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Autoimmune Illness as a Death-drive: An Autobiography of Defence
- Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 44, Number 3, September 2011
- pp. 189-203
- 10.1353/mos.2011.a450737
- Article
- Additional Information
This essay returns Derrida’s metaphor of autoimmunity to its biomedical origins and explores how various autobiographical narratives of autoimmune disease can provide a novel reading of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Freudian death-drive. I argue that Derrida’s autoimmunity autoimmunely secures the risks of psychoanalysis, science, science fiction, and deconstruction itself.