Publisher's Synopsis
According to modern medicine, disease is an accident, an effect of bacteria, viruses, toxins, and genes. It has no meaning outside a science of the body's machinery. Infected with Difference: Healing Dis/ease in the Body Politic argues in contrast that disease is often dis/ease, a meaningful expression of the self's entanglement in systems of power, exclusion, and hierarchy. And so, healing disease depends not just upon changing the body's biochemistry, but upon politicizing at least some aspects of the world the self is implicated in. According to this book, disease is not an accident, it is a calling, an irruption of truth. Infected with Difference begins with a discussion of the new science of psychoneuroimmunology, which deals with the intimate relationship between the mind's thoughts, feelings, and images and the body's biochemistry. According to discoveries in psychoneuroimmunology, not just the brain, but the immune system and all the rest of the body "thinks," processes the world. Immune cells, in particular, are surprising sophisticated at sensing the world, interpreting it, and communicating their response to the rest of the body. Given the way immune cells function, disease is not just an invasion from the outer world, but an interpretation the body makes of the world. If psychoneuroimmunology is right about claiming that mind and body are not two different entities but one, a mindbody, then, this book argues, that which is diseasing the self cannot be limited to the psychology of the individual but must be extended to the individual's family, community, and polity. The images, metaphors, thoughts, and feelings that constitute and enable the immune system's response to the world are not just personal, but intersubjective and transpersonal, an effect of language, culture, tradition, and systems of power. If the individual's body is diseased, there is something dis/easing about the world it is in, and so it must be called into question, politicized, before the individual can be healed. Healing the body means healing the world. This, of course, raises a whole series of questions about responsibility for disease. The book ends by cautioning against a politics of blame, guilt, and resentment. According to Sikorski, we must not build the world of evil others to blame for disease, those who must be excluded from the polity, punished for their sins, and silenced because of danger they pose. That only introduces more sources of dis/ease into the world.
