modified his poignant plea for a more liberal, tolerant immunological
homunculus. In 2012 he noted that Burnet’s clonal selection theory had been predicated
on a “culture-bound” assumption of a wholly autonomous “self”— but this “prior and
persistent” identity now was superseded in immunology. Immunologists had come to
recognize that “self is made up and defined by potentially dangerous encounters at one’s
boundaries.” In fact, the immune system appears to be exploring otherness as much as
defending self: it is, indeed, involved in a “creative attempt to engage difference,” not
eliminate it. Antibodies, according to the anthropologist, “function as ‘self’ search en-
gines—search engines for the information (harmful or helpful) that sits latently in
viruses.” Like many humanities scholars, Napier was convinced that immunology “is
perhaps better positioned than any other domain of modern science . . . to help us rethink
notions of the self that have dominated Western philosophy at least since the Enlighten-
ment.” As a humanist, he thought it timely to “reconsider immunology’s contribution to
the metaphysics of identity.”20
Known for his practice of “deconstructing” or complicating the binary logic of con-
ventional philosophy, adept at revealing how the excluded other comes to haunt even
supposedly pure or “unscathed” objects, Jacques Derrida discovered autoimmunity in the
early 1990s. In Specters of Marx, the roguish philosopher observed: “To protect its life,
to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it [the ego] is
necessarily led to welcome the other within . . . it must therefore take the immune defenses
apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them
at once for itself and against itself.” According to Derrida, “the living ego is autoimmune
[le moi vivant est auto-immune].” He meant that an internal process was compromising
the integrity of the person, dishonoring sovereign identity, overturning a power, at the
same time as it opened up possible options for the future, for individual transformation.
Before long, Derrida became obsessed with the logic of autoimmunity, the vision of a
specter haunting the self. He perceived the need to let the ghosts speak, and he wondered
“how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in
oneself”— how, that is, to recognize and express an autoimmune logic.21 Initially puzzled,
his admirers eventually assimilated the immunological trope. Some came to regard the
figure of autoimmunity as “an image with considerable surplus value, one whose imme-
diate applicability is startling and that continues to resonate.” They asked: “Is it the case
that deconstruction itself is a species of autoimmunity?” One of Derrida’s English

19 A. David Napier, The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World (Chicago: Univ.

Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 3, 11, 78, 79.

20 A. David Napier, “Nonself Help: How Immunology Might Reframe the Enlightenment,” Cultural Anthro-

pology, 2012, 27:122–137, on pp. 125, 130, 132, 133, 132, 134.
21 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International

(1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 177, 221. By the late 1980s, Derrida had come
to appreciate the challenge of AIDS to the metaphysics of the subject. “AIDS, an event that one could call
historial in the epoch of subjectivity,” he said to Jean-Luc Nancy in 1991, “if we still gave credence to
historiality, to epochality, and to subjectivity”: Derrida, “‘Eating Well’; or, The Calculation of the Subject”
(1991), in Points. . .: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1995), pp. 255–286, on p. 285. As Hans-Jörg Rheinberger insists, “we have to situate Derrida’s work with
respect to science in a more general sense”: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Translating Derrida,” CR: The New
Centennial Review, 2008, 8:175–187, on p. 180.

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translators claimed that autoimmunity names “a process that is inevitably and irreducibly S
at work more or less everywhere, at the heart of every sovereign identity.”22
At times, Derrida’s understanding of autoimmune pathology was eccentric. “As for the
process of autoimmunization, which interests us particularly here,” he wrote in 1996, “it
consists for a living organism, as is well known and in short, of protecting itself against
its self-protection by destroying its own immune system.”23 Perhaps he was thinking of the
transitory autoimmune explanation of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS),
which had proposed—wrongly, as it turned out—that some immunological process was
destroying the body’s T lymphocytes.24 In any case, the philosopher proved eager to
extend the domain of immunological critique: “As the phenomenon of these antibodies is
extended to a broader zone of pathology and as one resorts increasingly to the positive
virtues of immuno-depressants destined to limit the mechanism of rejection and to
facilitate the tolerance of certain organ transplants, we feel ourselves authorized to speak
of a general logic of autoimmunization.” “Nothing in common,” he wrote, “nothing
immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous
living present without a risk of autoimmunity.” For Derrida, autoimmunity could be a
positive force, inasmuch as the Freudian death drive could be affirmative. “Self-contesting
attestation keeps the autoimmune community alive, which is to say open to something
other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or love of the
other.”25 In other words, autoimmunity stimulates us to rethink life and death.
Toward the end of his life, Derrida elaborated on the “autoimmune double bind of the
democratic.” He argued that in order to save democracy, or to allow a future democracy,
polities often attacked elements of democracy, or provided the conditions of possibility for
such an attack— either “referring” democracy, sending it elsewhere to protect it, or
“deferring” democracy, adjourning or delaying it until later elections. He had in mind the
conditions leading to the destruction of the World Trade Center, in New York, on 11
September 2001—and the response of the United States government to this attack on its
sovereignty. For Derrida, these events manifested an autoimmune logic, a sort of death
drive, against the democratic self. The inevitability and unpredictability of the “other
within” means that “there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune.”
Nor should there be: “Autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure
to the other, to what and who comes—which means that it must remain incalculable.
Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would even happen or arrive; we
would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one another, or expect any
event.” The autoimmunity of democracy is both terrifying and necessary. Thus autoim-

22 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity,” Crit. Inq., 2007, 33:277–290, on pp. 281,

286; and Michael Naas, “‘One Nation . . . Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and
the Sovereignty of God,” Research in Phenomenology, 2006, 36:15– 44, on p. 17.
23 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” (cit. n. 2), p. 73n. He repeats this definition in Jacques Derrida, “Auto-

immunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Philosophy in a Time
of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 85–136, on p. 94.
24 See, e.g., John L. Ziegler and Daniel P. Stites, “Hypothesis: AIDS Is an Autoimmune Disease Directed at

the Immune System and Triggered by a Lymphotropic Retrovirus,” Clinical Immunology and Immunopathology,
1986, 41:305–313. By the early 1990s, AIDS was commonly attributed solely to infection by the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV). See also Ilana Löwy, “Immunology and AIDS: Explanations and Developing
Instruments,” in Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, ed. M. Norton Wise
(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 222–247.
25 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” (cit. n. 2), pp. 73n, 47, 51. See also Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback (London: Hogarth, 1922).

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munity for Derrida was not only good to think with; it was obligatory, inescapable—“a
transcendental pathology.”26
Immunology also grips the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. “The fact that some of
the most important contemporary authors, working independently from one another and
following different paths of thought,” he said in 2006, “came to work on the category of
immunization signals just how important the category is today. . . . Today a philosophy
that is capable of thinking its own moment [tempo] cannot avoid engaging with the topic
of immunization.” Indeed, for Esposito, the apprehension of immunity “invents modernity
as a complex of categories able to solve the problem of safeguarding life.” In the past,
immunology had been obsessed with violent defense against the foreign, with the self
“modeled as a spatial entity protected by strict genetic boundaries,” but now “the body is
understood as a functioning construct that is open to continuous exchange with its
environment.” His reading of the more cognitively oriented immunologists leads Esposito
to argue that “the immune system must be interpreted as an internal resonance chamber,
like the diaphragm through which difference, as such, engages and traverses us.”27 The
philosopher believes that one must choose to focus on “either the self-destructive revolt
of immunity against itself or an opening to its converse, community”— on autoimmunity
or tolerance. In his interpretation of recent scientific research, the immune system “acts as
a sounding board for the presence of the world within the self,” which means the self is
dynamic, always in process, under construction. It is through the self that one recognizes
the other: “nothing is more inherently dedicated to communication than the immune
system,” writes Esposito.28 In the twenty-first century immunology thus seems capable of
“naturalizing” everything.
* * *
But how wholesomely natural is the science of the self? The common intellectual culture
of the interwar years and Cold War exigencies fundamentally shaped the science of
self—indeed, in Burnet’s case, made it the science of self. So is it any less natural or
scientific? Fearing some sociological or metaphysical taint, the more fastidious immu-
nologists and philosophers of science have sought to purge the field of the metaphoric, or
metaphysical, self. “To define the self has become immunology’s primary mission, the
ultimate puzzle for the science that is attempting to identify the organism,” writes Alfred
I. Tauber, an immunologist turned philosopher of science. “To specify that endeavor,
however, the discipline has borrowed a philosophical term to approximate a language that
is inadequate to that task. It is in this sense that self is used metaphorically.” For Tauber,
recourse to the self makes immunology consort with bad philosophy. “What began with
a vague, metaphorical intuition about how immunity might function as a participant within
a larger context . . . quickly was submerged by the dominant concern of defining the

26 Derrida, Rogues (cit. n. 2), pp. 39, 150 –151, 152, 125. The cause of Derrida’s death was pancreatic cancer.
27 Roberto Esposito, in Timothy Campbell, “Interview: Roberto Esposito,” trans. Anna Papacone, Diacritics,
2006, 36:49 –56, on pp. 53, 54; and Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2002), trans.
Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), pp. 159, 17, 18. Esposito is influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis
of the relations of the body to technical attachments. See, in particular, Nancy’s account of his own heart
transplant, in which “my self becomes my intruder”: Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New
York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2008), p. 168.
28 Esposito, Immunitas, pp. 141, 169, 174. See also Timothy Campbell, “‘Bios,’ Immunity, Life: The Thought

of Roberto Esposito,” Diacritics, 2002, 36:2–22.

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U
immune self in molecular terms.”29 Therefore we should purify the language of immu- S
nology, remove its metaphoric contaminants, and get the science closer to nature. Evi-
dently, those policing the boundaries of science reject Mary Hesse’s argument that all
language is metaphorical, that the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric is
spurious. They deny, too, Latour’s interpretation of Hesse’s theory, his claim that science
is a “slow construction (not a social construction though) of family resemblances that is
never radically divorced from all the other sources and associations.”30
Some feel that a similar cleansing of social theory and philosophy is in order. Even in
the 1920s, Oswald Spengler’s “pretense” at science in The Decline of the West infuriated
the novelist Robert Musil, who argued that superficial mathematical and biological
reasoning produced only sham philosophical insight.31 Anger at such intellectual impos-
ture grew toward the end of the last century. In a notorious scam, Alan Sokal embarrassed
the editors of Social Text who had gullibly published his essay arguing that quantum
gravity endorses progressive cultural views. Sokal declared that the ready acceptance of
his hoax had demonstrated the fatuity of social constructivism and philosophical relativ-
ism in the humanities.32 In the late 1990s, the sound of reactionary intellectuals grinding
axes could be deafening. Jacques Bouveresse, for example, took the cudgel to the activist
médiologiste Régis Debray, denouncing his use of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theo-
rem—that organized systems are not self-sufficient, requiring external elements for clo-
sure—to bolster his political thesis. Bouveresse, claiming inspiration from Musil and
Wittgenstein, criticized Debray for making ostentatious recourse to complex science in
order to cover the structural weakness of his arguments. “Gödel’s theory,” Bouveresse
wrote, “effectively shows us . . . absolutely nothing about social systems.”33 Debray was

29 Alfred I. Tauber, The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), p.

295; and Tauber, “The Immune System and Its Ecology,” Philosophy of Science, 2008, 75:224 –245, on p. 226.
30 Bruno Latour, “Review of Michael A. Arbib and Mary B. Hesse, The Construction of Reality,” Isis, 1988,

79:135–137, on p. 136. See Mary Hesse, “The Explanatory Function of Metaphor,” in Revolutions and
Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 111–124; and
Hesse, “The Cognitive Claims of Metaphor,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1988, 2:1–16. Evelyn Fox
Keller believes that “referential imprecision can have a positive function in scientific work” and claims that “the
mark of a good metaphor . . . is the very uncertainty we are left to feel about the proximity of its referents”:
Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and
Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 119, 146. In this sense, the “self ” functions like
the “gene.” See also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press,
1980).
31 Robert Musil, “Mind and Experience: Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West” (1921),

in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: Univ.
Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 134 –149. See also Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918), trans. Charles
F. Atkinson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991). I consider these issues in more detail in Warwick Anderson,
“Waiting for Newton? From Hydraulic Societies to the Hydraulics of Globalization,” in Force, Movement,
Intensity: The Newtonian Imagination and the Humanities and Social Sciences, ed. Ghassan Hage and Emma
Kowal (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 128 –135.
32 Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,”

Social Text, 1996, 46/47:217–252. See also Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Impostures intellectuelles (Paris: Jacob,
1997). Latour suggests that this is another example of policing the modern divide between nature and culture or
science and society. See Bruno Latour, “Y a-t-il une science après la Guerre Froide?” Le Monde, 18 Jan. 1997;
and Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,
1999).
33 Jacques Bouveresse, Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie: De l’abus des belles-lettres dans la pensée (Paris:

Liber-Raisons d’Agir, 1999), p. 27. See also Bouveresse, “Why I Am So Very unFrench,” in Philosophy in
France Today, ed. Alain Montefiore, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983),
pp. 9 –33; and Thomas Baldwin, “Jacques Bouveresse: Being unFrench, Metaphorically,” French Cultural
Studies, 2007, 18:321–333. For Régis Debray’s account of l’affaire Sokal as boundary maintenance see “Savants
contre docteurs,” Le Monde, 18 Mar. 1997, pp. 1, 17.

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just showing off, trying to be clever, and in so doing was distorting science to make a
dubious sociological point.
Even Derrida cautioned that autoimmunity “might look like a generalization, without
any external limit, of a biological or physiological model”— before he rejected any
purification of his terms and went on to deploy the idea with abandon.34 And why not?
Like Haraway, Martin, Sloterdijk, Esposito, and many others, Derrida knew he was
working within a common intellectual context. Only when we try to create and sustain a
bipolar ontology, when we police the boundary between nature and society, do we provide
the conditions of possibility for naturalism. As Derrida would point out, such binary logic
is always fallacious. In this sense, the fallacy of the “naturalistic fallacy” is the attempt to
purify the categories of nature and culture, bestowing sovereignty on one category over
the other. It is the fallacy of the moderns. As historians of science, we could do worse than
follow pragmatic immunologists and roguish philosophers in dissolving the artificial and
inadequate membrane created between the natural and the social, or at least in showing its
absurd permeability. That is, we might show how nature and society work as errors of
categorization and confidence tricks— or “con games,” as Erika Milam puts it.

34 Derrida, Rogues (cit. n. 2), p. 109.

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