The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies

by Mark Neocleous

The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight—Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty—Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder.

Wide-ranging and polemical, Politics of Immunity lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Medicine, Science, History

368 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2022

Reviews

[Nicole HPK · Rating 5 out of 5]

It turns out that even if we believe the system is autopoietically self-regulating, it is still regulating itself to death

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting ideas, though some of the material does not entirely connect. the birth of immunology and the immune system in political historical context was fascinating, but i felt it was missing some important analysis. perhaps i missed it, but i don't remember reading much about how surveillance and policing are intimately tied to race- and gender-making enterprises, nor do I remember explicit mention of the role of colonization in developing surveillance techniques/technologies. i find the exclusion of the latter particularly surprising, given lengthy discussion of sovereignty throughout the text, and its transmutations over time.

was also (naively) hoping for more guidance on how to explain the conditions and processes we associate with "the immune system" and its "dysregulation" without relying on narratives of surveillance, othering, and policing of difference. as always, leaving with no answers, and many more questions, but it's certainly helpful to be unsettled.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starts a little slow and is very theoretically-focused. The book dives deep into the origins of the language around immunity and that can make for some dry reading. However, in the latter 2/3rds of the book, the energy picks up, as though the author feels the groundwork has been laid and he can focus on the ideas he'd been building to the whole time. And that's where the book is most interesting: when it examines the idea of sovereignty, violence, and the state's use of immunity as a metaphor to justify all of it.

[Ewan Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a plethora of information in here, however I found myself lost often. Also trigger warning for some, like myself, much talk of the death drive and suicide. This had me take several breaks before being able to complete the reading.