A body worth defending : immunity, biopolitics, and the apotheosis of the modern body / Ed Cohen.

  • Cohen, Ed, 1958-
Date:
2009
  • Books

About this work

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.

Publication/Creation

Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2009.

Physical description

x, 372 pages ; 25 cm

Contributors

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-358) and index.

Contents

Living before and beyond the law, or a reasonable organism defends itself -- A body worth having, or a system of natural governance -- A policy called milieu, or the human organism's vital space -- Incorporating immunity, or the defensive poetics of modern medicine -- Conclusion : immune communities, common immunities.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    Medical Collection
    QW540 2009C67b
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780822345183
  • 0822345188
  • 9780822345350
  • 0822345358