Anuraag Bukkuri

Field cancerization, the process by which prior carcinogenic 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 is a paradigmatic case of a broader explanatory problem: How can we account for biomedical phenomena whose current pathology is continually 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.