City Research Online

Abstract

Field cancerization, the process wherein prior insults corrupt the semiotic landscape through which immune cells detect and respond to “the other”, persists even after the precipitating conditions resolve and the tissue histologically appears normal. This exemplifies a broader explanatory problem: How can we account for biomedical phenomena whose pathology is constituted by a history that standard mechanistic accounts cannot recover? I argue that a comprehensive understanding of field cancerization requires us to supplement molecular mechanistic explanations with lineage-level accounts, developed through a dialogue among Derrida’s hauntology, ghost criminology, and von Uexküll’s Umwelt as formalized through Peirce’s triadic model of signs. This framework generates a three-ghost taxonomy of immune semiotic corruption, explains why treating the present condition without addressing historically constituted corruption fails, and suggests concrete therapeutic implications based on this framework.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	field cancerization, immunology, biosemiotics, hauntology, ghost criminology, Umwelt, Derrida, Peirce
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics R Medicine > RC Internal medicine
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Department of Mathematics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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