A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body

by Ed Cohen

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, History, Science

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Alok Vaid-Menon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense read, but so much genius here. Truly transformed, and especially helpful for thinking through this current moment of pandemic, "herd immunity," and vaccines. Cohen traces how the concept of "immunity" travels from a judicial and legal term to a biological term. At its heart, it's a story about the potency of metaphor. The metaphor of immunity suggests how war/conflict becomes diffused into politics more generally, shaping how we relate to ourselves and the natural world in perpetual conflict. "We imagine that we are fighting off a cold...defense quickly replaces healing as medicine's scientifically approved ethos" (4). In conducting a genealogy of immunity, Cohen is able to trace how our conception of the modern body (flesh enclosed, defined against external others) gets drawn how theology gets displaced into philosophy, the immortal soul molds into the mortal body. It's a story of how secularism, science, and biomedicine become assembled and why. At the end of the book he offers "biological community" as an alternative to "biological immunity" and it's so beautiful I thought I'd quote it in full:

“How might we experience ourselves as organisms if we imagined that coexistence rather than self-defense provides the basis for our well-being? How might we have organized our care for the ill and our systems of healing, or indeed our entire political and economic relations, if we imagined that our ability to respond to corporeal challenge engages our ability to commune with others? Might biological community enable us to appreciate healing not just as a biomolecular phenomenon but also a political, ethical, and material value” (281)

[Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An incredibly dense but well-argued text on how biological immunity infuses political-military assumptions into the body and thereby makes it against and not with the environment. The strongest chapters are the first three. In the introduction, the reader gets exactly what the author is trying to do and the following two chapters digs up the political and economic conceptions (i.e. the body as a property that can be improved using labor). However, the weakest chapters are the two before the conclusion. I hope to reread it soon as it is an original and significant contribution to cultural studies.

[Praise Feng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense but informative and timely as it helps me to think of the relationship between the power and individual bodies during the pandemic, and how the developments in the sciences are not isolated from specific historical moments and sociology-political relations. I appreciate the genealogical study of how the metaphor/rhetoric of “immunity as defence” emerges first as a legal concept and naturalized into biological terms.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was stimulating in some ways, and I learned from it. But it also contains some really specious arguments, and its upshot is more or less that biomedicine fails to foreground the social—true, and worth repeating, but not startling if you read in this area.

The prose is clunky academicese. And history is rendered in the present tense, like a sports announcer talking over the instant replay.

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 4 out of 5]

After having finished this book I would like to edit my review. Originally, I felt it was a very dry book and it didn't really capture my interest. After returning to it, I have found myself with a newfound respect for the depth and critical analysis that Cohen makes regarding the relationship of biological immunity to its jurdicio-historical past. It is a fundamental text for any historian of science studying immunology, politically or biologically.

It is very informative about the relation between politics and our current theoretical framework regarding the immune system and that makes it a very valuable resource. One of my main thoughts is that Cohen seems to assume that the immune system and politics were originally separate and were then brought together, mainly with an overlapping of political discourse onto the immune system. My desire is to see an approach that sees immunity as always/already political and it always containing that potentiality. The main question would be, what if its not a matter of interpreting the immune system in a certain way to fit our politics, but that the immune system itself developed with our politics, and thus of course they would be aligned. - this is as it turns out the approach that Vicki Kirby encourages readers to take and one that Michelle Jamieson takes in her article, "The Politics of Immunity: Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism" which I would say is a MUST READ to follow-up any reading of this book.