The Politics of Immunity

New Materialism and Matter–Meaning Entanglement

In recent decades, New Materialist or Material Feminist discussions of the body, biology and science have presented a robust challenge to orthodox engagements with these topics in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Calling for closer attention to matter itself in thinking through questions of subjectivity, politics, ethics, the human, etc., this area of scholarship responds to the exclusion of materiality entailed in the overemphasis on language, discourse and culture epitomized by the linguistic turn. This ‘material turn’ (Der Tuin, 2011: 271), though diverse in its manifestations, ³ is characterized by a concern with complicating the nature/culture binary, critiquing anthropocentrism, reconsidering the agency or vitality of the nonhuman, and addressing knowledge in ontological terms. One of the major themes to emerge from these collective endeavours is the problematization of politics as a distinctly human domain and invention.

Of particular relevance here is a school of New Materialist thought whose proponents argue for a view of life’s ontology as a single system. Instead of approaching matter as an object that underpins or supplements language or discourse, Vicki Kirby, Karen Barad and Elizabeth Wilson open up the question of matter without assuming ontological dichotomies between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, politics and life. For these thinkers, engaging matter does not mean examining the interaction between material and social-political forces construed as separate; nor does it entail ascribing traditionally human attributes (such as agency and politics) to nonhuman objects. Instead, their works demonstrate the ontological entanglement already implicit in these dichotomies, and explore the implications for a variety of issues. For instance, Wilson’s analyses of conversion hysteria (1999), bulimia (2004) and depression (2008) offer detailed engagements with biology and pharmacology that make it impossible to sustain clear divisions between the organic and inorganic, biological and social. Barad’s (2007) examination of the ontology of scientific practices in quantum physics persuasively illustrates how subjects and objects, discourse and matter, are performatively enacted in specific experiments, or moments of observation. And Kirby’s (1997, 2008, 2011) discussions of issues such as the relationship of language to corporeality and the efficacy of scientific models evidence a long-standing intellectual commitment to thinking nature and culture as one system.

In beginning from the position that there is no ‘outside’ the system of life, these scholars ask us to think critically about the disciplinary frames, terms of reference and intellectual investments that secure our analytic perspectives. This is especially relevant to how questions of biology, life and science are addressed in cultural criticism, given the disciplinary emphasis on matters relating to subjectivity, culture and politics. On this point, Kirby draws attention to a general reluctance to engage human subjectivity – in the fullness of its social and political dimensions – in biological terms: ‘we are comfortable with the idea that biology attaches to the self but we are unable to embrace the suggestion that individual human capacities such as cogitation, curiosity and agency are biological expressions’ (2008: 6–7, emphasis in original). She offers a simple but compelling example of this point:

if we were without our skin and we could witness the body’s otherwise invisible processes as we chat to each other, read a presentation aloud, type away at our computers, or negotiate an intense exchange with someone we care about, we might be forced to acknowledge that perhaps the meat of the body is thinking material. If it is in the nature of biology to be cultural – and clearly what we mean by ‘cultural’ is intelligent, capable of interpreting, analysing, reflecting, and creatively inventing and memorialising – then what is this need to exclude such processes of interrogation from the ontology of life? (2011: 75)

Canguilhem: Knowledge of Life

The work of French philosopher and historian of science Georges Canguilhem offers a remarkable illustration of these commitments in thinking about the question of biology, and its relationship to practices of knowledge. Echoing the critique of anthropocentrism explicit in Kirby’s evocation of the human as ‘thoughtful meat’, Canguilhem’s (2008 [1965]) notion of ‘knowledge of life’ captures the ontological confounding of human, cultural activity and biological or organismic existence in the practice of biology. In Knowledge of Life, Canguilhem puts forward a unique elaboration of the relationship between knowledge of biology and biological life that challenges a conventional view of science as a human-centric endeavour grounded in a subject–object separation. Maintaining that biology is always both an object (namely, the substances and processes of organismic life) and the scientific discipline dedicated to its study, he argues for an account of life that resists reducing it to either of these expressions. By insisting that the biologist is not removed from the world but him- or herself a worldly expression, he poses the question of science in terms of a broader question of life.

In Knowledge of Life, Canguilhem takes the life sciences as a biological object. He regards the very existence of the life sciences – that is, of scientific inquiry about life – as a remarkable occurrence, and a phenomenon comparable to any other of, or belonging to, the natural world. Rather than privileging science as something that can only be practised or understood by ‘deferring to the experience of a subject’ (Rose, 1998: 159), he asserts that ‘to do biology…we sometimes need to feel like beasts ourselves’ (2008 [1965]: xx). In other words, Canguilhem reasons that human subjectivity is already an expression or example of biological life, and asks what this must mean for our understanding of science. For him, the devotion of human beings to the tasks of studying, conceptualizing and knowing life is a fascinating characteristic of biological life. Importantly, in rejecting ontological distinctions between nature and culture, animal and human, vital and intellectual, epistemology and ontology, his analysis is made from a position that calls the frameworks and assumptions of humanism and naturalism into question.

Specifically, Canguilhem argues that in the biological sciences the object under investigation and the biologist compelled to knowledge are both instances of biological life. Given that subject and object of inquiry are examples of biology, the life sciences pose a distinct philosophical problem: that life takes itself as an object of knowledge. This dilemma – the study of life, by life – is most clearly illustrated in the empirical example of the biologist. As Foucault outlines in his introduction to The Normal and The Pathological:

the biologist…[is] an object of a type to which he himself belongs, since he lives and he manifests the nature of the living being, he exercises it, he develops it in an activity of knowledge which must be understood as a ‘general method for the direct or indirect resolution of tensions between man and the environment’. (Canguilhem in Foucault, 2007 [1989]: 20)

Here, Foucault explains that Canguilhem’s account of the biological sciences characterizes ‘living being’ as an ‘activity of knowledge’. Paraphrasing Canguilhem, Foucault asserts that the biologist ‘manifests the nature of the living being’ in the act of investigating life. In other words, the biologist is living being in the very moment and task of producing knowledge, and, by extension, scientific inquiry is a biological activity constitutive of the living being of the biologist.

Thus Knowledge of Life radically refigures an orthodox interpretation of both biology and knowledge by suggesting that the very matter of biology is this disciplined effort to better know itself. In conceptualizing knowledge as a biological innovation, and biology as inherently thoughtful and knowing, Canguilhem problematizes the idea of knowledge as purely notional and epistemological, an abstraction guaranteed by the human subject’s cultural enclosure. Within the terms of his analysis, scientific knowledge, in being a human–social construct, is already of the natural world because practices of knowing are basic to the organism’s existence: ‘it is a human living being (as living being) who is, at the same time, a scholar curious about the theoretical solutions to the problems life poses by the very fact of its existence’ (2008 [1965]: 7–8, emphasis in original). Thus for Canguilhem, biology empirically evidences the ontological entanglement of knowledge and life in the event of scientific inquiry.

Immunity’s Political Origins

The relationship of medical and scientific knowledge to biological life is a central concern of Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (2009), which forms the most recent contribution to critical cultural discussions of immunological discourse. ⁴ Continuing in the tradition of Donna Haraway and Emily Martin, Cohen’s text shares a similar concern with the politics of immune system discourse, and asserts that immunology’s dependence on the explanatory value of defence betrays a deep-seated commitment to a political subjectivity grounded in the principles of autonomy, individualism and self-possession. However, unlike them, he offers detailed historical evidence of the specific political subjectivity that finds empirical purchase in biological immunity. Cohen’s analysis brings this generalized concern with the politics of defence into focus both historically and theoretically by anchoring immunity’s taken-for-granted political associations in a lineage of concrete events.

Central to Cohen’s critique is the claim that ‘biological immunity makes the body modern’ (2009: 10, original emphasis). Cohen argues that the emergence of immunity in the areas of biomedicine and bioscience as a basic description of organismic life indicates the biologization – the material actualization – of the modern political subject. He asserts that ‘with the advent of biological immunity’, the ‘monadic modern body’ is realized as a biological entity (2009: 8). As he explains, ‘until the end of the nineteenth century the modern body does not exist, strictly speaking, as a biological body’, but rather, as a ‘political, economic, philosophical, and…psychological phenomenon’ (2009: 7). In making this case, Cohen’s text offers a detailed genealogy that demonstrates how its biological incarnation comes to embody the political, philosophical and historical complexities of the modern subject. Thus at the heart of his text is an ontological argument concerning how our politics becomes biological.

By carefully tracing the course of immunity’s conceptual and historical development, Cohen demonstrates how this originally juridico-political concept belonging to ancient Roman law comes to be adopted within modern immunology as a fundamental principle of organismic and human life. Beginning with immunity’s etymology, his analysis shows how the political and philosophical investments intrinsic to its initial formulation are literally given substance through its later figuration as a biological concept. Significantly, the history that Cohen constructs firmly locates its foundations in the domains of law and politics. He argues that immunity ‘existed as a powerful juridical and political concept for two thousand years before medicine applied the idea to vital contexts’ (2009: 274). Writing from this premise, Cohen presents a chronological narrative that differentiates historically and contextually between immunity’s juridico-political and biological figurations. This narrative structure compartmentalizes the political from the biomedical and biological, and highlights the imaginary and material work involved in immunity’s slow transformation from political concept to biological fact. He explains:

biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor, for that matter, does the idea that organisms defend themselves at cellular and molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years, immunity, a legal concept first conjured in ancient Rome, has functioned almost exclusively as a political and juridical term.…‘Self-defense’ also originates as a political concept, albeit a much newer one, emerging only 350 years ago in the course of the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first ‘natural right.’ One hundred and twenty five years ago, biomedicine fuses these two incredibly difficult, powerful, and yet very different (if not incongruous) political ideas into one, creating ‘immunity-as-defense.’ It then transplants this new biopolitical hybrid into the living human body. We have not been the same since. (2009: 3, original emphasis)

From the outset, Cohen establishes that the concepts of immunity and self-defence originate in the field of politics, not biology. Moreover, he insists: ‘Immunity’s province…has not only historically been political; it has actively served – and continues to serve – to circumscribe the domain of human action that legally constitutes “the political”’ (2009: 45). Early in the first chapter of the text, Cohen gives a detailed account of immunity’s etymology that outlines the term’s original usage in ancient Roman law. He explains that immunity was first used to designate the exemption of certain citizens or citizen groups from the obligations and duties that were required of Roman citizens and which legally constituted their citizenship. Put precisely, immunity described an exceptional category of Roman citizenship based on the lawful suspension of citizenry obligations (2009: 39–45).

Cohen argues that this political meaning is preserved in immunity’s biological incarnation. He asserts that the logic of exemption, as in exemption or freedom from a general law or rule, is fundamental to the immunological interpretation of immunity, in the sense that the immune organism is exempt from the experience of certain infections or diseases to which others are vulnerable. He notes that, long before immunity was established empirically, it ‘appears repeatedly’ in discourses about health ‘as an unspecified, and indeed, unknown, set of conditions that permits some people to “escape” from the epidemic influence of a “reigning illness”’ (2009: 211). Furthermore, Cohen highlights the extent to which the legal logic of exemption informed early understandings of biological immunity:

Prior to Metchnikoff’s revision…when immunity appears in medical texts, it explicitly borrows against its juridico-political inheritance – especially in reference to epidemics. According to immunity’s metaphoric tenor, nature acts precisely as a political sovereign does, affirming its jurisdiction by defining those whom it exempts from its laws. (2009: 207)

Taking politics as its departure point, Cohen’s analysis anticipates, and establishes the groundwork for, an historical narrative that aims to explain how the political, conceived as distinct from the natural, then becomes biological. Implicit in this account is an assumption that biology is not already political. This division is demonstrated in Cohen’s characterization of politics as a distinctly human endeavour that begins with the emergence of the ancient Greek city-state. This figuration of politics as a feature of human culture that arrives historically suggests that politics exists at a remove from the natural world. In Cohen’s genealogy, politics secures the difference between nature and culture, demarcating the human from its natural environment. As such, these sections of the text affirm an initial separation of the two domains that immunity negotiates historically: politics and nature.

This assumed division between politics and life is reinforced in the conceptual tools Cohen uses to account for the ‘transubstantiation’ of juridico-political immunity into ‘biological function’ (2009: 24). To account for this transformation he draws heavily on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, and specifically Foucault’s analysis of political power during the modern era. For Cohen, the historic ‘convergence’ of political life and biological life theorized in the notions of biopower and biopolitics is central to the genealogy he offers and, in fact, is an insight that provokes his investigation of immunity. In this sense, it might be more accurate to say that Foucault’s work provides a theorization of the relationship between politics and life, which Cohen animates or discovers in the case of biological immunity.

Biological Immunity as a Category Error: Mistaking the Political for the Natural

Cohen’s reading of biological immunity as a biopolitical phenomenon is devoted centrally to elucidating the means by which immunity renders the boundary between political and biological life indistinct – how it negotiates, transgresses or transcends the difference between these spheres. Implicit in this project is the idea that it does not belong authentically or correctly to the latter field. Throughout the text, Cohen states that the adoption of immunity from a juridico-political context in itself means that it does not and cannot constitute a neutral or accurate description of physiological function. For him, its later usage within biology is a strained misuse of the term:

The longer I work on this project, the less I understand why it seems obvious to us to use a complex legal and political concept to describe how we coexist as organisms. Taken at face value, immunity has little to recommend it as an organismic possibility…it seems hard not to notice that the trope only works as catachresis. (2009: 14)

Cohen suggests that immunity’s application in a biological context works only insofar as it distorts or perverts its original meaning. Within the historical and epistemological parameters of his analysis, immunity’s biological incarnation appears as a concept out of place. In this sense, Cohen understands it as an improper or erroneous use of a trope that, in being essentially political and cultural, bears no intrinsic relation to the biological phenomenon it has come to represent.

This reading of biological immunity as catachresis is reinforced by the frequent references Cohen makes to the non-accordance between the concept of immunity and the biological reality it purportedly describes. Immunity’s status as a politically mediated description of actual biological processes is repeatedly underscored in the text. For instance, he writes, ‘immunity…does not transparently reveal the material processes of the living organism as it coexists with other living beings in shared environments’, but instead ‘construes the individual as a natural unit’ (2009: 274). This sense of an ontological gap between real biological processes and their representations is explicit in the following statement:

The language of friend and enemy in no way derives from the matter of the world; it does not describe the unfolding of biochemical processes according to immutable natural laws; it does not constitute an unmediated representation of an essential physical truth; rather the trope of friend and enemy has circumscribed Western politics since Aristotle. In fact, it has provided the canonical framework for defining ‘the political’ as such ever since there first was a polis. (2009: 277, emphasis in original)

In this quotation, Cohen clearly differentiates between the rhetoric of immunity, which necessarily organizes our understanding of ‘the political’, and the material referent (‘unfolding…biochemical processes’) whose relationship to this rhetoric is arbitrary. This dichotomy is reflected in Cohen’s references to nature’s ‘immutability’ and its ‘essential’ characteristics, which demonstrate an understanding of biology as an unchanging and enduring substance that precedes and underlies its political and cultural description. Here, Cohen summons the biological in opposition to the political as a counterpoint whose stable anchorage in the material world highlights the contingent and mutable nature of cultural representation.

In highlighting the disparity between the idea of immunity and its underlying reality, Cohen judges immunity’s appropriateness as a biological concept on the basis of its juridico-political heritage. He argues that there is something inherently problematic, or to use his words, ‘patently improper’ (2009: 14) about using political concepts to describe natural phenomena. For instance, expressing alarm at ‘how obviously its “political nature” hides in plain sight’ (2009: 14), he suggests that biological immunity disguises politics as nature. Here, Cohen maintains that immunity’s entry into the field of biology entails the concealment of its juridico-political heritage – an act that compromises the integrity and mutual exclusion of these presumably very different modalities of life.

Here, a number of issues come to mind. First, what is at stake in diagnosing biological immunity political, and therefore inappropriate? It is by now well established that science is a culturally and historically situated enterprise, and that scientific knowledge is never neutral but reflects and embodies the politics of its day (e.g. Daston and Galison, 2007; Keller, 1995; Haraway, 1988). Given this, isn’t immunity’s impropriety simply evidence of the conditions of scientific knowledge production? Second, Cohen’s suggestion that biomedical discourses are only ever approximations of an underlying reality to which we have no direct access raises the issue of how these discourses work empirically. While biological immunity is by no means a perfect concept (some major exceptions include autoimmunity, microchimerism, pregnancy and commensal bacteria) ⁵ there are important instances in which it does have efficacy, most notably, in explaining infectious diseases and vaccines. With this in mind, how could discourses and representations that are contextually specific and contingent be constitutive of material life if they were truly external or foreign to the nature they describe? In Kirby’s words: ‘If all we are ever dealing with are the signs of reality and not reality itself, then why do signs and second-order models of reality have any pragmatic purchase whatsoever?’ (2008: 7).

Cohen’s assertion that immunity ‘has no “natural” significance whatsoever’ (2009: 45) accounts for the relation between life and knowledge as a causal interaction between separate entities, or spheres of activity. Yet, viewed from the perspective of Canguilhem’s reading of biology – as a confounding of discipline and object, an understanding of life as inquiry – knowledge and life (politics and biology) are not distinct ontological domains. Reading Cohen through Canguilhem, there is a very literal sense in which the ‘the language of friend and enemy’ could not derive from anything other than ‘the matter of the world’, because the human – in being a political subject or a scientist – is an ‘unfolding of biochemical processes’ (Cohen, 2009: 277). Put differently, life, when it acts politically or seeks to know itself scientifically, never ceases to be biological. In fact, if we bear in mind Canguilhem’s commitment to understanding human endeavours as biological endeavours, then the practices that have come to be synonyms for our elevation above animality (e.g. language, technology, politics, etc.) are biological in nature. Crucially, this perspective is not a deterministic or naïve naturalism that reduces the complexity of human life to biology (conceived as automatic physiological processes); rather, it is one that appreciates the complexity and error entailed in a life form that is curious and thoughtful by nature. As Canguilhem explains: ‘if thought and knowledge are inscribed within life so as to regulate it – as is the case with man – this very life cannot be the blind and stupid mechanical force that one likes to imagine when one contrasts it to thought’ (2008 [1965]: xviii). Thus if we maintain a view of life as one system – of biology as at once a substrate of physiological activity and a human subject or collectivity that is politically and scientifically articulate and complex – then one could argue that biological immunity evidences a familiarity (in every sense of the word) between politics and life itself. On this view, immunity’s origin cannot be located in a political domain that was not always already a biological domain.

How Our Politics Becomes Biology

Cohen’s assertion that biological immunity constitutes a misappropriation of its original political meaning is consistent with his argument that immunity’s history witnesses the biopolitical transformation of political into natural life. He suggests that immunity works within a biomedical context to the extent that its usage skews its intended political meaning; it is taken from one field of knowledge and applied to another. Here, Cohen’s claim is primarily epistemological: immunity is perceived as moving across different discursive domains, and, as such, it transforms our biology insofar as it transforms medical discourses and practices. This argument is demonstrated in Cohen’s discussion of the diplomatic negotiations between European nations to deal with epidemic outbreaks of cholera (2009: 216–35). He shows that the interventions used to combat the spread of infection (sanitation and quarantine) align with different medical explanations of the disease that support the economic and political interests of individual countries.

However, Cohen refrains from elaborating what immunity’s migration entails biologically. Despite frequent use of terms such as ‘incarnate’, ‘incorporate’, ‘embody’, ‘literalise’ and ‘transubstantiate’ (2009: 274, 34, 34, 225, 24) to describe this transformation, there is little engagement with the biological detail that underpins and secures the generalized discourse of immunity. Instead, these terms – which encapsulate the ontological leap from language to matter (culture to nature) – infer a causal explanation between discourse and biology, where the former infects the latter. He writes:

Those of us who live within the province of Western medical practice incorporate immunity both in our tissues and in our minds. Most of us who rely on allopathic medicine as our primary means of health care now materially embody immunological doctrine (via vaccinations, inoculations, antibiotics, etc.). That is to say, we have been biochemically altered at the cellular, molecular, and perhaps even subatomic levels by the powerful consequences of this transformative image. Furthermore, we not only recognise ourselves through the frame of biological immunity (e.g., believing that we have an immune system or that our bodies defend themselves against pathogens) but also hold that immunity tells us something fundamentally true about our experiences of health and illness. In doing so, we make immunity matter. (2009: 34)

This passage describes the body as an object materially transformed by medical practices engendered by the discourse of immunity. Here, Cohen views biology as an inert mass that is subjected to, and modified by, a series of external biomedical instruments and interventions (such as vaccination and antibiotics). Within this frame, political concepts enter biology insofar as they structure and inform biotechnological and clinical practices that alter bodies themselves. For Cohen, immunity becomes a biological phenomenon as a consequence of the instrumental and technical applications of this discourse. This causality is further affirmed in the assertion that ‘we make immunity matter’, which suggests that immunity’s material purchase as a biological principle relates to the fact that we invest it with meaning and significance.

In figuring matter as a passive object shaped by discursive practices, Cohen argues that immunity transforms our biology to the extent that it transforms medical knowledge and practice (construed as linguistic, political and cultural). Thus, his critique provides an account of how the concept moves across discursive domains. For instance, he states that ‘immunity metaphorically carries over the legal logic that historically animates it into biological texts and contexts’ (2009: 49); and the concept of self-defence enters ‘the nature of living matter’ ‘by analogy’ (2009: 55). As such, the question of how immunity is biologized falls outside the parameters of Cohen’s analysis: his many references to the body’s fleshy materiality (e.g. cells, molecules) are references to ways of knowing or construing this materiality, which, we are led to believe, are not inherent to these processes of knowing or construing (itself), as Canguilhem might have it.

Naturalization: Biopolitics as an Immunological Narrative

Cohen accounts for the efficacy of immunity’s mis-contextualization by arguing that juridico-political immunity is naturalized as a biological concept. He intends this in the most literal sense: immunity, which he interprets as belonging properly to politics and therefore foreign to the study of biology, is adopted in biomedicine as though it were native to this sphere.

Significantly, Cohen’s interpretation of naturalization is given in his use of immunological concepts as metaphors to describe immunity’s appropriative transfer from politics to biomedicine. He writes, ‘[i]mmunity incarnates ideas about human being from modern politics, economics, law, philosophy, and science, which then belatedly achieve scientific status when immunity inoculates them into the living organism and thereby validates them as essentially “natural”’ (2009: 8, emphasis added). A few pages earlier, he states, ‘[i]mmunity strangely grafts or inoculates both military and political potentials into human biology as an entangled mode of explanation’ (2009: 6, emphasis added). And with reference to the notion of ‘immunity-as-defense’, Cohen claims that ‘biomedicine…transplants this new biopolitical hybrid into the living human body’ (2009: 3, emphasis added). In each of these instances, Cohen refers to therapeutic practices as literary devices to describe how political and cultural ideas are naturalized as biological concepts. Grafting, inoculation and transplantation – which refer to immunological processes of naturalization – serve as metaphors for the means by which immunity negotiates the boundary between the fields of politics and biology. In appropriating these immunological concepts, Cohen infers a mechanistic explanation of how these areas of life become intertwined such that biology becomes a political enterprise.

Although grafting, transplantation and inoculation refer to quite different procedures, they are nevertheless grounded in a common immunological principle: namely, immunity. In each instance, the body is induced to tolerate something foreign to itself (non-self) as native (self) – that is, it is conditioned to no longer elicit the same harmful response to that foreign agent. In the cases of grafting (allografts) and transplantation, the host’s active defence mechanisms are suppressed so that it will accept tissues (for example, vital organs) from foreign donors of the same species. Here, foreign tissues are supported, nourished and incorporated physiologically by the body as though they were part of that body (native to the self), and, as such, they become part of that body. In the case of inoculation, a small amount of attenuated viral material is injected into the host to induce the generation of specific antibodies that, upon later infection, proliferate within, and protect, the host. Inoculation describes the process by which the host body alters its response to subsequent infections by the same foreign agent from harmful to harmless. This alteration in response corresponds with a transformation in the identity of the antigenic substance – from toxic (non-self) to benign (self) – specific to that body. As such, grafting, transplantation and inoculation each describe an initial instance of infection (the penetration of one enclosed entity by another) that sets in motion a process of naturalization (the transformation of an entity’s status from foreign to native).

In employing these concepts to describe immunity’s migration, Cohen argues that politics infects biomedicine. He construes this infection as catalysing a process of naturalization, where politics, viewed as foreign (external) to biological phenomena, is incorporated into biomedicine as though it were natural to this domain. Here, Cohen imagines the political and the biological in the conventional immunological terms of self and non-self (native and foreign, inside and outside), and suggests that politics contaminates or infringes upon a sphere (an entity or body) to which it doesn’t normally or natively belong.

There is a striking resemblance between the underlying logic of these immunological procedures and the critical-theoretical framework Cohen employs to make his argument, namely, the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Crucially, Cohen’s interpretation and application of immunological concepts reflects his reading of Foucault: one that is consistent with an orthodox interpretation of immune events, and thus grounded in the principle of immunity. His reading of biopolitics draws heavily on the trope of infection, and thus on the linear, causal model of immunological explanation it implies. In this sense, his interpretation of biopolitics as an historical phenomenon begins from the assumption of a familiar series of agonisms including self/other, native/foreign, nature/politics, normal/pathological. Importantly, it is this agonistic understanding of relationality that Cohen installs in one instance, which he disputes and rejects in another.

Rethinking the Nature of Nature

Cohen conceptualizes power’s historical, biopolitical transformation as the naturalization of politics, or the politicization of life, such that after this point, political and biological life can no longer be separated. Here, naturalization and politicization are processes by which life becomes denaturalized. This account of biopolitics assumes the existence of a natural, pre-political state that precedes the moment of infection (in this case, modernity). At stake in Cohen’s genealogy, then, is an investment in a fixed, immutable nature that precedes the human and politics. This commitment is most evident when, in emphasising the essentially political nature of immunity, he asserts the inherent ‘naturalness’ of an alternative conception: organismic coexistence. He writes ‘immunity…does not transparently reveal the material processes of the living organism as it coexists with other living beings in shared environments’ (2009: 274). And at other points he questions ‘why it seems obvious to us to use a complex legal and political concept to describe how we coexist as organisms’ (2009: 14). Here, the notion that organisms naturally coexist in shared environments is a point evoked as axiomatic and non-political.

Biomedical interventions are certainly responsible for changing life in remarkable and irreversible ways (e.g. through the use of vaccines, antibiotics, etc.). However, if life is viewed as one system – as the entanglement of matter and meaning, knowledge and life, intellectual and vital – then the characterization of this change needs to be rethought. From this perspective, the denaturalization of life must, like knowledge, science, politics, etc., be a unique capacity of life. This view animates a different set of questions: What does life’s responsivity to cultural and political determinations suggest about the nature of biology? That is, could these biomedical concepts and practices be viewed as telling of the nature of the life forms they investigate, articulate and modify? And how might this challenge or change our understanding of what constitutes the domain of biology?

Understanding biology in Canguilhem’s terms as a confounding of knowledge and life refigures the terms of reference that secure a conventional reading of immunity’s history. If the human, politics and knowledge are never outside biology, but properly biological expressions, then immunity’s history need not be read as a case of misappropriation. Rather, it evidences of the entanglement of politics, knowledge and human subjectivity in and as life. Politics, then, is not something that arrives historically, outside or above the biological, but is indicative of life’s tendency toward self-inquiry. If knowledge issues from, and is a direct expression of, the life that it interrogates, then immunity – even in the moments when it fails as a scientific concept – is never not biological. Thought in these terms, immunity’s history is a remarkable illustration of the political and historical complexity of life itself.