ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reveal the tropological line that runs through and connects Jacques Derrida's rhetorical concerns. It draws out the always-already contamination of and by rhetoric exemplified in the biophilosophical concept of autoimmunity, which is often critiqued from outside philosophy as a metaphor that has been mis- or poorly re-appropriated from the biomedical domain. By the late 1980s, Derrida's rhetoric of contamination has encompassed not only contagion and parasitism, but also virality and infection. Again referencing the 'intersection between AIDS and the computer virus', Derrida argues that All he have done, to summarize it very reductively, is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things. Where Derrida engages most directly with law and with the law of contamination, however, is in his monumental essay of 1989, 'Force of Law', which was originally presented as a seminar at the Cardozo Law School.
