1
“No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into…”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow[1]
“Here is where the problem of Etats voyous that I announced in the beginning forms a real knot. To understand this knot- I am not saying to undo it.”
Jacques Derrida, Rogues[2]
Viral Politics: Jacques Derrida’s reading of Auto-immunity and Carl Schmitt
Andrew Johnson, LSU
I:
Since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 essay “Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority,”[3]Carl Schmitt has been a perennial subject of Derrida’s political critique. I will argue that Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is uniquely applicable to Derrida’s interpretation of Schmitt’s political philosophy. Therefore, my argument will consist of two interrelated but equally divergent parts; the digressive structure will attempt to mimic Derrida’s complex style of weaving opposed concepts into a coherent whole. First, I will demonstrate the many forms of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity. Second, I will exhibit how this schema uniquely applies to Derrida’s criticisms of Schmitt and the contemporary state of politics.
II:
Derrida is a philosopher of a thousand faces. Perhaps, his last face was his concept of auto-immunity. Derrida begins to utilizes this biological concept as early as the 1990s, but only after the terrorist attacks of September 11th does this concept becomes a predominate schema in which Derrida configures his philosophy.
Derrida’s schema of auto-immunity also has a thousand faces. In many ways, this is the final concept of an illustrious history of prior concepts. However, auto-immunity retains shades of all the rest. Auto-immunity captures a pervasive and consistent philosophical critique that has taken many guises throughout Derrida’s career. Indeed, auto-immunity is deconstruction. As Michael Naas puts it: “Undecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind: autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Roguesinto a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo-nyms” (Naas, p. 29).[4] Or as Derrida puts it: “I have granted to this autoimmune schema a range without limits” (Rogues, p. 124). Therefore, it is my principal intention to untangle the various knots that Derrida has so carefully interwoven into the make-up of his final adieu.
III:
Auto-immunity first gained prominent attention with the spread of AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, during the early 1980s. It is under this guise that Derrida first began to discuss auto-immunity.[5] I would like to discuss the medical discourse surrounding AIDS and HIV, particularly as John Protevi describes this discourse in terms of Derrida’s political physics,[6] so as to assert a preliminary understanding of why it is important and difficult for philosophy to wrestle with the metaphysical problematic of auto-immunity.
By the time Michel Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, the disease he died from wasn’t fully understood publicly or scientifically. In the early 80’s the discourse surrounding AIDS was predominately moralistic as it was publicly derided as “the Gay disease,” and the scientific discourse surrounding the causes, effects, and possible cures were simultaneously lagging. In fact, Protevi’s argument is that AIDS is still not fully understood. Currently, there is a hegemonic interpretation of AIDS that describes it solely in terms of virology. This interpretation argues that AIDS is entirely caused exclusively by the HIV virus. Under this model of explanation, a virus, from the outside, infects and causes the AIDS disease. By describing AIDS in terms of virology there is a resulting interpretation of our bodies that is philosophically relevant. Protevi describes what this model means conceptually:
In this picture, the virus comes from outside, breaching the walls that should separate the unitary body from its opposite, the outside world. The body is seen as an interiority encased by a protective barrier, a frontier. According to the oppositional cultural imaginary, the ideally seamless mucous membrane walls are in fact fragile, prone to tiny invisible tears, opening the inside to an outside that should stay outside. The response to this factual degeneration from ideal separation is to police the borders of the somatic body politic. The messages we all know by now: separate inside and outside. Avoid mixing the famous bodily fluids. The truth about AIDS is a liminology, a discourse on borders: keep your fluids to yourself! Don’t bring foreign blood inside! Clean your needles, watch your blood supply: regulate the purity of the outside substances, if you must—through perversity or medical order- incorporate them. Keep your penis and its fluids to yourself! The condom keeps the outside, even when it is inside, outside. Keep your clitoris and vaginal secretions to yourself! The dental dam keeps the inside, even when it is outside, inside. Latex is life; fluid exchange, death (Protevi, p. 101).
Opposed to the HIV-only paradigm, Protevi believes that Derrida provides us the philosophical concepts to think otherwise. Insofar as virology creates an oppositional discourse that Derrida would deem a “restricted economy,” Protevi’s counter-paradigm, immunology, provides a non-oppositional logic of difference that he contends Derrida would rightly call a “general economy.” Mind you, the genius of Protevi’s analysis is that his publication predates Derrida’s extrapolation of auto-immunity as a dominant model to describe his philosophy.
The shift from a restricted economy to a general economy is the shift from a logic of opposition, inside versus outside, to a differential logic of force and physics that posits overlapping and opposed “systems.” Protevi explains the importance of such a shift:
For immunology, the question is never one of inside and outside, but of the economic distribution between intakes, assimilation or rejection and excretion. The unitary, self-present body is exploded into a systemic interchange, a point of exchange of forces; in other words, immunology studies forceful bodies politic. The outside is already inside, in relation to the inside; the regulation of this interchange is the job of the immune system (Protevi, p. 102).
Whereas the virological model describes AIDS in terms of a virus transmitted from a sexual exterior, Protevi’s immunological model deconstructs the trite demarcations between inside and outside.[7] This shift in emphasis and explanation provides a new economy of meaning that changes the context of AIDS discourse.
The general economy of the somatic body politic in the AIDS context, by contrast to the oppositional liminology of virology, focuses on immunology. Immunology is the study of a process, a discourse that attempts to explain the regulation of a site of interchange. Immunological models are fuzzy and soft compared to the elegant precision of virological experiments. Disturbing new logics are called for. There is frustratingly enough, no one ‘cause.’ Information theory and cybernetics, as Donna Haraway demonstrates…, are the paradigms of immunology. The immunological system’s task is one of reading, of espionage and counter-espionage. The endgame of auto-immune disease- especially when it targets the immune system itself- is that of the impossible task of undoing the mistakes committed by the internal police who confuse internal police for foreign agents masquerading as internal police dedicated to tracking down foreign agents masquerading as internal police…. Suspicion taken to the limit; hermeneutics in extremis. Compared with the paranoia of immunology, the virological war model, where the task is the defense of the garrison from the enemy storming the walls, is relatively reassuring (Protevi, p. 101-102).
Protevi’s argument does not ask us to abandon the virological model, but rather he contends that this model neglects important aspects of AIDS: such as microbiology or social/political conditions. The immunological model provides a much more robust and accurate depiction. No longer can AIDS discourse revolve solely around that of condoms and external viruses, but we must forge new frontiers in describing AIDS. The immunological model stresses a deconstructed model of metaphysical identity, corporeal constitution, and our physical relations with the external world, and configures new remedial policies that address the availability of sexual education programs, economic development, and stable political climates as factors in the severity of AIDS cases.
The beauty of Protevi’s explication is the obvious foreshadowing of how this seemingly biological condition, AIDS, has a distinctly political imagery. As opposed to a traditional war-model where there are clearly defined opposed sides with rigid borders and rules, the immunological model extends far beyond mere scientific discourse to a description of the world and our understanding of it as an asymmetrical battlefield of loosely defined alliances and ambiguous conflictual relations. In fact, we might notknow whether the internal police are really foreign agents! The way in which a mere biological “model” can be used to describe a “physics of force,” even at the level of large nation-states and international law, is the focal point of my analysis of Jacques Derrida, auto-immunity, and Carl Schmitt.
IV:
Auto-immunity is, first and foremost, a biological concept. In all of Derrida’s subsequent writings on auto-immunity he always points to a long footnote, in his 1994 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” that demonstrates the biological necessity of his auto-immune logic:
It is especially evident in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the ‘indemnity’ of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization,… it consists for a living organism… of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system… [W]e feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of auto-immunization (Religion, p. 72-73).[8]
Auto-immunity is the biological condition in which a living organism “works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’’ immunity” (Time of Terror, p. 94).[9]
The inherent biological definition of auto-immunity is the momentum that allows Derrida to proliferate the concept into a panoply of divergent meanings. However, as Derrida says above, he is less concerned with its biological implications and more interested in its “general logic.”
Auto-immunity is a relationship between self and other. The concept of auto-immunity obfuscates the traditional opposition between self and non-self. Hence, auto-immunity is the deconstruction of the self. This relationship has been a primary concern for Derrida for the better part of his career. The designation self and other ignores how neat divisions or boundaries are adopted or drawn with a certainty that remains problematic.
To understand auto-immunity we must first understand what separates it from immunity. The most significant thing that separates immunity from auto-immunity is the prefatory auto. Autos differs from other etymologies of the self, such as Ipse, by referring to an active self, a self that is involved in movement. Autos mean self, but retains shades of an entire lexicon of similar autos words: such as automatic, automaton, even autonomy. Derrida takes this prefix and creates an original vocabulary of like minded auto-words. Deconstruction is nothing but the destruction of the various types of self, or autos, in terms of their own identity. Discrepancies accompanying the full embrace of a self/non-self discriminatory model to explain auto-immune functions remain vexing; auto-immunity is a process that breaks down these neat divisions and boundaries. Derrida says: “Between the immune and that which threatens it or runs counter to it… the relation is neither one of exteriority nor one of simple opposition or contradiction. I would say the same about the relationship between immunity and autoimmunity” (Rogues, p. 114). This insight is helpful in two ways. First, auto-immunity is internal to immunity, but, perhaps, exceeds it. Auto-immunity is an immune reaction gone awry. Second, the relationship between a foreign antigen and the organism it threatens is not one of irreducible opposites, but two processes that imply each other. The disease is internal to immune defenses. Take the example of vaccinations: a vaccination, a routine procedure intended to increase one’s immunity, is a small dose of a given disease. Indeed, the analogy that our immune system signifies an unbridgeable wall between self and other is a false one. Our immunity is but one last hymen that is not able to separate the inside from the outside, self or other. Auto-immunity exposes the outside as implicitly internal to an organism. While auto-immunity is an entirely automatic and spontaneous process, it demonstrates an attack and degeneration against the self.
Before addressing Derrida’s logical perversion of auto-immunity it is first important to understand what relation this biological process has with his philosophical concerns of subjectivity. Derrida’s philosophical logic is grounded in the body, in the self, the human, and its essential anatomical constitution. Derrida’s philosophy concerns itself with biology insofar as it concerns life and death. Auto-immunity interests Derrida because it deconstructs the traditional demarcations that separate life from death. Derrida explains:
To lose itself all by itself, to go down on its own, to autoimmunize itself, as I would prefer to say in order to designate this strange illogical logic by which a living being can spontaneously destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it against the other, to immunize it against an aggressive intrusion of the other. Why speak in this way of autoimmunity? Why determine in such an ambiguous fashion the threat or the danger, the default or failure, the running aground or the grounding, but also the salvation, the rescue, and the safeguard, health and security- so many diabolically autoimmune assurances, virtually capable not only of destroying themselves in a suicidal fashion but or turning a certain death drive against the autos itself, against the ipseity that any suicide worthy of its name still presupposes? In order to situate the question of life and of the living being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of my remarks (Rogues, p. 123).
The stakes of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is nothing less than life or death. Auto-immunity has a role in both protecting life and causing death. By protecting life, there is, in fact, death. “If only because they bear death in life” (Time of Terror, p. 119). What Freud calls the ‘death-drive’ and Heidegger terms ‘being-towards-death,’ Derrida might just as easily term auto-immunity. But, as we will see, this is only the preliminary wager; auto-immunity, as a political trope, is invested with the lives, and deaths, of millions.
V:
Auto-immunity is a logical concept. Just as the nation-state personifies immune-functions by protecting itself from foreigners, language attempts to remain immune to everything that threatens it logical syntax. A definition, by definition, is a border, an immune protection, from everything it is not. Derrida’s entire career has been dedicated to upsetting the immunity of definitions; deconstruction is the upsetting of definitions, particularly in terms of their oppositional structure.
As we saw with Derrida’s deconstruction of the self, auto-immunity, as a “general logic,” attempts to upset the authority of logical partitions. Auto-immunity is a final term in this continuous series of hierarchical ruptures.
I could… inscribe the category of the autoimmune into a series of both older and more recent discourses on the double bind and the aporia. Although aporia, double bind, and autoimmune processes are not exactly synonyms, what they have in common, what they are all, precisely, charged with, is, more than an internal contradiction, an indecideability, that is, an internal-external, nondialectizable antinomy that risks paralyzing and thus calls for the event of the interruptive decision (Rouges, p. 35).
Auto-immunity is an aporia: the very thing that aims to protect us is the thing that destroys us. The paradox at the heart of auto-immunity is the collaboration of two seemingly antagonistic processes. Auto-immunity demonstrates a double movement: protection and destruction, threat and chance.
The use of “constitutive,” by Derrida, to describe auto-immunity necessarily refers to the political concept of constitution. A constitution is a legal statute of definitions. A constitution as a set of laws creates a structural vocabulary and thereby constitutes its own logical language game. What is against the constitutions is, by definition, illegal. The use of logic, as a mobilization of divergent immune-strategies, is a power-mechanism intending to protect itself a priori. Politics is but one specific structure of language. Politics is literally the structure and/or logic of law. Derrida believes that the concept of auto-immunity upsets this traditional and prevalent misuse of definitions, and can open up the possibility of a new type of political thought.
VI:
Auto-immunity is a failed attempt by an organism to protect itself. It is clearly connected with another age-old Derridean trope: the pharmakon. The biological concept of auto-immunity is a question of health. In attempting to protect itself, it destroys itself; it plays both the role of both medicine and poison. “[T]his poisoned medicine, this pharmakon of an inflexible and cruel autoimmunity” (Rogues, p. 157). “Once again the state is both self-protecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison. The pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic” (Time of Terror, p. 124).
As Derrida says there is no condom for auto-immunity. “For there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Rogues, p. 150-151). Auto-immunity is pregnant with itself. This pharmakon partition, between poison and medicine, between self and non-self, signifies both a threat and a chance. Therefore, auto-immunity is not necessarily bad. In fact, while it threatens, it retains a hopeful chance and hyperbolic promise. As Derrida says: “[O]pportunity or chance and threat, threat as chance: autoimmune” (Rogues, p. 52). “[A]lready a question of autoimmunity, of a double bind of threat and chance” (Rogues, p. 82). We must be cautious to not easily discount auto-immunity as a mere poison threatening to destroy our defenses, but as a possible medicine that opens up chances and hope.
The threat is perfectly apparent; however, what is the optimistic chance of auto-immunity? Quite simply, hospitality.
In this regard, autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and who comes- which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect another, or expect any event (Rogues, p. 152).