ABSTRACT
“Cancer”: why does it frighten us with its name, as if thereby the unnameable were designated? … Here is a cell that doesn’t hear the command, that develops lawlessly, in a way that could be called anarchic. It does still more: it destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message. It wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs. Cancer, from this perspective, is a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate, through proliferation and disorder, the universal programming and signifying power. This task was accomplished in other times by leprosy, then by the plague.
