Twentieth-century society organized itself by immune-style rejection of foreignness
Evidence
The past century was an immunological age. The epoch sought to distinguish clearly between inside and outside, friend and foe, self and other. The Cold War also followed an immunological pattern. Indeed, the immunological paradigm of the last century was commanded by the vocabulary of the Cold War, an altogether military dispositive. Attack and defense determine immunological action. The immunological dispositive, which extends beyond the strictly social and onto the whole of communal life, harbors a blind spot: everything foreign is simply combated and warded off. The object of immune defense is the foreign as such. Even if it has no hostile intentions, even if it poses no danger, it is eliminated on the basis of its Otherness. — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 10
Categorization
- XREF: Directly prepares the contrast with Foucault’s disciplinary society that the reader wants to explain and test. — connects to: Capital acceleration requires suppressing immune defences against otherness — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 186