Introduction

In biomedicine, the term most frequently encountered is microchimerism, which refers to a small but significant presence of so-called non-self cells coexisting with a dominant population of self cells in the same body. The move to bring together the seemingly disparate arenas of political philosophy and the body is at the heart of biopolitics, and it is worth remembering that biology both emerges as a symptom of politico-cultural discourse and is generative of that discourse. As an authoritative discourse, biomedicine cannot be separated from the realm of the sociopolitical, where the concept of immunity speaks to the modernist desire to protect the illusory purity of the defended self and, in Robert Esposito's terms, undermines the development of positive community. In short, the biological ground of the mutually reinforcing biopolitical trope of immunity as the underpinning of the distinct identities of self and other is far from certain.