ABSTRACT
In immunology, allergy and autoimmunity are recognised as some of the most common types of immunopathology. Autoimmune disease involves 'a destructive reaction of the immune system against one or another of the body's own constituents'. This mutinous self-reactivity embodies 'a vital paradox' as that which safeguards life is simultaneously its greatest threat. Focusing on Clemens von Pirquet's account of the allergy hypothesis given in his article 'Allergie' (1906) and monograph Allergy (1911), this chapter explores how the concept of altered reactivity complicates a conventional reading of self and other, normality and pathology, as naturally opposed or mutually exclusive entities or states. Pirquet's experimental framework, then, suggests an understanding of immune responsiveness as a contaminated ecological scene from which individual moments or entities cannot be simply or meaningfully disaggregated. The phenomenon of sensitization deserves close consideration here because it complicates the conventional material organization and discretion of stimulus and response, organism and antigen.
