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- Title
"God has No Allergies": Immanent Ethics and the Simulacra of the Immune System.
- Authors
Mackenzie, Adrian
- Abstract
We know that biopower — the extension of relations of power over life, throughout all its unfolding — is currently a crucial site of ethical concern. Yet conventional approaches to ethics aim to contain that concern outside the embodied ethos, as if there exists a clean division between social/moral and objective biological domains. Following the example of immunology, this essay argues that such a containment overlooks the ethical import of somatic individuation. In immunological models of individuation, two forces of ancient metaphysical provenance contest the field: the iconic and the simulacral. The theoretical-pragmatic complex of immunology is shot through with the traces of their divergence and disparity. Their confrontation does not result in a reconciliation, but in an unsettling of the borders between self and other, and between interior and exterior. In this instability might be found the possibility of an immanent ethics that would not affirm unity and identity as the origin of the embodied self, but draw out the divergences that trouble any notion of an immune self.
- Publication
Postmodern Culture, 1996, Vol 6, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
1053-1920
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/pmc.1996.0014