The Politics of Immunity

Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism

Bibliographic Data

ID3809012
AuthorsMichelle Jamieson (0000-0003-2333-7549, Macquarie University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume22
Issue4
Pages106-129
Publication date2016-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBody & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1357-034X • E-ISSN: 1460-3632
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1357034x14551843
OpenAlexW1972390074
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited35

The issue of what is proper to nature, or life itself, is central to critical accounts of biomedicine and its complex interrelations with social, political and economic forces. These engagements, namely biopolitical accounts of medical practices and ethical-political critiques of biomedical discourse, grapple with the indistinction between the political and biological that biomedicine enacts. Making a significant contribution to both literatures, Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending argues that the emergence of the concept of biological immunity signals the entry of politics into life itself and, as such, constitutes a concrete example of biopolitics. This article examines Cohen's account of how the political becomes biological, and the view of life it assumes. Seeking to open up the question of biology, it draws on the work of Georges Canguilhem, and New Materialist accounts of matter-meaning entanglement, to offer a reading of knowledge and life, or politics and biology, as ontologically entangled

Biology · Biology and political science · Biomedicine · Biopower · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Materialism · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Systems theory in political science · Law · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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