AVANT Volume III, Number 1/2012 www.avant.edu.pl/en 65 A Body Worth Defending. Opening Up a Few Concepts: Introductory Ruminations 10 Ed Cohen Department of Women's & Gender Studies Rutgers University New Brunswick, USA Editorial Abstract The following text is an introduction to Ed Cohen’s book A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Author investigates the way in which immunology influences the perception of both the human body, and political entities, demonstrating that contemporary conceptualizations of these phenomena exist in a double bind. The historical framework Cohen applies allows for tracing the history of the metaphor of immunity in politics and medicine. Keywords: biopolitics; body; immunity; medicine; modernity. In this culture, medical thought is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man. [Michel Foucault: The Birth of the Clinic] Science projects are civics projects; they remake citizens. [Donna Haraway: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouseTM] The choice of explanations in medicine is always a choice of values. [Lawrence Kirmayer: “Mind and Body as Metaphors”] 10 The article was originally published as the introduction to Ed Cohen’s book: A Body Worth Defending. 2009. Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the Publisher.