Schillmeier, M.Eventful Bodies: The Cosmopolitics of Illness. London: Routledge. 2014. 196pp £95 ISBN 978‐1‐4094‐4982‐9 (pbk)

Abstract

Schillmeier's book is organised into three sections that centre on case studies of ill bodies: the forgetting body (Alzheimer's disease); the stroked body (stroke); and the infectious body (SARS – Severe and Acute Respiratory Syndrome). Although the social, material and historical particularities of these cases are attended to, the main contribution of the book is to show how each of these cases challenge common-sense understandings of social relations. For Schillmeier, these embodied experiences constitute a cosmopolitical event because they put the taken-for-granted, embodied relations of everyday life at risk. In the first and largest section of the book, Schillmeier shows, for instance, how Alzheimer's disease and the forgetting body disrupts and tests our common-sense claims and perceptions of normalcy, so that the process of dementing itself ‘introduces difference, uncertainties and insecurities’ (p. 42). Mrs M, Schillmeier's protagonist in his chapter on forgetting bodies, is a powerful figure through which the reader is called upon to rethink both human and non-human relations via the actor-networks of dementia, and matters of care, for which attending to affective relations and acknowledging the difference of others is an essential part. By exploring the significance of caring relations in particular, in the second section of the book, Schillmeier captures how the stroked body troubles our conception of home. It is worth stating that the relations of care being described in this book are not a means for advocating any formalised processes of care-giving but instead attend to the situated requirements of Schillmeier's eventful ill bodies. The section on the stroked body provides a detailed description of the complex set of relations that are implicated in the accomplishment of the feeling of being at home. The significance of this analysis is in the proposition that such a feeling is a collective achievement. This is indicative of the book's theoretical thrust that situates feelings and emotions (affective relations) within their material and socio-political networks. Finally, in the third section of the book on infectious bodies, Schillmeier reflects on the 2003 SARS outbreak to explore the cosmopolitics of being at risk of illness, an event that he contends can disrupt and alter our past and present lives. This section marks a departure from the previous two by moving away from bodies experiencing a serious illness. However, there is also a degree of continuity in interrogating human and non-human relations. In the case of infectious bodies, non-human entities like bacteria or viruses gain cosmopolitical agency, challenging the modernist dualism between nature and the non-human on the one hand, and society and humans on the other. The book makes a persuasive case for the cosmopolitics of illness which is well consolidated in the short but powerful conclusion. Part of the success of the book's argument is in the depth of Schillmeier's consideration and critique of concepts that cut across a number of theoretical domains, including a genealogical analysis of the making of different kinds of illness and bodies and social theory that foregrounds networks, social relations, embodiment and affect. Schillmeier is careful throughout the book to distinguish his cosmopolitics of illness from what he describes as a cosmopolitanism of health. The former challenges the very foundation of universalist proponents of ‘good’ health that are often grounded in modernist conceptions of what it means to be human. It would be difficult to recommend this book as an introductory text to a reader unfamiliar with the theoretical traditions that inform it. The accessibility of the book may have been improved in the introduction by a more thorough situating of the cosmopolitics of illness in the wider discipline, with reference to the theories and concepts that a cosmpolitical research agenda challenges and departs from. That said, the book's scholarly ambition and theoretical insight mean that for those readers who have a committed engagement to contemporary social theory, science and technology studies and/or medical sociology, it offers plenty in the way of rewards. It is a book that provides a rigorous theoretical interrogation that is simultaneously visceral in its attention to feelings, emotions and the fleshy nature with which bodies, illness and care are experienced.