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Notes
1 There are several versions of Katherine Craster’s ‘The Centipede’s Dilemma’, poem that speaks nicely to the paradoxical incoherence of subjectivity or personhood. We assume we are decision-making agents and yet we can’t account for how those decisions are made. Of relevance here is Benjamin Libet’s pioneering work in the 1980s on the neuroscience of volition. He observed an apparent lag between the neurological registration of decision-making activity – an unconscious ‘decision’ to flex a finger - and the conscious awareness of our intention to do so. On a first reckoning the experiments appear to confound what we mean by agency, and their interpretation is much debated as a consequence. Indeed, Libet himself was not persuaded that the results compromised individual freedom (See Libet, Mind Time).
2 The notion of ‘autoimmunity’ fascinates researchers, even in the humanities and social sciences, because it destabilises the integrity of a departure point and the conventional logic of cause and effect. In simple terms, we tend to think of change as an external force – for example, time and the vicissitudes of life - that alters ‘something’ that was previously unchanged. However, the medical definition of autoimmunity presents us with a more complicated story: in this case, we learn that the integrity of the individual organism, or self, was never intact: ‘The healthy human body is equipped with a powerful set of tools for resisting the onslaught of invading microorganisms (such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites). Unfortunately, this set of tools, known as the immune system, sometimes goes awry and attacks the body itself. These misdirected immune responses are referred to as autoimmunity, which can be demonstrated by the presence of autoantibodies or T lymphocytes reactive with host antigens.’ (Johns Hopkins Autoimmune Disease Research Center). The implication here is not simply that this individual, or self, is also attacked from the inside. More alarmingly, a question arises about the very status of an individual if ‘it’ is constitutionally undone.
3 For important historical references that introduce the problematic aspects of immunity discourse, see Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,” Martin, Flexible Bodies and Napier, The Age of Immunology.
4 Osteoarthritis used to be explained in terms of external causes, such as ‘wear and tear’ on the joint, whereas rheumatoid arthritis was regarded as an autoimmune disease. Today, the former has also been described as an immune response. It is as if the body is reacting to a ‘chronic wound’ or protracted inflammation that it produces itself in the form of ‘endogenous “danger signals”’ (Scanzello, Plaas and Crow, “Innate immune system activation in osteoarthritis: is osteoarthritis a chronic wound?” 565). It has become routine in the medical literature to describe this perversity in terms of misrecognition. See also Orlowsky and Byers Kraus, “The Role of Innate Immunity in Osteoarthritis: When Our First Line of Defense Goes on the Offensive.”
5 In Australia, a ‘mere’ handshake captured the nation’s interest on the eve of the 2004 Federal Election. Mark Latham, the opposition hopeful, was seen to seize the then Prime Minister’s hand, to yank him awkwardly with an inward jerk, and to then pump his arm with unseemly aggression. Even supporters saw the handshake as a sign of Latham’s emotional immaturity and lack of statesmanship, and his aspirations were quickly dashed as a consequence. (See ‘Mark Latham shakes John Howards hand’).
6 See Mackay, “Travels and Travails of Autoimmunity: A historical journey from discovery to rediscovery.”
7 Thomas Pradeu notes that Burnett remained uneasy about the distinction and offered alternatives towards the end of his life, however “unfortunately, these [Burnett’s] revisions were paid scant attention by his contemporaries who remained, in their great majority, dedicated to the strict differentiation between self and nonself” (see The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity, 81).
8 Cited in Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 26.
9 Ibid., 27.
10 Ibid.
11 For a provocative and detailed analysis of A Body Worth Defending, see Jamieson, “The Politics of Immunity: Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism.”
12 Matzinger in Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 29.
13 An interesting illustration of how such questions might pay dividends can be seen in the career move of astrophysicist, Paul Davies, into the medical sphere of cancer research. Quite specifically, his given task is to radically reconsider the ontological status of cancer. Although Davies doesn’t discount the sense of cancer as threat, dysfunction and pathology, he qualifies this reading when he reminds us that cancer is inherent to all of life, even plants. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that the cellular behaviours of cancer are also described in terms of atavistic survival and endurance strategies, as if each cell can be seen as a lone entity whose most basic aspiration is to endure. Zeeya Merali, commenting on Davies’ work, notes, ‘[Cancer] cells jettison higher functionality and switch their dormant ability to proliferate back on in a misguided attempt to survive. “Cancer is a fail-safe,” Davies remarks. “Once the subroutine is triggered, it implements its program ruthlessly”. (see Merali, “Physicists’ model proposes evolutionary role for cancer”). What interests me here is that all cells carry these atavistic memories such that their ‘true’ program must comprehend an historical record whose triggers can sustain and sabotage at the same time. Given this, why do we assume that the life of each cell is, or should be, subordinated in some way to a larger biological entity whose sovereign existence demands it? Are terms such as ‘atavistic’, ‘misguided’, ‘higher functionality’ and ‘program’ justifiable if the identity of the sovereign self proves elusive?
14 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 27.
15 See Magnusson et al., “Relationships between diet-related changes in the gut microbiome and cognitive flexibility.”
16 Stauth, “High Fat and Sugar Diets May Lead to Loss of Cognitive Flexibility.”
17 See Wilson, Gut Feminism.
18 Martone, “The Neuroscience of the Gut – Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract.”
19 Young, “Gut instincts: The secrets of your second brain.”
20 Smith, “Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?”
21 Ibid.
22 I note in passing that a recent issue of New Scientist (January 9, 2016) offers a rather dramatic example of why the autos, or sovereign self, cannot be immunised against the other. Under the compelling title, “Strangers within: meet the other humans who live in your body,” we learn about the phenomenon of michrochimerism, which also has implications for immunity/autoimmunity. It seems that the barrier between mother and child in placentation is not absolute but strangely capricious, something which explains why cells with Y chromosomes can appear in the brains of mothers. I offer a brief description of just one aspect of such implications, aptly subtitled ‘A family affair’: ‘Take, for example, a woman pregnant with a baby girl, her second child. We know that michrochimeric cells can stick around for decades, so it’s easy to imagine cells from her eldest still running around her body. They could get transferred to her new baby. If the eldest was a boy, the daughter now has cells from her brother. These could conceivably be passed on when the daughter has a child of her own – who would therefore have cells from their uncle’ (Ridgway, “Strangers within: meet the other humans who live in your body”). I first came across this fascinating phenomenon in the work of Myra Hird (“Chimerism, mosaicism and the cultural construction of kinship”) and Rebecca Yoshizawa (Placentations: Agential Realism and the Science of Afterbirths).
23 Naas, ‘“One Nation…Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God’,” 18.
24 Catherine Malabou’s work is exemplary of this turn. See Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction.
25 Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, 45.
26 Derrida in Kearney, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” 65.
27 Derrida in Vitale, “The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction,” 109.
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Vicki Kirby
Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She recently edited What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2017). Books include Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke University Press, 2011), and Judith Butler: Live Theory (Continuum 2006). She teaches regularly in Europe and was Erasmus Mundus Professor at Utrecht University in 2013. In 2015 she was Visiting Professor at the Winter School, Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Bern, Switzerland. She has articles forthcoming in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour and Philosophia, and a chapter in David Wood, Matthias Fritsch, Phil Lynes (eds.), Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Ethics. Fordham University Press. Email: [email protected]