This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, SARS-CoV-2 was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in a vulnerable age demographic, to reflect publicly and plentifully on the meaning of the pandemic. These days, it seems, an epidemic demands urgent philosophical inquiry, and lots of it—personal protective equipment for the mind, …
The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both. – Eula Biss, On Immunity
In recent years, outbreaks of highly contagious diseases like measles and whooping cough have reached epidemic proportions in the US. Such a resurgence in supposedly eradicated diseases has been attributed to rising rates of vaccine refusal in …
This article is part of the following series: Translating Vitalities
Prologue: Pope Francis and Zhang Taiyan 章太炎
On 16 June 2015, Pope Francis published Laudato Si’ (Be Praised), an encyclical letter on climate change tellingly subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home.” The encyclical links the destruction of the environment with the exploitation of the poor, and it unambiguously roots both in capitalism’s pernicious gluttony [10]. In the Pope’s analysis, …
This article is part of the following series: Translating Vitalities
…“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” cries Nietzsche’s madman in a famous parable of The Gay Science. “Are we not continually falling? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing [5, 7]? Isn’t empty space breathing at us
This article is part of the following series: Book forum, History and HIV, Transcriptions Series
We are happy to present a book forum organized around the release of Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay‘s Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Here, a “short” history should not be mistaken for one that is “thin” – Anderson and Mackay masterfully navigate a terrain populated as much by bodies as ideas. …
Intolerant Bodies is beautifully written—an informed, informative, and engaging assessment of the history of autoimmunity. But the small book is far more than the short history it humbly claims to be; for Anderson and Mackay take on a complex subject many of us have struggled to summarize with more words than fewer.
As with many researchers, the difficulty of conceptualizing …