Derrida's Error and Immunology

Abstract

While Derrida's work is often seen as removed from matter, influential arguments have also been made about deconstruction's capacity to capture some foundational logic of matter or life. I offer an example of the way Derrida's work may be read to suggest the latter, even in a case where Derrida may be wrong: based on Thomas Pradeu's Limits of the Self, I suggest that Derrida's arguably erroneous use of autoimmunity anticipated recent developments in immunology. However, instead of simply concluding that Derrida ‘anticipates’ immunology, I suggest that Pradeu's theory had earlier been prefigured in immunology around the term ‘allergy’ in agreement with the Derridean use of it in ‘Plato's Pharmacy’. Last, I will briefly consider what Derrida calls ‘life in general’, in order to demonstrate a resistance in his work to be simply proven right within what he understands as the organicist discourse of living matter.