Postgraduate workshop

This seminar will allow students to discuss with Ed Cohen the introduction to his recent book A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke University Press, 2009). This important work asks how we have come to believe that as living organisms our bodies are what separate us from the world rather than what connect us. Inspired by Michel Foucault's writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces immunity's migration from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies which percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. In so doing, he shows that by the late nineteenth century, "the body" literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

In general, Professor Cohen's work focuses on exploring how the ways we make sense of the world both inform and deform how we make the world and ourselves along with it (whoever "we" "are").  He began exploring this conundrum by reflecting on why sexuality and gender have come to seem so natural and true to us in numerous articles and in Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (Routledge, 1993).

Reading: Introduction to A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke University Press, 2009) (Scanned copy available on registration.)