Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2000).
For the historical appearance of this concept of biological immunity in the nineteenth century, and in connection to responses to the cholera pandemic in Europe, see Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke University Press, 2009).
With the word “army” I am referencing a Darwinian discourse that pits the immunocompromised against the group that presumably can fight. My usage is also reminiscent of the term “loser militia” that artist Jesse Darling uses in her work Neoliberal Agitprop Poster (2013). See the discussion of this and other works by Darling in Giulia Smith, “Chronic Illness as Critique: Crip Aesthetics Across the Atlantic.” Art History 44, no. 2 (2021): 286–310.
See →.
Ed Cohen, “Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self but Not Self, or the Knotty Paradoxes of ‘Autoimmunity’: A Genealogical Rumination,” in Autoimmunities, ed. by Stefan Herbrechter (Routledge, 2018), 29.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984).
“We want to see how autoimmunity became thinkable,” write Warwick Anderson and Ian R. MacKay in their conceptual history of autoimmunity: Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmune Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 4. The adjective “autoimmune” was first used in 1951, and the noun “autoimmunity” coined in 1957. The brief overview of the history of autoimmunity in this paragraph and the next is based on Anderson and MacKay’s account.
Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 3. Cohen’s book provides a masterful analysis of this merger’s (bio)political, economic, and medical implications.
This prohibition against self-harm was proposed by the immunologist Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), who called the idea of “autotoxins” “dysteleological in the highest degree.” Cited in Arthur M. Silverstein, “Autoimmunity: A History of the Early Struggle for Recognition,” in The Autoimmune Diseases, 6th Edition, ed. Noel R. Rose and Ian R. MacKay (Academic Press), 10.
Cited in Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 34.
Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 48–49.
Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 2–3.
Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 3–4.
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 2003).
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” n.p.
Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 74–76. This theory, which earned Burnet a Nobel Prize in 1960, is still accepted today as the mechanism of the immune response.
Burnet, cited in Anderson and MacKay, Intolerant Bodies, 89.
Anderson and MacKay situate the discovery of autoimmunity within the Cold War context of “cybernetics, and theories of command and control” (143) as well as “significant postwar investments in clinical research” (49), which Burnet and his colleagues benefited from, especially in the US. For an insightful analysis of the Cold War mobilization of the “post-ideological ideology” of individual freedom, see Antonia Majaca, “Odysseus of the Nimble Wits: The Spirits of Totalitarianism and the Cultural Cold War’s Entscheidungsproblem,” in Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, ed. Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca (Sternberg Press, 2021), 123–49.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (Routledge, 2002), and Rogues (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Marina Vishmidt, “Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 8 (2020): 35. For a perspective that focuses more specifically on contemporary art, see Smith, “Chronic Illness as Critique.”
In fact, Cohen’s “known unknown” refers not just to the unknown etiology, since even on the level of the accepted description of (auto)immune response, grounded in Burnet’s account of differentiation between self and other, it is still unclear why the body would not launch a lymphocyte response to “friendly” bacteria in the gut microbiome, or a fetus in pregnancy—all questions that some immunologists have posed to challenge the classical model. Cohen thus wonders whether “immunology’s unquestioned appropriation of a logical opposition—derived from and embedded in Western thought’s governing epistemo-political ontology—as a bio-logical axiom unnecessarily limits our capacity to grasp our own complicated nature as living beings.” Cohen, “Self, Not-Self, Not Not-Self but Not Self,” 30.
The video recording of the lecture-performance, which took place at Indeks, Stockholm, is here: →. See also the essays by Maria Lind and Brian Kuan Wood written in conjunction with Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition “Insurgency of Life” at e-flux in New York, 2020: Maria Lind, “What Is Wrong with My Nose: From Gogol and Freud to Goldin+Senneby (via Haraway),” e-flux journal 108 (April 2020) →; Brian Kuan Wood, “Insurgency of Life,” e-flux journal 109 (May 2020) →.
Goldin+Senneby, Star Fish and Citrus Thorn, lecture-performance script shared with the author by email. All ensuing quotes from the discussion of the performance are from this script.
Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,“ New Left Review, no. 92 (2015): 128.
“Extra-institutional and, perhaps, extradiscursive, authotheory has the potential to become ‘the next big turn’ in visual culture and literary studies.” Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021), 2.
The argument proposing that Freud’s retreat on his “seduction theory” was not performed in good faith has been controversially made by Jeffrey Moussaieff, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Penguin Press, 1985).
This is the experience recounted by Carolyn Lazard in their text “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” The Cluster Mag, January 2013. Lazard identifies as nonbinary; the dismissal of their complaints as “hysterical” nonetheless illustrates the gendered response of the medical professionals who treated Lazard. For more on Lazard’s own artistic work on autoimmunity, see Smith, “Chronic Illness as Critique.”
Yehuda Shoenfeld, Infection and Autoimmunity (Academic Press, 2015).
On the philosophical implications of epigenesis, see Catharine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Polity, 2016).
Olga Khazan, “A Breakthrough in the Mystery of Why Women Get So Many Autoimmune Diseases,” The Atlantic, June 18, 2019.
H. Okada et al., “The ‘Hygiene Hypothesis’ for Autoimmune and Allergic Diseases: An Update,” Clinical and Experimental Immunology 160, no. 1 (2010): 1–9.
The WHO cites antibiotic resistance as “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today” →.
Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin Books, 2015).
Arndt Manzel et al. “Role of ‘Western Diet’ in Inflammatory Autoimmune Diseases,” Current Allergy and Asthma Reports 14, no.1 (2014): 1.
Majaca, “Odysseus of the Nimble Wits,” 140.
Derrida, Rogues, 123.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (Abacus, 2014).
Sharmila Rudrappa, “Famines, Fertility Interventions, and Death: Modernization Projects in Southern India,“ e-flux architecture, April 2021 →.
See the discussion of Louis Althusser’s “absent cause“ in Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Duke University Press, 2011), 55–59, or, via Jacques Rancière’s reading, in Jaleh Mansoor, “Militant Landscape: Notes on Counter-Figuration From Early Modern Genre Formation to Contemporary Practices, or, Landscape After the Failure of Representation.” ARTmargins 10, no. 1 (2021): 20–38.
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.
Fiona Filder and John Wilcox, “Reproducibility of Scientific Results,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition) →.
Ironically, one of the major points of contention that has drawn a boundary between the supposedly oppositional realms of science and anti-science—namely, vaccination—was the invention of a nineteenth-century scientist who took a cue from vernacular knowledge, borrowing the anecdotal evidence of a farmer who successfully inoculated himself and his family against cowpox. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity From Antiquity to the Present (Fontana Press, 1999).
See →.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017). Scott borrowed his title from an earlier investigation along the same lines: Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (Paw Prints, 2008).
Felicity Lawrence, “Can the World Quench China’s Bottomless Thirst for Milk?” The Guardian, March 29, 2019 →.
Diane Kriz Kay, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (Yale University Press, 2008). It is of course precisely refined sugar, as well as refined wheat, that is thought to be the most detrimental to health.
Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
For one of the most theoretically rigorous and illuminating readings, see Sami Khatib, “Where the Past Was, There History Shall Be,” in “Discontinuous Infinities: Walter Benjamin and Philosophy,” ed. Jan Sieber and Sebastian Truskolaski, special issue, Anthropology & Materialism (2017) →.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Although Husserl speaks of “the crisis of the European sciences” as inherent to the “internal” historicity of science and philosophy, his account must also be seen against the background of his own experience as a philosopher of Jewish origins who, with the rise of the Nazis, suddenly lost his identity as a German and European intellectual, together with his right to partake in intellectual life. See Ronald Bruzina, Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938 (Yale University Press, 2004).
Consent Not to Be a Single Being names a trilogy of Fred Moten books published by Duke University Press: Black and Blur (2017), Stolen Life (2018), and The Universal Machine (2018).