Autoimmunity

Autoimmunity, as deployed in this passage via Derrida, names the structural condition by which any living system — biological, political, or subjective — turns its own defensive mechanisms against itself. The concept is imported into Žižek's analysis of the refugee crisis to argue that the fantasy of a pure, self-enclosed community or identity is not merely empirically false but structurally impossible: the very mechanisms a collective deploys to protect its identity become the agents of its undoing. The autoimmune process is therefore not an accident or pathology superimposed upon a healthy organism but the constitutive logic of any self that attempts to fortify itself through exclusion. In Derridean terms, immunity itself becomes the threat; the border that is drawn to keep out the foreign is simultaneously the wound through which the system hemorrhages.

Within the Žižekian-Lacanian frame of the source text, autoimmunity functions as the ontological ground for rejecting both liberal humanitarian and right-wing nativist responses to the refugee crisis. If the self — whether individual or collective — is constitutively non-coincident with itself, then the appeal to a self-same identity that must be "protected" is always already undermined from within. This non-coincidence does not collapse into relativism but, paradoxically, enables a more genuine political solidarity: because no community is ever purely itself, the antagonism that the refugee "represents" is not an external invasion but a symptom of the system's own internal contradiction. The concept thus operates as a critique of the immunity-fantasy and as a precondition for the global class solidarity Žižek endorses.

The concept appears once, in todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 (p. 201), where it is threaded through Žižek's engagement with the refugee crisis. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts in the corpus. Most directly, it operates as a structural critique of Ideology and Fantasy: the fantasy of communal self-identity — the imaginary closure of the social body — is precisely what autoimmunity exposes as impossible. Just as ideology requires fantasy as a supplement to paper over constitutive antagonism, the immune fantasy of a pure community requires the repression of its own self-undermining logic. Autoimmunity names what happens when that repression fails. The concept also resonates with Dialectics, specifically in its "negative dialectic" or "implacable dialectic" inflection: the community's self-protective move generates its own negation, not as Hegelian sublation but as irresolvable structural tension.

The concept further touches the Real and the Neighbour. The refugee as figure of the Neighbour — the proximate Other who cannot be fully symbolized — is the site at which the autoimmune logic becomes visible: the community's immune response to the Neighbour reveals that the foreign is already internal. In relation to Jouissance, one might infer that the autoimmune fantasy is also a jouissance-structure: the enjoyment extracted from the very act of communal self-protection is what drives the compulsive repetition of exclusion even as it destroys the community. Autoimmunity thus functions as a rare Derridean import that the source text wields to specify, at the level of political ontology, what the Lacanian concepts of fantasy, ideology, and the Real imply for collective identity.

Žižek Responds!Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · 2022 (p.201)

Autoimmunity entails a process through which, as Derrida puts it, 'a living being, in a quasi-suicidal fashion, "itself" works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its "own" immunity.'

The phrase "immunise itself against its 'own' immunity" performs the very paradox it names — the quotation marks around "itself" and "own" enact the impossibility of self-coincidence, signaling that the self protecting itself is never simply self-identical, which is precisely the theoretical point: self-protection is structurally self-subverting. The qualifier "quasi-suicidal" further marks the drive-like, compulsive character of this process, aligning autoimmunity with the death-drive logic familiar from Lacanian jouissance rather than with a simple error or malfunction.