Search Results

The general question of biological identity has two main aspects, uniqueness (what makes each living thing unique?), and individuality (what ensures that a living thing remain “itself” while constantly changing?). Contemporary immunology, dominated by the concepts of self and nonself, considers these two questions as its province. An important task is to assess this assertion. This chapter defines the two questions of uniqueness and individuality, and explains how immunologists claim to respond them. It emphasizes the necessity to define more precisely the notions of self and nonself, and to articulate the immunological perspective on biological uniqueness and individuality with other biological perspectives, in particular the evolutionary one.

This chapter investigates the different definitions of immunology, in particular the dominant definition stating that immunology is the discipline that studies the defense of organisms against pathogens. The different steps towards the autonomy of immunology as a discipline are examined, from immunization to the elaboration of a theory of immunity, and eventually the institutionalization of the domain. I propose my own definition of immunology as the discipline that studies specific interactions between immune receptors and antigenic patterns, triggering mechanisms that destroy or prevent the destruction of target antigens. I show that, contrary to what has long been believed, every organism has an immune system. I describe several examples of immune systems (in mammals, insects, plants, and even unicellulars). I close this chapter by an analysis of the concepts generally considered as central in immunology, those of “self” and “nonself.”

This chapter focuses on the role of self-identity (or personal identity) in a politics focused on populations and multitudes. The chapter discusses modern conceptions of personhood and the meaning of identity when recognition and personhood are absent. Texts considered in this chapter include Clare's fragmentary essay “Self Identity” and his poems “I Am” and “Invite to Eternity,” which are considered in relation to the innovative ethnographic work of the anthropologist João Biehl and Paul de Man's discussions of selfhood in criticism.

With his idiotypic network theory, Niels Jerne offered an alternative theory to Burnet’s model of self/nonself discrimination. Jerne modeled the immune system as an interconnected latticework of antibodies recognizing and binding to each other. The network was thus constituted as a continuous web-like structure. The model predicted that introduction of antigen disrupted the resting order of the lattice and thereby initiated immune activation. The antigen carried no meaning of its own but, rather, assumed its “foreign” character by its interruption of normal connections. Despite promising early research, the network hypothesis soon fell into disfavor, but the basic idea that an antigen’s meaning is determined by the context of presentation and that immune activation is a collective property of the system-as-a-whole has appeared in new guises, which are reviewed in this chapter.

In this chapter, Daya Krishna reflects on adhyāsa in relation to Advaita Vedānta. That something is taken as something else cannot be a sign of unreality of either, and yet this has been the ground of the rejection of the reality of the nonself by Advaitins since Śankara wrote his famous bhāsya on the Brahmasūtra and described the identification of the self with the nonself as the foundational adhyāsa on which all other erroneous cognitions are based. Krishna revisits issues surrounding samvāda and offers a close (counter) reading of Śankara's introduction to his Brahmasūtra-bhāsya.