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This chapter offers a critique of the self-nonself theory. I first analyze data on autoreactivity and normal autoimmunity, in particular phagocytosis and regulatory cells, in order to reject the idea that self constituents do not trigger immune responses. In a second step, thanks to a description of immune tolerance to genetically foreign entities, including the fetus and huge amounts of commensal and symbiotic bacteria, I reject the idea that every nonself triggers an immune response of rejection. I show that every organism is “impure” in so far as it contains a great number of “nonself” constituents. I conclude that the self-nonself theory is experimentally inadequate, and conceptually too vague to still be used as a satisfying scientific framework to explain the triggering of immune responses.

This chapter compares the continuity theory that I propose with the other theories available in today’s immunology, including the self-nonself theory, the systemic theory of the immune “network” (Jerne), the autopoiesis framework (Maturana, Varela, Coutinho), the self-organization theory (Cohen and Atlan), and the danger theory (Matzinger). I emphasize the aspects that the continuity theory borrowed or inherited from these theories, as well as the many aspects on which it differs from them. I show that some frameworks elaborated to understand the immune system are not genuine scientific theories, but rather mere “viewpoints” on immunity. I insist that no framework has, up to now, succeeded in taking into account the importance of both innate immunity and immune tolerance – two aspects that are at the center of the continuity theory.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is considered an autoimmune chronic inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (CNS) characterized by demyelination and axonal damage. The view of MS as a “two-stage disease”, with a predominant inflammatory demyelination in the early phase (relapsing-remitting MS form) and a subsequent secondary neurodegeneration in the early phase (secondary or primary progressive MS) of the disease, is now challenged by the demonstration that axonal destruction may occur independently of inflammation and may also produce it. Therefore, as CNS inflammation and degeneration can coexist throughout the course of the disease, MS may be a “simultaneous two-component disease”, in which the combination of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration promotes irreversible disability. This chapter discusses factors that contribute to the pathogenesis of MS, immune surveillance in the CNS, regulation of immune responses in the inflamed CNS, initiation of T helper 1 (Th1)-mediated immune reactions in the inflamed CNS, amplification of Th1-mediated immune responses in inflamed CNS and tissue damage, and development of autoimmunity in MS.

The immune system is characterized by a complex network of cells and organs specialized to extinguish foreign invaders or malfunctioning cells of the organism. Although innate immunity, B-cell function via antibody responses, and cytotoxic T lymphocytes are very important for protection of the body, T cells play a central role in the immune system and are more important for its regulation. This chapter discusses T-cell regulation within the immune system, along with central and peripheral tolerance mechanisms of positive and negative selection, anergy, and deletion. Immunomodulation in the nervous system as well as vascular system during inflammation and autoimmunity is described using the paradigms of two complex pathological conditions: multiple sclerosis and atherosclerosis. The role of T cells and T regulatory cells in breaking or maintaining tolerance is examined, together with the proposed ways of their therapeutic manipulations to ameliorate disease progression.

For several decades the incidence of NHL has increased more rapidly than that of almost any other cancer. Established risk factors such as immunosuppression, autoimmunity, and certain infectious agents explain at most only a small fraction of the cases. Other possible risk associations include particular food products, medications, pesticides, and hair dyes. Recent evaluations of epidemiologic patterns of NHL according to histologic subtype have documented clear differences among the different NHL subtypes, which strongly suggests they may also have different risk factor profiles.

Drawing on ‘queer-crip’ theories which expose the normative conditions of social participation, this chapter examines a range of works concerning illness, impairment and disability to examine the relationship between bodily propriety and neoliberalism’s preference for self-sufficient, ‘immune’ citizens. First exploring notions of responsibility which surround the representation of illness and disability, discussion examines the tension between care and self-care, and the cultural narratives which link charity, responsibility and individual agency. By challenging narrow and prejudicial notions of atypical bodies and neurologies, solo performance suggests new ways of understanding the ethics of intersubjective exposure. Featured practitioners: Brian Lobel, Robert Softley, Katherine Araniello, Bobby Baker, the vacuum cleaner, Martin O’Brien.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the critical tradition that ascribes a prophetic status to Kafka's texts. Skeptical of the contention that Kafka's writings were realized after his death, it tries to instead theorize Kafka's claim for their apocalyptic destiny. The chapter does so by drawing a correlation between the inscriptional machine in “In the Penal Colony” and Derrida's hypothesis of a textual programming machine that programs in advance Nietzsche's appropriation by Nazi politics. It further demonstrates how Kafka's story functions as a programming machine capturing the inscriptional apparatus of the concentration camps (tattooed numbers), thereby manifesting itself as an apocalyptic text. The chapter concludes by examining Kafka's text in relation to Derrida's thought on autoimmunity. What is at stake is the way in which a dangerous piece of private writing might be said to struggle for its public existence against an author who would consign it to oblivion.

This chapter attempts to develop the three principal theses that run throughout “Faith and Knowledge.” While Derrida does not himself identify these three theses as such, this chapter shows the extent to which they structure the entirety of Derrida’s essay. That there are two sources of religion, that in order to indemnify one of these two sources religion must enlist the forces of technoscience, and that religion and science share a source in a kind of originary faith that makes all community possible—these theses are at the center of “Faith and Knowledge.” It is also in this chapter that the autoimmune relationship between religion and science, and particularly religion and the media, is developed.

This chapter explains (in the light of Derrida's work) how a nation can be undivided, by autoimmunity and democracy, especially in Europe and America. It examines Derrida's notion of autoimmunity, and looks at the consequences of a terminological shift (deconstruction) for understanding Derrida's entire collection of works.

This chapter uses Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis to explain ideas enclosed in Derrida's work about identity and autoimmunity. Cosmopolis illustrates what Derrida argued in many texts, namely, the essential self-destruction or autoimmunity of every auto as a self-affirming identity. The autos at the center of DeLillo's novel relate to the automobile, in this sense, a super-stretch limousine.

Focusing on “X mosaicism” theories of female biology, health, and behavior, this chapter examines the longstanding and infrequently questioned association of the X with femaleness. Drawing strongly on resonances between traditional ideas of femininity and the concepts of chimerism, mixedness, and two-ness, human X mosaicism theories seek the origins of mysterious “female maladies” and female behavior in their doubled Xs. Analyzing X mosaicism theories of female biology and behavior and X-chromosomal theories of the higher incidence of autoimmunity in women, this chapter shows how gendered assumptions operate to sustain and cohere hypotheses of dubious empirical merit in high-priority areas of women’s health research. Sourcing notions of the X as female, and chimerism as feminine, X mosaicism theories of female biology and behavior present a poignant case of gendered conceptions of biological objects of analysis influencing scientific reasoning.

Lope de Vega's famous play about a popular uprising and revolt throws the “organ transplant” logic of sovereignty into crisis. Here, the conceptual and representational operations of transfer and transplant that effectively restored sovereignty in Measure for Measure are confronted with a dual resistance to the law's desire to “have the body,” as the structures of sovereignty protection turn on themselves in an act of political and philosophical autoimmunity.

This chapter explores the nexus of race and sexuality in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. It shows how the novel exploits the multiple and contradictory meanings of “stain” in order to reconceptualize the human as fundamentally haunted by the bestial traces it disavows. In addition to race, animality, and sexuality, “stain” also marks the discrimination that inheres in all social relations. Indeed, the abjection of Coleman Silk both for his perceived racism and for his sexual activities mirrors the exclusionary violence it aims to denounce. It constructs him as a rogue threat to the ideals of equality and inclusivity, even though such principles are always already undermined by what Derrida describes as the autoimmunitary character of democracy--its failure to materialize the ideals of inclusivity that it champions. That all aspirations to universal inclusivity necessarily fall short of achieving their ideals attests to the autoimmunitary response inherent in various forms of community, kinship, and belonging, which inevitably produce “beasts” notwithstanding our apparent desire for nonviolence.

Derrida’s later work is marked by an apparent hostility to Islam.  Derrida claimed that Islam was “the other of democracy.”  He supported the coup that forestalled the likely victory of Algerian Islamists in democratic elections, arguing for the idea of democratic autoimmunity.Though he freely acknowledged his debts to Judaism and Christianity, he insisted on his distance from Islam, the Muslim philosophic tradition, and Arabic.  Yet five times a day for the first nineteen years of his life Derrida heard the Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, sound over the city.  Derrida is often seen in and through the figure of the Marrano, but what is concealed in his work is not Judaism but Islam.This chapter contends that the concerns recorded and recited in the adhan are inscribed in Derrida’s philosophy, most notably in the imperative to bear witness, and that Derrida’s work obliquely acknowledges the costs of exclusion of the Muslim.  Reading Derrida conscious of the hidden Muslim, the phantom friend, re-opens the possibilities of democracy for Muslims, and for all the Abrahamic faiths.

This essay provides a new framework for understanding Derrida’s engagement with religious concepts and challenges the numerous theological accounts of deconstruction. The proliferation of apparently religious terms in Derrida’s late works—which Hägglund here examines through the triad of faith, the unconditional, and the messianic—has given rise to a widespread notion that there was a “religious turn” in Derrida’s thinking. In contrast, Hägglund argues that Derrida engages religious concepts in accordance with a logic of “radical atheism.” Radical atheism does not pursue an external critique of religious concepts, but rather seeks to read these concepts against themselves, thereby unearthing their atheological and irreligious condition of possibility. Hägglund pursues this argument with regard to basic notions of good and evil, showing how Derrida’s notion of “radical evil” entails a revaluation of established religious values and illuminating what is at stake in the “autoimmunity” of living beings.

Derrida’s whole thinking (e.g. from trace to text to iterability, spectrality and autoimmunity) can be understood as an attention paid to forms of survival or surviving. So, how alive or dead are different formulations of that thinking?

Immune theory is based on constructions of individuality, agency, and selfhood, each of which suffers ontological ambiguity as debated by philosophers of biology. In the setting of immunology, circumscribed identity has been further deconstructed by recent appreciation of the prevalence of symbiosis. How mutualistic relationships impact development, physiology, and evolution has focused attention on immune tolerance as the active mechanism that establishes such cooperative relationships between species. These findings have broken disciplinary boundaries so that a new amalgam has emerged that studies how immunity impacts ecological, evolutionary, and developmental biology. The most immediate research has focused on the ecology–immunology interface, so-called “eco-immunology,” which has turned immunology’s focus from the insular individual to the full ecological setting of exchange that immunity must facilitate. These developments are shifting immunology’s governing concepts of insular individuality to a dialectical construction of immune identity.