Assemblages to Contagion: Thinking at the Intersection of Biomedicine and Biophilosophy

• Main Authors: Wan-shuan Lin, 林宛瑄
• Other Authors: Hsiao-hung Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/10657398838346903712

博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 96 === One significant event which has attracted considerable attention over the past few decades is the explosion of emerging infectious diseases. The eruptions of newly discovered pathogens and the resurgence of old diseases have received extensive media coverage and induced overriding concerns among many researchers and theorists. However, this recent surge of interest largely reinscribes some ideas about contagion persistent in human imagination, most of which express adverse meanings of threat, contamination, and so on. In my dissertation, I argue contrariwise that instead of testifying to the advent of certain unprecedented catastrophe, the experience of infectious diseases in our time articulates a new way of perceiving contagion which entails a reconceptualization of identity and selfhood. Rather than describing the unpleasant invasion and pollution of a self-enclosed boundary by minuscule and harmful invaders, contagion can be understood as a lesson of becoming and affect doing away with the assumption of a consistent self. The traditional notions of self/other relationships are rendered irrelevant in continuous connection and reconnection of heterogeneous “elements” proceeding in more than one direction. The analytic framework of this dissertation follows a trajectory of thought which has been termed as “biophilosophy,” which is generally known as a subfield of philosophy of science dealing with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedicine sciences. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s visionary accounts of conditions of life have been especially referred to. To counter the old model of contagion effectively, I examine related biomedical descriptions and turning the picture thus described around so that its traditional theoretical underpinnings can be toned down and ultimately give way to different implications. The first chapter is devoted to sketching an account of historical transformations of the social or cultural responses to infectious diseases and their biomedical management mainly from the nineteenth century to the new millennium. The task carried out in the next two chapters is to demonstrate how new discoveries or perceptions of biomedical details in the fields of virology and immunology contribute to comprehending contagion as circulation of affect among assemblages instead of as certain self-other confrontation. In Chapter Four I will apply my analysis of contagion informed by Deleuzian philosophy to examine the latest epidemic of the SARS as a case study to see what difference a new model of contagion can make in modifying the way we take what would have bee considered as an outright disaster. To sum up, having reflected on contagion as such, it is made explicit that the human body is not a battlefield where the self and nonself fight for sovereignty. Thinking beyond the level of certain subjective anxiety about losing its autonomy or supremacy to certain contaminating force of other, encounters with “others,” ranging and extending from pathogenic ones to those lower terms of any binary oppositions, actually might result in certain novel becomings, which means possible new bodies in the field of biomedicine and in cultural politics means the invention of new trajectories which release the subject in its traditional sense from the grid of rigid categories so that real creations and real differences can take place.