Allergy: the body as self-evidence

Abstract

In both the social and natural sciences, mind and body are conceptualised as distinct phenomena. Though viewed as closely connected, the body – the material substance of our biology – is understood to be separate from, and certainly prior to, those aspects of life typically deemed social, cultural, historical and psychical. This assumption, that biology and sociality are mutually exclusive, speaks to the disciplinary division between the social and natural sciences. The difficulty of thinking across this divide is evidenced in specific attempts to theorise their interface. For instance, social scientific studies of the embodiment of medical discourses and experiences of illness have yielded more sophisticated accounts of how biology and subjectivity, science and culture, life and knowledge, interact. However, the theorisation of this relation as an ‘interaction’ presumes that an essential, ontological difference underwrites the division of biology from sociality. Yet the authority and empirical purchase of medical discourses, to which these studies consistently draw attention, suggest that this idea of two discrete, communicating systems, is inadequate to account for life's ontology.

Focusing on the phenomenon of allergies, this thesis investigates the Cartesianism that grounds contemporary biomedical accounts of the immunological body. As a condition in which what is social and what is biological cannot be easily differentiated, allergies present a concrete example of the contagion that constitutes the reality of being an embodied subject. Composed of three lines of inquiry, this thesis is defined by a general concern with the question of identity. Through detailed analyses of Clemens von Pirquet's original theory of allergy, Donna Haraway and Ed Cohen's critiques of the politics of immunological discourse, and the biology of allergy, it critically interrogates the concept of identity that grounds a biology/sociality or nature/culture division: a given, bounded, autonomous self. Taking issue with the notion that the biological body pre-exists its social and cultural contextualisation, this thesis argues that allergies empirically evidence the originary ontological (or ecological) entanglement of these apparently separate spheres.