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-defense" 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-defense." In
"A Body Worth Defending," Ed Cohen reveals the 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 the migration of immunity 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 that percolates through European political, legal,
philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical
discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth.
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-defense 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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