The haunted Umwelt: a biosemiotic and hauntological account of immune semiotic corruption in field cancerization

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.