ERG, Stockholms Universitet, Stockholm, Sweden
Med Humanit. 2021 Dec;47(4):388-396. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2020-011982. Epub 2021 Feb 26.
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.
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，这些问题不断地涉及到轮回、迁移和萦绕。特别是心脏移植是检验人类生死界限的场所，不仅对接受者，对供体也是如此。在传统的生物医学中，死亡的定义和因此死亡的时刻是两个主要思想流派之间持续存在的令人困扰的争议点。我们是否应该理解生命在心脏功能停止的那一刻结束，或者相反，是在脑干停止的那一刻结束？然而，整个逻辑都是基于熟悉的生死二元论，而无法解决社会文化想象、后现代哲学和日益探索的生命科学领域的紧迫问题。如果死亡总是有一些不可思议的、超越理性主义思维的东西，那么我们就需要改变这个概念，思考死亡过程的更敏感的方式。接受者的延长生命的概念本身并不是一个简单的结果，而且关于谁的生命被延长的问题也远不清楚。我的贡献涉及到以寄生虫的方式思考移植的想法，但将提出一种替代的德勒兹式的前进方式。
