ABSTRACT
Illness has always threatened the intactness of mind and body, but in postmodern times this threat takes the particular form called as embodied paranoia. The term embodied paranoia suggests the internal conflicts that attend this fear of colonization; what is involved is more complex than simple fear for one’s body. Even war and crime are “natural” threats in the sense that they are intended to harm and fear of them is natural. Disease and treatment happen to a body-self that is already substantially unmade by a combination of embodied paranoia and post-colonial skepticism. Postmodern times place the embodied self in a perpetual condition of multiply threatened intactness. Disease is all too effective as a journalistic metaphor for social problems because disease metaphors tap the intuitive connection between internal threats to the body and external threats. Embodied paranoia reflects a blurring of internal and external: everything has potential to threaten.
