Abstract:
The practice of human organ transplantation studies is shot through with questions concerning the concepts of selfhood and identity that continually reach out towards transmigration, displacement and haunting. In particular, heart transplantation is the site at which the parameters of human life and death are tested to their limits, not simply for the recipient but for the donor too. In conventional biomedicine, the definition and therefore the moment of death is a matter of ongoing and disturbing dispute between two major channels of thought. Should we understand life to end at the point of cessation of cardiac function, or alternatively that of the brainstem? That whole logic is predicated, however, on the familiar binary of life/death that fails to address urgent concerns in three arenas: social-cultural imaginaries, postmodernist philosophy and increasingly exploratory bioscience. If there is always something about death that is uncanny, that exceeds rationalist thought, then we need to queer the concept and ask whether there are more sensitive ways of thinking the process of dying. The very concept of extended life for the recipient is no simple outcome, and the question of whose life has been prolonged is far from clear. My contribution touches on the idea of thinking transplantation in the mode of parasitism but will suggest an alternative Deleuzian way forward.
摘要:
人体器官移植研究的实践充满了关于自我和身份概念的问题,这些概念不断延伸到轮回,流离失所和困扰。特别是,心脏移植是将人类生死参数测试到极限的部位,不仅仅是为了接受者,也是为了捐赠者。在传统的生物医学中,因此,死亡的定义是两个主要思想渠道之间持续和令人不安的争议。我们应该理解生命在心脏功能停止时结束,或者是脑干的?整个逻辑被预测,然而,在熟悉的生与死二元结构上,未能解决三个领域的紧迫问题:社会文化想象力,后现代主义哲学和日益探索性的生物科学。如果死亡总有一些不可思议的事情,这超出了理性主义思想,然后我们需要奇怪的概念,并询问是否有更敏感的思维方式死亡的过程。延长接受者寿命的概念并不是简单的结果,谁的生命被延长的问题还很不清楚。我的贡献涉及以寄生模式进行思维移植的想法,但将提出另一种Deleuzian前进的方式。