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Paper short abstract

Here I present an ethnographic-informed reflection on the question of whether the contemporary standard immunosuppression-based treatments for autoimmune diseases (such as arthritis, lupus, MS etc.) can be seen as co-constitutive of what Gilles Deleuze conceptualized as ‘societies of control’.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I present an ethnographic-informed reflection on the question of whether the contemporary standard immunosuppression-based treatments for autoimmune diseases (such as arthritis, lupus, Sjögren syndrome etc.) can be seen as co-constitutive of what Gilles Deleuze conceptualized as ‘societies of control’. For decades, immunosuppressants as careers of this particular therapeutic model increasingly spread as promissory biotechnological innovations within and from the Global North to other countries, in which established biomedicine plays a major regulatory role. In Brazil, for instance, their most expensive forms are subsidised by the government and available at its public health care system. Yet, they remain standing only as palliative resources for immunopathologies, for which a cure, officially, has never been announced.

My reflection is based on a multiplicity of research materials. In my presentation, I primarily mobilize and interpret those ones co-produced through conference attendances of biomedical events, which occurred mostly during the Covid-19 pandemics in multiple places, and medical literature as well. I structure my analysis by focusing on three synergetic biomedical practices. First, the recurrent enunciations of such ailments as chronic, and related tensions between their co-existing distinctiveness and inseparability from each other as variations of pathological autoimmunity. Second, the splitting of people into dividuals capable of harming themselves also on molecular level. Third, the urgings to keep autoimmune symptoms under control through modulation, including those still not manifested after a pre-emptive logic. I suggest that it might make sense to answer positively to the guiding question presented above, and explore related implications.