“Every system like our own, which functions by surface impulse, produces this kind of surface repulsion, which is its bodily manifestation. Every society which functions by rejection, by exclusion, causes this kind of inflammation or protective rash -- a barrage against the seduction of a world you fear, but also against the crowding-in of a world which disgusts you.
Contrary to the hysteric, who, by making an exhibition of himself, betrays his despair at not being there, allergy testifies to the confusion of being there, and to the excessive presence of the body. Let us not forget that allergy is hypersensitivity to a particular substance. It is an excess of positive reaction. Thus an allergic world is a world of excess, of an oversensitivity to anything whatever -- precisely, to others? -- but one which turns around in a negative conversion. The same pattern in anorexia: denial of the excess of body, metaphor for the hypertrophy of the system.”