Auto-Anti-Bodies

What if autoimmunity isn’t a mistake, but a meaningful response? A philosophical look at the “auto-anti-body” as a somatic expression of our dissonance with a sick system.

The metaphysical purpose of autoimmunity is to recount a dissonance between the body and its context.

In Byung Chul Han’s Palliative Society, he meditates on pain today. In Han’s words: The palliative society is characterized by an unlimited permissiveness. […] Boundaries are removed. Thresholds are torn down. The immunological resistance to the other is radically weakened. […]

Every page of Han’s essay is rife with passages in which I am tempted to replace the word “pain” with “autoimmunity”. For example:

“In our absolute determination to combat [autoimmunity], we also forget that [disease] is socially mediated. [Illness] is a reflection of socio-economic distortions which leave psychological and physical traces. [Immunosuppressants], prescribed by the dozen, mask the social conditions that create [autoimmunity] in the first place.

The strictly medical and pharmacological treatment of [autoimmunity] prevents [illness] from becoming eloquent, even critical. It deprives [autoimmunity]of its character as an object, as something social. […]

The powerful anaesthesia of the palliative society makes the world unreal, [it] increasingly reduces resistance, makes antagonistic opposition, the anti, the anti-bodies, disappear.*”

Han’s translator makes explicit that here “anti-body” translates Han’s German neologism ‘Gegen-Körper’, meaning a body that opposes us, and urges the reader not to confuse this with the term ‘antibody’ in the sense of the proteins formed in the body as an immunological response to antigens. The Gegen-Körper is an external agent acting against us.

But Byung-Chul Han is dealing with words, with the metaphysics of pain itself. Why not take the anti-body as a concept, a plaything, and make a minimal leap to the auto-anti-body. No longer the other body that opposes us, but the body that opposes itself, the self-opposing-body.

The auto-antibodies of medicine were conceptualized in the 1940s when antinuclear antibodies and rheumatoid factors were recognized as the diagnostic features of systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis, respectively. They are said to be immune system proteins that mistakenly target and attack the body’s own healthy cells, tissues, and organs. They are already the body opposing itself.

To deal with this strange protein gone rogue, the drugs of auto-immunity are immunosuppressants and anti-inflammatories; they are numbing agents that enforce compliance in the body but do not address the cause of its outcry.

The self-opposing body, the autoantibody, shocks us into reality. The shock is this: I am harming myself. How could this be true? Auto-anti-bodies eat away anaesthetic self-denial. No part of the self-pattern can be ignored once the auto-immune process is underway. Auto-immunity is nebulous and everyone experiences it differently.

Illness is a narrative function. The mythos surrounding disease exists in interchange with sickness itself, altering the course of its signs and symptoms. Auto-anti-bodies are strange attractors that intervene within the system to show us where our attention needs to go.

The problem with the pharmacological approach to treatment is that it treats the body like a closed system. Biochemical intervention, and most modern natural approaches, treat the human body as a complicated machine with a set of inputs and outputs. Vitamins, minerals, and min-max strategies for self-optimization. Rather, the body is a complex self-organizing system collaborating at scale with the wider earth-system.

The biochemical micro-managerial approach to treatment is always palliative, never curative. Only a method which accounts for whole-system permeability and exchange, with a sense of pattern-mapping the relationships between organisms at micro and macro scale, with respect for the life functions of human and non-human cultures, may begin to do the work of healing and repair.

The presence of illness intensifies self-perception. From a state of numb apathy, the auto-anti-body shocks the whole web into a state of wakeful alertness.

Biochemistry’s response to auto-anti-bodies is to suppress the immune system. The immunosuppressant makes the auto-anti-body harmless, rendering the terrain “safe”. So safe, in fact, that all martial power has been stripped away. The body has been forced to say “Yes!”; it cannot refuse entry to anyone from the outside.

The immune system is a tool for discernment and value-judgement. It does not have an auto-immune response as a form of self-mutilation and self-harm. Boundaries are necessary. The capacity to discern and maintain boundaries is a biological life function and a survival need. The body is inherently a self-correcting open system, and it tends towards repair.

If the symptoms of chronic illness were void of eloquence and had no story to tell, then all they would signify is the material malfunction of a dysregulated machine. Immunosuppressants repress the poetics of the immune system, rendering it incapable of self-expression and unable to speak out in defence of the body’s relationship to its environment.

Something is wrong. Auto-immunity attunes, tunes the body into awareness with its own discordance. Constellations are only visible in the interstices between the stellar nodes. Can you hear it? Cognitive dissonance finds its somatic expression in the body’s artful self-resistance. A split mind makes the self feel sick. The sky exists in its dark matter, it is the song of illness.

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There is a long, very long in fact, tradition of the philosophy of medicine, more recently of immunology. (Canguilhem, Sontag, Foucault, Pradeu, and a thousand others). This blog post makes no attempt to say anything new or add to scholarship, though I am feeling enlivened lately by reading philosophy, in a way I haven’t felt in years. I’ve spent most of 2023-2025 reading almost exclusively Chinese medical theory, Vedanta, Ayurveda, and graphic novels.

I am taking liberties scholars would scoff at. The purpose of Auto-Immune In Practice is to give a voice to the narrative function of illness, and clear some terrain to make sense of what it means to have a body that opposes itself.

What’s more, it turns out I’m not so interested in words that are empty of practice. The primary difference I am finding in my method is that it rests on daily ongoing contemplative embodied practice, a continuous attempt to learn how to move from the source, instead of comparative scientific analysis.

If I zoom out again to the system, to the ecology that composes me, I am only ever sick if the system is sick. I heard recently: “No tree burns alone.” If I’m sick, the land is sick. If you’re sick, you’re not alone. But if you’ve been reading me a while, you know that I’m not here to provide self-help advice or to tell you how to prepare for winter with supplements. I’m not looking for sponsorship, and I’m not trying to sell a group peer-to-peer insurance network.

The “problem” with my project is that it is probably incomprehensible to most people, and it is entirely unmarketable.

Is that a problem?

Maybe these words are helpful to one in a million.

Is that worth it?

For now, it’s what I’ve got.