A Body Worth Defending
Subtitle: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
By: Ed Cohen
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9780822345183; 9780822345350
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-358) and index.
Table of contents: title: Living before and beyond the law, or a reasonable organism defends itself; title: A body worth having, or a system of natural governance; title: A policy called milieu, or the human organism's vital space; title: Incorporating immunity, or the defensive poetics of modern medicine; title: Conclusion : immune communities, common immunities.