On Reading Immunity in Literature: Metaphor, the Immunitary Unconscious, and Immunity as Mode of Protection

This article argues for literature and literary criticism's unique capacity to question and disrupt the immunitary unconscious, or the normative and bio-political dimensions of immunity's ongoing signification processes. The article opens with a rhetorical history of immunity that reads existing genealogies of immunity in terms of the metonymic, metaphoric, and allegoric borrowings they make visible. In neoliberal society, the result of immunity's metonymic, metaphoric, and allegoric borrowing is a mode of protection that understands all forms of protection to be achieved through desocialization. Disrupting this mode of protection and achieving a form of "co-immunism," or commonized mode of protection, is important in the face of today's major transnational crises. The article concludes with the argument that, given their particular affinities with metonymy, metaphor, and allegory, literature and literary criticism are uniquely well-equipped for renegotiating the immunitary unconscious, for critiquing the contemporary mode of protection, and for imagining speculative co-immunisms.