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Moving parts: reconfiguring corporeal difference and the human through organ transplant narratives

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Moving parts: reconfiguring corporeal difference and the human through organ transplant narratives

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MOVING PARTS:

RECONFIGURING CORPOREAL DIFFERENCE AND THE HUMAN

THROUGH ORGAN TRANSPLANT NARRATIVES

by

Nisha Kunte

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Nisha Kunte

ii

Acknowledgements

How difficult it seems to thank the many people who have made this dissertation
possible. I know my gratitude for their support, generosity, and kindness cannot be
captured in words; what an impossible task to fix to the page the fluid world of
mentorship and friendship that I have been so lucky to inhabit. First, I offer thanks to my
committee: I thank my chair, Dorinne Kondo, for her commitment to and care for my
work; her intellect and expertise informed and inspired the most difficult and rewarding
aspects of this project. I thank Viet Thanh Nguyen for the time he took to put forth
thoughtful and challenging critiques, sparking me to set rigorous goals for my writing. I
thank Fred Moten for his unwavering belief in this dissertation and his fearless
imagination that dared the project to go places I never dreamed I could take it. I thank
Tara McPherson for her kind support – her fine intuition and insight have been
invaluable.
The community within the department of American Studies and Ethnicity and the
University of Southern California has been a wonderful place to bring this project to
fruition. Through the years, the staff of ASE has been vital for my project’s completion.
Thank you for your cheerleading and patience: Sonia Rodriguez, Kitty Lai, Jujuana
Preston, and Sandra Hopwood. I have also been so lucky to form bonds with USC faculty
that have taught me the value of mentorship and intellectual courage. Thank you, David
Román, Richard Meyer, Lanita Jacobs, Jane Iwamura, and Peggy Kamuf. Finally, as
there are many kinds of support that we receive from our home institutions, I am grateful

iii

for the generous funding I have received toward the completion of this project from the
USC Graduate School and the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.
I must acknowledge my intellectual beginnings as an undergraduate at Columbia
University and the professors there who encouraged my burgeoning life in academia.
Thank you, David Eng, Ritu Birla, Gary Y. Okihiro, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
You planted the seeds for this project to flourish. I also thank members of the Columbia
medical community – Dr. Gerald Appel and Dr. Alan Benvenisty. The level of personal
care I have received from you as my doctors has been astounding. I very literally would
not have survived without you both. Finally, there are the friendships I forged as an
undergraduate that I must acknowledge. Thank you, Marie Holmes, Amanda Sneider,
Florence Juillard, and Calista Brill for so many years of sweet companionship.
I would like to thank my fellow travellers in graduate school, those whose humor,
commiseration, and collaboration I can’t imagine life without: Perla Guerrero, Imani Kai
Johnson, Micaela Smith, Adam Bush, Sionne Neely, Fiorella Cotrina, Shaoling Ma, Viet
Le, David Clinton Wills, Laura Fujikawa, Cam Vu, Bert Emerson, Araceli Esparza, Amy
Cimini, Rachel Corkle, Wendy Cheng, and Robert Eap. I would especially like to thank
Emily Hobson for the walks and the talks; Margarita Smith for the late nights and the
songs; Jake Peters for the many second breakfasts; and Jesús Hernández, Neetu Khanna,
and Jason Goldman for being the best renegade Getty Center comrades in the world.
Finally, to Sam Solomon and Shiben Banerji: this project and its writer have been so
fortunate to know your magnanimous spirits, shrewd intellects, and expansive capacity
for silliness.

iv

To my parents, I owe everything. My mother, Vera Kunte, and my father, Uday
Kunte, have redefined the meaning of the words love and support.
Finally, Christopher Farrish patiently sat by my side and listened to me read every
word of this dissertation aloud. What a gift it has been to bend his ear for a while. The
enthusiasm, love, and respect he has shown for me and my work have been my
sustenance. I am lucky to share my life with someone of such intellectual tenaciousness,
confidence, and passion.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Introduction: Moving Parts 1

Chapter 1: Narrative Suture: Representations of Organ Transplantation 29
as Gift of Life in Grey’s Anatomy and House

Chapter 2: On the Margins of the Human: The Objectified Donor 71
and the Melancholic Subject in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Chapter 3: Blackness Beyond the Borders of the Body: 108
Race, Transplantation, and Community in Sekou Sundiata’s blessing the boats

Chapter 4: Who Put the I in the Intruder? 152
Immunity, Identity, and World Making in Jean-Luc Nancy’s
and Claire Denis’ L’Intrus

Coda: When and Where I Entered 196

Bibliography 205

vi

List of Figures

Figure 1: SS. Cosmas and Damian Graft the Leg of a Moor 2
on to Stump of an Amputee, Jaume Huguet (1415–92) /
Santa Maria of Egara in Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain, Index /
The Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 2: Lewis Rat with a hind limb transplant from a 2
Hybrid Brown Norway Rat performed by scientists
at the University of California – Irvine in 1981 /
New England Journal of Medicine, February 11, 1982

Figure 3: Sekou Sundiata in blessing the boats 128

vii

Abstract

Organ transplantation materially reconfigures the biological boundaries between bodies,
but it also reshapes the social and ethical possibilities of using certain bodies as resources
for the lives of others. In its physical reorganizing of the fleshy material of bodies, it
conjures up vivid associations and rearticulations of the relationship between self and
other, of the individualist Enlightenment subject, and of what it even means to be and
have a human body. Moving Parts examines how associations and rearticulations like
these are represented in literature, television, theater, and film. In examining the stories
that circulate around the most fundamental questions about the organ transplant’s
possibility, I argue that we can see how narrative constructs the body as knowable
subject. Moving Parts contends that these modes of narrativizing the act of organ transfer
are indicative of a pervasive preoccupation not simply with a technology that drastically
reorganizes how bodies relate to one another in the materiality of their flesh, but also with
the very strategies these stories deploy in order to narratologically negotiate this radical
corporeal reconfiguration. I argue that the organ transplant should be understood as a
discourse, a profound transformation of bodies where the objectified other is the very
thing that allows for the continued life of the self. It is a discourse through which we may
understand the self to always have been a precarious construct teetering between healthy
and individual and ailing and contingent. In the face of a technology that demands a
radical understanding of the borders of between self and other, the stories I examine in
Moving Parts allow us to think a human subject that must begin beyond where the body

viii

ends in order to resist the liberal humanist discourses that produce debased others
premised on corporeal difference.

1

Introduction: Moving Parts

The Saints Cosmas and Damian were reputedly born in Asia Minor in the 3
rd

Century. The twin brothers became physicians devoted to the care of the poor and were
famed for their miraculous feats of healing which they performed for no fee in adherence
with their Christian faith. They were martyred under the Emperor Diocletian in the year
287. (Matthews) Cosmas and Damian’s place in medical history is secured by their act of
the first transplantation of a human body part, an endeavor made even more remarkable
as the saints executed this surgery nearly one thousand years after their deaths. The
surgery took place in Rome in a dream. A servant of the Church, and devotee of the
saints, was dying from a cancerous affliction of his leg. As he lay in his bed, sleeping,
Cosmas and Damian came to him, amputated the diseased leg, and replaced it with the
limb of a Moor who was recently buried in the cemetery of St. Peter’s. When the servant
awoke in the morning, he found that his leg had been cured, but as described by Zenonas
Danilevicius,
O woe! It was black. This reminded him of his dream, and he ran to the
grave of the Moor to see if it really were true. He found other people
already curiously peeking into the grave, inspecting the Moor's body next
to which lay the diseased white leg. The servant and the people who were
with him were aware that they had witnessed a great miracle and prayed in
veneration and gratitude to the physician saints. (146)

The transplantation of the Moor’s leg onto the church servant’s white body has been the
subject of several European paintings of the Middle Ages, an example of

2

Figure 4 SS. Cosmas and Damian Graft the Leg of a Moor onto Stump of an Amputee, Jaume Huguet
(1415–92) / Santa Maria of Egara in Terrassa, Barcelona, Spain, Index / The Bridgeman Art Library

Figure 5 Lewis Rat with a hind limb transplant from a Hybrid Brown Norway Rat performed by scientists
at the University of California – Irvine in 1981 / New England Journal of Medicine, February 11, 1982
which is seen in the image (figure 1) by the Catalan artist, Jaume Huguet. The altarpiece
depicts the moment of union between the prone white man’s body and the black leg of
the deceased Moor, consecrated by the presence of angels holding surgical instruments

3

behind Cosmas and Damian. In the foreground, the diseased white leg is cast off, marred
by pox and blood trickling from the stump. Relegated to the right of the picture plane,
there is an inset of Cosmas and Damian harvesting the leg from a naked black body. The
representation of the black body plays a surprisingly paradoxical role in this image and
myth. The stark relief of the black leg against the white sheet, adjoining the white thigh,
visually heightens the miracle of transplantation. We can see clearly that a feat of medical
transformation has occurred here in the color contrast between bodies. Further, that such
a joint could take place across the social and political gulf between the Moor and the
Roman church servant doubles the fantastic quality of the act performed by Cosmas and
Damian.
However, while the blackness of the body serves to condition the transplant as a
particularly virtuosic and nearly unbelievable act of medical intervention, it also points to
the anxiety implicit in the enacting of such a procedure. There is the servant’s reaction
upon seeing his leg for the first time: O woe! There is the need to depict the harvesting of
the Moor in order to fully illustrate the astonishing facts of the miraculous act, but the
view of dismemberment of the black body (and indeed, the foregrounding of the diseased
white body) haunts the larger image, marking the tension over the crossing of corporeal
borders of difference. The image of the black leg on the white body may make the
miracle of a seemingly seamless transplantation more visible, but it also articulates what
Brent Hayes Edwards might call the decalage - “the kernel of precisely that which cannot
be transferred or exchanged…the world of ‘differences in unity.’” (14). It is an example
of how a medical technology that attempts to create new forms of bodily union by

4

moving parts across established corporeal, cultural, and social borders both effaces and
exposes the work it does both for and against difference.
What then do we make of the image of the rat with a black leg? (Figure 2) On
February 11, 1982, a letter titled “Cosmas and Damian in the Laboratory” issued from
scientists representing the Transplantation Laboratory, Division of Urology, the
Microsurgical Laboratory, Division of Plastic Surgery, and the Department of Surgery at
the University of California – Irvine was published in the New England Journal of
Medicine. Black, et al., noted in their correspondence that in their testing of the use of
cyclosporine-A, a then novel immunosuppressive technology, towards the successful
allografting of limbs onto rats that they were attempting to “follow the lead of Cosmas
and Damian in the laboratory.” (368) They also describe the subjects of their
experiments: “Our white subjects were Lewis rats and our black donors were hybrid
brown Norway rats,” (Ibid.) and provided the image of such a composite rat to be
published alongside the letter. At first, we might dismiss this racialization of rats as part
of the necessity to test cyclosporine across breeds to better determine its
immunosuppressive efficacy in the face of greater genetic variation. There is a kernel of
truth to this crossbreed logic, however, in subsequent trials by Black, et al., they switched
the donor rat from the brown Norway rat to the white Fischer rat (Black, et al. 1982;
Black, et al. 1985). Why then, in their early efforts at transplantation experimentation did
these scientists feel the need to emulate Cosmas and Damian to the point of aesthetically
replicating the racial border crossing of that singular act of organ transfer onto the bodies
of rats?

5

What the comparison between these two images shows us is the preoccupation
with the extra-medical aspects of organ transfer – in this case, even within the medical
community. It is not enough that a body part from one human (or rat), possibly deceased,
could vivify another human (or rat). There is the need to fortify the story with the socio-
cultural discourse of race, crosscutting the cutting open of the body, and revealing the
ways that organ transplantation does the work of much more than a life-saving, cutting-
edge medical technology. Organ transplantation materially reconfigures the biological
boundaries between bodies, but it also reshapes the social and ethical possibilities of
using certain bodies as resources for the lives of others. In its physical reorganizing of the
fleshy material of bodies, it conjures up vivid associations and rearticulations of the
relationship between self and other, of the individualist Enlightenment subject, and of
what it even means to be and have a human body.
I use this comparison as a means to introduce the powerful mode of analysis that
organ transfer offers in examining an eclectic body of work. That is to say, I enact here,
on a small scale, the types of readings that one will find in Moving Parts in which organ
transplantation acts as both the impetus for critical engagement with a variety of texts and
as a discursive mode of analysis through which these texts are examined. This type of
reading constitutes an opening up of the body and the subject for a consideration of larger
questions of political and corporeal possibility. In this way, questions of race,
community, and justice are not simply grafted onto a body of literature that happens to
deal with the biomedical reorganization of the flesh. Rather, grafting itself, both in its
literal form of transplantation and the figurative form of reading through and against,

6

becomes the foundation upon which to build a more robust framework through which to
analyze questions of sovereignty, subjectivity, and the body that are always already at
work in any narratological exploration of the corporeal contact zones between people.
Moving Parts examines how contact zones like these are represented in literature,
television, theater, and film. The juxtaposition of the images above serve to introduce this
project’s interest in the production, circulation, and modification of the narratives that
arise in the wake of the biotechnology of organ transfer. In examining the stories that
circulate around the most fundamental questions about the organ transplant’s possibility,
we see how narrative constructs the body as knowable subject. Moving Parts contends
that these modes of narrativizing the act of organ transfer are indicative of a pervasive
preoccupation not simply with a technology that radically reorganizes how bodies relate
to one another in the materiality of their flesh, but also with the very strategies these
stories deploy in order to narratologically negotiate this radical corporeal
reconfigurations.
This interrogation of the boundaries of the body and the stories that construct and
are constructed by it are part of a project of thinking the human body and its relationship
to difference. The stories that arise in relation to organ transplantation produce their own
anxieties, interests, and incommensuration beyond the technology they narrativize. In
examining the discursive excesses of representations of organ transplantation, Moving
Parts argues that we can shift the logic of dominant discourses that privilege white,
Western, normative individualism as a means for coherent subjectivity and personhood,
negotiating a border politics of the body that reconfigures corporeal understandings of

7

racial difference. To do so would be to attempt an unfurling of the strands of what
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls the subject-effect:
that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense
discontinuous network (‘text’ in a general sense) of strands that may be
termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language and so
on. (Each of these strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven
of many strands.) Different knottings and configurations of these strands,
determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves
dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating
subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness
symptomatically requires a continuous and homogenous cause for this
effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject. (204)
In the work done here, we replace the homogenist, deliberative consciousness with the
narratological impulses encoded in the stories examined within Moving Parts, all of
which constitute a continual reiteration of the body that provides a space both for
inhabitance and the failure to inhabit. We do so in order to examine the interplay between
this narrativization and failure of narrative in an effort to begin to undo the knottings of
these strands or perhaps entangle them even more with the view of disrupting the positing
of a sovereign and determining subject.
Organ transplantation itself does not throw the liberal, humanist body inherited
through Western Enlightenment thought into crisis; that work has been done in the
legacies of poststructuralist and feminist interventions of the past fifty years. It is
therefore not the technology of organ transplantation itself that forces the creation of new
subject formations. Organ transplantation, rather, through the narratives that it necessarily
engages, creates the possibility of thinking how concepts of the human and difference are
materially and psychically negotiated through the construct of the body. I argue that the

8

organ transplant should be understood as a discourse, a profound reconfiguration of
bodies where the objectified other is the very thing that allows for the continued life of
the self. It is a discourse through which we may understand the self to always have been a
precarious construct teetering between healthy and individual and ailing and contingent.
In the face of a technology that demands a radical understanding of the borders of
between self and other, the stories I examine in Moving Parts allow us to think a human
subject that must begin beyond where the body ends in order to resist the liberal humanist
discourses that produce debased others premised on corporeal difference.
The modern history of organ transplantation begins with the first successful solid
organ transplant performed in 1954 in the United States when Dr. Joseph Murray and his
colleagues transplanted a kidney between identical twins, Ronald and Richard Herrick.
Since the brothers shared the same DNA, the recipient twin’s immune system did not
react to the donor organ as a foreign body and attack it. This experimental procedure
proved that organ transplantation was possible if rejection could be managed (Diethelm
507). As pharmaceutical immunosuppressive therapies improved, the possibility of
donation extended to immediate family members. Today, transplantation is possible even
between unrelated donors, provided blood type and other histocompatibility matches are
confirmed.
With the advent of brain death as a new category for determining the end of life in
1968, the loss of total brain function joined cardio-respiratory failure (the irreversible
cessation of breathing and of the heart beat) as a means for doctors to declare death in the
United States (Ott 17). With this development, a new category of possible organ donors

9

emerged. Those who were legally dead, but whose solid organs are healthy and
vascularized
1
, could be harvested for transplantation. The criteria of informed consent,
that is permission to harvest organs given under noncoercive conditions, were extended
out to the rights of the cadaverous donor in the requirement that, while alive, a person
give permission for organ procurement in the post-mortem handing of his body either
through a living will or a donor card. In lieu of such designations, the decisions of the
deceased’s immediate family in these matters must be solicited and upheld. As the
number of persons in organ failure waiting for transplants rises due to the use of
transplantation to treat more and more conditions and the approval for transplantation of
more people previously considered unsuitable for transplant, there have been mounting
efforts to increase the supply of cadaverous donor organs as less than fifty percent of
potential cadaverous organs are harvested and transplanted (National Kidney
Foundation). Currently, in the United States, under the law of required request, if a
person dies of total brain function loss and has left no legal specifications regarding the
disposal of her body, medical professionals must ask the next of kin if they consent to
organ procurement on behalf of the dead. In practice, even if the deceased indicated her
desire to be an organ donor on a donor card or living will, families are still often asked to
provide consent, and some contradict the stated wishes of the potential donor (Siminoff et
al.).

1
Vascularized simply means that the organ is supplied with blood through working blood
vessels. Organs procured from those who die from cardio-respiratory failure no longer
have regular blood flow and enter rigor mortis. However, organs within totally brain dead
people, like organs within living donors, remain vascularized and thus may be
transplanted.

10

Some bioethicists see this as not only a waste of transplantable organs but also a
violation of an individual’s rights before his family. Further, they seek to eliminate the
requirement to ask for family consent and to bridge the disparity between the number of
Americans who purportedly support organ donation and the number who actually carry
donor cards or indicate their consent to organ procurement in living wills.
2
Two
suggestions to remedy these problems and increase the number of available
transplantable organs are mandated choice and presumed consent. Mandated choice
would require every citizen to indicate whether or not she consents to donating her organs
upon death either during driver’s license renewals or on income tax forms. Answers
would then be compiled into a federally maintained, searchable database that could be
consulted by hospitals only after a potential donor had been declared legally dead (Spital
148). Presumed consent would function as an opt-out policy in which every citizen would
be assumed to consent to organ donation unless he registered his objection in federally
sponsored and maintained database (Futterman 164).
The proponents of presumed consent and mandated choice maintain that the
decision to donate organs should not be made in the hospital by a family faced with the
often sudden and tragic loss of a loved one. Both proposals attempt, as Aaron Spital, an
advocate for mandated choice, states, “to redirect our focus away from family and back to
the individual, the one who is best suited to decide the disposition of his or her own body
after death" (151). Nonetheless, both these proposals have been rejected on precisely the

2
According to Donate Life America, while 90% of Americans support organ donation,
only 30% know how to indicate their consent for donation (“Understanding Donation”).

11

grounds that they diminish the rights of the individual to his own body. Critics believe
they run afoul of the very argument that serves to justify transplantation as ethically
possible in the face of the physician’s violation of the Hippocratic oath – that the rights of
the individual in respect to the use of his own body be respected above any other
consideration, including increasing the supply of transplantable organs for those who
might die without them, and that every individual must provide informed consent before
becoming an organ donor.
Ethicists Robert Veatch and J.B. Pitt argue consent cannot be presumed unless it
can be shown that people would “consent to a policy of taking organs without explicit
permission” and that no such data supports such a claim (176). They maintain that
proponents of presumed consent are actually arguing for a regime of routine salvage that
places the common good before the individual. Such a policy may wrest the power of
consent out of the hands of the next of kin, but it then places that power in the hands of
the state. Surgeons may not accept such consent to justify cutting into a dead body,
removing organs in a procedure that clearly does not benefit the deceased in any way.
Similarly, opponents of mandated choice find fault with the ethical groundwork of such a
theory, not in the consent part of the proposition, but rather in the designation of such
consent as informed. Ann and David Klassen posit that rather than being irrational and
uninformed, decisions made by next of kin in moments of tragedy may come at the only
time a family can gain the experiential knowledge to make valid decisions about such a
rare and unusual event as the possibility of cadaverous organ donation (155). Critics of
both mandated choice and presumed consent astutely point out that non-registrants in a

12

federal database of organ donors would “tend to be from ‘hard-to-reach’ segments of the
population such as lower socioeconomic groups, minorities, and non-English-speaking
persons” (Klassen and Klassen 158). Studies show that these groups are likely not to
consent to organ donation under the current system of organ procurement and as Veatch
and Pitt state, “it is precisely this group of people who would run the highest risk of not
knowing the proper procedures for opting out of the system" (179). Given this, no
surgeon could ethically assume that a person who did not explicitly opt-out of the
presumed consent or mandated choice did so based on an informed understanding of the
organ procurement procedure, or indeed, on any understanding of what might happen to
their body after death at all.
The arguments above are produced by physicians, legal scholars, politicians and
philosophers who have written much of the existing academic work on organ
transplantation. Much of the field of bioethics – issues concerning stem cell research,
xenotransplantation, the definition of death, and the right to life, for example – is
connected to questions raised by organ transfer. Social scientists Nancy Scheper-Hughes,
Judith Swazey, Renee Fox, Margaret Lock, and Lesley Sharp, to name just a few, have
made important contributions to the study of organ transplantation within the fields of
Medical Anthropology and Sociology. These scholars supersede the bioethicist’s
concerns with the juridically determined ethics of the practical application of medical
technology by addressing the social, cultural, and political problematics at root in even
the most legally “pure” notion of organ transplantation. I will discuss their contributions
at greater length in my first chapter.

13

My research builds upon this work in the social sciences; however, the project’s
methodological commitments and indeed the focus on imaginative cultural productions
surrounding organ transfer are very different than much of the work done within Medical
Anthropology and Sociology. Moving Parts engages with stories of organ transplantation
through the methodologies of narrative analysis and an examination of the psychoanalytic
aspects of subjectivity alongside a consideration of medicalized corporeality. The project
is also deeply indebted to the field of Asian American Studies for framing the political
stakes of examining hybrid bodies for the purpose of discovering modes of corporeal
resistance. This intellectual commitment might be a bit more difficult to trace than the
use of poststructuralist understandings of narrative and the psychic life of the body.
However, it is nevertheless central to the theoretical genealogy of Moving Parts and
therefore bears explanation. Not only do I argue that Asian American Studies informs the
core of this project’s political trajectory, I also believe that examining the organ
transplant as a discourse through which to understand the consequences of materially
hybridizing bodies vitally reconfigures and contributes to the field of Asian American
Studies. But how does one get from a consideration of corporeality and subjectivity as
refigured through organ transplantation to a reconsideration of Asian American Studies?
In order to begin to answer this quandary, we must begin with an ancillary
question: how do we think through organ transplantation as a discourse that reframes a
foundational and familiar question of the discipline of Asian American Studies - just who
are we talking about when we talk about the Asian American subject? From its inception,
Asian American Studies has continually struggled to identify the subject of its intellectual

14

and political inquiry. There is a way in which we have come to terms with this problem
through the understanding of Asian American not simply as premised on an identity
carried through racialized bodies, but as an ethico-political structure through which we
may understand processes of identity, a critical position that posits those objects we
consider Asian American to be elements of a theory of practice. After briefly tracing two
of these interventions, I will examine how organ transplantation similarly can be
understood and deployed as a critical discourse that recursively re-theorizes the
theoretical solutions offered to the problem of Asian American subjectivity.
When outlining the major interventions into totalizing articulations of the Asian
American subject – and if our eventual goal is to lay these interventions against the
constellation of social formations shaped by a medical technology that produces what we
might think of as a hybrid corporeality, we must begin with Lisa Lowe’s seminal
corrective to nationalist master narratives of Asian American identity and culture. Lowe
famously offers heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity as modes through which to
reckon with the differences inherent to Asian Americans as a group while maintaining an
active political core from which to position Asian Americanist critique.
I would like to highlight two aspects of this position advocated by Lowe. The first
is the promotion of heterogeneity not as a diversification tactic – that is, of legitimizing
multiple kinds of Asian American social formations through expanding the inside of what
we consider Asian America, but rather through a contestation of the very construction of
inside and outside as inert borders separating two opposing terms: “The materialist
argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the conception of difference as exclusively

15

structured by a binary opposition between two terms, by proposing instead another notion
of ‘difference’ that takes seriously the historically produced conditions of heterogeneity,
multiplicity, and nonequivalence” (72) The second is to reiterate that if such a
complication of our understandings of binaristic oppositions is the result of, as Lowe
says, “The boundaries and definitions of Asian American culture…continually shifting
and being contested from pressure both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the Asian origin
community” (66), even in a scrupulous examining of the historical and material
conditions through which difference is discursively produced, we are left with a
porousness in the demarcation between inside and outside to the extent that we might
question where inside ends and outside begins. I do not wish to suggest that a concern
with hybridity allows a slip into a dissolving ambivalence that evacuates what we term
Asian American of any coherence, but that there is a theoretical and corporeal border
politics that is continually being negotiated in Lowe’s solution to the problem of locating
the subject of Asian American studies.
Kandice Chuh’s positing of Asian American studies as a subjectless discourse
puts even more pressure on the permeability between inside and outside as she argues
there is no ground from which to even begin to posit an “Asian origin community” (as
Lowe puts it) from which we might then trouble the borders of Asian America. For Chuh,
subjectlessness means “point[ing] attention to the constraints on the liberatory potential
of the achievement of subjectivity, by reminding us that a ‘subject’ only becomes
recognizable and can act as such by conforming to certain regulatory matrices” (9) In this
formulation, Asian American identity can never be a subject position from which to stake

16

a political claim, even strategically. Asian American rather, becomes a “a category of
critique rather than identity." (56) Chuh argues, then, that Asian American has difference
at its heart – “it is a term in difference from itself – at once making a claim of achieved
subjectivity and referring to the impossibility of that achievement” (8) and as such, “The
point is not to work toward resolving differences, to promote some version of
assimilation, but is instead to insist on the productiveness of dissensus in demonstrating
the impossibility of any objectivity, the irreducible inadequacy of any totalizing approach
to our disciplining of knowledge” (28).
Again, I would like to point out two crucial points of Chuh’s position. The first is
that Chuh’s description of Asian American as a term in difference from itself is due in
part to the impossibility born of what Chuh calls “collaborative antagonism” (28) born of
the joining of the two terms of Asian and American. This highlights that the corrective to
the problem of the Asian American subject that Chuh offers is fundamentally
transnational and globalized - "Subjectlessness as a discursive ground for Asian
American studies can…help to identity and trace the shifting positionalities and
complicated terrains of U.S. American culture and politics articulated to a globalized
frame, by opening up the field to account for practices of subjectivity that might not be
immediately visible" (11). Further, impossibility as a theoretical hallmark of the
subjectless discourse should not be misread as an apolitical stance that forecloses justice
– rather, “’Asian American’ is/names racism and resistance, citizenship and its denial,
subjectivity and subjection – at once the becoming and undoing – and, as such, is a
designation of the (im)possibility of justice, where ‘justice’ refers to a state as yet

17

unexperienced and unrepresentable, one that can only connotatively be implied” (8). Our
questioning of inside and outside, of binaristic opposition, becomes expanded in this
formulation requiring a consideration of the Asian American subject (if we can
provisionally speak of one) constituted across global borders in ways that may not be
“immediately visible” as Chuh articulates it. The discursive coming into being of these
subjects cannot rely solely on historical articulations of race and citizenship, nor can such
problems be resolved in the present but must be ever deferred to an unknowable future.
From this foundation upon two interventions into the problems of naming the
Asian American subject, we have a point from which to examine organ transplantation as
a network of social and political relationships that refract the four points we have
demonstrated: 1) the use of heterogeneity to challenge binaristic constructions of
difference, 2) the consequent pressure such challenges puts on the boundaries of the
Asian American subject, 3) considerations of this subject in a transnational context, and
4) the (im)possibility of representing the Asian American subject that results from these
interventions and challenges. Organ transplantation is a biomedical technology that not
only de-synchronizes the subject from the corporeal by moving body parts of one person
into another but, due to the “shortages” in human body parts mentioned before, also
promotes a global market in organs, with hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys flowing from
the peripheries of Asia into the fleshy core of America. The 2008 Declaration of Istanbul
on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, a document created by the Transplantation
Society and International Society of Nephrology at the behest of the World Health

18

Association, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, defines organ
trafficking as
the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receipt of living or
deceased persons or their organs by means of the threat or use of force or
other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse
of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving to, or the
receiving by, a third party of payments or benefits to achieve the transfer
of control over the potential donor, for the purpose of exploitation by the
removal of organs for transplantation (75)
and travel for transplantation as
the movement of organs, donors, recipients or transplant professionals
across jurisdictional borders for transplantation purposes. Travel for
transplantation becomes transplant tourism if it involves organ trafficking
and/or transplant commercialism or if the resources (organs, professionals
and transplant centers) devoted to providing transplants to patients from
outside a country undermine the country’s ability to provide transplant
services for its own population (Ibid).

As has been noted by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes in her important and
extensive work on organ trafficking, “In general, the flow of organs follows modern
routes of capital: from South to North, from Third to First World, from poor to rich, from
black and brown to white, and from female to male” (193). She has characterized this
flow by invoking the language of institutionalized racial segregation: “Indeed, a kind of
medical apartheid has also emerged that has separated the world into two populations—
organ givers and organ receivers” (64). However, here we will consider a particular kind
of transplant tourism in which recipients of organs travel from the global north in order to
extract body parts in the global south that, we may say, in a fraught logic of material
heterogeneity, complicates the racialized charting of the flow of organs along a uni-
directional understanding of the routes of capital and movement of third world peoples to

19

the global north. The complication is rooted in that these organ-seeking individuals
traveling west to east have traversed this path before, but in reverse. In 2008, the most
comprehensive study done to date on transplant tourism originating in the United States
was published in the American Journal of Transplantation. It stated “Asians were more
than 10-fold more likely than non-Asians to receive foreign transplants” (Merion et al.
991)
Currently, China holds the market in cadaverous organs used in organ trafficking,
almost all of which are supplied from recently executed members of the prison
population (Budiani-Saberi and Delmonico). Until 1994 with the passage of a law
banning the sale of body parts and the donation of organs to non-kin, India was the
source of most live organs for transplant tourists. While there remains a thriving black
market trade in body parts, the end of the grey market in India led to an increase in
transplant tourism in Pakistan and the Philippines (although the Philippines has cracked
down on illegal organ selling with the passage of a similar law enacted in 2008)
(Shimazono; France-Presse). Ethnographic work with Indian and Pakistani organ sellers
reveals that most people enter into contracts to sell their kidneys due to crippling debt
with the money they receive for the sale of their flesh resulting in only a few years of
respite from financial ruin (Moazam, et al.; Goyal, et al.). A significant number of people
on the receiving end of these organ “donations” are Asian/American. Single transplant
center studies from Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, the University of Minnesota
Medical Center and the UCLA medical center all find that “tourists included a larger

20

proportion of Asian-American patients, and most patients traveled to the region of their
ethnicity to obtain transplantation” (1825 Gill et al; Rhoades and Schiano; Canales et al.).
What we find in the expansion of the distillation of figures presented above is a
multiplicity of the Asian/American body figured quite literally. Asians who have become
Asian/American through a rubric of labor, migration, and race (to name just a few
identarian markers) that is inscribed by and through global capital retrace the scars of
transnational border crossing – they return “home.” They do this in an effort to make
whole the bodies inhabited and referenced both by and through this discourse of
subjectivity. But in making themselves whole through purchasing a liver, a lung, a heart
or a kidney, they literally partition the bodies of the people who serve as the others
through which their oppositional subjectivity as Asian American is figuratively
composed. They return to the United States, excessively organed (excessively
Asian(ed)?), corporeally inhabiting a heterogeneity, multiplicity and hybridity in their
very flesh. To point to these Asian/Americans is to materially open up the Asian
American subject that has been so contested. This opening up allows us to examine how
the body becomes a ground for challenging assertions that subjectlessness or
heterogeneity may provide for a conception of future justice. How can we imagine either
of these rubrics as positing a politically productive elsewhere for our conception of the
Asian American subject when these transplanted bodies so complicate the inside and
outside of the Asian origin community? That is to say, how can we think about expanded
notions of justice for Asian/Americans through the tropes of a hybridity or
subjectlessness that invest theoretical, historical, and social value in making complex

21

connections between the terms “Asian” and “American” when these transplanted Asian
American bodies enact a subjectivity that, in their incorporation of Asian organs, actually
produce an invisibility of those Asian bodies.
I do not bring up the case of Asian/American participation in organ trafficking
and the bodies that result from it to negate the interventions made by theorists like Lowe
and Chuh or to contest the viability of a unifying Asian American theory. Rather, I do so
to compel a greater opening up of those very theories of heterogeneity and
subjectlessness. As Christopher Lee argues in his recent work regarding the theorizing of
Asian American subjectivity and identity, “Asian American is…the resistance to theory
because whenever we engage its material manifestations, its finiteness always involves
the foreclosure of its own theoretical labor” (30). Such resistance is not a mark of a failed
theoretical intervention – it is rather the mark of theory itself. Lee, reading through De
Man, notes that theory must always resist itself as it is a practice of opening up that, once
deployed, constitutes a closure. It is in this way that I argue for reading organ
transplantation as a theory against theories of Asian American subjectivity for the
transplant is a discourse through which bodies and subjectivity are both figuratively and
literally opened up. They force us to reckon with the inside/outside problem that results
from Lowe’s important intervention into binaristic definitions of identity with their
surgical internalization of the outside and the other. They force us examine the corporeal
consequences of Chuh’s notion that Asian American names citizenship and its disavowal,
race and its disavowal – that is, theirc collaborative antagonisms - when the actual body

22

parts of disenfranchised Pakistani, Indian, Filipino, and Chinese people power the lived
experience of Asian/Americans in America.
Anthropologist Lawrence Cohen notes of the advances made in the late 1980s in
the development of immunosuppressive drugs that allowed unrelated persons to exchange
body parts without the bio-self rejecting the bio-other: “Cyclosporine globalizes, creating
myriad biopolitical fields where donor populations are differentially and flexibly
materialized. Difference is selectively suppressed, allowing specific subpopulations to
become ‘same enough’ for their members to be surgically disaggregated and their parts
reincorporated” (12). How do we figure nation and its (dis)articulations of difference in
the face of the theoretical and fleshy rearticulations of race and citizenship these
aggregate bodies (at the cost of the disaggregation of others) pose precisely through their
exploitation of material and social histories of the movement of resources and people
(where people, in fact, become resources) from south to north? What questions like these
allow for is a productive, but difficult opening up of the incredibly useful and powerful
solutions to the problem of Asian American subjectivity. It is the use of a theory of the
body against a theory of the subject. This offers another kind of collaborative
antagonism, if I may repurpose Chuh’s phrasing, that allows us to resist the resistance of
theory in order to continue the work of finding what Lowe demands is the “Asian
American necessity to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same
time...inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that
relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences” (68) This radical

23

opening up of the Asian American subject through a discourse and theory of organ
transplantation answers such a demand and demands that we take such a risk.
I have rehearsed the consequences of applying the discourse of organ
transplantation to the methodology of Asian American Studies in an effort similar to the
beginnings of this introduction: to demonstrate the mode in which transplantation allows
for contending with the larger stakes of a text, a theory, or a method. In the following
chapters, I work through how organ transplantation may be deployed as a discourse
through which we may open up established theoretical practices in order to conceive of
alternate forms of political possibility. In investigating the organ transplant’s
narratological presence in film, television, literature, and performance, I weave together
the strands of an argument based upon the particular manner in which the transplant
opens up the body. I do this to rearticulate the formation of the subject and to recondition
what we may consider the stakes of articulating the (im)possibilities of intercorporeal
constructions of community and the implications this (im)possibility has for ethical and
just dealings with the other. In the proceeding chapters, organ transplantation as a
discourse raises questions regarding the ethics of storytelling, the racial subject and the
conditions of the human, the borders of the body and its conditioning of the construct of
community, and the socio-political consequences of attempting to chart the movement of
bodies across the globe. What is at stake in Moving Parts is linking together these
disparate texts in an effort to conceive of how a medical technology, a seemingly
bounded form of intellectual inquiry, resonates across the borders of the body to force a
fundamental reordering of our theoretical conception of difference.

24

My first chapter analyzes the bioethical and popular narrativizing of the transfer
of organs between humans as the so-called “gift of life.” I ask how the gift of life
narrative of organ transplantation persists as the dominant means through which we
understand organ transfer, especially considering the body of work within medical
anthropology critiquing the use of gift analogies by bioethicists. I analyze the ways in
which the gift of life story is repeatedly deployed to strategically resolve narrative
problems within in the television medical dramas Grey’s Anatomy and House. In these
shows, organ transplantation is often used as a narrative means to bring together
characters with estranged relationships or allow for a doctor to cure a difficult patient’s
illness. I argue that we can see how it is actually the constitutive flaws of the gift of life
narrative that command its continual reiteration. As the gift of life story is re-told through
these demands for sentimental or structural resolution of the television genre, its constant
re-telling serves as an attempt to solve the very problem it was conjured into existence to
remedy. The gift of life story attempts to solve the problem of a medical technology that
takes apart bodies that could very easily slip into the unethical and even macabre.
However, as seen in my discussion of Grey’s Anatomy and House, its demand for re-
telling is a mark that the story fails to serve its purpose of complete remedy precisely
because it must be continually re-iterated.
In my second chapter, I consider the psychic consequences of reading the donor
body as it is melancholically conjured in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In reading
this story of young clones bred to donate all their vital organs, I examine the intersection
of the clone’s subjectivity, impoverished by loss and an incomplete identity formation,

25

with the text’s consideration of a humanity achieved through education. Here, I
simultaneously knit together and unravel these strands of psychic identity formation in
order to examine how the power relationship between the mind and body is thrown into
question by the clone slated to donate all her organs. As opposed to the Cartesian mind-
over-body (I think therefore I am), the clone body establishes itself as primary in its
brutal utility; the mind that is not only subordinate, but irrelevant to being.
In the third chapter, I discuss Sekou Sundiata’s solo theatre piece, blessing the
boats, a re-telling and reflection upon the poet’s experience of kidney failure and renal
transplant. I examine what is produced and what is lost in Sundiata’s cross-cuttings of
raced / ailing identity alongside a consideration of a subjectivity that both fails and
supersedes the body and its story. In so doing, I argue that we are forced to attend to an
ethical engagement across difference as socially constructed through the discourses of
both race and illness. In blessing the boats, Sundiata offers the audience access to a
narrative of self that subverts dominant formulations of illness and race, but refuses
sympathy or consumption of a triumphalist narrative as the mode of audience
identification with the performer. Like the transplant itself, the performance creates
destabilizing connections among bodies that require an ethical response to dealing with
embodied others across the boundary of stage and audience, donor and recipient – bodies
that must find a mode of social interaction across time and space. I argue that in taking
two selves into one body, Sundiata’s performance re-imagines a Du Boisian double
consciousness that does not posit a triumphalist individual but rather resides in the
discursive intersection of race and illness.

26

Finally, in my fourth chapter, I examine Jean-Luc Nancy's L'Intrus, an
autobiographical account of his experience with heart failure and an interrogation of the
technology of transplantation. I do this alongside Claire Denis’s film of the same name,
an interpretation of the essay that travels from the Franco-Swiss border to Korea to
Tahiti, drawing out the postcolonial anxieties of the metaphorical, geographic, and
physiological border crossings implicit in Nancy’s reflection. From the start, Denis
troubles the borders that enclose and protect both bodies and nation from harm. Through
this work, I examine the powers and persistence of the form of the nation and the form of
the body in terms of the medical and the neoliberal, specifically through Denis’s
relentlessly critical vision of the movement of bodies across the borders of postcolonial
nation-states. In this way, I strategically complicate my arguments for subjects extending
out beyond the borders of their bodies to include other formerly dehumanized others. We
cannot allow a commitment to collectivity to create further subjugation of certain literally
denigrated bodies by subjecting them to erasure under the sign of a triumphant
communalism as opposed to triumphant individualism. Through my analysis of Nancy
and Denis, I argue that an engagement with transplant narratives demands that we not
allow our making incoherent of the autonomous Enlightenment subject to elide the
intersubjective or collective back into the subhuman.
The texts I analyze in Moving Parts constitute a body of literature that takes
charge of ethical questions in medicine by actively reconstructing the terms through
which society relates to concepts of difference and the human. What draws these various
narratological engagements with transplantation together is their need to attend to what

27

gets expelled in the making of something whole. That is, they engage with the psychic
consequences of the addition and removal of body parts between people, negotiating both
what lies in excess and what is left behind in this trade in body parts. In doing so, these
stories of organ transfer enact a contestation of the history and primacy of liberal
humanist individual, echoing a trajectory that resonates with the critical engagements
with the construction of the raced body that has troubled this same history and primacy.
Furthermore, in its literal technology, these narratives of organ transplantation sift
through the dependence, erasure, and remembrance of the other’s role in constructing the
self, enacting the same role that the raced body plays in the psychic contestation of the
liberal subject. Moving Parts bridges these two ideas in arguing that these stories are a
sort of attempt at a psychic amelioration of the physical, literal wound dealt to the body
and as such are reiterative. This reiteration is seen in the particular recursivity of the
kinds of issues narrativized in the texts I take up here – issues like raced markings,
melancholia, being-in-common, and suture. Through a critical reading of the plays, films,
novels, and television programs discussed above, Moving Parts uses organ transplant
technology as a discursive site to call into question Enlightenment legacies that have
produced the normative, liberal, individual subject. In so doing, we find new conceptions
of corporeal political possibility through this discourse, embedding this exchange of
organs in historical and global socio-political networks of human subjugation and
corporeal exchange. In the movement of body parts, the borders of what we consider the
human and the ideological spaces the human inhabits, such as community and nation, are
transgressed and reconfigured. In evaluating the narrative response to this medical

28

technology of transient human body parts, Moving Parts raises the political stakes of
examining the discourse of organ transplantation, arguing that such stories reveal the
cultural value of the body in literature, political community, and intellectual histories of
personhood.

29

Chapter 1
Narrative Suture:
Representations of Organ Transplantation as Gift of Life
in Grey’s Anatomy and House

. . . though I am still
a part of any part of every particle

of me, though I’ll be softly reconstructed
by the white gloves of metonymy,

I grieve: there is no feeling in a cut
that doesn’t heal a bit too much.

This Gentle Surgery, Malachai Black

The problem of metaphorizing the transfer of organs between humans as gift has
circulated in the writings of bioethicists, lawmakers, and social scientists trying to make
sense of the socio-medical implications of transplant technology since its inception in the
late 1960s. Much of this literature points to the struggles and contradictions implied in
narrativizing the surgical act of removal and reinsertion of body parts between people
into a “gift of life.” The organ transplant breaches the boundaries between two bodies
with formerly disparate identities in time and space with the removal and reinsertion of
body parts between people. With this act, transplantation collapses the time and space
between self and other and inaugurates both a physical and psychic gap in our
understanding of the constructed totality of the human body. The literal and figurative
wound the organ transplant deals to the identity of the individually total body is sutured
through the story of the body part transfer figured as gift exchange. The gift of life

30

narrative provides what Paul Ricoeur calls a “narrative identity” to the act of organ
transfer; it is a story that makes this medical technology not just biologically possible, but
also ideologically thinkable. In examining the kinds of stories that circulate around the
most fundamental questions about the organ transplant’s possibility, we see how narrative
constructs the body as knowable subject and how the body escapes that very knowability.
In the face of the contradictions of characterizing the occasion of the wounding of
the human body’s totality as an exercise in gifting, why has this narrative of organ
transplantation become the legally and culturally sanctioned mode of understanding the
ethical and moral transfer of body parts? Further, we must ask ourselves how the gift of
life narrative of organ transplantation persists as the dominant means through which
organ transfer is represented both by the medical industrial complex and in the popular
imagination. Through an analysis of the representation of the organ transplantation in the
television medical dramas Grey’s Anatomy and House and the ways in which the gift of
life story is deployed to strategically resolve narratological problems within the televisual
text, we can see how it is precisely the constitutive flaws of the gift of life narrative that
command its reiteration both by medical professionals and the television audiences that
comprise the consumers of the transplant industry’s self-presentation.
Lawmakers and bioethicists worked together to create the gift of life narrative in
response to the ethical problems that could arise in a commodifying, coercive
environment of organ procurement. In response, social scientists have actively critiqued
this reliance on gifting language to allay ethical doubts about organ transplantation,
pointing out that the gift of life narrative is composed of its own failures and gaps even as

31

it attempts to cover over the wounds dealt to the liberal subject by its founding medical
technology. Looking at the ways in which television medical dramas such as Grey’s
Anatomy and House depict the story of organ transplantation, we can begin to understand
how both the telling and reiteration of the gift of life story functions as a kind of narrative
suture of these caesuras created in the act of organ transfer. We might think of the gift of
life narrative as suturing in multiple ways. Suture not only references the surgical action
that completes the transplantation of one person’s organ into another, but also allows us
to think the televisual in the register of the psychoanalytic: what is lost in representation
of organ transplantation and how does narrative play a potentially restorative role in
response to that loss? Furthermore, in thinking through the concept of suture, we
encounter a nested theoretical lens through which to examine the how such an aporetic
narrative is represented in the visual register of television with its assumption of the
totalizing gaze of the camera. In thinking of the gift of life story as narrative suture, the
response to the cut opens up several productive possibilities in our understandings of the
body.
Television offers a particularly fruitful mode of narrative analysis for this type of
thinking because its commercial aspect requires that it deploy familiar, popular stories in
order to capture as broad a viewing audience as possible. Analyzing these stories allows
us to pinpoint the moments of failure that both structure the gift of life narrative and
require its recapitulation. That these failures provide such narratological fodder for the
enduring genre of the medical drama indicates just how deeply wounding they are to
popular conceptions of the body and how stories like the gift of life narrative produce the

32

conditions of their reiteration. What may come out of engaging with these televisual re-
tellings of the gift of life narrative of organ transplantation? In examining the ways in
which the gift of life narrative is deployed in the service of television medical dramas, the
feeling that results from this story that heals too much – its scars show at the seams –
highlights its own undoing and subsequent recapitulation. The gift of life narrative thus
acts as both solution and problem to the wound it inflicts upon conceptions of bodily
totality. Examining organ transplantation figured as such reveals the process of self-
making that is endemic in all assertions of the liberal, independent body as subject - not
just those assaulted by new medical technologies. By taking on such storytelling and the
subsequent critical reading of the gift of life narrative, we are forced into an ethical
reckoning with body parts out of place and time.
At the dawn of the 21
st
Century, organ transplantation seems an ordinary and
expected form of treatment for various illnesses and bodily failures (Klassen and Klassen
154). People in end stage renal, liver, pancreatic, intestinal and lung failure may seek out
living organ donors among their friends and family. Those who do not have access to
living donors, who are unable to function with only a lobe of a lung or liver, or who are
in need of a heart are routinely listed on the United Network for Organ Sharing’s
3
waiting
list for a cadaverous donor. According to UNOS, there are currently 248 hospitals in the
United States operating organ transplant programs (UNOS, “Membership: Transplant

3
Established by the Congress of the United States of America in 1984, “the United
Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is a non-profit, scientific and educational
organization that administers the nation's only Organ Procurement and Transplantation
Network (OPTN)” (UNOS, “Who We Are”).

33

Centers”). The proliferation of these centers in major and mid-sized cities across the
country shows that solid organ transplant is increasingly becoming part of the standard
medical landscape in the United States.
4
This was obviously not always the case. The
growth of the transplant industry is directly related to advances in medical technology
that have allowed for increasing success in recipient survival rate and long term
prognosis. New surgical techniques like laparoscopic nephrectomies (the removal of a
donor kidney through minimally invasive surgery) and liver and lung lobectomies (the
removal of only part of the liver or lung) allowed for greater procurement of organs from
living donors. Innovations in immunosuppressive drugs like Cyclosporine and Prograf
lowered rejection rates, even when donor and recipient were not close tissue matches.
Growth can also be attributed to the legalization of changes in medically informed social
designations. For example, with the medical and legal advent of brain death, organs could
be harvested for transplant from juridically designated cadavers as well as from those
bodies commonly understood to be living. However, as more and more people become
eligible for organ transplants and the sources from which these organs may be obtained
are expanded, the central questions raised by the very possibility of the organ transplant
become ever more pressing: How do we ethically transfer organs from one body to
another and whose bodies will serve as the source of those organs? How could one
remove an organ from a healthy individual, causing injury to a body for no other purpose

4
While it is true that more transplant centers were needed with the increasing numbers of
transplant procedures, Renee Fox and Judith Swazey importantly note that the
proliferation of new centers across the country in the 1980s had much to do with the
regional allocation policies for cadaveric organs as instituted by UNOS (Fox and Swazey
1992).

34

than to heal an entirely different person, without violating one of the primary precepts of
modern medical ethics: first, do no harm?
The violation of this tenet of the Hippocratic oath could not be offset solely
through recourse to the common good – the saving of a fellow human from death or
illness. Such a solution would put the good of the polis before the rights of the individual.
To resolve this dilemma, transplant surgeons, hospital ethics boards and several court
cases negotiated the policy of informed consent to mitigate the conflict engendered in
harming one individual to save another (Caplan and Coehlo 113). The legitimacy of
informed consent in relation to organ transplantation is premised on the legal
consideration that a free individual has exclusive rights to her body and may submit to
organ or tissue procurement as long as she is informed and uncoerced. Arnold G.
Diethelm, a pioneer of renal transplant surgery, stated in a speech on the history of
transplantation ethics that informed consent required “the patient, i.e., donor, must (1)
understand the procedure and the risks and imponderables, (2) not be coerced, (3) provide
a voluntary answer, and (4) be mentally competent and of legal age” (509).
Implied within the ethical rubric suggested by the ideology of informed consent is
the conceit that organ donors should have a voluntary, altruistic desire to give a body part
to an ailing person. The wound inflicted by the surgeon on the healthy body is allayed by
the complicity of the mind housed within that body in its wounding in the service of the
ailing other. The individual’s informed, uncoerced consent plays a central role in the
medical ethicist’s justification of organ procurement and transplantation. Altruism and
voluntarism are by definition determined by the individual in relation to external

35

motivations but are exempt from outside compulsion of will. These two tenets are then
poised to establish who might be ethically designated a valid source of organs for those in
end stage organ failure. However, we must note that within the narrative put forth by
medical ethicists, altruism and the gift become mutually imbricated in painting the need
for transplantation as medically and culturally necessary.
Such an alignment may not seem remarkable at first. Viewing the altruistic
transfer of an organ from one body to another as a gift given by the donor that might save
a gravely ill person’s life seemingly does not contradict any of the ethical considerations
given to informed consent or altruism discussed above. Indeed, the federal legislation put
forth in 1968 to standardize informed consent and encourage voluntarism was called the
Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. As medical ethicists and chief consultants to the
commission that framed that legislation, Alfred and Blair Sadler state in a defense of
voluntarism, “Philosophical and humanistic principles strongly support a system based on
consent. We believe most people would prefer a community of givers rather than takers”
(8). Such language does more than just form a justification for novel life saving medical
technologies - it elevates the ethical foundation of organ transplantation to a prescriptive
for a just medical culture and public commons. It stretches the official story on organ
transplantation told by medical ethicists to encompass the Judeo-Christian virtues of the
gift-mode of exchange, a shift in language and associations that may not contradict
altruistic voluntarism, but certainly does work to cast a culturally favorable light upon the
business of organ exchange.

36

Renee Fox and Judith Swazey were the first social scientists to undertake a
thorough inquiry into the burgeoning technologies of organ transplantation. For almost
thirty years they turned a critical eye on the ways in which transplantation was
constructed within the medical community, noting the necessity for such an interrogation
as "organ transplantation continues to be one of the most sociologically intricate and
powerfully symbolic events in modern medicine" (31). Fox and Swazey’s work is
particularly concerned with the construction of the transfer of human organs between
bodies as a gift. They frame the gift exchange of organs along the lines of sociologist
Marcel Mauss’ seminal studies of reciprocity and gifting. As described by Mauss, gift
exchange constitutes a complex social network that mediates freedom and obligation,
generosity and self-interest.
5
Fox and Swazey take this analysis of the gift to note the
psychological and social disputes involved in conceiving of organ exchange as a gift. In
doing so, they illuminate one of the major internal discrepancies in such a conception.
Mauss’ model of gift exchange contradicts the very notion that terming organ transfer a
gift might protect transplantation from coercive forces since gifting is always embedded
within a network of unequal power relations. In this we see how discourse around organ

5
This notion of gifting as a form of reciprocity and not the pure altruism as seen in the
transplant community’s figuration of the gift does not, in Mauss’ argument, necessarily
imply that such forms of exchange are corrupted by compulsion figured as a lack of
freedom of choice. Rather, duty itself is seen as a pathway to peaceful coexistence and
even liberty. As Mauss puts it, “A wise precept has run right through human evolution,
and we would be as well to adopt it as a principle of action. We should come out of
ourselves and regard the duty of giving as a liberty, for in it there lies no risk” (69).
Keeping this in mind, we may find how that which lies in excess of the transplant
professional’s strict understanding of altruism might lead not simply to a path of moral
decay, but rather, perhaps, to liberty in coming “out of ourselves,” a figuration so literally
enacted in the exchange of living human body parts.

37

transfer breaks down the imagined individuality that supposedly protects the autonomy of
the bodies engaged within that very technology. Gifting is only possible within an
inequality determined by the ways in which the social aspects of our bodies adhere to the
gifts we give, creating and maintaining a social bond that demands reciprocity and return.
As such, gifting disciplines the people involved in such exchange, enmeshing them and
their social transactions in a complex network of obligation and power through the bonds
created between giver and receiver encoded in the gift itself.
Fox and Swazey’s extensive, long-range research allows them to chart changes in
the deployment of various medical narratives of the organ transplant. They note how the
complexities of gift exchange were known to medical professionals and up until the
1970’s, in the experimental days of transplantation, steps were taken to account for the
clash between cultural modes of giving and ethical guidelines for organ transfer.
However, as transplantation became more therapeutic and the numbers of those awaiting
transplant grew, transplant professionals responded to the “shortage” of transplantable
organs with various proposals to increase donation. Fox and Swazey note that in this
climate of “crisis,” “the theme of organ transplantation as a gift of life was framed and
addressed primarily as a social policy problem of supply and demand” (45). In this sense,
the gift of life narrative served to increase awareness and consent to donation of organs
rather than a means to understand the complex social relations wrapped up in the process
of organ exchange.
This understanding of the coercive nature of the gift stands in stark contrast to the
conflation of gifting with altruistic donation. Further, Fox and Swazey’s assertion that the

38

gift of life narrative served to increase the availability of transplantable organs
complicates the binaristic opposition between gifting and the market within the medical
ethicist’s model of sanctioned organ procurement.
6
Economic sociologist Kieran Healey
dismantles this binary in his book, Last Best Gifts. His work aims to look at “the cultural
contexts and organizational mechanisms that provide people with reasons and
opportunities to give” (2). By locating the impetus to donate organs within the cultural
and economic structures in which we live, Healey vexes the process by which we might
find the ethically ideal donor: an individual motivated by voluntarism and altruism. In
this account, gifting is not part of a complex network of social ties as discussed by Fox
and Swazey, nor is it an assurance against coercive forms of procurement; rather it serves
to imbue the process of organ procurement with a kind of righteousness in order to stave
off any unsavory associations organ harvesting might have with commodifying or
objectifying the body. The commodity form of the body is not in opposition to the gift
narrative, rather, it is the cause for the narrative’s expediency in fostering good will
towards organ transplantation. The idea of organ transfer as gift is produced and deployed
strategically by transplant professionals. As Healey puts it, “the donor procurement

6
Arthur Caplan and others bioethicists have vigorously asserted, "the coercive nature of
money would make notions of informed consent impossible" (Caplan and Coehlo 194).
Medical ethicist Edmund Pellegrino argued against a proposal to subsidize the medical
expenses the families of cadaveric donors precisely because such compensation would be
corrosive to informed consent. He asserts that the only path to uncoerced donation is
through altruism because "no one can be coerced into altruism because altruism requires
a free and conscious recognition of other persons in the way we conduct ourselves" (205).
Within the medical community, altruism became a measure of social virtue and
psychological competence through which a potential living donor could be judged.

39

system helps produce altruism through its policies, practices, and cultural work and that it
has industrialized altruism by treating it as a resource-extraction problem" (44).
It is, of course, precisely this strategic deployment of the gift of life narrative in
the face of the deleterious commodity form of the body that highlights the tenuous nature
of the individualized bodies that are engaged bio-socially in the practice of organ
exchange. It is not simply the validity of the Hippocratic oath that is at stake when organs
move between bodies, harming one to aid another; it is the idea that these bodies had any
integrity as their own totalities, capable of the liberal subject’s consent to enter into the
contractual relations that supposedly protect said bodies from the market’s abuse that
powers the creation of the gift of life narrative. The creation of this narrative is an effort
to reinstate the individual’s will within the coercive network created by these multi-
stranded discourses of commodification and gift exchange, to naturalize the bounded
form of the modern body, and to engender a social environment that fosters good will
towards a technology that threatens the very basis for ideals of an embodied liberal
humanism.
Medical anthropologist Donald Joralemon argues that transplantation radically
assaults western notions of the body’s totality and “there [must] be an ideological
equivalent to cyclosporine to inhibit the cultural rejection of the surgery and the view of
the body it promotes" (336).
7
Gift giving is one such ideology used to “to legitimize what
is in fact a profound transformation in the way we think about and act toward the human

7
Cyclosporine is a drug which suppresses the body’s natural immune response to attack
foreign bodies thus preventing white blood cells from destroying transplanted organs.

40

body. In what amounts to a 'cultural transplantation,' clusters of powerful images and
priorities are taken from other domains of social and economic life and grafted onto the
idea of organ transplantation so as to make it seem to be fully consistent with those
cultural meanings" (342). Joralemon points out how transplant advocates draw on various
Western cultural scripts such as Judeo-Christian commitments to altruism and the notion
that “by giving organs we contribute to ‘communitas’” (344) to legitimize the project of
organ procurement. Medical anthropologist Lesley Sharp’s important ethnography of the
work done by recipients to construct post-transplant identities understands transplantation
to be embedded within various social processes. Sharp points out that transplant
professionals, including doctors, nurses, psychologists and social workers, perpetuate
certain principles for how a recipient should go about this construction of self. Recipients
are encouraged by their transplant coordinators to depersonalize the experience and to
objectify the organ as a commodity now their own. Sharp argues, however, that these
attitudes are actually fraught with contradiction precisely because the gift of life narrative
rigorously resists the commodification of the organ in its assertion of the transplant as
part of gifting relations.
8

Given this sort of critical reflection upon the gift of life narrative, we see how
socio-cultural understandings of organ transfer are not in synch with the contradictory
claims put forth by the interplay of altruism, individual choice and communitas that make

8
Sharp’s extensive work on the social values that arise through the advent of organ
transplantation explores these sorts of contradictions. She calls these contradictions the
“paradoxical premises of organ transfer.” (25) Her in-depth ethnographic writings on the
socio-medical consequences of transplant technologies can be found in her excellent
book, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self.

41

up the transplant professionals’ medically, ethically and legally sanctioned gift of life
story. If this is the case, why do we still recognize the gift of life story of organ
transplantation? Further, what purpose does it serve for public understandings of organ
transplantation and how does its very nature as a story that is compulsively repeated work
with and against the very contradictions it contains? And finally, as we telescope our
argument beyond the narrative itself to encompass our engagement as viewers and
readers with it, how does this retelling of the gift of life story constitute its own ethical
intervention into our popular understandings of organ transplantation?
We turn to an analysis of organ transfers’ representation within popular television
medical dramas to answer these questions. The serial nature of the programs examined
here are particularly useful as our central question revolves around the repetition of the
gift of life story. We have a genre that is itself repetitive in which we may base our
inquiry into how and why transplantation appear and re-appear figured as a gift of life.
Further, we can examine the narrative strategies used by television medical dramas to
learn what viewers find particularly compelling in their recognizability. Organ transplants
are featured heavily in these programs, suggesting a public fascination with the
technology and the complex storytelling possibilities it offers. Further, as the medical
drama charts its origins as far back as the 1950s, conventions of the genre have become
eminently readable. Viewers are well versed in how these programs operate and in fact,
draw much working knowledge of public health and medical practice from the types of
stories they see unfolding on their television screens. Medical philosopher Rebecca Kukla
remarks that many of her students use medical dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and

42

House to support medical claims (34). Television medical dramas are a node in the
general public’s production of health knowledge. These storylines, reiterated in television
shows, actively read and deployed by viewers, constitute a kind of “shared
storytelling…[which] can impart valuable narrative and emotional knowledge of the
repercussions of various medical possibilities and situations” (Kukla 32).
Narrativization is one of the strategies of the genre to create a pleasurable viewing
experience. Television medical dramas order the complexity of their subjects, be they the
issues surrounding an organ transplant or the romantic entanglements of the doctors
performing the transplant surgeries, to produce engaging narrative. These programs take
the questions and contradictions surrounding medical ethics and health technologies of
the body and make them into stories. By examining how these questions and
contradictions are narrativized, we can see how the story of the gift of life comes into
being in the popular imagination. What aspects of the story pose conflict for characters?
How well does the narrative of the gift of life fare within the larger story telling project of
the show; that is, does the gift of life narrative work in the ways intended by transplant
professionals? How is the narrative itself represented within a genre that places the
storytelling impulse above all other considerations?
As we consider the efficacy of the medically sanctioned gift of life story, we
might consider how the genre of television in re-telling the gift of life story may actually
destabilize the very parameters by which the story is considered to be an ethical solution
by members of the medical community, casting its status as solution into question. As we
have discussed, medical ethicists and the transplant community comprised of doctors,

43

nurses, hospital administrators and governmental health advocates struggled to define the
ways in which organ transplantation might find medical and cultural acceptance. Social
scientists have critiqued these efforts to control the discourse around transplantation
through a mapping of how the sociocultural readings of the gift of life narrative run
counter to the expectations of the professional transplant community. The television
medical drama’s representation of organ transplants offers a similar critique, as its drive
for narrative coherence and pleasure dislodges the medical community’s grip on how the
gift of life story can and should be told. Some medical ethicists, like George Annas, see
this as a possible pedagogical boon. He notes that while television shows are not always
accurate in their portrayals of medicine and bioethics, “both are often so compellingly
portrayed as to provide us with extraordinary opportunities to use them to encourage
more in-depth discussion, and to make bioethics itself more accessible and democratic”
(40). However, others feel that narrativizing bioethics hinders public education and is an
assault on reason, that cornerstone of informed consent and indeed, modern bioethics.
Bioethicists Carl Elliot and Jeffrey Kahn argue that television’s visual language
sacrifices the abstract and the rational for the emotional and the personal (23).
Representations that are immediate and identifiable are a condition of television’s
storytelling genre. While Elliot and Kahn concede, like Annas, that storytelling helps
bring coherence to ethical discussions, the role of the bioethicist within the narrativized
representations found on television is sidelined: “The bioethics pundit is thus seen not as
a disinterested commentator, but as another player in the drama; or at best, a part of the
Greek chorus, expounding on a tragedy” (Ibid). In such a scenario, any presumed

44

objectivity attributed to the ethicist is lost in representative poetics – but perhaps more
telling, so is any authoritative voice rooted in a recourse to objective rationality. The
medical expert is no longer the triumphant master of issues like organ transplantation; he
is simply a member of the chorus.
9

Eliot and Kahn express consternation that the body and its ethical quandaries
might be put into order and meaning by those outside the trained gaze of medical
professionals. Perhaps this unfocusing of the professional gaze is one reason why
television medical dramas are so popular, enduring from their first introduction in the
1960s with soap operas like General Hospital to prime time dramas like St. Elsewhere,
the precursor to contemporary programs like ER. Terrence Holt’s discussion of doctors’
narrativizing themselves through memoirs takes him to a chiasmatic examination of
other’s narrativizing doctors in popular media. He notes that while doctors’ personal
memoirs grapple with humanizing the medical profession from within
10
, programs like
Chicago Hope or Bill Cosby’s role as an Obstetrician on The Cosby Show are appealing
to their audiences because they succeed in “domesticating a frighteningly aloof

9

Historically, the practice of western medicine has turned the penetrating gaze of the
physician upon the human body as patient, making it into an object for medical inquiry –
particularly within industrial institutions of medical care, like hospitals. As Michel
Foucault points out in Birth of the Clinic, the subjecting (or objecting) of the body to the
clinical gaze opens the entire body to the physician's gaze without the interpretation of
the "self" or surface of the patient. This marks the beginning of the continual process of
knowledge production through a constant, trained gaze upon the (dis)ordered, penetrable
body.

10
In fact, these attempts by doctors to tell stories from within the profession are often met
with trepidation from those within the medical establishment out of fear that such
personal musings might compromise the physician’s social standing as expert.

45

institution” (326). Television medical dramas bring the clinic into the home as a readable
text. Further, the programs do not take patients as their primary character. Viewers can
take pleasure in viewing the hospital in ways they are never allowed in actual clinical
settings because these shows ask them to read the world of health care through the eyes
of doctors. While these shows do indulge in the troping of the surgeon as conquering hero
first put forth during the Romantic period (Lawrence 7), it is precisely the fact that a
layperson viewer has been constructed as bifurcated from a mastery of her own body
within the clinical encounter that the opportunity to view the world of health care through
the penetrating eyes of the doctor is a particularly pleasurable exercise in reading as re-
casting self. Television medical dramas, then, prove immensely useful in reading how
dominant medical knowledge-making projects filter into popular understandings of the
gift of life narrative.
Grey’s Anatomy and House are two of the most successful recent one-hour
network television serials to fit within the genre of the medical drama. Both programs
debuted during the 2004-2005 season. House premiered on the Fox network in the fall of
2004 to middling ratings. This changed when it benefited from reality talent show
behemoth American Idol’s lead-in audience in January of 2005 and began pulling in as
many as 17.3 million viewers (Jensen 37). Since its first year on air, House has
maintained its excellent ratings with even summer repeats, garnering 10 million viewers
(Svetkey 31). Grey’s Anatomy, on the other hand, enjoyed instant success as a mid-
season replacement on the ABC network. It followed the established soap opera of
suburban intrigue, Desperate Housewives, and managed to gain 5 million viewers more

46

than the show it replaced, the courtroom dramedy Boston Legal (Rhodes E8). While
Grey’s Anatomy did maintain as many as 25 million viewers in its second season
(Ogunnaike E1), after its third season, its ratings began to slip (McNamara E1). While
Grey’s hit a series low of 8.5 million viewers in 2011 (Furlong), it remains television’s
most DVR’d program while House charts at number 4, behind the aforementioned
American Idol and Desperate Housewives (Rice). House and Grey’s Anatomy are thought
to be examples of both the rejuvenation and abiding endurance of the genre of the
medical drama (Hiltbrand H1), especially given their emergence during the declining
popularity of ER, NBC’s long-running emergency room series that ended in 2009
(Maynard C7).
Medical dramas have proven to be a constant form within television’s serial
programming. Their depiction of doctors takes its place within the pantheon of ur-
vocations like the cops and lawyers seen on so many prime time shows. New York
Magazine’s book critic Sam Anderson suggests that a doctor’s profession contains all the
major points of what we might consider a perfect ordering of Aristotelian plot elements:
“crisis, attempted solution, result” (80). But Anderson argues that the public’s fascination
with medical professionals goes deeper, satisfying the story consumer’s need for
engaging emplotment and a (re)presentation of recognizable mythic forms: “Doctors
seem to tug simultaneously on just about every important string in the culture – they're
not only detectives but fortune-tellers, priests, master technicians, executioners, and
kings” (Ibid). Earlier examples of the medical drama like Dr. Kildare, starring Richard

47

Chamberlain, and Father Knows Best’s Robert Young as Marcus Welby, MD depicted the
doctor as having the patriarchal attributes of the mythic figures Anderson conjures.
However, as Washington Post television critic Robert Thompson argues, the
doctor as demi-god changed in 1982, with the premiere of NBC’s St. Elsewhere, a drama
featuring a large ensemble of doctors working at a decaying Boston hospital (Y5). These
doctors still performed heroic medical tasks, but the show’s narrative pulled back the
curtain on their personal lives, as well. In many ways, the lives of the doctors trumped the
conditions of the patients: “The doctors themselves were providing an endless supply of
tragedy, comedy and hubris” (Hiltbrand H1). St. Elsewhere’s multiple storylines wove
together various character’s trials and triumphs, forgoing the master narrative of a single
heroic physician. This portrayal of humanized medical professionals continued on NBC’s
blockbuster ER, which debuted in 1994. ER, television’s longest running medical drama
to date, drew in viewers by depicting surgeries with a speed and realism not seen on
television before. This realism allowed the viewer access to the rarefied world of the
doctor, and the mingling of the personal with the professional gave the public a measure
of familiarity with those performing complicated procedures on the screen. As Los
Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara notes, “We may not know how to
surgically disconnect conjoined twins, but most of us have known the frustration of
thwarted love and betrayal” (E1).
Grey’s Anatomy differs from any other medical drama, on or off-air, in that it
includes the first-person narration of a woman. Its regular cast features Black, Asian
American and Latin@ actors and the minor characters that circulate through Seattle

48

Grace hospital bear the mark of an intentionally multiculturalist agenda in including a
racially diverse mix of patients and family members. Currently, the show features eight
major characters as women physicians. This attention to unsettling stereotypes of medical
professionals and its use of humor within the walls of the hospital also set it apart from
previous medical dramas.
11
The show’s emphasis on female characters and the voice-
over have led critics describe it as a cross between ER and Sex and the City
12
(Stanley
E1). Meredith Grey, whose last name along with the classic anatomy text book provide
the show with its title pun, muses abstractly during her voiceovers about the links
between the medical and social events of each episode. Grey’s Anatomy’s first season
begins by following Meredith’s studies to become a surgeon alongside fellow interns
Christina Yang, George O’Malley, Alex Karev and Izzie Stevenson. The show’s first
episode opens on the morning of the first day of surgical internships with Meredith,
naked in her living room, kicking out a one night stand who later turns out to be one of
Seattle Grace’s attending surgeons, the love of her life, a married man and her boss,
Derek Shepherd. From the first moment, Grey’s Anatomy shows that it will be equally

11
It should be noted that while a surface commitment to diversity in gender, sexuality,
and race are a hallmark of Grey’s Anatomy, sexism, racism, and other forms of systemic
oppression endemic within the institutions of medicine are rarely, if ever, addressed.

12
In a derisive review of the show, TV critic Tom Shales suggests that the clichéd nature
of Grey’s Anatomy derives from audiences wanting “new shows that remind them of old
shows” (C1). However, TV critics indulge this desire in placing new shows within a
continuum of older programs in their initial reviews. As such, Grey’s is compared to Sex
and the City while House is seen to be CSI in a hospital. (Kushman, E1) Todd Gitlin
analyzes how these types of shows are conceived of and produced, calling them
recombinants, a result of the television industry’s “absurd industrialization of
mannerism” (64).

49

concerned with the social lives of its characters as it is with their struggles at the lowest
rung of the ladder in their studies to become surgeons. Show creator Shonda Rhimes has
gone so far as to say, “This is not a medical show. This is a relationship show with some
surgeries thrown in for good fun” (McNamara E1).
Some critics point out that the dramatic pleasures offered by the exceedingly self-
centered doctors of Grey’s Anatomy go well beyond unsettling the medical mastery of a
Dr. Welby. In a piece for the Boston Globe subtitled “It Doesn’t Want to Save the World
and That’s Why We Love It,” Matthew Gilbert argues, “Grey’s Anatomy is shamelessly
short on altruism…[it’s] all about the doctors, and only tangentially about the patients”
(N1). However, within this analysis of the show, we can see how the program uses the
medical cases taken on by Meredith and her peers to allegorically articulate their own
personal struggles. This weaving together of the personal and the moral makes Grey’s
Anatomy a valuable starting point in unfurling the various strands of the popular
understandings of the gift of life narrative in popular culture, since the program relies on
the overdetermining of its medical conundrums to buttress the interplay of the
characters.
13
By looking at Grey’s Anatomy’s use of the gift of life story, we move away
from its functional narrativity, and, to use Barthes’ structural mode of analysis, focus on
its indexical referentiality. How does this transplant story serve as a diffuse concept that
informs the character progression of these doctors? This shift, even as it moves away

13
Kozloff notes in her work on the narrative structures of television that, as is pointed out
by various other media studies scholars, “it is characters and their interrelationships that
dominate television stories” (75).

50

from the specificity of the transplant encounter between two bodies exchanging organs,
marks the affective efficacy and potency of the transplant narrative.
Reaction to organ procurement and transplantation is first used to aid in the
articulation of Grey’s Anatomy’s characters in the third episode of the first season. It is
telling that transplantation used in this way should make such an early appearance in the
show’s trajectory. Transplantation accesses various aspects of argument surrounding
procurement familiar to the audience and allows us as viewers to quickly read character
proclivities through the positions they assume. In this episode titled “Winning the Battle,
Losing the War,” a patient is admitted to Seattle Grace, a victim of a car crash caused by
a renegade bicycle race, with no identification on his person. Neurosurgeon Derek
Shepherd and Preston Burke, the hospital’s attending cardio-thoracic surgeon, quickly
ascertain that the man is most likely brain dead and that nothing can be done to revive
him. Surgical interns Izzie and Christina are told to watch the patient for six hours, per
hospital protocol, making sure he doesn’t show any signs of brain stem function before
calling time of death. Izzie asks aloud if they are “supposed to just stand here and watch
him die?” Christina interjects that if the man has no brain function, he is already dead,
prompting Izzie to derisively mutter, “Technically. Legally.” Christina reprimands Izzie:
“Actually, Izzie. Actually dead.” They continue to bicker, Izzie adamant that the man
could miraculously wake up. Derek interrupts them to give a short lecture on the ethical
procedure for determining total brain death, perhaps more for the viewer’s pedagogical
benefit than that of the plot’s progression. After he leaves, Christina crassly quips that she
wishes the patient would hurry up and die so she could work on the more interesting

51

casualties of the bike race. Izzie, disgusted, argues that the man probably has a family and
his life should not be a waste. Christina interrupts to agree, but as she says to a stricken
Izzie, it would be a waste of organs not to get the family’s consent for donation.
While the scene attempts to grapple with the debate over the designation of total
brain loss as a category of death, it also employs the debate to shorthand the kind of
characters we will be encountering in this series. Izzie is sympathetic and caring, but
specifically because she quickly forms personal bonds with her patients. She imagines the
man to have a family at home and hopes that he lives for their sake. For her, brain death
is invalid, not because it is broadly unethical to consider anything but cardio-respiratory
failure as the end of life, but because she has affectively created a space within which this
man could live again. Christina, on the other hand, is brusque and at times, callous. She
objectifies her patients as the raw material necessary for difficult and heady surgical
mastery. This man offers her no such opportunities. She has no reason to personally hope
for the man’s recovery, so she accepts the attending physicians’ slangy diagnosis: “He’s
gorked.” Brain death, again, is not an ethical question for Christina; it is practical.
As they wait for the police to locate the patient’s next of kin, Izzie and Christina
continue to squabble. While Izzie clings ever more desperately to the notion that he might
live, it has become clear to other characters, and indeed, the viewers, that Izzie has
become too personally invested and irrational. Additionally, at this point in the fabula, we
have been introduced to another Seattle Grace patient, Lloyd Mackie, who is in desperate
need of a liver transplant and is a match with the brain dead John Doe: our sympathies as
viewers are with Lloyd. While the foundation for a reiteration of the gift of life narrative

52

as conceived by transplant professionals is in place, a few things are lacking within this
episode’s story form for that recapitulation. Izzie is still railing against the possible organ
procurement insofar as it signals the death of the patient. She has not accepted that brain
death is death, the basis of legal cadaverous organ procurement. Further, while Christina
represents the enthusiasm for donation voiced in gift of life rhetoric, her motives are
selfish. As she admits to surgical resident Miranda Bailey, she is enthusiastic not because
she wants to save lives, but because she wants to perform a harvest surgery. Her position,
however, begins to change when the family is finally located.
Christina is the one tasked with asking the wife and daughter of the dead man to
sign consent forms for the procurement of various organs and tissues. Christina’s tone in
the scene is decidedly blunt until the wife reacts to her unconcerned request to donate her
husband’s skin. “You want to cut off his skin?” she cries, prompting Christina to flee the
room. Bailey follows her and instructs her to return to the room and complete her task.
Christina, shaken, refuses; interacting with patients isn’t her strong suit, she says. Bailey
admonishes her, demanding she repeat the dead man’s name, and firmly says, “He’s
someone’s husband, someone’s son, not a collection of body parts for you to harvest, a
person.” In saying the dead man’s name, Kevin Davidson, Christina finds some measure
of compassion, but also completes the metanarrative of the gift of life. When Izzie
sneeringly refers to the doctors waiting to procure organs for their various transplant
patients as vultures, hungry to take the dead man apart, Christina says, “Every one of
them represents someone somewhere who’s going to live because of Kevin.” In using his
name for the first time, Christina puts the body back together under the sign of the gift,

53

and Izzie, agreeing to aid in the harvest surgery, begins to understand that Kevin’s life
was not wasted. Celebratory, driving music plays, the singer repeating the words, “You
are my joy,” as we see the organs taken from Kevin’s body cavity ceremoniously placed
into ice and plastic. The music stops abruptly, and we hear the sounds of activity in the
operating room dying away as Kevin’s heart is removed. After all the other doctors and
nurses leave, Izzie and Christina stay behind to sew up the body cavity together, a visual
metaphor for their progression towards some kind of unity around an acceptance of the
organ donor’s possibility and pathos as embedded within the gift of life narrative.
Grey’s Anatomy uses organ transplantation for multiple narratological purposes,
but the most important is for character conflict and development. While the transplant
narrative is invoked and contradictions within the medical profession’s sanctioned view
of organ transplantation are exposed through character conflict, the story of the gift of life
always consummates because the characters must find emotional common ground:
recapitulation of the gift of life narrative functions as denouement. Transplantation serves
character development, conflict and its ultimate resolution in Grey’s Anatomy. The social
and cultural inconsistencies of the sanctioned transplant story are mined for
representation in these episodes. The public becomes well aware of their existence and
the problems inherent in the uncritical acceptance of the gift of life narrative. However, in
the interest of putting together a compelling piece of television drama, this narrative of
organ transfer must find completion. The organs get transplanted. In every episode of
Grey’s Anatomy to date, no character asked to donate or accept an organ has refused.
Dead men live on with their body parts beating inside others; children get a chance to

54

lead new lives in accepting the gift of new organs; doctors grow as characters and cement
their relationships over these medical miracles, and we as viewers enjoy the results. In
episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, it is the juridical or socio-cultural disjuncture of the gift of
life narrative that serves conflict, but it is that narrative’s affective plausibility that
constitutes the aesthetic unity of the resolution. These representations of transplantation
are depicted without the regard paid by medical ethicists in crafting an ethically coherent
story or by social scientists in delineating its implications for cultural conceptions of the
body and self. Grey’s Anatomy reduces the gift of life narrative to its barest emotional
currency.
While Grey’s Anatomy twisted the conventions of the medical drama through its
focus on women, people of color, and melodramatic relationship conflict, House took this
subversion of the canonical patriarchal doctor in another direction. Gregory House, a
nephrologist and infectious disease specialist at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital,
is a white male who is brilliant, but he bears no other resemblance to that genealogy of
television doctor. House is mean and misanthropic; he shows no signs of changing his
attitude. About five years before the events of the series’ plot begins, House suffers an
infarction in his right leg that went undiagnosed for three days. The resultant injury and
pain from the muscle death leaves him with a limp and an addiction to Vicodin. His
experience with the incompetence of the medical system only spurs his own arrogance to
greater heights, and the constant pain feeds his bad temperament. House’s interest in
healthcare lies in solving medical mysteries. The character’s name is itself a synonymic
play on Sherlock Holmes. He practices medicine to prove his suspicions about illness

55

right and he prefers to dress like a scruffy, stubbled layperson in jeans and t-shirt to
prevent patients from recognizing him as a doctor. He does this to prevent anyone from
expecting a reassuring bedside manner in addition to an ingeniously deductive mind.
House disregards the opinions and feelings of his patients and fellow doctors in the effort
to diagnose and cure disease. He is a deliberately unsympathetic character. The show
offers no indication that House will be redeemed through an encounter with a piteous
patient or a romantic relationship with another physician. Executive producer and show
creator David Shore considered this curmudgeonly character a risk, since “networks are
known for wanting to put on 'likeable' characters, and they always define that as being
somebody who's nice. I don't think that's what it means. I think likeable means someone
you like to watch” (Kelly-Saxenmeyer D14).
House has garnered favorable reviews, mostly because of the main character’s
“negative charisma that is fascinating to watch, and likable in its way” (Gilbert D1). As
the show’s run begins, House runs Princeton-Plainsboro’s department of differential
diagnosis,
14
leading a team of three fellows during the first three seasons of the show:
Allison Cameron, an immunologist, is idealistic, caring and concerned about the ethical
and compassionate treatment of patients; Robert Chase, a surgeon, is ambitious, eager
and often unquestioning of House’s frequently questionable treatment decisions; and Eric
Foreman, a neurologist, is arrogant, prefers honesty to sympathy, and holds the most in
common with his churlish boss. The cast was completed by House’s only friend, a kindly

14
The idea of a differential diagnosis department is fabricated for the show. Real world
hospitals have no such program (Jensen Screen 1).

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and long-suffering oncologist, James Wilson (his name an alliterative reference to John
Watson), and Dean of Medicine, Lisa Cuddy, a no-nonsense hospital administrator
mostly concerned with the legal implications of House’s medical misbehavior.
House, like Grey’s Anatomy, was compared to its antecedents in critical reviews.
Due to its use of highly technical medical jargon in the characters’ race to diagnose
obscure diseases, and computer graphics that take the camera inside the bodies of
patients, showing the audience the patient’s diseased viscera, House is often called a
hybrid of ER and CSI (Goodman E1). It differs from many other popular prime-time
dramas in that it relies more on episodic, procedural storytelling (Carter, E1) that focuses
on the introduction, development and conclusion of one case each episode, rather than the
serialized continual character melodrama seen in Grey’s Anatomy. The show’s homage to
Sherlock Holmes (Jensen Screen 1) plays a part in determining this storytelling structure.
Every episode presents a mystery to be solved. House is aided or antagonized by his
fellow physicians, who act as his character foils in his investigations of seemingly
impossibly ill patients and solving of puzzles no other physician at Princeton-Plainsboro
could crack.
As pleasing as the mystery plot structure can be and as compelling a character
House is, critics have pointed out that the drive to solve the medical puzzle in the
presence of familiar character types that mostly react to the protagonist can lead to
predictable and clichéd narratives (Rosenthal 49). Variety’s Brian Lowry called it “pretty
by-the-numbers storytelling, albeit in a glossy package" (59). Entertainment Weekly’s
Gillian Flynn went so far as to argue that House’s punchy, unexpected plot twists come at

57

the expense of meaningful character development. As we might expect, the gift of life
narrative as used on House differs extensively from its deployment on Grey’s Anatomy.
Since House’s narrative structure follows a repetitive format (a mysterious illness is
presented, investigated and solved) organ transplantation can only make two
appearances: it is either part of the resolution as transplantation is a surgical cure for
several illnesses or, more commonly on House, it serves as a complicating event en route
to the completion of the medical puzzle.
House is structured as a character who expects rational consistency at the expense
of social complexity; take, for example, his principle of justifying all human behavior by
an overriding imperative to self-preserve through deception. Characters on House do not
enter into complex ethical situations like those surrounding organ transplantation to
develop or change. Their static traits are used as catalysts to incite a narratological
reaction that complicates the mystery discourse of each episode. Characters like House
react in predictable ways to the capriciousness of illness and the body. It is, rather, the
discourse that changes, twists, and moves, offering House a compelling narrative
structure.
The subversion of the gift of life story makes an appearance in an episode from
House’s second season entitled “Sleeping Dogs Lie.” A woman, Hannah, is admitted to
Princeton-Plainsboro with severe, life threatening insomnia. In the course of giving her
medical history, Hannah says she has allergies, noting that this was the reason she was
forced to return the puppy her very supportive girlfriend, Max, gifted her as a birthday
present. From this assertion (and several other medical inconsistences in Hannah’s story

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of her illness), House guesses correctly that Hannah is planning on leaving Max. She only
claimed to have allergies so her real reason of returning the pet, a fear of a long-term
commitment, would not be revealed. When Hannah goes into acute liver failure and
House still doesn’t have a diagnosis, Max offers to donate a lobe of her liver, giving the
team 36 more hours to find out what is causing the insomnia. The ethically concerned
Cameron is outraged that House is not planning on telling Max that Hannah is no longer
invested in their relationship. She argues that Max is only giving Hannah part of her liver
out of love, and that ignorance of Hannah’s intentions compromises Max’s informed
consent. House maintains that their only ethical obligation is to their role as physicians,
i.e., to save Hannah’s life. He argues that Cameron’s position seems to imply that “it’s
only moral to save a person if they love you.” Cameron later retorts that the moral good
doesn’t matter at all to House; he’s just concerned with solving his mystery: “If she
[Hannah] talks, if she does the decent thing, then you don’t get to solve your puzzle.
Your game is over. You lose.”
House’s need (and indeed, the ends and means of the show’s mystery genre) to
solve the puzzle does triumph, and the team pushes forward with the transplantation.
Cuddy, a physician as well hospital administrator, ignorant of the specifics of dispute
between Cameron and House, is enlisted to determine if Max is making her decision to
donate her liver based on sound medical and psychological reasoning. In short, is Max
giving informed consent to the liver donation? Cuddy seems skeptical at first, but sighs
with gentle acquiescence when Max says with tears in her eyes, “I just want me and
Hannah to lie in bed together as old ladies, compare scars.” This statement seems to fit

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with our conception of the transplant as an altruistic gift that cements the bonds of
humanistic community. Max volunteers to make a grave sacrifice, and she is doing it out
of love and deep concern for someone other than herself. However, since we know of
Hannah’s intentions, we see that this does not satisfy the balance of the gift exchange.
The gift of life implies both a physical and affectual transfer. Transplanted organs are
buttressed by appropriate expressions of voluntary giving and gracious receiving. Max’s
heart (and liver) is in the right place, but is Hannah’s? By the end of the episode, House
solves the mystery of Hannah’s insomnia: she contracted the bubonic plague from the
puppy Max gave her. Cameron sits with Max, watching a now recovering Hannah
through the glass door of her hospital room. Cameron expresses her awe and admiration
over Max’s sacrifice. However, to her surprise and dismay, Max reveals that she knew all
along that Hannah wanted to leave her, but with the liver transplant complete, “She
[Hannah] can’t leave me now.”
The episode’s subversion of the gift of life narrative is contingent on the
audience’s familiarity with the way the story should go. We must be aware of the
altruistic view of gift giving espoused by the transplant community. House plays off the
contradictions implicit in viewing organ transfer as an altruistic gift in order to build
suspense and drama into the rigid form of its procedural mystery genre. We as viewers
are expected to recognize the classic, sanctioned form of the gift of life story of organ
transplantation and derive narrative pleasure from its subversion, as the main characters
force it to unravel through a relentless interrogation of the social and medical clues of the
mystery.

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“Sleeping Dogs Lie,” requires us to recognize how the actions of the characters
fail to measure up to our expectations of the proper motivations behind organ
transplantation. We have these expectations because of the enormous effort expended by
the transplant community to sanction the gift of life story as the appropriate mode of
organ transfer. But part of recognizing and deriving narrative pleasure from the breaks in
the gift of life narrative is realizing that it can break in the first place; that is, being able to
acknowledge that the narrative is both rife with contradiction and constructed towards a
specific purpose, just as we saw in the social scientists’ critique. It is only because we can
see that the gift of life story of organ transplantation is constructed that we can read how
it is taken apart by both the television medical dramas we have discussed above. The
breaks within the story of the organ transplant as gift of life are deployed within these
dramas to solve narratological problems.
In Grey’s Anatomy, the breaks within the gift of life act as a stage upon which
character conflict is performed. The subsequent recapitulation and mending of these
fissures in the plot of Grey’s Anatomy signal that the character conflict has been resolved
since we recognize that the gift of life story has been returned to its proper progression –
we know that the doctors have reconciled and cemented their relationships over their
patients’ enacting of altruistic giving and gracious reception of body parts. In House, the
propriety of the transplant community’s vision for organ transfer breaks for the purpose
of plot, not character, complexity. Since narrative resolution within the mystery genre is
predetermined to be the solving of the puzzle, House is not beholden to a recapitulation
of the gift of life story. Rather, House breaks the idea of the transplant as a gift of life

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along the lines of our expectations, that is, it follows our understanding of its internal
ethical and affectual flaws. However, House then allows it to break once again, using
those same expectations of the gift of life’s flaws to precipitate suspense and a surprise
ending. Just when we think we’ve figured out a character’s motive, she defies us
precisely because we think we understand how the successes and failures of organ
transplantation as gift of life work.
The story of the organ transplant as a gift of life is a narrative structured by
transplant professionals to gain public acceptance for the therapeutic utility of
transplantation and the communal necessity of organ donation. It is a story composed to
solve ethical and social problems posed by the transfer of body parts between people. The
removal of an organ from one body that is then placed into another creates a physical and
psychic gap that the gift of life narrative aims to cover over. In turn, on television
medical dramas like House and Grey’s Anatomy, the representation of the transplant as
gift of life is used to negotiate narratological gaps endemic to their respective genres of
storytelling as played out upon the televisual screen: both are responses to a cut, and the
comparison aids us in recognizing how the gift of life narrative functions as part of the
visual apparatus of television.
When a viewing subject watches the screen, she at first may believe that the entire
plane of vision is open to her. However, the viewer must realize that she does not have
such full access. The cinematic apparatus controls what is seen, and it is from its vantage
point that viewing subjects are allowed to see the events unfolding on the screen. This
realization initiates the experience of Lacanian lack – the total, expansive gaze we

62

thought we had is lost to the gap in our vision, the space occupied by the camera. In order
to allay this castrating loss, the realization that there is a gap in what can be known to the
viewer, a reverse cut is then employed by the cinematic apparatus, revealing the
perspective denied to the viewing subject. This cut is the moment of suture, and in order
to sew back together the gap in the total gaze, the viewer must engage with its fiction.
The cross cut sutures the loss of the total gaze and provides the subject with a
narrativized point of view located within the diegetic space of the screen. This recourse to
narrative is specifically prescribed by the initial cut and resultant gap. As Kaja Silverman
asserts, “a complex signifying chain is introduced in place of the lack which can never be
made good, suturing over the wound of castration with narrative. However, it is only by
inflicting the wound to begin with that the viewing subject can be made to want the
restorative of meaning and narrative” (204).
We might apply the idea of the loss of a total gaze to the cinematic cut to the loss
of a total body implied by the physiological cut of transplant technologies. Medical
narrative scholar Katharine Young discusses the fragility of the discourse of totality in
her account of surgery as a cultural practice, observing that medicine functions as an
ideology in the project of self-making and the coming of the body into subjectivity. She
asserts, “Surgery shifts the boundary from the skin to the sterile membrane. The sterile
membrane is not inscribed with the lineaments of individuality, traces of presence, so we
cannot move from the perception of individuality to the apprehension of subjectivity…”
(97). Organ transplantation is a kind of surgical cut that undermines our ability to access
the lineaments of individuality that adhere to the total body and its ideological

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implications for the liberal subject. We see just how threatening the transfer of organs
between people is in the juridical wrangling implicit in the crafting of the gift of life
narrative. The liberal, consenting subject that makes possible the recuperative narrative of
altruistic gifting is the same subject that bears the deepest mark of the organ transplant’s
psycho-social cut. We begin to see here how the gift of life narrative functions in a
similar manner to suture. It is a restorative narrative response to the material and psychic
wounding of the total body through organ transfer, a wound that profoundly affects us all
in that the mere existence of transplant technology reveals the fragility of the total,
bounded body we all assume to be our province. The continual infliction of this wound
requires the continual need and production of narrative. This gift of life narrative through
its constitutive gaps and flaws produces the conditions of this perpetual oscillation
between need and reiteration.
The integration of the suturing narrative of the gift of life into the televisual text
in the form of character or plot development reflects the ways in which television relies
on intertextuality in its success “as dominant socio-cultural ideology” (191), as media
theorist Mimi White puts it. In deploying the gift of life narrative within television
medical dramas, we are able to see how the recognition of its flaws at the register of the
material body sutures the threat of exposure of television’s commodification of that very
narrative. We engage with the stories in Grey’s Anatomy and House, recognizing and
questioning the ways in which medical discourses assault our conception of the body as
an independent, total subject, but we do this only as part of our acceptance of the ultimate
narrative goal of the show: to entertain. We might expand this critique situated within the

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televisual narrative into the outside of our very bodies – bodies that are not only
continually assaulted by medical discourses, but also by commercialized media
discourses that capitalize on our viewing bodies. White describes this process of
recognition and disavowal: “Television hereby exhibits its own fictionality, but in terms
that insist that this fictionality exercises affective and intellectual appeal…television is at
once completely artificial and completely meaningful to its viewers” (196). In this
inscription of the real within the fictional, television as an ideological apparatus enacts a
form of suture not unlike the gift of life narrative.
Slavoj Zizek asserts that suture’s main function is to contend with the gap
between the particular and the universal (31). He bases this claim on an interpretation of
Ernesto Laclau’s understanding of representation and radical alterity in which Laclau
points out paradoxical claims of maintaining a system of differences. A system can only
be understood as a system through the establishing of boundaries - that is, by delimiting
what lies outside the system – but difference itself only comes into being with this very
delimiting of boundaries. How then do we determine the boundaries that define
difference within the system from the ones that define the system itself, that is, the
exclusionary boundaries that by definition must lie outside the system of representation?
Or as Oliver Marchant puts this conundrum, “the radicality of the radical outside (non-
meaning) is not only the condition of possibility for establishing a signifying structure

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(meaning), it is at the same time the condition of impossibility of establishing a structure
as a closed totality (full meaning)” (59).
15

Zizek connects this paradoxical question to Laclau’s understanding of hegemony
and its presupposition of the paradoxical relationship between the delimiting of
intrasocial differences from the beginning of nonsociety. He argues that which is
radically antagonistic and must lie outside the system of representation, must also be
represented within that same system in order for such a system to maintain coherence. Or
as Zizek puts it as he relates this system of representation back to suture, “the very
opposition between the symbolic order and its absence has to be inscribed within this
order, and ‘suture’ designates the point of this inscription” (32). Zizek goes on to say:
External difference is mapped onto the inside. In suture, the difference
between the image and its absence/void is mapped onto the intra-pictural
difference between the two shots…What one should bear in mind is the
fundamental ideological operation that is involved here: the threatening
intrusion of the decentring Other, the Absent Cause, is sutured. The
trickery thus resides in the fact that the gap that separates two totally
different levels –that of the enunciated content (the narrative fiction) and
that of the decentered process of its enunciation – is flattened: enunciation
is reduced to one in the series of elements that constitute the enunciated
fiction…(33)

Within this context, we see that the gift of life narrative is more than an attempt to repair
the wound inflicted by the transfer of body parts between people. The gift of life narrative

15
Another way to understand this contradiction is through the following description of
Laclau and Chatal Mouffe’s revised understanding of Gramscian hegemony as
summarized by Judith Butler, Laclau and Zizek: “The theory of hegemony presupposes,
on the one hand, that the ‘universal’ is an object both impossible and necessary – always
requiring as a result, the presence of an ineradicable remainder of particularity – and, on
the other, that the relation between power and emancipation is not one of exclusion but,
on the contrary, one of mutual – albeit contradictory – implication” (8).

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itself is suture; it is the point of inscription that represents the radical antagonism between
the breached body of the organ donor and the abundantly organed body of the recipient. It
is the fictionalized account we are desperate for in the face of the absence produced by
organ transfer, an absence that simultaneously threatens and reveals the socio-cultural
constructions of the concrete, unassailable body that houses the self. We need to
reintegrate the absolute alterity organ transplantation conjures through representation
within a narratological system of difference. By seeking out the representation of organ
transplantation within television medical dramas, we can more dramatically understand
the relationship between the wound of the filmic cut and the surgical incision. The
necessity of narrativization is doubled as its role as suture therapeutically responds to
both violent injuries.
Paul Ricoeur posits a narrative intervention as fundamental response to gaps
within the politics of representation, yet he asserts this gap is not caused by the loss of a
total gaze, a spatial loss, but instead by a temporal loss. That is, narrative intervention is
necessitated by the fundamental unrepresentability of lived experience in time:
“temporality cannot be spoken of in the direct discourse of phenomenology, but rather
requires the mediation of the indirect discourse of narration” (241). I have shown how the
spatial and temporal movement of the organ in transplantation, that is a body part taken
out of the time and space of one person and placed into another, posing a risk to both
medical and socio-cultural understandings of the body, is indirectly narrativized into
normalized representation through its figuration as the gift of life. This narrativization
that covers over the gap left by the absented and transplanted organ (the thing out of

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place and time) is precisely what then allows for us to recognize and identify that very
organ as transplantable – a recognition we have discussed in our examining of the
strategic deployment of the gift of life narrative within Grey’s Anatomy and House.
Ricoeur calls this notion of recognizability narrative identity, in which “individual and
community are constituted in their identity by taking up narratives that become for them
their actual history” (247).
This narrative identity of the organ transplant allows for its deployment within
medical dramas discussed above, the story of the gift of life becomes a recognizable
identity that can be referenced and read within the texts of Grey’s Anatomy and House.
However, such programs exploit the internal inconsistencies of the story of the gift of life
in order to further storytelling motives. In thinking about the deployment of the gift of
life’s constitutive flaws within television medical dramas, we can see how those very
flaws work within an imperative for ethical action through the process of telling the story
of the organ transplant. The narrative of the gift of life is not just constructed to bridge
over the gaps in time and space left by the transfer of human organs; it is also built upon
and constituted by those gaps. That is, the gaps are part of the story’s structure. This
becomes clearer when partnered with Zizek’s assertion that suture is the moment of the
inscription of absolute alterity within the system of representation. The problem, the
absence, the other are always already part of the representational politics concurrent with
the gift of life narrative, a story marked profoundly by its constitutive impossibility.
Furthermore, the failures of the story as discussed in socio-cultural critiques of organ
transfer and strategically deployed in popular representations of transplantation indicate

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that these gaps are conditions of the gift of life narrative’s possibility. The gift of life
story only acquires its tenuous coherence through these aporias. Ricoeur thus speaks of
the flaws within narrative identity as a marker of its instability – “narrative identity
continues to make and unmake itself…[it] thus becomes the name of a problem at least as
much as it is that of a solution” (249). In engaging programs like Grey’s Anatomy or
House, we can see how this instability of narrative identity marks the gift of life story as a
means to both close and pull apart the gaps created by removal and transplantation of
human body parts.
This solution poses problems precisely in so far as it is read into the gaps it aims
to cover over. In setting out to describe how suture functions, Jean-Pierre Oudart states,
“Suture is best understood through a consideration of what is at stake in the process of
‘reading’ film” (45). That is to say, we must consider how reading the text of a film
engages the interplay between the Symbolic and the Real, the register of narrative and the
register of the world. We find in this directive a connection between the logic of the gift
of life theory as a form of suture and our understandings of the gift of life as a narrative
identity deployed for our recognition as viewers within popular television medical
dramas. The fictional turn is the mode through which suture operates, and it is through
the engagement with this turn that the wound is sutured; that is, it is through the act of
reading the narrative of the gift of life that we attempt to fill the physical and psychic gap
caused by the transfer of organs. However, this act is continually confounded by the
constitutive flaws of the palliative nature of the altruistic story of transplantation. The
very texts we attempt to read, such as medical dramas, expect viewers to not only

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recognize the narrative identity of the gift of life story but also to read the plot and
character conflicts posed by those very same flaws internal to the narrative.
Reading these texts places us at another aporia, one not unlike the gap called into
existence by the transplant itself, a gap seamed over by the narrative recognized as suture
itself – reading places us squarely in the gap between the text and the world. We reiterate
the story of the organ transplant as gift of life because this gap must also be bridged. That
we read these texts about organ transplantation brings us back to two questions posed by
medical ethicists: how do we ethically account for the transfer of human organs, and what
purpose does the reiteration of the gift of life narrative as an ethical solution serve?
Ricoeur contends that narrative identity, while recognizable as a coherent construction
that aims to bridge gaps in representation, is only coherent insofar as it is read as such;
that is, its stake lies not in being a solution but in being the impetus for action. That organ
transplantation would find its representation within a narrative that can be located not
only in socio-juridical formats such as government bills and non-profit charters but also
in fictive television portrayals does not divest that representation of its ethical imperatives
to action. In fact, these disparate points of recognition gesture to the necessarily unstable
and composite nature of narrative identity, and in doing so we see the importance of the
role of the reader as an active interpreter of these multiple sites of identity formation. As
Ricoeur asserts, narrativity is always an act of persuasion and as such, “narrative already
belongs to the ethical field in virtue of its claim – inseparable from its narration – to
ethical justice” (249).

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Reading the organ transplant as a gift of life is an ethical act, not because a
medical ethicist wrote the story and the transplant industry then printed it as a slogan on
its fund-raising merchandise. Rather, it is an ethical act because we confront the
movement of body parts as reading subjects, recognizing the construction of the gift of
life as cohesive narrative identity by those that built it and those that use it to produce
their own popular representations. Readers, while bridging that final aporia between text
and world, must continually struggle with the fluidities and frictions, the problems and
solutions, encountered in reading and recognizing the narrative identity of the organ
transplant figured as gift of life.

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Chapter 2
On the Margins of the Human:
The Objectified Donor and the Melancholic Subject
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

“The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound.”

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

“The wound has come and it hasn’t healed, but it’s not going to get any worse; yet the
wound is there. It’s a kind of consolation that the world isn’t quite the way you wanted it,
but you can somehow reorder it or try and come to terms with it by actually creating your
own world and own version of it.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” Vorda and Herzinger

The titles of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are a canny lexicon of melancholia. The
Unconsoled, An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day,
A Pale View of Hills, When We Were Orphans…Between the covers, his protagonists
remember their lives in fits and starts, wandering through their pasts, exhaustively
speaking around the longing for the lost objects that shape their remains: self-narrations
of the presence of absence. These novels are narrative documents of melancholia, their
unfurling fabulas and characters enact the inability to mourn the lost object and move on.
They return to the scenes of loss and refuse to let go, page after page. Ishiguro’s body of
work is produced and sustained through the creative power of melancholia. Ishiguro
states of his process as a writer, “For me, the creative process has never been about anger
or violence, as it is with some people; it’s more to do with regret or melancholy” (Jaggi
23). Loss in these novels is generative.

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The author was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, immigrating with his parents to
Surrey, England at the age of five. In early interviews and reviews of his work, critics
often resorted to Orientalist assumptions about the author’s influences, asserting that his
voice had “an uncannily Japanese quality emanating from his perfectly pitched English
prose” (Mason 3). While critics have generally abandoned this racist characterization
over the course of the last twenty years since the publication of his first novel, there is
still interest in a racialized classifying of Ishiguro as either a writer deeply influenced by
exile, displacement, and diaspora (Wong, Lewis) or a novelist who transcends place in
the guise of the humanist international (Matthews and Groes). Ishiguro himself describes
his own writing as that of the cosmopolitan universal, but considers that style a response
to the vicissitudes of his transnational personhood.
16

Ishiguro’s work has seen enormous popular and critical success from the
publication of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. His third novel, The Remains of the
Day, won the Man Booker Prize in 1989
17
and most of his work has been translated into
over 30 languages. Recently, there has been increased theoretical interest in Ishiguro’s
writings with the publication of several essay collections and monographs locating him
within the canon of contemporary British writers (Sim, Wong, Matthews and Groes,
Cheng, Lewis) working in the modernist, humanist tradition. His influences are firmly
within European realism and he references Bronte, Chekhov, Dickens and Dostoyevsky

16
Ishiguro states, “Nobody’s history seemed to be my history. And I think this did push
me necessarily into trying to write in an international way” (Ishiguro and Oe 58).

17
An Artist in the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go were
all short-listed for the Booker Prize.

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in particular (Mason 336). His writing style is often considered to be reminiscent of “such
modern novelists as E.M. Forster (for his ‘plain’ style of writing and for his interrogation
of the idea and ideal of England), Ford Madox Ford (for his vivid portrait of character
and narrative repression), Henry James (for his ability to show ‘us people changing their
self-images – gradually, hesitantly, yet with lasting, troubling consequences’) and, more
recently, Franz Kafka (for his depictions of the uncanny)” (Shaffer 6). However,
Ishiguro’s experiments with psychological realism indulge in a writing style that is spare
and yet so dreamlike as to verge on experimental.
18
All six of his novels to date are
written in the first person, voiced through unreliable narrators hallmarked by their
emotional repression and unwillingness to directly recount the traumatic events that
shape the plots of their personal stories.
This chapter focuses on Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, perhaps the title that most
succinctly encapsulates Freud’s diagnosis of the pathological response to loss. The novel
uses melancholia as the language in crafting the memoir of Kathy H., a young woman
looking back at her life in what seems at first to be a traditional boarding school in
England during the 1970s. We might ask ourselves why Kathy in her early 30s has taken
to writing about her life as if she were an old woman about to die, as if she had to commit
these memories to the page because she would no longer be able to voice them. As
Kath’s memories unfold, centering on her relationship with her oldest school friends,

18
While Ishiguro has said that he is “not a great subscriber to Freudian theory” (Jaggi
115), the author speaks of his style as something we might liken to a writerly
unconscious: “The language I use tends to be the sort that actually suppresses meaning
and tries to hide away meaning rather than chase after something beyond the reach of
words. I’m interested in the way words hide meaning” (Vorda and Herzinger 71).

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Tommy and Ruth, the reader realizes that Kath and the rest of the students at the boarding
school, Hailsham, are clones bred to donate their vital organs as young adults to members
of the general population. In the face of this certain truncated future, Kathy recounts her
life in a series of vignettes in which her coming into subjectivity is marked by psychic
loss – of her friendship with Ruth, her love of Tommy, and even her relationship to
Hailsham itself – all shadowed by the inevitably premature material loss of her own body
to institutionalized, coerced organ donation. This future can be said to inflict the open
wound of which Freud speaks, a wound that in this text operates both in the spirit and in
the flesh.
Melancholia structures Never Let Me Go at multiple levels of the text. Not only
can the protagonist be characterized as melancholic in her actions, but the manner in
which the story itself unfolds, redoubling itself to tell and retell past events with a
tenuously desperate grasp, reveals the manner in which both the subject and the form of
the novel struggle to account for profound loss. David Eng and David Kazanjian note that
loss “is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of
it, by how those remains are produced, read, and sustained” (2). Loss, as such, both
powers and produces Never Let Me Go in so far as it allows Kath to narrate what remains,
both of her memories and of the flesh of her friends, through the language of
melancholia. But what of this melancholic language? How does it function in telling a
story about organ donation? I argue that it is crucial to think through loss and
melancholia and its allegorical representation in texts like Never Let Me Go in
relationship to the bioethics of transplantation precisely because it is a medical therapy in

75

which the organ recipient receives a gain that is always haunted by loss. How should we
understand the melancholic language of Never Let Me Go, a coming of age founded on
loss, if we read it in an effort to interrogate the narrative ethics of organ donation? How
do loss and melancholia shape our ideas of the subjectivity of organ donors and the
political ramifications of partitioning one body for the benefit of another? What does the
melancholic subjectivity of the clone and the narrative responses to it reveal about
normative ethico-political modes of understanding the act of organ transfer, a medical
technology made possible only through the loss of life?
My analysis of Never Let Me Go will turn on three theoretical interventions in an
effort to engage the preceding questions. The first intervention will discuss loss as the
structuring psychic language of the text and the mode in which melancholia informs the
narrative subjectivities of the clones, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. The second will examine
how the novel’s structuring of the clone identity through an intimate experience of loss
reveals the assumptions made by a totalizing rubric of liberal humanism that requires the
figure of the de-based subhuman - be it the animal, the machine, the woman, or the slave
- to stake a claim on its supremacy. Finally, we will examine the intersection of the
clone’s subjectivity, impoverished by loss and an incomplete identity formation that is
foundational to her institutionalized socio-political dehumanization, with the text’s
consideration of a human-like positionality achieved through education. We will do this
in an effort to examine how the mind-body problem brought to bear by the clone slated to
donate all her organs throws into question the power relationship between the two. As
opposed to the Cartesian mind over body (I think therefore I am), the clone body

76

establishes itself as primary in its brutal utility as determined by others over the mind that
is not only subordinate, but irrelevant to being. Such an assertion forces us to question the
adequacy of any becoming-human project proposed through the logic of an oppressive
regime of liberal humanist education and posit alternatives to understanding a non-
individuated, non-totalizing subjectivity based on the very possibilities offered through a
melancholic understanding of the human body as narrated through the clone.
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud explains “the nature of melancholia by
comparing it with the normal affect of mourning” (243). Both mourning and melancholia
are “reaction[s] to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has
taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (ibid.). While
the two conditions possess many of the same symptoms (“painful dejection, cessation of
interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity…”
(ibid.)), melancholia bears the distinction of inducing “a lowering of the self-regarding
feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and
culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (ibid.). In mourning, through the
hyper-cathexis of the memories attached to the lost object, one is able to libidinally
detach from the object and transfer her energies to something new. In melancholia, one’s
libidinal energies turn against the ego itself, impoverishing it at the expense of never
having to admit the loss of the loved object.
19
Loss is internalized and the remembrances

19
We should note here that the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholia is
one of great debate. As Judith Butler points out in The Psychic Life of Power, Freud
himself revises the relationship between the two terms in his later essay, The Ego and the
Id. Post-Freudians such as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s re-workings of

77

of the loved object become part of the constitution of the subject – “by taking flight into
the ego love escapes extinction” (257).
It is through this Freudian understanding of melancholia that we might claim that
“never let me go” is a fundamentally melancholic imperative.
20
The novel takes its title
from a song Kath finds particularly moving as an eleven-year-old student at Hailsham.
Students at the school are born and raised within its walls and have no contact with the
world that necessitates their creation and dismemberment as a panacea for corporeal
illness. Twice a year, the school sponsors a sale during which students may purchase
small items from this outside world like pencil cases, clothing, records and other special
objects for their own personal use – things that were never available to them in their
cloistered boarding school world – with tokens earned from their teachers for the
completion of excellent school work. At one such sale, Kathy is drawn to a cassette tape
titled “Songs After Dark,” the cover art featuring the singer Judy Bridgewater, dressed in

melancholia into the concept of incorporation also trouble this firm boundary, as do
Benjamin’s writings on loss (although they do not explicitly refer to Freud’s theories of
mourning and melancholia.) Furthermore, in much of the recent work on loss and in
trauma studies, critics seeking to depathologize the melancholic response to trauma often
see the terms mourning and melancholia as almost interchangeable or even mutually
constitutive. These terms are examined as the socio-political particularities of the
experience trauma, delineating and revealing the impossibility of a universal
understanding of normative responses to loss. Such negotiations can be seen in the essays
of David Eng and David Kazanjian’s influential edited volume, Loss.

20
We may ask to whom this command is addressed and it seems that at multiple points
within the text, the phrase speaks to not only the possibility of Kath and her friends living
beyond the clones’ fate as organ donors or as a reference to their unrealized love for each
other, but even as an address to the reader herself. We shall see how multiple actants and
receivers of the narrative are asked to never let go of various lost objects as our reading
of the text continues in this chapter.

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purple satin, gazing out dreamily while sitting at a bar and holding a cigarette. The image
of the coquettishly smoking woman causes Kath to secret the tape away. She discusses
how cigarettes were a great taboo at Hailsham: “there was even a rumour that some
classic books – like the Sherlock Holmes ones – weren’t in our library because the main
characters smoked too much…” (62). This image of smoking with its implicit suggestion
of not only what harm cigarettes could do to the body, but the even greater stakes such
damage posed for bodies whose only purpose was to offer health to those that fail, posed
an understandable reason for Kath’s secrecy. However, it was rather her willful
misreading of the meaning of her favorite track on the album that led her to listen to the
song “Never Let Me Go” over and over, alone in the afternoons in her dormitory:
What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn’t used to
listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: “Baby,
baby, never let me go…” And what I imagined was a woman who’d been
told she couldn’t have babies, who’d really, really wanted them all her
life. Then there’s a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this
baby very close to her and walks around singing: “Baby, never let me
go…” partly because she is so happy, but also because she’s so afraid
something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her
(70).

Kath’s attachment to her tape is multiply fraught and crosscut by melancholic loss. Her
attraction to the tape’s cover image betrays the peculiarly visceral melancholia of her
status as a clone – that is, she must guard her body against harm because she will
ultimately be called upon to give it away. Additionally, the title of the track itself acts as
melancholic summation of her own reading of a romantic torch song as a plea to that
most fundamental of lost love objects, the mother who is lost to the child in order for the

79

psychoanalytic subject to enter the Oedipus.
21
But Kath’s relation to this foundational
connection is doubly ticklish. As a clone, not only does she lack a mother to lose, she is
also unable to bear children. Both the child and the mother are melancholic figures in the
extreme, lost objects that Kath never had to begin with and yet with which she must
contend and internalize into a body that is haunted by loss from its inception.
22

Kath’s connection to the possibility of a child who might one day let her mother
go is foreclosed to a point that such scenario can only exist alone in her dormitory,
inhabiting a furtively imagined space of motherly connection to the child as she slowly
dances to the song, clutching to her breast a pillow she pretends to be her longed for
baby. During one of her many enactments of this foreclosed loss, she is seen by Madame,
a woman who comes to Hailsham often to evaluate the student’s artwork, but whose

21
In order for the child to progress into subjectivity, he must enter into the Oedipus
complex, renouncing his first love object, the mother, in favor of identifying with the
father. Judith Butler links loss and identity in her work on subjection stating
“Melancholia is precisely the effect of unavowable loss. A loss prior to speech and
declaration, it is the limiting condition of its possibility: a withdrawal or retraction from
speech that makes speech possible” (170). We shall speak at length later in this essay of
Butler’s linkage of melancholia with subjectivity in respect to Ishiguro’s clone,
considering that her dismemberable body is an a priori melancholic object.

22
Cynthia Wong explicitly links the types of loss experienced by Ishiguro’s characters to
the writer’s own diasporic, lost relationship to Japan (2). The idea of a the loss implied by
the dialectical relationship between unstable immigration and suspended assimilation in
relation to the idea homeland whose authenticity is always contested for the figure of the
transnational subject is further explored in David Eng and Shinhee Han’s “A Dialogue on
Racial Melancholia.” Indeed, we might read Ishiguro’s feeling that he was “forced to
write in a more international way” as a response to his assessment that he had “no clear
role, no society or country to speak for or write about” (58). Ishiguro’s disconnection
with a generational home within a specific nationalist literary tradition is mirrored by
Kath’s homelessness within heteronormative reproduction through which nationalist
literary canons are allegorized.

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official role at the school remains a mystery to both the students and the reader until the
end of the novel. As Kath is dancing, she realizes that Madame is standing in the corridor
outside her room, sobbing. As she recalls her reaction as being that of unsettlement and
embarrassment, she notes, “It seems to me, even if she wasn’t a guardian, she was the
adult, and she should have said or done something, even if it was just to tell me off. Then
I’d have known how to behave” (72). Madame’s presence, for the young Kath, completes
the casting of foreclosed relationships she may engage only within an imaginary space.
However, Madame is failing to play her maternal role. Guardians are the closest persons
the clones have as parental figures, and Madame, as an adult who fails to inhabit that
figure, leaves Kath at a loss of how to act, caught out imagining she could have children,
pretending that her body had a genealogical connection to a past (a mother) and a future
(a child) that might exempt her from the fate of only lateral, as opposed to generational,
reproduction.
However, Madame sees the scene of imagined desire and potential loss of the
loved object quite differently. She tells Kath and Tommy when they meet again many
years later, after the students have grown into young adults, after Hailsham itself is
closed:
When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new
world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the
old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl,
her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that
she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and
pleading, never to let her go (272).
Madame’s reading of the song’s chorus further undercuts the clone’s melancholic desire
for an indivisible body as sublimated and normalized through the “Never Let Me Go”

81

fantasy. In viewing the scene as a harbinger of a dystopic future, Madame objectifies the
clone under the sign of historical loss.
23

Freud contrasts mourning and melancholia: “In mourning it is the world which
has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (Freud 246). This maps
nicely onto Madame and Kath’s alternate relationships to the novel’s titular song.
Madame sees the image of the young girl dancing as a loss within the world; Kath,
destined to give up her body parts, imagines her dance as a performative comment on the
loss of her own flesh. But if melancholia is an effect of the loss of an object that gets
transmuted into a loss of self, for the clone, the loss of object is doubly a loss of self. For
the clone, the self is already impoverished from the material loss of her body – her very
body is the lost object that causes melancholic ego-loss. As such, the loss of self that
brings about this impoverishment of the ego by the “shadow of the object” falling upon
the self is amplified. Further, Freud notes the refusal to transfer libidinal energy to a new
object and subsequent refusal to let go of the lost object leads the melancholic “to
establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (249). Thus, this
doubled loss which reflexively both determines that which identifies (the ego as self) and
that which informs such identity (the lost object – also the self) is foundational for

23
This Benjaminian imagery is present throughout the novel, the characters often
imagining themselves caught in the storm of progress as they look back on the wreckage
of loss that piles at their feet. When Tommy dies after his fourth donation, Kath stands at
the side of a windswept field littered with detritus: “I was thinking about the rubbish,
flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and
I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since
my childhood had washed up…” (287). We can imagine the melancholic possibilities of
the Angel Novus.

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establishing selfhood for the clone. The clone’s subjectivity is an internalization of
multiple losses that occasion the externalization of her very viscera – the surgical
harvesting of her insides conditioned by her ultimate utility to a community of humans
she is excluded from socio-politically even as her flesh is destined to be incorporated into
their very bodies.
We might link the clone’s melancholic selfhood and haunting utility to the general
population she must serve with her body to that of the melancholic raced subject
24
as
described by Ann Anlin Cheng. Cheng discusses racial melancholia as the condition of a
literally denigrated subject-formation in which the racial minority is both “the one lost
and the one losing” (17). She states:
For the racial minority, the ‘object’ that has been lost is the myth of an
integral, inviolable self. The racially melancholic minority is doubly
versed in the art of losing. The racially denigrated person has to forfeit the
full security of his/her imaginary integrity (a process that, in
psychoanalytic terms, is arguably necessary for anyone entering the
symbolic) but then is forced to take in (rather than project that lack to
another) and reidentify with that loss: a double loss. These layered losses
for the racialized subject are then sanctioned, both legally and culturally
(175).
Cheng considers “racial melancholia…both the technology and the nightmare of the
American Dream” (xi).
The clone body in Never Let Me Go literalizes this melancholic technology of
social oppression, a biotechnological nightmare of legally and culturally sanctioned
death-dealing institutions that make Kath’s double-loss the condition of her possibility as

24
Literary critic Cheng Chu-chueh makes explicit this connection in his reading of Never
Let Me Go, comparing the clones’ fate as coerced organ donors to “the indigenes whose
resources are exploited to serve their colonizers’ needs” (188).

83

a body for consumption and her dreams of an alternate future fundamentally unreadable
to those like Madame who would benefit from her sacrifice. To Kath, the “Never Let Me
Go” fantasy is a reckoning that imagines that she might have access to a material
sociality, a connection to an integral identity securely formed in relationship to the bodies
of others, not just the brutal loss of her own. Madame, an agent of the majoritarian sphere
that disallows the clone her body and her life, sees this actual material, that is, Kath’s
body, as a mark of the passing of the old world; she sees the dancing body of the clone
whose destruction makes possible the cure for old diseases – but she refuses to see it.
Madame erases that clone body into allegorical material for mourning the loss of the
world as opposed to seeing that very world as haunted by the young girl dancing with her
own death as dehumanized total organ donor. Madame lets Kath go.
While Hailsham students might have known their fate as organ donors, the effects
of this knowledge often emerged subconsciously as in Kath’s “Never Let Me Go”
fantasy. We might remember this as we begin to think clone subjectivity as established
by melancholia – that subjectivity as determined by the internalization of the lost object
that is also the clone’s very body is marked by an almost unconscious perception of that
body as lost. Or, as Freud nuances this point, the melancholic “knows whom he has lost
but not what he has lost in him” (245). The masking of what is lost to the Hailsham
students is not only an effect of their melancholia, but is also aided by the school’s
humanizing mission, which allows for Kath and her friends’ sublimated and contradictory
relationship to their bodies. They know they will donate their bodies to others and die

84

young, but because of their schooling, their identification as students, they also imagine
lives as movie stars, office workers, and artists – all foreclosed possibilities
25
.
Only Tommy shows any sign of knowing both whom and what he has lost. The
first recollection of Hailsham that Kath shares with the reader involves Tommy’s well-
known temper tantrums and details how students would bait Tommy into a wild rage.
While he eventually grows out of this behavior, it returns at the end of the novel when he
is a young adult. Kath and Tommy, finally realizing their love for another, decide to seek
out the former administrators of the now shuttered Hailsham, Madame and Miss Emily,
in an effort to determine if the rumors they had heard from other clones are true – could
they get a deferral of their donations in order to enjoy a normal life as a couple for a few
years. The rumors suggested that Hailsham couples, due to the comparatively privileged
life they led being trained in the liberal arts at a country estate as compared to other
clones who were raised in more bare-bones, prison-like facilities, were allowed this
special consideration if they could prove they were in love. However, when Tommy and
Kath do find Madame and Miss Emily, they are told that the rumors are untrue and that
they must return to their fates, Kath to her first donation after years of caring for other
clones and Tommy to his fourth and final donation – that is, to his death.

25
While Kath speaks longingly and lovingly of Hailsham throughout the novel, the reader
is often puzzled by the idea of what seems very much like a tony, public boarding school
whose purpose is teaching clones who will not live to realize the fruits of a traditional
liberal arts education. Martha Montello notes this perverse dissonance in the sonic
similarity between “Hailsham” and Dickens’ sinister creation, Miss Havisham. Leona
Toker and Daniel Chertoff also consider the school’s name to be encoded with subliminal
meaning, pointing out its combination of the words “Hail” and “Sham.”

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After this bitterly disappointing revelation, Kath drives Tommy back to his
recovery center. He asks her to stop the car, saying he doesn’t feel well. He walks into a
field and flies into a fury, “raging, shouting, flinging his fists and kicking out” (274). The
scene echoes Kath’s first description of Tommy’s temper – both take place in a muddy
field, and Kath herself is the one who arrests his screams and kicks by approaching him
and making physical contact. While throughout the novel Tommy’s temper is always an
object of curiosity for Hailsham students, on that night, after their devastating
conversation with Miss Emily, Kath wonders, “I was thinking maybe the reason you used
to get like that was because at some level you always knew” (275). Tommy denies this at
first, asserting he was just being foolish, but then accedes, “Maybe I did know,
somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn’t” (ibid.). His fellow students,
less conscious of the terrible implications of this knowledge, Ruth and Kath in particular,
are marked as particularly melancholic in their paradoxical relationships to their own
futures and identities which are formed by “an object-loss which is withdrawn from
consciousness” (Freud 245). Tommy, unlike his fellow clones, had at least a
subconscious knowledge of what exactly was lost to him – his very life.
26

26
A question often asked of the clones in Ishiguro’s novel, particularly in the filmic
adaptation of Never Let Me Go, was “Why don’t they fight? Why don’t they run?” The
film attempts to allay these questions by making more explicit and recognizable the
conditions of the clones’ imprisonment, adding in identification bracelets the clones must
scan as they enter Hailsham or the Cottages. Despite this “obvious” policing, many critics
found it difficult to care for characters that seemed to care so little for themselves
(Denby, Dargis). Ishiguro himself, when asked why the clones accept their fate with such
resignation, replies, “Let’s suppose that there is a reason” (Mullan). While there is
something very compelling about Wai-Chew Sim’s reasoning that the clone’s acceptance
of her situation allows for the building of reciprocal, non-commodity based relationships

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Judith Butler, in her study of the psychological stakes of subjection and
subjectivity, notes “the subject loses itself to tell the story of itself.” (9) That is, the
subject must turn itself into an object in order to narrate its own subjectivity. In a sense
Never Let Me Go, a fictional memoir, enacts this kind of narration – in telling her story,
Kath loses herself. The act of narration brings about the subconscious loss that
characterizes the melancholic subject. Further, autobiography as memoir necessarily
takes the self as its object. The form of writing one’s self into subjectivity and identity
assumes the melancholic character of taking the self as object in identifying with that
which has been lost. Coming into subjectivity is predicated on melancholia. As Butler
says, “Freud’s essay makes clear there can be no ego without melancholia, that the ego’s
loss is constitutive. The narrative grammar that might account for this relationship is
necessarily confounded from the start” (171). However, just as subjectivity is inaugurated
by a melancholic response to the foreclosure of the desire for autonomous subjectivity as
the self is othered by taking itself as an object for reflection, the ego is continually
characterized by its accrued losses. “It is the congealment of a history of loss, the
sedimentation of relations of substitution over time, the resolution of a tropological
function into the ontological effect of the self” (169). That Never Let Me Go is a memoir

that act as a challenge to the reader’s “widespread acceptance of neoliberal doxa” (261),
it is my contention that what is at stake in the inability to understand the supposed
“acceptance” of the clone to her fate is part of the violent logic used to justify the
butchery of her body. The idea that fight or flight is the only recognizable mark of
resistance, that the clone is only deserving of sympathy for her plight if she engages in
such action, and that such action is the mark of personhood (as in, she runs therefore she
is (worthy of keeping the heart and lungs that power her flight)) marks the chauvinism of
those of us who might take for granted a liberal subjectivity not contested by the flesh of
our bodies.

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of loss and longing about characters whose very lives are brought about for the purpose
of their eventual dismemberment requires us to account for the subjectivity and identity
of the clone through the lens of accumulated loss and melancholia.
In speaking of the subjectivity of the clone as the effect of accrued loss, we might
note the novel’s spatial allegory of Norfolk, England – a place Hailsham students imagine
as the physical location of recovery for all their lost objects. This mythologizing of space
begins in a geography class during which the students wonder why the seaside town of
Norfolk doesn’t include a picture in guardian Miss Emily’s presentations on the English
countryside. In lieu of visual representation, they ask her to describe it, and Miss Emily
replies that it is “something of a lost corner” (65) of England. The students seize onto this
phrase, fantasizing that perhaps all lost property in the country might eventually end up in
Norfolk. Kath wonders why they invented and believed this incredible story and
remembers Ruth’s reflection on Norfolk as she was in a recovery center after her first
donation:
When we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still
couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still
had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up,
and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and
find it again in Norfolk (66).
If this lost corner is indeed the imagined location of unification with all lost objects in a
forever deferred future, Norfolk is the space of possible recuperation of loss, including,
perhaps, paradoxically, a restoration of totality in the loss of loss itself- in the possibility
of restoring an ego identity evacuated of loss.

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It is in her recollection of a trip made to Norfolk during her tenure at the post-
Hailsham, but pre-Carer training cottages that Kath confronts such a moment of
possibility but finds it impossible. After students completed their schooling at Hailsham,
they were sent to various intermediary centers like the Cottages throughout Britain where
they trained to be Carers, clones who had not yet donated organs but looked after the
psychological wellbeing of clones who had begun the dismemberment process. The
students would meet clones from other parts of Britain at these centers and were free to
explore neighboring towns while they completed their training as Carers. When Kath,
Tommy and Ruth arrived at the Cottages, they became friendly with a clone couple who
had already been there for a year or so. This couple, Chrissie and Rodney, while on a visit
to a friend in Norfolk, see a woman working in a office they hypothesize to be Ruth’s
“possible” – that is, the human source of the genetic material from which Ruth was
copied. Kath is immediately skeptical of this claim as it so closely matches Ruth’s
“dream future.” The clones often would spend hours at the cottages discussing what they
would like to do with their lives if they were not bound to donate their body parts and
eventually die so others might live. Kath notes the ambivalent nature of these
conversations: “We probably knew they couldn’t be serious, but then again, I’m sure we
didn’t regard them as fantasy either” (142). Kath learns of Ruth’s dream future while
walking down a frozen lane with her as they come upon a crumpled, muddied
advertisement on the ground. Ruth is enthralled with the image depicting a “beautifully
modern open-plan office” and sighs, “Now that would be a proper place to work” (144).

89

She later describes the image in vivid detail to her captivated peers as what she most
desires for her dream future.
In Ruth’s relationship to this image, we might begin to locate the particularly
melancholic iteration of the mirror stage as it is available to the clone. The mirror stage,
as formulated by Jacques Lacan, is the fleeting moment when an infant enters into the
imaginary by recognizing his corporeal self as whole and total through viewing it
reflected back at himself in a mirror. As Lacan states, the mirror stage is to be understood
“as an identification,” but we must ask ourselves how the clone body might begin to
enter into this stage of identification. The identificatory moment for the non-clone toddler
comes when, “though held tightly by some prop, human or artificial,” he “overcomes, in
a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly
leaning-forward position and take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it
in his mind” (76).
What could this prop be for the clone, when the clone is without a reproductive
lineage? The clone can never break free from the prop as mother, because the clone never
has a mother to begin with. David Eng discusses the role of the mother as prop, noting
that she acts as support not only for the child’s inchoate bodily control, but also the
cultural discourses that inform the child’s idealized future possibilities. He describes her
holding the child close to the mirror:
“Look, junior, you doctor, you lawyer, you fireman,” coos the mother. Her
acoustic invocations and bodily gestures thus work in tandem with the
mirror image of the infant to laminate it to its sense of self while
conveying a pregiven set of social (gendered, racial, and class)
expectations (114).

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If we consider Eng’s revision to the mirror stage as occurring prior to entry into
signification, language and the symbolic, an assertion he bases on Kaja Silverman’s
concept of lamination, we see how like the interned Japanese American children Eng
analyzes in Lonny Kaneko’s short story, Shoyu Kid, the clone’s moment of pure
identificatory joy is distorted by the incommensurate relations between her body and the
socio-culturally sanctioned ideal subject. The mirror stage operates curiously in these
linked cases. Both the children in the internment camp and Hailsham’s students are
closed off from union with the image even prior to stepping in front of the mirror. The
former are denied union due to the racial difference mapped upon their bodies. In
contrast, the latter is an exact biological copy evacuated of any phenotypical difference
but are also exempted from identification precisely because of their self-sameness – the
biotechnology of exact mimicry of the dominant is that which allows for the clone’s
dismemberment and dehumanization at the service of the bodies it replicates so
perfectly.
27
In Ruth’s moment of identificatory aspiration when glimpsing her future in
the muddy advertisement on the road, we see the clone’s identity is one that is improperly
culturally sanctioned, poetically marked as such in the text by her mirror appearing not as
reflective glass but crumpled, dirtied paper. The advertisement serves to reveal Ruth’s
totality as multiply interdicted by the other, not only through the representational politics

27
We might make something of Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and menace here and locate the
clone within “the ambivalent world of ‘not quite/not white’” (131). If colonial mimicry
“is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is
almost the same, but not quite”(122), and as such, is ambivalent and thus produces its
own slippage, excess and difference, then the ambivalence of the clone’s mimicry lies in
its dissolution of difference – an excess produced by the absence of difference that marks
the clone body’s utility to power.

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of the image as future possible reflection, but also through the discordant relation
between that image and the clone’s identity as foreclosed future subject.
Never Let Me Go often references this future that is simultaneously proffered and
denied to the clone in her strange process of identification, an impossible projection that
is always premised on the clone’s originary purpose. Kath recalls Miss Lucy, a beloved
teacher at Hailsham, taking on the ambivalent role of mother as socio-cultural support.
She remembers an afternoon break from games, sheltering from the rain in the field
pavilion, students gossiping among themselves as Miss Lucy looks on. The teacher
overhears a conversation between two boys discussing the logistics of becoming a
Hollywood actor and gives the students an impromptu lecture:
“The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve
been told, but none of you really understand…If you are going to have
decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly. None of you
will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will
be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day.
Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re
old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital
organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the
actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were
brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have
been decided. So you are not to talk that way any more” (81).
Miss Lucy’s words here are a counter to Eng’s imagined dialogue between the mother
and child in front of the mirror, a lecture that reveals the contradictions implicit in the
clone’s subject formation through the project of humanizing education. That which they
are promised implicitly as learning subjects – “you doctor, you fireman, you grocer, you
office worker” – is denied explicitly as medical objects in the requirement that they end

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their lives in donating their organs to others, who will inhabit much more than the bare
subject position of human they so desire.
This socially supported méconnaisance of the mirror stage for clones is one that
Kath reflects upon quite explicitly. During their school years, Ruth gathers her friends to
test her theory about the mysterious Madame, the woman who sometimes appears at
Hailsham to collect the best work students produced in Art and Poetry class, the woman
who sobbed at the sight of Kath dancing alone in her dormitory. Ruth contends that
Madame is terrified of the students at Hailsham. Kath describes Ruth’s plan: “The plan
we’d come up with to test Ruth’s theory was very simple: we – the six of us in on it –
would lie in wait for Madame somewhere, then ‘swarm out’ all around her, all at once.
We’d all remain perfectly civilized and just go on our way, but if we timed it right, and
she was taken off-guard, we’d see – Ruth insisted – that she really was afraid of us” (34).
Ruth’s hypothesis is proven to be true: as they walk by her in a large group, surrounding
her, Madame freezes, her eyes fixed in terror. What was intended as a childish prank
turns into a moment of identity crisis for the students:
We were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves –
about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the
people outside – but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant…All the
same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time
a moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been
waiting…So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for
the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that
there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you
any harm, but nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you – of how
you were brought into this world and why – and who dread the idea of
your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself
through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking

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past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it
shows you something else, something troubling and strange (36).
It is this relationship to the mirror that makes the clone a harvestable body. They see
themselves reflected back through the eyes of others who mark the clone’s difference
corporeally, shuddering at the thought of the clone’s touch. As such, this revulsion is
internalized as the clones themselves come to see that their subject difference from the
outside world is that they are precisely not subjects, but rather objects that will power the
bodies of others.
If, as Lacanian scholar Lorenzo Chiesa suggests in arguing against misreadings of
the relationship of the ego to subject, the ego is invented for the subject through the
mirror stage, we can see how this recognition of the self as object works in concert with
our reading of the clone as melancholic subject. Chiesa is working against the mistaken
assumption that the ego equals the individual subject. To make such an error would undo
the fundamental subversion and productive revision to the Enlightenment subject that
Freudian psychoanalysis has brought us: a realization of “the subject’s predominantly
subconscious nature, and the consequent displacement of the ego from the central
function in psychic activity attributed to it by both Cartesian and classical psychology”
(14). By insisting that we read Lacan correctly, and see that the ego is in fact an
imaginary necessity for the functioning of the subject, we understand that “the ego qua
imaginary identity individuates the subject only by way of a detour through the other”
(15). For our reading here, this clarification is important in understanding why we marry
a reading of the clone’s melancholic subjectivity that must take her own body as lost
object with her perverse identity formation through the distorted mirror stage. Both

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reflect the same reaction to loss that culminates in the taking of the self as the object
while making an other of the self – both aid us in understanding the psychoanalytic
workings of institutionalized, socio-political dehumanization. This is the self-wounding,
ego impoverishing melancholic aspect of the mirror stage for the clone. Chiesa states:
“By means of the continuous acquisition of new imaginary identifications corresponding
to different crucial moments in the subject’s psychic life, the mirror-stage experience is
repeated indefinitely throughout one’s existence due to the imaginary relationships that
are established with other human beings” (16).
Within these crucial moments of identification, even the mirrors that reflect back
these degraded images are marked as shameful. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy take a trip to
Norfolk, that geographical place where they had always imagined they might recover all
their many losses, to see if Chrissie and Rodney were right about the woman they had
seen working in a scene so like Ruth’s dream future – could she really be Ruth’s possible.
After discovering that the woman was most likely just an office worker with a striking
resemblance, Ruth, much to Kath’s repressive horror, spits out: “‘We all know it. We’re
modeled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as
they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from… If you want to look for possibles, if
you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in the rubbish bins.
Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all come from’” (166). In this we
see how the clone is psycho-socially constructed as an object for consumption through
the mirror stage, in seeing herself as “something troubling and strange,” something that is
already marked as sub-human as it is merely a copy of the already dehumanized (“look

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junior, you junkie, you prostitute, you convict”), as something that may be killed and
taken apart for others.
What then is the clone subject, impoverished as she is through the melancholic
response to accrued losses and her imaginary totality never fully realized due to her
eventual dismemberment? The intersection of the clone’s bio-technological genesis,
humanistic education, and fated corporeality have made it impossible to understand
within a normative framework for the bestowing of a liberal subjectivity. However, this
same impossibility born out of these multiple technologies of subjection provides a
valuable narratological formation that critiques liberal humanism as the totalizing rubric
for understanding the subject and its relation to the body. The clone subject is formed on
the depraved margins of the human, but it also then illuminates and complicates what
Bruno LaTour calls the Great Divides between the nonhuman and the human. Donna
Haraway expands upon Latour:
Whelped in the Great Divides, the principle Others to Man, including his
[Latour’s] ‘posts,’ are well documented in ontological breed registries in
both past and present Western cultures: gods, machines, animals,
monsters, creepy crawlies, women, servants and slaves, and noncitizens in
general. Outside the security checkpoint of bright reason, outside the
apparatuses of reproduction of the sacred image of the same, these ‘others’
have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and
self-certainty (10).
She goes on to sum up Freud’s delineation of the three great wounds that decenter the
exceptional Enlightenment human – the Copernican, the Darwinian, the Freudian (and
Haraway, of course, adds the Cyborgian) – these are all wounds that comprise the
Enlightenment subject and melancholically, they never heal.

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In thinking through one such open wound, we may look to Akira Lippit’s
understanding of the animal in relationship to the clone’s subject position. Remember
that Kath describes Ruth’s plan to approach Madame as a “swarming out,” and continues
the use of animalistic language in characterizing Madame’s fear as “the same way
someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred
to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders” (35). Lippit
charts the ways in which the discourse of the animal forms a conceptual dyad with the
coming into being of the modern human subject. He states:
By tracking the animal across the philosophical spectrum, one discovers
the systematic manner in which the figure of the animal comes to portray a
serial logic: the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the
animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a
virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a
radically antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of
humanism (73).
The clone, like the animal, does inhabit a point of opposition to the human. It must be
provisionally exempted from that category if it is to be killed and made a harvestable bio-
object. However, rather than being exempted from language like the animal, the clone as
student is forced into the status of an ever deferred, becoming human through the project
of education. She is not exempted from death like the animal, and though she is infinitely
reproducible materially (as opposed to alinguistically like the animal), she can experience
death. It is this very death that makes her akin to the animal form: her virtual, perpetual
existence is guaranteed within the bodies of humans for which she is created in
contradiction and supplement.

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The form of the clone as animal is beautifully described by Ishiguro in imagery
created through the character of Tommy, Kath’s unspoken love throughout the novel.
Hailsham placed great emphasis on artistic production, and students vied with one
another to create works that would be deemed good enough for Madame to take away
from the school for her gallery. There was much speculation as to why Madame
maintained a gallery of student work, the truth of which is not revealed until Tommy and
Kath seek her out at the end of the book, before Tommy’s death. At the Cottages, the
same place where Kath and her friends discuss their dream futures, the former Hailsham
students hear rumors of the possibility of deferrals. Chrissie, a non-Hailsham alum, tells
Ruth, “What they said…was that if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with
each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it…They sorted it out so you
could have a few years together before you began your donations” (153). Tommy
speculates that this was the reason they were asked to produce art works at Hailsham. He
remembers Miss Emily explaining that “things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff,
she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul”(175).
He posits that the reserve of work in the Gallery would be used as proof that petitioners
for deferral were “really, properly in love.” He clarifies his theory to Kath: “She can find
the art they’ve done over years and years. She can see if they go. If they match. Don’t
forget, Kath, what she’s got reveals our souls. She could decide for herself what’s a good
match and what’s just a stupid crush” (176).
Despite this hopeful revelation, to Tommy’s despair, he realizes that since he was
never good at poetry or visual arts in school, he had no work in the Gallery to which

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Madame could refer if the rumors of deferrals turned out to be true. While at the Cottages
he begins work on a drawing portfolio he hopes could use for such purposes. On a cold
afternoon, Tommy shows his drawings to Kath. She does not know what to make of
them.
I was taken aback at how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a
moment to see they were animals at all. The first impression was like one
you’d get if you took the back off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving
tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive
precision, and only when you held the page away could you see it was
some kind of armadillo, say, or a bird…For all their busy, metallic
features, there was something sweet, even vulnerable about each them. I
remembered him [Tommy] telling me, in Norfolk, that he worried, even as
he created them, how they’d protect themselves or be able to reach and
fetch things, and looking at them now, I could feel the same sort of
concerns. (188)
Tommy’s animals bear a striking psychic resemblance to the clone himself. The clone
through his agenerational genesis as bio-tool/object that comes of age within a liberal
project of education at the boarding school contains within himself the opposition of
techne and episteme. These are animals whose flesh is composed of inorganic materials
imagined to be utilitarian (just as the entire clone body is) and impervious, yet those very
qualities, densely articulated, reveal the vulnerability of their delicate bodies and evokes
sympathy for their diminutive innocence, their technological armor an extension of their
search for ability, identity, and survival.
That Tommy’s animals, cyborg-like, blur the line between organic and inorganic
makes them an ever more apt representation of the clone subject if seen through Lippit’s
argument about the transitional role of the animal in defining that which it is not – that is,
the human. Lippit posits that modernity is marked by the replacing of the animal with

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technology. Further, animals bear a metaphoric relationship to technological modes of
infinite reproduction such as cinema. He states, "because animals are unable to achieve
the finitude of death, they are also destined to remain 'live,' like electrical wires, along
transferential tracks. Unable to die, they move constantly from one body to another, one
system to another"(192). Just so the organs of Kath, Tommy, and Ruth will move from
one body to another. The clone body is a fleshy analogue to the technological
transference that lives within the animal, both a haunting presence that defines the human
in opposition.
Tommy and Kath never get to show these drawings as proof of their love for each
other. Before Tommy’s final donation, the couple seek out Madame to request a deferral
of their deaths. It is then they learn the true purpose of Madame’s gallery. Miss Emily,
Hailsham’s head mistress who shares a small house in a seaside town with Madame, tells
them that the Gallery was a means to exhibit what can only be considered a most extreme
form of outsider art – it was used to argue that clones deserved humane treatment: “We
took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more
finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (260). She goes on to detail what amounts
to the activist mission of schools like Hailsham, noting the importance of considering the
clones as students, not just objects for medical science.
The quest for humane treatment, however, belies the brutality of the unkept
promises of liberal humanist education and the failure of sympathy to produce ethical
treatment: in order for one to be treated humanely, she must necessarily inhabit a subject
position outside of the human. Kath asks Miss Emily, “If we’re just going to give

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donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions”
(259)? Miss Emily responds, “You mustn’t be dejected. I hope you can appreciate how
much we were able to secure for you. Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives,
you’re educated and cultured” (261).
28
It is not liberation that Miss Emily and Madame
seek for Kath and Tommy, but a much better prison. The clone/student is part of what
education scholar Gert J.J. Biesta would call manipulative pedagogy. “Manipulative
pedagogy entails the educational paradox – Kant’s question ‘How do I cultivate freedom
through coercion?’ – because in seeing education as a process in which the child is in a
sense made into a person, the personhood of the child is simultaneously affirmed and
denied” (4).
Bill Readings, in his work on the history and crisis of the modern university,
expands on the paradox of manipulative pedagogy in his history of the modern university
as influenced by post-Kantian German Idealism. Schiller rephrases the question of the
coercive education of the child in asking how it is possible to move from the state of
nature to the state of reason without destroying nature in the process. Readings
summarizes Schiller’s resolution of the contradiction:
The answer, briefly, is through culture as a process of aesthetic education…art
removes chance from nature (to allow morality) while at the same time art does
not free reason entirely from nature. This Bildung is a process of the development
of moral character that situates beauty as an intermediate step between the chaos
of nature and the strict and arbitrary structures of pure reason. Art stands, then
between the purely passive determination of reason by nature (man as beast) and
the utterly active determination of nature by reason (man as machine)…It is a
fundamentally historical process: reason is given organic life through historical

28
It would not be a stretch to consider the educated clone as analogous to the
undocumented student hoping for the passage of the DREAM act.

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study. Humanity does not achieve the moral state by rejecting nature but by
reinterpreting nature as a historical process (63).
It is the educational institution that acts as the intermediary through which culture will
prepare the natural nature of mankind for the state of reason, education becomes a
process of the subject’s development. The process develops the subject for the State. It is
the Bildung, the process of becoming a subject of and for national culture. This is the
legacy of the humanist educational project, rooted in the history of producing national
subjects through the transformational transmission of culture coded as learning. However,
what does this coming into subjectivity through the educational apparatus mean for the
clone whom may never perfectly engage in this project of cultural production? How can
she be the intermediary between nature and reason when her personhood is denied by
reason for nature so she can be butchered like an animal and furthermore, when her body
is denied by nature because of the brutal rationality of her biotechnological, agenerational
genesis so she can be dismissed as a machine? The clone’s foreclosed subjectivity makes
the project of humanistic education ridiculous – what is a humanizing project to subjects
that must never be human in order to maintain the system that both produces and denies
them? Indeed, this critique can be applied to the fundamental contradiction of humanist
education – that when confronted with collective (and often state sanctioned and
produced) difference in the face of an individualist narrative of self-improvement and
progress, there arises an irreconcilable difference between those who are simply are
human and those who need to prove their humanity.
In a sense, to return to Lippit’s rendering of the function of the animal in relation
to the modern humanized subject, the clone/students serve the function of both animal

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(that is non-human complement and producer of humanity) and machine (that which
reproduces and supplements the conditions of human perpetuity). They are part of Donna
Haraway’s provocative cyborg world, a fictive figuration of the border war between
organism and machine that disrupts the “origin story in the ‘Western’, humanist sense
[which] depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by
the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual
development and of history” (151). As we discussed above, the clone is agenerational and
outside the oedipal project of normative subjectivity. Further, the clone’s abject
corporeality, a body produced for dissection, can never be unified or full. Her existence
calls into question the assumptions we might make about the whole, individual subject
that exists in equivalence with one body, that might be said to be human through
humanist projects of individual development and history.
Hailsham is the sanctioning institution in which the clone is trained in the
humanities despite the explicitly inhuman project with which the school is involved– the
production, imprisonment, and eventual dismemberment of human bodies. Of course, the
question of the clone’s humanity is the paradoxical question at the heart of Hailsham’s
educational mission. In our linking of the historical development project of liberal
education with state-sanctioned violence, we would do well to remember how this
institutional complex works in tandem with the dehumanized, melancholic subjectivity of
the clone in relation to her training in the acceptance of social death. While it might seem
that this training in the acceptance of death points to a fetishization of melancholy against
an alternate response of anger or retribution (see footnote 11), I would argue that by

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creating the figure of the clone whose recourse to individualistic action is foreclosed
through the melancholic psychic construction of her subjectivity allows us to posit a
mode of resistant reading outside the triumphalist individual espoused by the very project
of humanist education that she defies – that is, the clone as a narratological device that
allows for us to imagine an elsewhere to a Cartesian solution that our reading of the clone
body reveals to be always and everywhere a paradox and trap.
The clone’s debased status within the alternate universe of Never Let Me Go
operates in a manner akin to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s seminal re-definition of racism as
“the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerabilities to pre-mature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political
geographies’’ (261). It is precisely the myth of the liberal human applied to the mythical
biotechnology of the clone that produces and sustains the social death of Kath and her
friends, that leads to the clone’s pre-mature death. This myth is produced, sustained and
sanctioned through the dystopic biotechnological iteration of what we see in the
dehumanizing of all oppressed groups – doubly melancholic identification, a restriction to
lateral reproduction, and the complicity in their own subhuman status.
29

The clone is a perpetual student of humanity, but never human. Like the cyborg,
the animal qua machine, and the multiply melancholic subject, she must inhabit this
space that lies in between in order to be as she is: a body produced for the service of
others. This in-between is the hallmark of transplant technologies and one that is

29
Or as Bruce Robbins puts it in his critical reading of Never Let Me Go, “we too have
schools that resemble prisons and prisons where almost everyone seems to be from the
same background” (3).

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continually negotiated by the transplant industries, usually to little avail. We have
discussed the aporetics of the gift of life narrative in the previous chapter and how the
story works in an attempt to suture the fissures dealt to the liberal subject by organs
moving out of place and time. We saw there that the story never quite heals completely
and scars remain upon normative understandings of corporeal subjectivity. Never Let Me
Go uses the language of psychoanalysis to draw out the in-between, fractured identities of
bodies that are created and defined by the imperative for total organ donation. We find
that a corporeality that is constructed by loss finds a subject position that is continually
marked by loss – by an imaginary that reflects back only imperfect realizations of social
identity and a melancholia that comes from the clone’s lost object as the subject body
itself.
The idea that such an impoverished subjectivity could be remedied through an
uplift program of liberal humanist education, a project that is premised on the very
system of differences that requires the sacrifice and categorical dehumanization of the
clone body, is presented as inadequate, laughable, and tragic. It illuminates the problems
with bioethical concerns regarding the treatment of donor bodies. We cannot expect
sympathy, a social relation premised on maintaining physical and affective separation
between bodies, to perform in the place an ethico-political engagement with the
fundamentally melancholic position of the donor, particularly when donation reveals the

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collapse and interchange between bodies.
30
These are medical technologies that make
evident the flaws within the individuated liberal subject – how can we possibly deploy
humanism through the apparatuses of education, the clinic, and the state when these
institutions require the foreclosure of that very humanity to donor bodies?
Rather, we suggest, that in the face of a subject made incomplete through the
politics of donation, we engage the resultant melancholic subjectivities through that same
lens: the lens of refusal, the modality of never letting go in the face of inevitable and
constitutive loss. What this brings us to is the sort of simultaneity implied by the border
skirmishes inherent in the transplantable body that resignifies our coming into
subjectivity. Ishiguro has said that his choice of cloning technology and organ
transplantation in Never Let Me Go was not intended to engage a commentary regarding
the bioethical concerns of organ transfer, but rather was an attempt to create a
narratological landscape in which all of a human’s major life events would be condensed
into a short period of time, intensifying the emotional resonance of the characters’
experiences. However, the choice of total organ donation as the instrument through which
the characters meet their foreshortened ends means that this condensation of time is both
contingent upon and productive of a spatial collapse between bodies. Organ transfer
could be said to inhabit what Donna Haraway call contact zones, “the flesh of world
making entanglements” (4). To assume that such figures then can be dealt with the telos
of a liberal humanist subject-making discourse, one that is founded upon the Bildung, the

30
Or as Ann Anlin Cheng says of sympathy in the work of Anna Deveare Smith:
“sympathy is not some kind of selfless identification but rather…a kind of crisis of
unbridgeability, a crisis of the awareness of boundary” (189).

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linear process of the individual subject for a death-dealing state, is a false premise.
Instead we are forced to call for a more full, complex, and spatialized as opposed to
simply linear and progressively oriented understanding of the body’s relationship to the
becoming subject – an elsewhere in the “I think, therefore I am.” This is an elsewhere
that may double back, that may create a world around a wound that won’t heal, a world
that exists in both time and space, as “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse
bodies and meanings coshape one another” (ibid).
Judith Butler notes that melancholia is an effect of the failure of deterministic,
linear narrative to provide objective coherence. It implies a reconciliation in the spatial,
an intersubjective simultaneity that comes from “any epistemological act that ‘intends’ or
‘anticipates’ the fullness of an object, because that ‘end’ cannot be reached, and that
fullness is elusive” (471). But as we have seen through our discussion of the project of
liberal humanist education, it is not in the Enlightenment subject that we are to find
coherence. As Readings states of the aparati of education, “we can never ‘find ourselves,’
come into our birthright; we cannot achieve the pure auto-affection that brings thought to
an end in the virtual presence of an entirely self-knowing and autonomous subject” (51).
In reading the clone as figure of organ transfer, a subject formed at the borders of the
human that illuminates the inadequacies of the becoming-human projects sanctioned by
liberal humanism, we see how melancholia will not allow a neat progression towards a
normative subject for all. When this melancholic understanding of the subject is forced
into a relationship with the liberal, humanist subject, we do not find purchase for these
spatially and temporally non-normative subjects and instead necessarily produce those

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debased others -the clone, the animal, the machine, the slave, the woman, the racialized
subject - consigned to premature death. This is where we might find our point of
intensification that reveals political possibility from reading Never Let Me Go. It is here
when we find where bodies collapse into each other and demand a different
understanding of the border politics of corporeal difference, in which we do not allow the
coherence of the autonomous Enlightenment subject to elide the intersubjective into the
subhuman – and we do this as readers, where we as readers confront the melancholic
mode of the simultaneous, the communal, and the interdependent and refuse to let the
wound heal, refuse to let go.

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Chapter 3
Blackness Beyond the Borders of the Body:
Race, Transplantation, and Community in Sekou Sundiata’s blessing the boats

I saw Sekou Sundiata perform his one-man play, blessing the boats, at Arizona
State University’s Gammage Auditorium. I was writing a review of the performance for
Theatre Journal, but I knew that this piece would just be the beginning of the work I
would do on the poet’s exploration of his experiences with renal failure and kidney
transplantation. After Sundiata accepted his standing ovation and the stage went dark, I
rushed to the event organizer, told her I was a scholar writing on organ transplantation
and asked if I could please speak briefly with Mr. Sundiata if he had a spare moment. She
let me backstage to see if I could catch him before he left for his hotel. I looked down the
corridor from stage left and saw his silhouette backlit against the stairs leading away from
the auditorium. I was too late.
I emailed him later, on July 27, 2006, after my review was to be published, to ask
if we could meet sometime to talk about blessing the boats in his native and my
temporarily adopted Harlem. I told him about my own writing about organ transfer and
narrative; I told him that his work especially touched me because of my own transplant
experience as a kidney recipient from my father. He responded the next day. He said he
was sorry, but he was in South Africa working on his new project, The (51
st
) Dream
State. Perhaps we could meet when he returned? He said he hoped I was feeling good and
that my numbers were great. He signed the email, “All of a sudden…Sekou”. Sekou
Sundiata survived heroin addiction, dialysis, kidney transplantation, post-transplant

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surgical complications, and a car accident that broke his neck and nearly left him
paralyzed. He died on July 18, 2007 in Valhalla, New York of heart failure. He was 58-
years-old. We never did meet.
Sekou Sundiata was a poet, musician, performer, and teacher. He was born in
1948 with the given name of Robert Feaster. Feaster was raised in Harlem and came of
age as a revolutionary artist at the end of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s. He
changed his name to Sekou Sundiata in the mid-1970s: Sekou, a common West African
name, and Sundiata after the 13
th
Century sovereign founder of the Mali empire. Sundiata
attended City College in 1972 where he studied English and received his MFA in creative
writing from the City University of New York. Later in life, he was a professor of
creative writing and poetry at the New School. Sunidata’s poetry reached mainstream
audiences through his participation in Bill Moyer’s PBS series on American Poets, The
Language of Life, and multiple interviews on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Sundiata’s
performance pieces include his two highly acclaimed performance pieces, blessing the
boats, and The 51
st
(Dream) State, a reflection on the American character in the wake of
September 11, 2001. Sundiata also collaborated with avant-garde jazz trombonist, Craig
Harris, on the staging of several performances, a few of which include Udu, regarding
slavery in Mauritania, and their much heralded play exploring the legacies of Black
radicalism, The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop.
This chapter focuses on Sekou Sundiata’s one man performance, blessing the
boats, first staged in 2002, which tells the story of a human body in the crisis of illness
and examines what changes to the conception of his own body and his connection to

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others emerge from that telling. blessing the boats was written by Sundiata, directed by
Rhodessa Jones, and went through many iterations since its debut. The piece takes its title
from Lucille Clifton’s poem, blessing the boats, and like the benedictory voice of that
poem, during the course of his performance, Sundiata tells stories about perilous, but
blessed journeys. The stories are those of the artist and the people he encountered leading
up to his kidney transplant in 1999. The piece opened in 2002 in New York and was
performed in over twenty cities around the country, many times in conjunction with
transplant awareness programs and conferences.
His performance essay tells stories that circle around and through the people, the
places, and his own changing notions of self encountered in the years surrounding his
kidney transplant in 1999. The set consists of little else than Sundiata’s own body – a
projection screen for images associated with his words, a desk, a chair and a music stand.
In many productions of the piece, part of the audience is seated on the stage itself,
encroaching on the outer border of the performance space. Sundiata roams about the
sparse stage, supported and interrupted by vocal and musical tracks, highlighted and
obscured by changes in lighting, inhabiting different voices and different bodies in his
acts of narrating illness. Sundiata continually reminds us that his stories can never quite
capture the biotechnology of an illness that requires the cure of suturing into the self
another's body part. And at the same time, as he tells a story that intimately details the
social context of his illness by interlacing his relationship with his friends, family,
doctors, music, and poetry to his experience of transplantation, we realize that the
narrative also exceeds the biologically understood ailing/healed body.

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In this realization, we understand that this performance will both engage us in a
social relationship with the performer as he speaks directly to us, frankly addressing us at
times, as it deals with the social aspects of how the body operates in world constructed by
densely interwoven discourses of race and medicine. In discussing the political
significance of performance studies, Diana Taylor suggests that “performances function
as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity.”
(2) The social transfer encoded in blessing the boats makes clear that Sundiata’s
identifications and those of the people who inhabit his world that now includes regular,
regulatory interactions with the medical establishment, have not been transformed by an
illness that triumphs over all other forms of embodied contestation. Sundiata’s
performance is one in which race and illness intersect; he maps the medical industrial
complex across the bodies of people of color. We see here that the kinds of bodies in
dialysis rooms and their experience of health care and the clinic are bound up in
structures of power and inequality that racialize the experience of illness and corporeal
possibility. Further, reflexively, illness inflects racial histories of identity. Sitting at the
desk, reflecting on how a year of vasospasms and dizziness had prevented him from
writing, Sundiata wistfully recalls his youth in the black arts movement and the call of
black power. He says, “back in the days of revolution, we wanted to shake up the world!
Now, I just wanted the world to stop shaking.”
In blessing the boats, Sundiata weaves together stories in which race and illness
inform one another, destabilizing the binaristic opposition between mind and body
implicitly coded in normative constructs of the liberal human as he is mindful of how

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these two modes of shaping the body co-inscribe one another and destabilize both.
Reflecting on his illness, demanding, “Where the hell is my cool? I was no longer the self
I thought myself to be,” Sundiata attempts to understand a new form of corporeal
belonging in terms of his raced subjectivity made different by the experience of organ
failure: the vasospasms that render him unable to concentrate on his poetry, the insurance
forms that require the enunciation of his “plantation name,” forcing the artist to ask
himself, “Who got the transplant, Robert or Sekou?”
My argument in this chapter turns on three critical interventions. The first is one
of double consciousness when corporeal difference is written through the discourses of
both race and illness. W.E.B. Du Bois famously states of this twoness: “One ever feels
his twoness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder” (5). What then might we make of a subject like Sekou
Sundiata, for whom race poses just one among many divisive discourses that separates
American from Negro - that is the fully human from its other? How do we understand the
subjectivity of a racialized body that is divided from yet another Cartesian indicator of
humanity, the individuated soul/mind, by an illness that divides self from self-known
self? What dogged strength keeps the ailing body from being torn asunder in the face of
these divisions and what do we gain (or, perhaps, lose) if we imagine a union purchased
through transplantation, the biotechnological junction that might make possible, to
transform Dubois’s words, a merger of a double-self into “a better and truer self?” (Ibid.)

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The second theoretical intervention asks the question if the transplant, as
materialized and represented within a world of unequal health care access as depicted in
blessing the boats, can as a commodity fetish be the condition of this merger? Further,
what do we make of this commodity fetish form of the transplanted organ that must
always mask its relations to exchange value by means of a detour through a Freudian
fetish of the gift? Perhaps we can understand Sundiata’s narration of the transplant
alongside Fred Moten’s reading of Marx’s speaking commodity: as a form of black
performance that exists prior to Marxist exchange-value. In other words, if as Lesley
Sharp states of the transplant, “[the organs’] cultural value lies in their economic and
their social worth: they are rare commodities in part because they are personalized
objects” (378), does the commodity with biography, like the commodity who speaks,
allow for the possibility for normative unity or conversely, does its force the
abandonment of any such unity?
Finally, in my theoretical and political intervention, I will argue that blessing the
boats illuminates another kind of double consciousness, one of taking two selves into one
body in order to not capitulate into the triumphalist individual. Such capitulation is what
is at stake in racist, liberal humanist incompatibility of blackness and the human, of
illness and the human, and is an ethico-corporeal contortion that allows the human to not
be communal. My reading of blessing the boats will argue that the transplant does not
itself create a social body, but rather that the discursive intersection of race and illness

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through transplant narratives shows how we have always been communal but have been
forced to disavow community.
31

31
There has been much important work critiquing the deployment of community as a
romantic past to which we must return in order to escape alienation and I take these to
heart as I discuss Jean-Luc Nancy’s critical consideration of community Chapter 4. In
thinking through Miranda Joseph’s important warning against the collusion between
community and capital in which “the discourse of community [is used] to legitimate
social hierarchies,” (viii), I offer my own clarification of my deployment of the terms
communal and community. Community might not be and is not about harmony or unity
or agreement between members construed as separate individuals, but rather about an
ontological aggregate which does not assume a non-frictional being. Furthermore, in
thinking of the material invoked by this form of community, I might speak of an almost
Spinozan monism of the communal that is invoked only insofar as it resists taxonomies of
dehumanization. Finally, while critics like Joseph argue for an attention to the opposition
between universality and particularism inherent in the violence of communitarian
interests that create and enforce boundaries between groups and offer an analysis based
on particularism and abstraction in order “to shift focus from the question of sameness
and difference to the question of social processes,” (xxxii) I am arguing here that
questions of sameness and difference are always already part of a social process.

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To begin, let us endeavor to think through Du Bois as a means for setting up our
close reading of Sundiata’s performance of the black subject as imbricated and
instantiated through the discourses of illness and transplantation. We reproduce here the
famous passage from the first chapter of Souls of Black Folk, “Of Our Spiritual
Strivings:”
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yielded him no
true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the
revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-
consciousnesss, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes
of others…One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a Negro: two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark
body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this
longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a
better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves
to be lost...He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American…” (5)
Within this passage we can read the overarching impulse that literary critic Nahum
Chandler locates within all of Du Bois’s work to both historicize the emergence of the
Negro as a possible subject identity and to understand what enables the possibility of
difference. Chandler terms the latter an interest in the general possibility of difference as
Du Bois interrogates the status of difference, not just its existence. The problem for Du
Bois, Chandler argues, “was how to situate the question of difference, how to situate to
each other the relation of sameness and difference” (237). As such, we see above how Du
Bois not only traces the historical conditions that locate the color line as the problem of

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modernity, he also questions boldly in this passage what it means for the black subject to
originate in, to be born into, a system of racialized difference.
However, we must ask ourselves, how does a system of difference instantiate
itself? How do we come to a graded social taxonomy of man (Egyptian, Indian, Greek,
Teuton, etc.) – without a foundation for the understanding of difference? That is, how do
we find the origin for a genealogy of difference within which the Negro is born the
seventh son? Chandler offers a Derridean reading of this problem, positing that Du Bois
offers a doubling back of an origin of the historically located system of socially
determined racial distinction through the workings of the social process of differentiation
itself. He states, “Du Bois practices a recognition, if he does not name it, of the necessity
that in order for racial distinction to operate as an iterable distinction, as a system of
repetitive marks, it can do so only in the making of subjects – in the making and not
before” (243). This is to say that in the making of the black subject, we also find the
repetitive marking that results from the generation of a system of difference that leads to
what we may understand as double consciousness, two warring ideals in one dark body.
It is important to interject into this system of difference that is premised on a
history of racial distinction the very materiality of that dark body if our project is to
consider the cross-cuttings of race and illness as a mode of complicating our
understanding of double consciousness. According to Du Bois, the dark body must
contain the ideals upon which difference itself is premised within the walls of its own
flesh, risking its own dissolution in the face of such discord. But if we are to think of the

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possibility of the material incorporation of another organ into this body yielding a very
literal twoness, how do we reckon with the concept of corporeal dissolution in the face of
a socio-politically inscribed twoness (that is, being a negro and an American)? What is
the effect of transplantation on systems of difference and repetition?
32
How does
transplantation trouble a notion of reproduction assumed in the black subject’s birth into
double consciousness? In the most basic medicalized understanding of transplantation,
that which brings about a split in the subject is not on the level of the transcendent ideal
which Du Bois figures as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”, but
rather on the level of the biomaterial as two warring bodies and immune systems. Further,
the very body that houses that which could tear it apart is reproduced through a peculiar
amalgam of death or at least wounding of a donor body – reproduction is premised upon
tearing asunder. I do not point this out simply to make a clever remark upon a very
peculiar case of medical technology that Sundiata takes as the object of his poetic
discourse. Rather, I interject this here in order to point to the ways in which the dark body
Du Bois invokes as both marking and being marked by a historical and general system of
difference is assumed to be total in order to advance a social reading of the problematics
of race and difference.
Du Bois himself allows for a paradox in his figuring of reproductivity. In Souls’
chapter “Of The Passing of The First Born,” he reflects upon the death of his young son,

32
I do not use this in the Deleuzian sense as identity for Du Bois, and indeed for Sundiata
as well, (at least insofar as it relates to the possibility of subjectivity) is not prior to a
metaphysical concept of difference.

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lamenting “He knew no color-line, poor dear – and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had
not yet darkened half his sun” (173). How is it that Du Bois’s son was not born with a
veil, but just the shadow of it upon him? We could take a Lacanian lens and view the veil
as a form of the mirror and assume that since the child had died before his entry into the
imaginary, he could know not yet “see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
However, there is a notion here that death itself, the total failure of the vital persistence of
the body, the loss of the struggle against being torn asunder, could exclude a child from
the repetitive mark of socially determined blackness – even in the name of the Father. Du
Bois’s ambivalence on the sociality of racial difference (and thus, subjectivity) that may
be removed in the face his child’s tragic death troubles the terrible strength granted to the
black body under the sign of double consciousness.
The troubling of the assumed natural givenness of the body insofar as it is
separated from a mind that is the exclusive arbiter of the acting subject is a hallmark of
poststructuralist interventions into metaphysical concepts of the human and his
capabilities.
33
Elizabeth Grosz articulates the problem of binaristic divisions between the
ideal (the mind) and the material (the body) as that of creating a relationship in which
otherness can only be defined in opposition to the one, creating the illusion of a static
dominance when, in fact, the one only comes into being as such through its relationship
to the other: “The one, in order to be a one, must draw a barrier or boundary around itself,

33
While we have pointed to a Lacanian intervention above in our discussion of the
ambivalence contained within Du Bois’s own writing we could certainly include
Deleuzian, Foucauldian, or deconstructionist applications here as well.

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in which case it is necessarily implicated in the establishment of a binary – inside/outside,
presence/absence.” (211) Given this, we have the basis for our troubling of the binaristic
opposition between the black body and the ideals it is said to contain if we are to consider
the conditions of that very body in the formation of those very ideals: “If the body
functions as the repressed or disavowed condition of all knowledges (including biology),
then providing new bases to rethink the body may share the unarticulated assumptions of
these knowledges.” (20) It is in an effort to rethink the black body and assumptions about
black subjectivity that we map Du Boisian double consciousness onto our reading of
Sundiata’s blessing the boats as the performance deals explicitly with the conditions of
the body’s repression in its relationship to normative subjectivity and enacts a bringing
forth of the corporeal that cannot be ignored.
blessing the boats begins with Sekou Sundiata’s voice cutting through the
darkness of the stage that is barely illuminated by a inky blue light projected on the
screen at center stage. The first lines he speaks serve as a kind of “when and where I
enter” for the ensuing performance. He situates us in time and space: “It is the first
birthday after my transplant so it is a double birthday.” He tells us it has been eight
months since his transplant, eight months in which the tremors in his hands, a side effect
of the immunosuppressants that keep his body from rejecting his new kidney, have finally
subsided to a point so that he may hold a pencil and begin to write. He says, in the
darkness, “I have been feeling a story building up on the road to recovery,” but since the

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pages are blank and the story must be reconstructed from memory, he “can open up my
journal, point to a spot, and begin anywhere.”
Sundiata situates what is to come for the audience, but the disruption of our
understanding of a knowable body that houses the self begins immediately as the lights
rise and we see Sundiata walking downstage wearing a simple, brown, Nehru-collared
shirt and slacks. He says:
One holds the knife like one holds the bow of a cello or a tulip – by the
stem. The knife is not for pressing. It is for drawing across the field of skin.
A stillness settles in my heart and is carried to my hand. It is the quietude
of resolve layered over fear. And it is this resolve that lowers us, my knife
and me, deeper and deeper into the person beneath.
We the audience do not know yet that Sundiata is not speaking his story in his own
words. Unless we are well-versed in the highly poetic, at times even baroque, writings of
physician-authors, we do not recognize these to be the words of Richard Selzer, the
famed surgeon and writer, from his renowned essay, “The Knife,” albeit re-arranged and
edited. Sundiata continues his quotation until he reaches the line
Beneath the fat lies the fascia, the tough fibrous sheet encasing the
muscles. It must be sliced and the red beef of the muscles separated. For
the first time we can see into the cavity of the abdomen. Such a primitive
place. One expects to find drawings of buffalo on the walls.
At this point, in a jaunty voice laced with a smile, much in contrast to the sonorous lyrical
quality he lent to the words of Selzer, Sundiata cuts in: “I got your red beef and buffalo
drawings.”
With this one line, not even five minutes into the performance, we have a text that
troubles the assumption that one might be able to dictate the body’s capabilities from the

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position of a masterful subjectivity. Sundiata’s voice explodes out of the extravagant
poetry of the humanitarian physician, making present the materiality of his body – “I got
your red beef and buffalo drawings.” This interjection not only makes present the
rawness of his flesh but also sardonically invokes a kind of blackness enunciated in
opposition to Selzer’s notion of the body as “primitive,” a place for buffalo drawings.
Sundiata notes that he had admired Selzer’s writing for “the lyrical drama of that
language,” but that he finds now after his personal experience with surgery that “there is
nothing lyrical about the operating room.” Not unlike the sorrow songs that frame Du
Bois’s entry into his sociological exploration of black souls and subjectivity, Sundiata’s
entry into the caverns of his own body is framed by piano and a soprano saxophone
dancing off each other as he speaks:
Somewhere, somewhere deep, somewhere deep and under anesthesia the
valves of a human heart open and close and the black scat syllables of
sacred science come pouring onto a clean page turning over in my mind.
The blues bat their eyes and rustle their wings. A double reed vibrates in a
pure light that means all things are possible. A bow draws out a round tone
across the waist of a bass. It could be the devil’s note, the way it cuts
through the wood and wind, the wood and wind, bending the sound right
side up, harmonizing the underworld. Whoever said the music goes into
the air and then its gone was wrong - it goes below the flesh and above the
grave where I am flat as a mesa, open as a great gorge under the Taos sky.
I try to remember the notes by humming but humming burns the notes out
of memory.
He asks the doctors and nurses after the surgery is finished if they, too, could hear the
beautiful music – they, of course, could not. The passage recalls that of Selzer’s only in
so far as there is an invocation of musicality – but rather than the instrumental nature of
the cello bow to the surgeon, Sundiata is inhabited by the lower faculty of black

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musicality. Here the music is both the thought and striving that tears apart (“the black
scat syllables of sacred science,” “the devil’s note…[that] cuts through wood and wind).
The body has now literally been torn asunder – “flat as a mesa, open as a great gorge” –
and the music is now the ideal that lives within that body, animating it. The harmony of
this music, like that of the piano and saxophone’s interplay, does not simply animate or
destroy the black subject; rather, it is both and neither. Like Chandler’s discussion of Du
Bois’s study of black sociality as recognizable through iteration, it is in the making of the
music that both inhabits and destroys that the black subject himself comes into his
subjectivity through and as an ailing body.
Frantz Fanon famously detours through music and the biology of the black body
in his struggle to find the ontology of blackness in a white world. Fanon states that even
though “scientists reluctantly admitted that the Negro was a human being; in vivo and in
vitro the Negro was identical to the white man: same morphology, same histology.
Reason was assured of victory on every level,” (99) nevertheless, a denigrated social
history of nonreason is grafted on to the body of the Negro – “they inscribed on my
chromosomes certain genes of various thickness representing cannibalism” (100). Fanon
shouts the unreasonability of blackness in response, through, as he puts it, the cadence of
rhythm: “putting out pseudopodia in all directions, I secreted a race” (102). Here, like in
Sundiata’s description of his surgery, music is responsible for articulating a defiance of
the primacy of mind over black body. The growth of added appendages (“pseudopodia”)
defies the biomedical knowledges that would define a body as normatively human

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morphologically or histologically speaking, but secretes a race that affirms the socio-
political humanity that same biomedical rationality denies.
Sundiata is playing through a history of an aesthetic contestation of separations of
mind and body, rationality and corporeality, writ on the black body. This aesthetic is
haunted by loss – of a rational totality for Fanon and of the very music (“I try to
remember the notes by humming but humming burns the notes out of memory”) for
Sundiata. blessing the boats, from its first scene of interjection into the lofty poetry of
medical science, describes a body that is crosscut by the social discourses that shape it, in
which music does not go into the air but into the flesh. This is a mixing of the world and
the body that is always at work, but is only revealed when the imagined unassailable
integrity of the body is disassembled by the surgical cut. Black subjectivity is determined
both by a body that is being torn asunder and the loss that such surgical tearing initiates.
This reading of the start of blessing the boats brings us back to our central questioning of
how the black body functions as the stage for a Du Boisian coming into subjectivity and
black consciousness if that same body is a discursive social construct itself.
Through our reading of Sundiata against Du Bois, we understand that to imagine
that a body, any body, particularly the black body, must be whole in order to enter into
the realm of the subject is to acquiesce to a system in which the normativity of the total
body is formed in large part in contrast to the deformed dark body of the other. This is the
social history of the taxonomy that the Negro is born into as the seventh son. Even if it
were possible for the black subject to be both a Negro and an American without an

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experience of loss, he would have to acquiesce to a system that denies his access to
humanity. From the moment of invocation and birth of the black subject, housed within a
body that must be capable of dogged strength, the subject “wishes neither of the older
selves to be lost...He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and
an American…” This assertion of the psychic strivings of the black subject for the
abrogation of the possibility of all loss is at the heart of the ambivalence surrounding the
black body evident within double consciousness. How could a dark body, in the throes of
a struggle against dissolution by the internal warring of those very ideals not experience a
loss of something in trying to be both a Negro and an American? Further, in the struggle
that must result in some form of loss, how could the dark body which both constructs and
is constructed by the subject not experience some form of fundamental transformation –
that is, a transformation to what we might consider to be black subjectivity?
In this transformation of the black subject that we are trying to locate through the
notion of double consciousness as contested by a black body that is not in binary
opposition to the ideals that determine it as such, we might turn to what Ato Quayson
calls aesthetic nervousness, a narratological disruption that occurs when texts engage
with representations of bodies made different through disability or illness.
34
Quayson

34
It is important to note here that while Quayson is making a very specific argument
about disabled figures in literature, his qualification of disruptive nervousness can be
extended out to many other forms of corporeally instantiated difference – in the case we
discuss here, black and ailing embodiment. Both of these markers of difference written
on the body can function as the kind of “threshold” Quayson discusses in terms of
disability: “In this totality, everything is linked to everything else such that in isolating a

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defines aesthetic nervousness as that which “ensues and can be discerned in the
suspension, collapse, or general short circuiting of the hitherto dominant protocols of
representation that may have governed the text” (26) by the representation of a disabled
character. The consequences of attending to bodies that resist representation is a
restoration of “an ethical core to the literary-aesthetic domain while also invoking the
boundary between the real and the metaphysical or otherworldly” (22). What this means
is that we as readers are unable to ignore the socio-political structures that construct
certain types of bodies as denigrated because their very representation disrupts the
surface aesthetic of the text, forcing us to confront the border between the metaphysics of
representation and the lived experience of the bodies being represented.
When we enact this sort of reading of double consciousness, the dogged strength
that we recognize as so precariously tying together the black subject against abject
dissolution reveals a nervousness within the text to which we as readers must respond
ethically as we attend to the materiality of the body. Within Du Bois’s formulation of
double consciousness, the boundary between the metaphysical and the real (or material)
that we are made aware of is, of course, doubly strange. We see the ideals clearly – an

detail of disability for analysis we take it not merely as a particular detail, but as a
threshold that opens up to other questions of a textual and also ethical kind. Often, this
threshold effect is also the precise point at which the short-circuiting of the dominant
protocols of representation reveal itself. Thus disability-as-threshold is also a signifier of
textual tension.” (208) In any case, what we mean to say is that there is no intention to
run roughshod over the specificity of disability, but rather to use it in itself as a threshold
to better understand the representation of race and illness as part of the system of
aesthetic nervousness.

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American, a Negro – but the awareness of the boundary between their metaphysical
status and the material returns us to the dark body, that which is continually marked as
black and houses those very ideals that threaten to tear the materiality of blackness
asunder. The boundary is double and strange, made nervous, because it shows us how the
ideal, instead of transcending the material, is shaped through it. Furthermore, the material
of the body that contains the ideal is also an ideal that has a social status – one that is
wounded by the very thing is warring within it, the birth of the black subject.
In thinking through Sundiata’s ailing body as subject, open as the mesa, both cut
open and animated through a black aesthetics that is marked by loss, we see how blessing
the boats is also marked by an aesthetic nervousness. Sundiata’s performance of his
illness and transplant is an example of how the socially inscribed, non-normative body
disrupts normative narrative conventions, echoing and inflecting the socially determined
struggles of the black body disrupting the notion of an idealistic denouement of joining of
Negro and American in one body without psychic loss or physical wounding. Quayson
asserts “the representation of disability has an efficaciousness that ultimately transcends
the literary domain and refuses to be assimilated to it” (19). When we analyze Sundiata’s
performance of the ailing, black body, we see how its representation refuses normative
narrative convention as Sundiata practices a performance of the black subject subjected to
the surveillance of the medical institution. Sundiata does not allow an easy linear
narrative to develop between illness and health, black radicalism and universal
community. Corporeal difference is both inscribed upon the subject and is created

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through the performance of that very inscription. This results in a performance that
refuses and transcends normative aesthetic convention in its delineation of what it is to be
black and sick.
In this mode of performative aesthetic disruption, Sundiata offers an answer to the
question that performance studies scholar Kimberly W. Benston poses as a central
tension in the performance of blackness: “Is the self of blackness an empirical presence, a
goal, or a necessary fiction to be ultimately discarded in the higher interests of
communality?” (4) In his deployment of the discourse of illness across a discourse of
blackness, Sundiata complicates the opposition between the two terms of the question,
performing a disruption of the binary between fiction and empiricism through the nervous
aesthetic. While he considered his work to be part of the Black Arts Movement, the
unnerving of the black subject that takes place within blessing the boats posits struggle,
not concretized articulations of blackness, as central to articulating the conditions of
black experience. Thus, the work coincides with Benston’s description of modern black
drama as “seethe[ing] with impulses both radical and recuperative, visionary and
strategic, iconoclastic and redemptive” (25). Sundiata’s place within black performance,
then, participates in a discursive economy of representations of blackness described by
performance theorist Nicole R. Fleetwood as circulatory: “It is not rooted in a history,
person, or thing, although it has many histories and many associations with people and
things. Blackness fills in space between matter, between object and subject, between
bodies, between looking and being looked upon. It fills in the void and is the void” (6).

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This troubling, in-between of Blackness animates Sundiata’s performance of an ailing
body that is, as we shall see, multiple and interstitial.
After talking through his experience of surgery, Sundiata takes us back three
years before the transplant to the incident that began his conscious understanding of his
illness. After explaining away his increasing fatigue as simple a lack of exercise, he
attempts to go for a bicycle ride. He makes it only half a mile from his apartment before
he has to return home. As he tells this story, the screen behind him mimics the vertically
moving crack of light that forms at the meeting of two elevator doors. Sundiata stands in
a small rectangle of light and describes “a curious fade into oh shit” overcoming him and
later awaking to find himself on the floor of the elevator, his bicycle laying on top of him.
He mentions that he can’t say how long he had passed out – “could be two minutes or
twenty minutes.” It is at that point he steps out of the “elevator” created on the stage to a
podium down stage. His voice is filtered through a microphone that creates multiple
overtones to his words as if many deeper voices were speaking at once. He enters into a
dialogue with his alter ego, different voices issuing from his body to indicate the two
players that now inhabit the one body we see presented before us on stage.
In the ensuing scene, we see the two warring ideals of both blackness and illness
realized through Sundiata’s performance. The alter ego begins by asking in his deep
chorus of a voice, “Mr. Sundiata, there is a big difference between two minutes and
twenty minutes, wouldn’t you agree?” Sundiata, the same performer, in the same spot and
in the same body, responds in his own singular voice, “Yeah, but I mean, what’s up with

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this ‘Mr. Sundiata’ all of a sudden? You my alter ego; you belong to me. I’m the A side,
you the B side.” The alter ego contests this graded bifurcation between self and other self
when he asks, “Who was it who collapsed on the elevator, Sekou Sundiata or Robert
Feaster?” When Sundiata responds, “C’mon, man, you know damn well Feaster’s my
plantation name,” the alter ego sharply replies that Feaster was the name they gave the
hospital to process the insurance and if that’s the case, who got the transplant? Sundiata
exasperatedly shouts to the audience, “What’s he talking about? This ain’t real!” the alter
ego responds with “When you go back and forth with yourself like that, Mr. Feaster, that
ain’t real. But when you start to argue with me, that’s drama. And by definition, all drama
is real.”
That the alter ego enters when Sundiata the performer describes his illness in a
lyrical manner doubles the mode in which illness, like Quayson’s disability, makes
nervous the performance of the self and disrupts the surface of aesthetic representation.
Not only does the alter ego literally interrupt Sundiata’s cohesive sense of self, cutting in
on his monologue, by splitting the performer in two and forcing the self to comment on
that split (“I’m the A side; you the B side”), the alter/other himself performs his
commentary on how the form of the narrative has been split. What the alter ego disrupts
is the lyrical poet’s musings, the alliterative description of a physiological loss of self
(Sundiata’s blacking out) as lasting “two minutes or twenty minutes.” The lyrical
assumes the subjective, the unified and the personal viewpoint of the performer. But the
alter ego points to the myth of this unified subject not only in his bursting out to

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aggressively question the self, but also in scolding Sundiata for referring to his “B Side”
in the third person, as if the alter ego were not always present, even in the moments in
which the subject tells its own story. The alter ego corrects Sundiata, saying that when he
“goes back and forth” with himself “that’s not real.” Any performance that assumes the
enunciating subject to be total participates in a false assumption of the lyrical. That is, it
does not realize that in the act of speaking the self, the self is bifurcated from itself. The
result is something akin to “skinny little lies” as the alter ego calls poetry. However,
when the self/Sundiata argues with the alter / other, “that’s drama.” The aesthetic form of
the text has been disrupted, made nervous. The dramatic form must have multiple voices,
conflict, interaction and exchange. Drama is intersubjective. Drama, the alter ego states,
“is real.” This contestation over the real in two voices is what challenges and disrupts
both the assumed unity of the ailing subject’s body that struggles to keep its other in
check and the singularity of the subject itself. Sundiata uses the form of performance to
critique dramatic forms that reproduce normative mind/body relations. Furthermore, the
performance of the alter / other materializes the warring of two ideals in the dark body
but does so in a way that black subjectivity is articulated through (and not against or in
spite of) a corporeal discursivity.
As we discussed above in regards to Du Bois’s figure of the dark body, it is
through the discourse of black subjectivity or even subjectivity itself that we can see the
assumptions made of the body forced to house the two warring ideals of the Negro and
the American, a war fought only because the latter’s univocal, peaceful equivalence with

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the white body is contingent upon the system of difference constructed upon the back of
the black body’s socio-political oppression.
35
It is therefore not the simple condition of
blackness, but rather the process of blackness that brings about the split, the double
consciousness of the black subject.
36
So too, in blessing the boats, the split is not brought
on by illness itself; it makes itself evident through the social discourse of illness. In one
scene of the performance, after describing the increasingly debilitating heart flutters and
vasospasms that have returned him “to some primitive consciousness in which time is
continuous and everything happens in the present tense,” Sundiata sits at a desk with a
water bottle, books and papers, and a bell placed upon its surface. A small bow shaped

35
This relationship between the Negro and the American could be said to be an example
of racial melancholia. As Anne Anlin Cheng describes this condition, “Racialization in
America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a
dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-
retention of racialized others. The national topography of centrality and marginality
legitimizes itself by retroactively positing the racial other as always Other and lost to the
heart of the nation. Legal exclusion naturalizes the more complicated ‘loss’ of the
unassimilable racial other.” (10)

36
For a more in-depth discussion of the split in determining racialized identity in terms of
the Lacanian mirror stage, see Chapter 2.

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sculpture sits at the center of the desk and as he speaks he frames it with his hands (fig 3).

Figure 6 Sekou Sundiata in blessing the boats
He begins
I go about my business acting like everybody else, like my day is
predictable and under control. No one can tell that I’m talking to them
from behind a mask. They don’t understand that I’ve come to know the
world as hard and soft, liquid and solid.
Sundiata then takes the bow shaped sculpture in his hands and rocks it back and forth as
he says in a voice punctuated by staccato inhalations, “And that I can see the real person

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in front of me as well as the iterations of their bodies going from flesh and bone to vapor
as their physical forms wiggle and evaporate and recompose into hard matter.”
37

Sundiata, through his experience of illness, has not only experienced a personal
revelation on the bifurcation between his mind and body, he also sees what assumptions
all humans who imagine their bodies to be only one thing – not “hard and soft, liquid and
solid” as he now knows – and visualizes this composition, in every person in seeming
good health that he meets. He uses the sculpture to illustrate the vacillation between these
two poles of material existence of the body that is elided in the imagined solidity of the
speaking subject who answers, “Nothing much,” when Sundiata asks him “What’s
happening?” The rocking back and forth of the bow, the staccato knocking it makes on
the desk as Sundiata speaks, is a sonic and visual reminder of Chandler’s diagnosis of the
in-betweenness of the black subject’s coming into being, the rough rocking back and
forth between the specifics of the subject (the need to answer in the moment “What’s
happening?”) and conditions of possibility of such a subject to emerge to answer such a
question in an (im)possible reductive voice (“Nothing much.”)
There is implied here a double consciousness, but one born of illness and
enunciated through blackness. In Du Bois’s determination of double consciousness, it is
the body that keeps together the self that is assaulted by its conditional allowance into the
sphere of the human. This bifurcation reinstantiates a divide between the self, the

37
It is almost as if through illness Sundiata has been given the ability to see others as
assemblages, Deluezian Bodies without Organs.

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interiority in which manhood resides, from the brute force of the body that keeps things
together. However, for Sundiata, there is an assumption of unity of mind and body that is
torn asunder by illness. If in Du Boisian double consciousness, the mind as self is split
due to the social discourses mapped onto the black body that must hold the resultant split
self together, through illness, that black body is now also split. This illness reveals the
split in the black body in its uncovering of the contingency of the mind/ideals on the
imaginary idea of that body being solid, not liquid and solid. The two discourses crosscut
each other. Sundiata performs a double consciousness that routes it way through the
social condition of his black body that creates the split in his mind as well as a double
consciousness that routes its way through the physiological condition of his mind to
affect his black body causing a corporeal split.
Both within Du Bois and in my reading of blessing the boats through Du Bois,
there is no ideological union for the black subject to be found within a struggling body as
the body is not mere material. It is also an ideological, social construct, that, in its
breaking down breaks through any form of narrative that tries to contain it as such.
38
We

38
In determining the Du Boisian body as a social construct, we find a means to articulate
the use of the social in this argument through Bourdieu’s habitus, "the durably installed
generative principle of regulated improvisations" (78) which is produced by particular
environmental structures. In Bourdieu’s linking of embodiment to the habitus, we find its
resonance for considering community and sociality alongside transplantation: "Every
confrontation between agents in fact brings together, in an interaction defined by the
objective structure of the relation between the groups they belong to...systems of
dispositions...such as a linguistic competence and a cultural competence and, through
these habitus, all the objective structures of which they are the product, structures which
are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular

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then turn to the question, what happens to this body, made “hard and soft, liquid and
solid” through the aesthetic nervousness of the discourse of illness, when it is further
multiplied by the addition of another organ – that is, what happens when the thing that
may cure the ailing body of the self is the material flesh of the other? Is there something
in this merger of two bodies as opposed to two ideals that conditions and alters what we
might think of Du Bois’s positing of “better, truer self” premised upon a unity that is not
dependent on being housed (impossibly) in one body but rather on the communalism
(that is, the coming together of disparate flesh) of bodies?
It is important to remember a complication of community as it is deployed in
transplant narratives as we attempt to think through the question posed above. As we
have explored in chapter one, gifts are never pure and are conditioned by the social and
political vicissitudes of exchange. Organ transplantation, while legally and bioethically
considered a non-monetized altruistic act, is not free from commoditization. In fact, the
application of gift metaphors to organ transfer masks the complex and profound actions
of the organ transplant in creating and fraying bonds of community – a medical and
social community that we find blessing the boats reckoning with in terms of race and
class and one that provides a social context for black bodies that house not only two
warring ideals but also two literally warring immune impulses. This clash of immunity
housed in fleshy objects further tears asunder any notion of the individual, total body as

history."(81) The social here is embedded in the improvisational interactions realized in
the embodiment of historical practice between people.

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the locus for resolving the problem of the color line when the line that inscribes the
beginning and ends of the material markings of race on bodies is stretched to
accommodate the organs of others into the self (or the removal of organs from the self to
be placed in the other).
39
What is at stake is not the abandonment of double consciousness
to a simple space of impossibility, but rather to examine the kinds of social bonds are
formed when double consciousness extends out beyond the borders of the singular black
body through its contact point with the discourse of organ transplantation. To reckon with
this mapping of a double consciousness of ideals onto a double consciousness of the body
is to consider Michael Taussig’s prescriptive on the sociality of the nervous system (and
we should link this nervousness to Quayson’s intervention into aesthetics): “To take
social determination seriously means that one has to see oneself and one’s shared modes
of understanding and communication included in that determining” (10). In the case of
organ transfer, this means taking the assemblage of the body seriously in its nested
relationship with other bodies that condition its literal possibility as a living entity.
To begin this reckoning, let us briefly describe the Marxist commodity fetish.
40

While the commodity may seem at first to be easily apprehended by reason, Marx

39
Or indeed when such a line is extended to include multiple entities as it is in
community. For a larger discussion of the complications of community, please see
Chapter 4.

40
A figure that Taussig not uncoincidentally finds to possess “a curious doubleness…
that quirky flickering unity formed by thingification and spectrality” (4).

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attributes to it a strangeness that arises from its transformation from a product of labor
into the commodity itself:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply
in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s
own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. (165)
In this way, the commodity transcends its bounds as merely a material thing – thus, it is
the commodity as such; commodities are “sensuous things which are at the same time
suprasensuous” (ibid). However, the commodity is a fetish because of the very
obfuscation of this exchange-value and the social character of the labor-power that
produces it that is then naturalized into an objective, intrinsic characteristic of the object
itself. The social processes are veiled in the form of the fetish and value (that which is
thought to be not the product of social relations between people but rather a quality of the
object form of the commodity itself) “transforms every product of labor into a social
hieroglyphic” (167).
41

How does this Marxist form of the commodity fetish bring us to understand the
organ transplant and illness as evinced in and through the black body in blessing the
boats? If the commodity fetish is a veiling of the social in the form of the magical
materiality of the object, the sick body and its cure, the transplanted organ, are its
chiasmatic opposite: their materiality is veiled in the suprasensual sociality of the two
warring ideals (subjectivity and abjectivity) that they house. This is worth noting because

41
Marx does use the term veil itself when describing how a free association of men (not
the cabal arranged under primitive man or the oriental despot) might remove this
“veil…from the countenance of the social life-process” (173).

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socio-political function of making transparent (or lifting the veil upon) what the fetish
masks in illness and transplantation is important not in its creation of unions between
free-thinking, independent men, that is, upon a rationalist, Enlightenment ideal of
sociality, but rather in making apparent what is at stake when the body, the material,
becomes obscured by the ideals it is said to contain.
Sundiata discusses the absenting of the body in the face of his illness when he
describes the nature of his encounters with people who learn of his kidney failure. He
performs the responses from “all the freaky people” he meets who all have their own
cosmic or mystical imaginative diagnoses for his illness or what might result from it. In
particular, he castigates those who offer “that dogmatic one size fits all philosophy,” as
he frenetically mimics their banal offering of advice: “Brother Sekou, I know you learned
many lessons from your journey through the divine order of the cosmos!” Sundiata
pauses, almost rolling his eyes towards the audience as if in askance at the prospect of
such an interpretation of his struggle with illness and declares mater-of-factly:
I didn’t learn a damn thing, but I found some shit out. There’s a
difference. Learning sounds lofty and elevated, but should you have the
occasion to find some shit out, it means you have been struck with awe
and filled with wonder as in “oh shit.”
42

In contrasting learning with finding shit out, Sundiata demonstrates a kind of de-
mystifying of the ideal that returns oneself profoundly to the materiality of ailing and the
black body. While being “struck with awe and filled with wonder” suggests a

42
This is, of course, the same phraseology that Sundiata uses to describe his black out /
fainting spell (a curious fade into “oh shit”) which first conjures the alter ego.

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transcendental experience, it is not one in which knowledge can be said to be magically
contained within the disruptive cadences of the body made different through its social
experience of race and illness. Rather, the body exceeds such a rigid, quantitative
understanding of knowledge – Sundiata doesn’t learn anything, but he finds shit out.
However, in finding shit out, we are returned to the body not as an idealistic subject (one
that learns through illness figured as a journey through “the divine orders of the
cosmos”), but through an abject materiality – as in “oh shit.”
Unlike the commodity fetish, the ailing or transplanted body conceals the social
not through a hyperrationality that overrides the suprasensual nature of the commodity,
but through a hypermysticality that overrides the suprasensual nature of the body. The
body is suprasensual because it is not simply its materiality, but also the socio-cultural
discourse that allows us to recognize it as a body as such (just as the suprasensual and its
elision allows us to recognize a commodity as such) and further imagine ideals to inhabit
its supposedly rigid boundaries. We have contested this rigidity generally and specifically
in terms of a Du Bosian understanding of the black subject and the social. This
juxtaposition allows us to liken the ailing and transplantable body to Fred Moten’s
consideration of a speaking commodity that serves not as a negation of the commodity
fetish, but rather an extension of the historical, political and social possibilities for the
demystification of the fetish that must come with revolution, that is to say an expansion
on what comes with the demand for the following acknowledgement of the social
processes of production and radical social and material reorganization: “The veil is not

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removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material
production, until it becomes production by freely associated men [and women], and
stands under their conscious and planned control” (Marx 173).
Sundiata illustrates the consequences of trying to mask the social conditions of the
body, here in the form of the ailing body, into silence in one of the more powerful scenes
in blessing the boats. He begins by describing the consequences of his illness on what he
thought to be the quality of his own construction of a black subjectivity:
Here I am…a poet who can’t make poems because there’s too much
distance between his mind and his body and anyway his mind is so dizzy
and so confused that ideas just bounce around and reverberate like a sound
effect. Where is my witty? Where’s my sovereignty? And most of all,
where the hell is my cool? I was no longer the self I thought myself to be.
How do you just wake up one day and not be who you think you are? I’ll
tell you how. The body is a low down dirty sneak. It remembers every
physical and psychological insult it ever suffered and every insult leaves a
scar and that scar is a map back to the insult and it just lays in the cut and
lays in the cut like a memorial and should you delete it from your memory
which is to say should you forget it, your body will retrieve the data and
bring that shit back up.
The body speaks, screams, through the surface of the imagined sovereignty of the subject
and this disruption functions both within a subjectivity borne out of the aesthetic (“a poet
who can’t make poems”) and the anticipatory and historical qualities of the aesthetic
itself (the embodied memories, the maps of scars that “lay in the cut and lay in the cut
like a memorial”). It is the body itself that reveals its social condition, it speaks its own
removal of the veil.
We can see the importance of listening to the body’s voice when we examine
Moten’s understanding of Marx’s speaking commodity. What Moten calls for is the

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possibility a commodity as coming into being and value beyond and before the social
process of exchange in a imaginative analysis of Marx’s facetious example of a speaking
commodity. Marx posits, in his estimation, the ridiculous conceit of commodities
speaking in order to prove that exchange value resides in the social, suprasensual quality
of the commodity:
If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may
interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to
us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities
proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values. (177)
Moten argues for a taking seriously of the possibility of the speaking commodity through
an analysis of black performance in Frederick Douglass’s description of the screams of
Aunt Hester:
The (exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were,
before exchange. Moreover, it exists precisely as the capacity for
exchange and the capacity for a literary, performative, phonographic
disruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility comes by a
nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature that is
given as a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity. (10)
We may recall here the narratological performance of Sundiata’s body that also shrieks
its way beyond the surface of the subject Sundiata thinks himself to be, a disruption of
the protocols of exchange that allows the coming into being of the subject as such
through the is and social/historical nature (the scars that remember their insults) of that
very body.
This consideration of the disruptive nature of the commodity that speaks is
reminiscent of Quayson’s aesthetic nervousness. I make this connection not to discredit a
Marxist materialist reading through recourse to lofty theoretical detours. As has been our

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continual point in this reading of blessing the boats, I wish to bring us back to a serious
consideration of the material of the black body and the ideals of both blackness and
Americanness (read as humanness) which it is said to hold. These ideals are held in no
hierarchal order, but rather in a mutually constitutive, discursive relation of the iteration
of socio-political understandings of difference and the coming into being of black
subjectivity through embodied performance. However, as we consider the performance of
black corporeality given by Sundiata, the materiality of the body made different through
the social processes of illness and blackness disrupts the surface of representation of
those subjects who may participate in a radical revisioning of what it means to be both
black and human, free and communal. Taking seriously the aesthetic disruptions of the
speaking commodity, like the nervousness of the ailing body, expands our understanding
of the animating sociality of exchange and allows for a more full and radical conception
of what bodies might be capable of producing by way of communal possibility. The black
ailing body is like the speaking, shrieking, singing commodity in that it violates the
protocols of exchange (that is, the interplay between value and the social) through
aesthetic nervousness and, as such, provides an opening up of the kinds of interactions
between and across bodies that constitute something of what we might call an alternate
form of community composed of a composite corporeality.
Through this mode of aesthetic disruption both in the speaking commodity and
Sundiata’s representation of the ailing black body, we see how the body and narrative
work together in making nervous the enunciating subject, forcing us to find a way to see

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double consciousness as expanding beyond its confines in the struggling black body
constructed as a individual, singular entity. Sundiata furthers this examination of the
“literary, performative, phonographic disruption of the protocols of exchange” (Moten
10) wreaked upon the possibility of a speaking subject that deigns to master itself. He
does this while narrating the warring ideals within the body that animate that body’s
coming into subjectivity through an autobiographical confession when he admits to
omitting that heroin use was the probable cause of his kidney failure, an admission that
comes over 30 minutes into his performance of blessing the boats:
Imma tell you who else is a low down dirty sneak: a narrative. And a
narrative is a twenty dollar word for a story. And once you start writing
your own story, it takes on a life of its own. Your own body and your own
story will get together without you. And then, in interest of full disclosure,
they’ll rat your ass out. Your story will catch you in a lie, your body will
make you fess up… my name is Sekou and I have a chronic narrative with
a behavior problem.
The literary, performative and the phonographic in the form of the narrative as “low
down dirty sneak” here works in collusion with the body in order to radically refigure the
social ideals and possibility of black subjectivity as they force (“they’ll rat your ass out”)
the enunciating subject to confess its social, embedded and dependent relations with the
material conditions of its existence (“My name is Sekou and I have a chronic narrative
with a behavior problem”). It is this recourse to performance and narrative that decodes
Marx’s “social hieroglyphic” of the commodity fetish. And like Peter Osborne’s analysis
of the commodity fetish as a means to “perform an internal critique of capitalism’s
aspirations to be a rational social form,” (20) so too does the ailing body and its aesthetic

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disruption of narrative through narrative perform a critique of the rational social form of
the enlightenment’s independent, enunciating subject.
There is still within blessing the boats and indeed, transplant literatures in general
(as we discussed in chapter one), a fetishizing of the organ against the terms of the
commodity through the Freudian fetish. That is to say, the sociality of exchange
embedded within the commodity form of the organ harvested for transplantation is
obscured precisely because of the desire not to see the organ as a commodity. It is
important to discuss Freud’s conception of the fetish and how it bears upon the
representation of the organ transplant and its concurrent sociality within blessing the
boats. The Freudian fetish is a form of aberrant sexual fixation in which desire for the
sexual object is displaced onto “some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation
to the person whom it replaces” (19). This form of desire relates to the discussion in
Chapter one of the gift of life narrative of the organ transplant, in that the
commoditization inherent in all gifting relations is displaced through a constant ethico-
juridical reiteration of the altruistic gift form of organ donation that is supported by the
medical industrial complex in the face of an anxiety generated by the transplantable
organ’s ambivalent position between life and death, self and other, and object and
subject.
Freud notes that in order for a fetish relationship to take place, it is necessary for
there to be a “psychologically essential overevaluation of the sexual object” (20). So too
does the organ provide a locus for an excess concentration of anxiety and psychological

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overevaluation precisely because of its resistance to so-called “natural” forms of social
classification. The pathology of the fetish for Freud comes not just when objects
associated with the sexual fixation are charged with desire, but when the sexual object
itself is fully transplanted by the fetish object: “when the fetish becomes detached from a
particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object” (ibid). In this way, the fetish
removes the sexual object from the realm of the social. That is, it removes the sexual
object from a context bounded by the improvisational, culturally and historically
determined, politically complex interactions between people. So too does the form of the
fetish we see within narratives of organ transplantation that assign a monolithic and
totalizing character to the concept of the organ as gift – it removes the social conditions
of organ transfer, negates the communities and complex relationships that result from
such transfer of body parts out of the realm of the social and into the realm of the
sentimental and idealistic.
While there is gifting rhetoric within blessing the boats and it does
problematically enter into the discourse of the sentimental, Sundiata does not engage with
a transcendental (that is, a consideration of an object that denies that object’s socio-
culturally determined materiality) figuration or performance of the gift. In doing so,
Sundiata manages to engage in a performance that does not completely evacuate the
possibility of the gift relationship. We must remember that for a gift to be “true,” it must
be without condition, as Derrida argues (17). Once there is an expectation or even
expression of desire or gratitude we can no longer say that its “unconditionality must be

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absolute and uncircumscribed” (ibid). “Pure” gifts assume a transcendental relationship
to the persons involved in gifting and this is not only patent impossibility, but also an
evacuation of the social relationships and intercorporeal community that we have so
tenuously tried to locate within the discourse of illness, black subjectivity, and organ
transplantation. Sundiata engages in what Derrida calls “a passivity of resistance” in
blessing the boats. He does so by not assuming a sovereign initiative that would annul the
possibility of the gift and therefore allows for a collaborative social interaction with the
other through the displacement of sovereignty from the enunciating subject of the
performative. As Derrida remarks on the seemingly paradoxical quality of passivity in
terms of the performative:
The same passivity marks the experience of all unconditional and pure
events as such (gift, forgiveness, hospitality, death). It marks and thus
doubly limits the most active and productive performativity: on the one
hand, a performative depends passively in itself on conventions that are
prior and external to the act, which supposed them and does not control
them; on the other hand, by virtue of an ‘I can,’ ‘I am authorized,
competent to,’ ‘I have the right and power to,’ whereby the performative
tries to master the event it is supposed to produce, it neutralizes and annuls
that event in the same stroke. Precisely because it has the power and the
possibility. A performative remains, therefore, passively exposed to what
is coming, to the other who comes and carries the day against any
performativity, which is exceeded by the event worthy of the name (xxxiv)
Sundiata’s engagement of this sort of performative in blessing the boats is “passively
exposed…to the other who comes” in his performance’s negotiation of a displacement of
sovereignty. Even as he does lament the loss of a subject/active performativity configured
as such, he marks within himself the limit of possibility and power figured through his
social interactions with others.

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Sundiata talks about how his nurses were amazed that he never asked them for a
kidney. He is amazed that anyone would ask: “I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it! I
couldn’t do it! What would I say? Um, excuse me, you know you got two of them, right?
Even when I practiced saying the words, I couldn’t imagine asking someone to give me a
kidney.” The inability to ask keeps in place some of the impossible possibility of the gift,
however, the power relations embedded in social interactions still haunt the seeming
absence of ulterior motives. Sundiata locates his inability to ask not in the piousness of a
refusal to impose upon another, but rather on the terror that he might be denied
community:
I mean suppose I asked and got no for an answer… Suppose nobody loved
me that much… Clear-eyed reason says you can’t be upset with people if
they put a limit on their love for you. But this is not about clear-eyed
reason! This is about expectations and assumptions and needing love to be
concrete like a noun, when it’s really a verb, perpetually moving the line
of demarcation between where the lover begins and the beloved ends and
vice versa.

While none of his close family members offer to give him a kidney and very few of his
close friends step forward, he does have five people offer him an organ: Kaize, his
partner; Bill and Claude, Kaize’s friends; Sidney, one of his oldest friends; and Katea, his
manager. Sundiata reflects on their offerings: “They just said they would do it with
certainty and with conviction. And I mumbled something about blood testing and tissue
typing - anything I could do to avoid looking them in the eye and saying yes, thank you.
Not because I didn’t believe it but because I did not believe it could be true.” Again, we
see the paradoxical relationship between performative passivity and the conditions of

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possibility for the gift – Sundiata troubles the possibility of gratitude for the gift, but in
the form of a tremulous desire, the condition of his need for the gift that in order to be
“true,” must be given and received without condition. It should be no surprise that it is at
this point in the performance that Sundiata’s marker of the contingent conditions of the
enunciating self erupts again, an authoritative voice of the alter ego that makes nervous
the surface of representation, the warring ideal that contests how its body is being
exempted from the social relationships in the form of the gift narrative and as such, bursts
out in disruption, “the impossible itself at the heart of the possible” (Derrida xxxiv).
The alter steps out, as he did before, this time for the last time in the performance,
lit from directly above so the shadows fall down his face, speaking in his multiple voice
in a mocking tone: “Not because I didn’t believe it but because I did not believe it could
be true. Boo hoo hoo. I think it would be reasonable to ask at this point do fries go with
that shake?” He goes on:
Love is a mediator of limits perpetually moving the line of demarcation,
blasé, blasé. That has a certain feel good turn of a phrase to it. But it
avoids several burning questions. Like how do feel about the fact that
none of our life long friends came forward?...Was there a motive? What
about love? Would true friendship and compassion count as motives?
What about an unexplained grace that instills reasons in the heart that the
mind will never know? What about our friends from twenty, twenty five
years ago? What about all those comrades we like to remember so fondly
in all our stories about the revolution? How do we feel about them? Well
the fire bird may burn us up today, but tomorrow it comes for them. I
know, that sounds like some Yogi Berra Bundini Brownism, but the
question hangs in the air: are we still speaking to them punk ass family
friends who didn’t step up to the plate? Hell no, if you ask me! But we are
in this together [gesturing to where Sundiata stood before] and we decided
we are still speaking to them just the same. It’s just that now we know

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where we stand which is a good thing because you can go through your
whole life with people and not know where you stand.

The alter ego conditions the sentimental discourse of the self, but not to the point of
nihilism. It is not the destruction of the black body that results from the struggle of the
warring ideals that live within it or rather, that results from our making present of the
conditions of the black body’s possibility against a transcendent black subjectivity that
does not account for the social relationships masked in both forms of the fetish. Again, as
he did the in his first appearance, the alter contests the notion that the self could tell its
own story in a singular voice, that there must always be a split when the subject speaks
for itself. Furthermore, the alter ego in tandem with Sundiata as the self is enacting the
interplay between the passivity and the activity of the performative – we have here both
the refusal to ask for the gift and the refusal of that refusal. This is why the alter ego must
speak out against love if we are to be open to the coming of love’s possibility. It is the
other who comes and is then exceeded by the event of love; love cannot become the
transcendent ideal housed within the struggling, ailing body. In this formulation
understood through Sundiata’s discursive performance of the affective consequences of
organ transplantation, love must constitute and reconstitute the body itself, just as the
alter ego conditions that love itself through the discourse of the ailing black body. If love
really is a verb “perpetually moving the line of demarcation between where the lover
begins and the beloved ends and vice versa,” the alter must engage with its limits, its

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impossibilities, in order to remain open to the intercorporeal communal relationship that
might be formed by such a perpetually moving line of demarcation between people.
blessing the boats ends with an account of the loss of possibility. Sundiata
recounts the story of going to the Outerbanks,
on one side of the road the Currituk Sound, that’s the predictable, well
understood waters where the sun goes in glory every night. On the other
side, the restless Atlantic, Pisces one minute, pulling in opposite
directions, the full blown zodiac the next minute up at all hours. This is the
first time we’ve been here since the transplant and I am pleased more than
ever to be composed of things that belong together.
The sentimentality of his post-transplant life “composed of things that belong together” is
made nervous by the preceding description of the waters, suggesting that what belongs
together are precisely the things that contradict what we might conceive of as harmonious
belonging. As he and Kaize enjoy the summer weather on the beach, they notice two
Ethiopian women, one carrying a baby, searching the waves for someone or something.
Kaize and others on the beach approach them as they become distraught. Another woman
approaches and takes the baby from its mother as she collapses in grief. The women are
sisters, and they have been looking for their father who had gone for a swim hours
before: “The man is gone. An hour later, he washes up on the shore a half mile away.
Now you see it, now you don’t. It’s the way of the world. All of a sudden all of the time.”
I end here because blessing the boats ends here. Sundiata does not leave the
audience with the resolution of his transplant, the black body made whole through the
loving incorporation of a loved one’s body part, now doubly available for the resolution
of humanity and black corporeality through a doubled double consciousness. He goes on

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to tell of this death as a coda to his story, making nervous again the borders of the body
through an invocation of its final frontier. Sundiata pushes us to find a subjectivity
embedded in the troubling openness of the social relationships between life and death,
health and illness, affirmation and negation, doubling and loss. This is the sort of
community we find in Sundiata’s blessing the boats. It is a community that extends
beyond the “conventions prior and external” (Derrida) of the body, beyond the bounds of
life itself to include loss of the body within the conditions of the body. In this way, we
see how the experience of illness and the ameliorative technology of organ
transplantation is not itself what creates community, but rather the social conditions of
the technology borne out of a response to the social conditions of illness that expose how
expansive and fluid the borders of the communal have always been. Through this reading
of intercorporeal connection in blessing the boats, we find a radical community beyond
the bounds of sovereign rationality of the singularity of narrative productions of self
where the surface of representation is disrupted in our essential exposure of a corporeal
intersubjectivity that has always been, all of a sudden, all of the time.

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Chapter 4
Who Put the I in the Intruder?
Immunity, Identity, and World Making in Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Claire Denis’
L’Intrus

In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy was forced to have a heart transplant. To readers who
receive most of their information on transplantation through US-centric medical and
media sources, the phrasing should jangle. Organ transplantation, as we have seen, is
popularly conceived of as a social good, a cure for the body that relies on the celebrated
generosity of others in death. Furthermore, those who receive transplants are imagined to
be gracious receivers of life saving gifts. If it is unethical and despicable within the
gifting language of organ transfer to speak of donors as being forced to give of their
bodies, it is unthinkable to conceive of receivers as being forced to accept their donations.
Yet “forced to have a heart transplant” is the way Nancy’s surgical encounter with the
other is phrased in his official faculty biography at the European Graduate School in
Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
We could attribute the inharmonious play off the ear of the word “forced” to a
matter of cultural dissonance, a difference in values between old and new world.
However, through closer inspection, there is too much embedded in the technology of
transplantation itself and the breakdown of the ameliorative narratives that surround
organ transfer.
43
We do not believe transplantation to be a medical act uncomplicated by

43

This is not to say that there are no cross-cultural misalignments and disagreements on
the status of organ transplantation. Such an investigation of the philosophical

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the social and political discourses that inscribe its possibility - the designation of certain
bodies as divisible into parts in order to prolong the life of a body that would still face the
consequences of a cure that wounds both physiologically and psychically. Furthermore,
since in this chapter we will be considering the work of Jean-Luc Nancy himself on the
psychic and physiological conditions of his own body, there is too much in the
philosophical concerns of Nancy to dismiss this violative language. Indeed, we can see it
as part of the larger theme of intrusion that Nancy uses to characterize his experience of
organ transplantation.
Nancy wrote “L’Intrus” (The Intruder), a short essay that uses the philosopher’s
experience of heart failure, heart transplant, and cancer caused by the immunosuppressive
therapy he received to prevent rejection, to discuss concepts of strangeness and intrusion,
of the foreign that lies in the heart of the “I.” The text, published in French in 2000,
touches on concepts central to Nancy’s philosophical oeuvre, an eclectic body of work
influenced by his responses to (among many others) Heidegger and Descartes in addition
to his tutelage under Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida. His exploration of the concepts
of sovereignty, immanence, community, and globalization all speak to an overarching

underpinnings of these conflicts in the language used around transplantation would take a
provocative and important look at the doggedly American foundations that still inform
the increasingly international concerns of the field of bioethics. Anthropologists like
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000) and Margaret Lock (2002) have done extensive
ethnographic work on the disparity between American, Western understandings of
transplantation and those of non-Western societies and are worthy starting points to this
line of inquiry that cannot be taken up here.

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preoccupation with the connection to the body and between bodies. While “L’Intrus”
evinces the fragmentation and instability that marks not just Nancy’s theoretical
commitments but writing style as well, it is also explicitly engages the personal and
autobiographical in its recounting of his experience of illness and transplantation in
intimate and explicit terms, the first time the philosopher’s own body is materialized
within writing that is so often concerned with bodies.
In this chapter, we will examine Nancy’s writing of “L’Intrus” as well as Claire
Denis’ filmic adaptation of the essay, L’Intrus. My theoretical interest in these works is
situated around how both negotiate the borders of the body and the body’s relationship to
the borders of community figured as nation. I begin by tracing Nancy’s troubling of the
enunciating subject and the ways in which this troubled subject handles intrusion through
the discourse of organ transplantation and identity. Next, after an analysis of the body
marked by intrusion as understood through immunology, a language used by Nancy in his
discussion of the borders of the body, I move into a consideration of Denis’ film which
builds upon Nancy’s ruminations. Denis works through the idea of intrusion just as
Nancy does, but explicitly expands her mapping of borders to a global scale, tracing the
movement of bodies across the boundaries between the global north and global south. In
reading these two texts together, I argue that we may build upon and complicate the
consideration of community we began in the last chapter as both Nancy and Denis enact a
critique of collectivity but not at the expense of political possibility. In doing so they
allow us to ask important questions about the connections between life and death as well

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as north and south. How do we reckon with questions of belonging and boundaries
understood through transplantation’s radical reconfiguration of bodies, where the foreign
object is the very thing that allows for the continued life of the self? How do we consider
the idea of community, so integral to our understandings of (trans)nation and so assaulted
in the legacies of imperialism, when thinking about transplantation and its creation of
these new biomedicalized, global citizens whose human subjectivity begins beyond
where their body ends?
“L’Intrus,” as mentioned above, means the intruder, and according to Nancy, the
intruder must always be foreign or strange to retain his quality as an intruder. We might
think, given that this is an essay about heart transplantation, that the most obvious form
the intruder will take is that of the transplanted heart. While this does develop in
“L’Intrus” as Nancy weaves the multiple strands of his reflection on illness and
transplantation into an argument on intrusion, it is not simply the insertion of the foreign
object into the body that reveals strangeness. After an introductory rumination on what it
is to be an intruder, Nancy first exposes his transplant in a way that is marked by
intrusion even in the way it is enunciated:
I have – Who? – this “I” is precisely the question, the old question:
what is this enunciating subject? Always foreign to the subject of its own
utterance; necessarily intruding upon it, yet ineluctably its motor, shifter,
or heart – I, therefore, received the heart of another, now nearly ten years
ago. It was a transplant, grafted on. (2)
44

44
We should note that unlike the biographical material quoted at the onset of this chapter,
Nancy does not use the language of compulsion here. He uses the French “recevoir” to
indicate he received a transplant and transplant (greffé) is used just as in English medical

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The first intrusion takes place at the level of the text: Nancy cannot even begin his
confession of heart transplantation without the interjection of “Who?” The second comes
not in the admission of the physiological intervention of the transplant, but at the inability
to claim a unified position of “I” which always must intrude upon the subject it speaks
for, an intruder that is necessarily the “motor, shifter, or heart” of that which it intrudes
upon.
It is the heart of the self, not the transplanted heart of the other, that inaugurates
intrusion, or more precisely, recognition of the intrusion that is always present at the heart
of the matter. Like the enunciating subject who must power (or not power) the subject it
delineates through the act of delineation (that is, speaking), the heart shows itself to be
foreign to the body that it powers. Nancy states
My heart was becoming my own foreigner – a stranger precisely because
it was inside. Yet this strangeness could only come from outside for
having first emerged inside…Until now it was foreign by virtue of its
being insensible, not even present. But now it falters, and this very
strangeness refers me back to myself: “I” am, because I am ill…But what
is done for is this other, my heart. Henceforth intruding, it must be
extruded. (4)
Like the enunciating subject, the heart has always been a stranger, both in its erasure as
an imagined part of the self and paradoxically, in its subsequent announcing of its
foreignness “precisely because it was inside.” Nancy is returned to the original intrusion
of the “I.” Strangeness, the inassimilable external, can only come to presence because it
has always been present, inside.

language which calls a transplantable organ a graft, both deriving their root from the
agricultural usage.

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When Nancy does finally come to describe the incorporation of another person’s
heart into his own body, he still maintains that this incorporation of the external is made
strange because of the quality of the internal. He is quick to point out the faultiness of
imagining organ donation to be an uncomplicated gift from the other in which a
“solidarity, if not fraternity” (8) is instituted between donor and recipient that is “without
any limit other than the incompatibility of blood type (and, in particular, without the
limits of sex or ethnicity: my heart may be the heart of a black woman)…” (Ibid.) This
notion of solidarity is broken not because of some identificatory intrusion premised
through this imagined black, woman donor, but rather through the incompatibility of
immune systems:
Very soon, however, the other as foreign element…may manifest itself:
not the woman or the black, not the young man or the Basque; rather the
immune system’s other – the other that cannot be a substitute, but has
nonetheless become one. This is called “rejection”; my immune system
rejects that of the other…it is a matter of what in the intrusion of the intrus
is intolerable…(Ibid.)
It is not foreignness as evinced in a fictive, static conception of race, gender or nationality
that causes the self to feel intrusion and to reject the intruder. Rather, it is the process of
contact and touch, of the dynamic misalignment between two immune systems, two
processes of intrusion that cause the response to intrusion – it is “a matter of what in the
intrusion of the intrus” (emphasis mine).
45
Strangerness is not a quality that can be

45
For a more in depth discussion of the legacies of phenomenology and the concept of
touch in the work of Nancy, please see Jacques Derrida’s On Touching – Jean-Luc
Nancy.

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ascribed to an other in a fixed manner; it is only in constant intrusion that the stranger
remains strange.
In this intrusion of the donated heart, it is the self that becomes foreign: “In me
there is the intrus, and I become foreign to myself…But becoming foreign to myself does
not reconcile me with the intrus…As soon as intrusion occurs, it multiplies, making itself
known through its continually renewed internal differences” (9). Nancy gives examples
of this in the infections like shingles and cytomegalovirus, viral agents that have always
lived within him but in the administering of immunosuppressants that simultaneously
allow him to keep “his” new heart and continue to mark the intrusion that keeps the
stranger strange, have made their strange presence known through infection. Nancy’s
immunosuppression gives rise to that strangest of strangers that lies dormant within the
self, mutating and multiplying the cells of the body until they choke out their host –
cancer. He says of his post-transplant lymphoma, a side effect of the immunosuppressant,
cyclosporine: “It is like the figure – worn, jagged and ravaging – of the intrus. Stranger to
myself and myself, self-estranging. How can I say this? (But the exogenous or
endogenous nature of the occurrence of cancer is still in dispute.)” (11)
Nancy describes the autologous stem-cell transplant for his lymphoma in highly
clinical terminology (“I am put in a sterile room for three weeks, which knocks out my
bone-marrow production before it is once again kick-started by injecting back into my
blood-stream the frozen stem-cells that were removed…The lowering of one’s immunity
– which becomes extreme – gives rise to high fevers, mycosis, and an entire series of

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disorders before the production of lymphocytes once again takes hold” (11). There is
something Ellisonian about Nancy’s description of his experience in the clinic, as it
recalls the scene in which the Invisible Man lies in the hospital after his accident at the
paint factory, being treated for what we are not exactly sure, wondering, as he is placed in
a contraption of steel and glass, “where did my body end and the crystal and white world
begin?” (181) There, in the clinic, the Invisible Man is asked what his name is and who
he is, but he is no longer able to answer and he begins to realize and is (re)born into
invisibility:
Who am I? I asked myself. But it was like trying to identify one particular
cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just
this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a
suitable answer than something I’d read somewhere. (183)

Nancy also loses identity in his experience of medical intervention, and his words could
be a description of the Invisible Man’s loss of cohesion and self-recognition: “One
emerges from this adventure lost. One no longer knows or recognizes oneself…Relating
to such a self has become a problem, a difficulty or opacity: one does so through pain or
fear, no longer is anything immediate – and mediations are tiring” (11). Like the Invisible
Man, Nancy has lost his identity because of his experience of illness and treatment,
however, his resulting cacophony of identity is not figured as the invisibility of Ellison’s
protagonist, but rather as an excess of opacity. While he does not know exactly what is
being done to him by the doctors, the Invisible Man is born into invisibility through their
procedures and intrudes upon others precisely through the negation of contingent,

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relational identity. As at the outset of the novel, he is invisible because others refuse to
see him; here, he is invisible again because he cannot/refuses to answer the doctor’s
questions of who is Brear Rabbit? To himself, he imagines he must be something he read
somewhere - I read therefore I am - not just an affective non-identity bound by blackness
and pain.
Conversely, as Nancy gives us a thick description of the medicalized interventions
into his body – a medicalized intervention borne of his own biomaterial being implanted
back into his body – and yet he is ever more obscured from himself. He is unable to find
a point of mediation despite the intimate knowledge he has of what is being done to his
body through the vectors of his own body when stem cells harvested from his own bone
marrow cause his immune system to revolt. Nancy experiences a loss that takes place
through pain and fear, making the self unrecognizable and unmediatable. This excess of
opacity comes from the self intruding into the self, another multiplication of the intrusion
of the intrus, one in which the inaugural intrusion of the enunciating subject “I” doubles
back upon the subject for which it speaks. Nancy has, through the self-estrangement of
his cancer treatment, gone both beyond and within the inadequacy of the enunciating
subject. No longer can we be content with the “simple” understanding that the speaking
subject always intrudes upon that for which it speaks; rather, an invagination occurs in
which the “I” intrudes upon itself. In this form, invisibility is not even enough because
there is no place, no matter how contingent, from which to speak, read, enunciate.

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Nancy describes this phenomenon by giving the examples of the enunciations “I
am suffering” contrasted to “I am in ecstasy”:
“I am suffering” implies that there are two “I”s, each one foreign to the
other (yet touching)…in “I am suffering,” one “I” rejects the other “I,”
while in “I am in ecstasy” one “I” exceeds the other. The two resemble
each other, doubtless like two drops of water, neither more nor less. “I”
end/ends up being no more than a tenuous thread – from pain to pain,
strangeness to strangeness. (11)
If the first intrusion comes when Nancy tries to disclose his illness through the
enunciating subject – “I” had a heart transplant – the multiplication of intrusions has
made multiply foreign this first intruder in the form of that enunciating “I.” It is split in
two and both rejects and exceeds itself, two seemingly identical forms (“like two drops of
water”) and yet, ultimately even the fundamental way through which we understand the
founding strangeness of the subject that is always out of unity with the self due to the
intrusion of the enunciating subject becomes a stranger to itself – the “I” intrudes upon
the “I,” forming only a fragile link from “strangeness to strangeness.”
This final network of intrusion is observed through the lens of Nancy’s encounter
not necessarily through the explicitly foreign other of the alien heart figured as black,
woman or Basque, but through the lens of immunity. This focus on immunity marks how
foreignness does not come to be a descriptor through a simple understanding of that
which is not the self, but rather works as a system of articulation mapped onto the bodies
of others through the discourse of the self. In exploring this system, we see how concepts
of intrusion may include immunity figured biomedically as a form that allows us to
understand how an analogue is formed between the racial, gendered, or national intruder

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and the concept of corporeal boundary. Indeed, there has been a rich body of work that
links the concepts of immunity and socio-political border crossings. Just as we do not use
transplantation as a facile comparison for cultural intrusion, this work does not simply
use immunity as a metaphor for understanding concepts of intrusion across geopolitical
or racial borders; rather, it investigates the historical, philosophical, and social construct
of immunity as a discourse that has always been bound up with the grouping of people
into distinct identity formations.
Alfred Tauber, a philosopher of biology, was one of the first scholars from the
field of traditional philosophy to chart the concept of selfhood as deployed in scientific
immunological theory. Tauber argues that with the Darwinian revolution and the
revelation that organisms are in a constant state of flux and evolution, identity, for the
first time, becomes a problem. Immunology arises out of the sets of issues resulting from
this problem: “If the self is not given, it must be defined in process, which in turn
requires a mechanism to identify self and…in a dynamic interaction of self and other, as
an articulated problem, self-identifying processes must in turn recognize the other” (3).
In wrestling with these issues, selfhood becomes a key metaphor for understanding
immunological processes of identifying what it is that belongs to the organism proper and
rejecting that which it is not. Tauber argues, then, that “the immune self is neither subject
nor object, but is actualized in action, the self becomes, on this view, a subject-less verb”
(295).

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Nancy’s consideration of his transplant and illness reflects Tauber’s consideration
of the immune self as a discursive process of self-articulation, “a subject-less verb.” We
have seen this in the continual attendance to the interruption posed by the intrus to the
subject – or even the possibility of enunciating a subject from the position of the self.
Changes in immune self render Nancy a stranger to himself:
The treatments given to the one who has received the grafted organ lower
his immunity so that his body will better tolerate the foreign element.
Medical practice thus renders the graftee a stranger to himself: stranger,
that is, to his immune system’s identity – which is something like his
physiological signature (9).
Tauber’s claim that immunology is part of a medical project to “uncover an ontological
basis of identity” is borne out here in Nancy’s description of immunosuppression in
which changes to the immune system through medical intervention disrupt one’s
physiological signature or identity.
Like Tauber, anthropologist Emily Martin also focuses on immunological
metaphors in her study of the body. However, she extends the argument beyond identity
and selfhood to mapping the concept of an evolving immunological self onto questions of
nation and the flow of capital. Through her discussions with both members of the medical
profession and laypersons, she examines the ways in which imaginings of the scientific
processes of the immune system inform the construction of the body as an impervious
totality or susceptible mass. She contends that the ways in which advances in immuno-
technology are mapped onto conceptions of the body correspond with flexible
specialization in late-capitalism. Military metaphors of the immune system prevailed

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from the early 20
th
century. Martin states, "the basis for choosing military metaphors is
said to be that they maintain a sharp, clear boundary between self, which is to be kept in,
and nonself, which is to be kept out." (100).
However, Martin charts the shift in metaphorizing of the immune system with the
concurrent discovery of T-cells and the production of antibodies and flexible
specialization. "Foreign materials can be 'seen' by the immune system only in the form of
'internal images' of them; because of the infinite variety of antibodies produced by
somatic mutation, all possible varieties of the foreign have already been made in
advance." (110) As such, bodily metaphors could no longer be maintained as strict
delineations of self and other. Rather, the body, through a medicalization congruent with
both immuno-technology and late capitalism, according to Martin, has come to be seen as
flexible in its negotiations with the outer world. Furthermore, this flexibility is
understood as “a trait to be cherished and cultivated…flexibility is an object of desire for
nearly everyone’s personality, body, and organization” (xvii). That this troubles Martin
aligns her telescoping of the problem of immunity onto the scale of global capital with
that of Nancy’s troubling of the invaginated, enunciating “I.” Martin points out the
paradox of valorizing flexibility as an imagined mutability of the self through what we
might think of as a sort of benevolent intrus, one in which the self is liberated from the
constraints of the body. She pointedly asks, “But can we simultaneously realize that the
new flexible bodies are highly constrained? They cannot stop moving, they cannot grow
stiff and rigid, or they will fall of the ‘tightrope’ of life and die” (248). Like the

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multiplication of intrusions of the intrus that lead to even the inability of a subject to
announce itself as such, there is no escaping the “continually renewed internal
differences” (Nancy 9) through flexibility, and as such one must continually confront
foreignness in this system of immunity.
Priscilla Wald, in her work on the outbreak narrative, looks specifically at the
ways in which the imaginative responses to immunity inform and perpetuate attitudes
surrounding both health and nation. In terms of the concept of intrusion and the crossing
of boundaries both corporeal and geopolitical, Wald contends that the outbreak narrative
animates the figures and maps the spaces of global modernity. It also
accrues contradictions: the obsolescence and tenacity of borders, the
attraction and threat of strangers…It both acknowledges and obscures the
interactions and global formations that challenge national belonging
…(33)
In this narrative, the stranger is continually confronted through a discourse of immunity
mapped onto the nation form in that “the stranger is at once dangerous and
necessary…the community articulated through disease is balanced precariously between
its fear and exclusion of strangers and its need for them, poised anxiously between
desired stasis and necessary flux.” (57) Strangers are necessary because they bring with
them the possibility of diversity – a desirable flexibility as discussed by Martin – but they
also pose the threat of dissolving that which might be thought of as uniform and cohesive
into social anarchy. Wald argues that narratives arise around the concepts of disease and
immunity in order to deal with this ambivalence of the stranger, the intruder who reveals

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“the nature of those exchanges that are often concealed,” (38) so as to imaginatively
manage “the most anxious dimensions of national relatedness”(67).
In thinking through Wald’s characterization of the stories that deal with the link
between immunity, identity, intrusion, and nation, we might move into a discussion of a
film that takes such themes as its central conceits while maintaining a close relationship
with the physiological and philosophical intricacies of the intrus as discussed by Nancy.
Claire Denis takes as her inspiration Nancy’s “L’Intrus” for her film of the same name
and engages these themes of the fear and exclusion of strangers alongside their
paradoxical illicit desirability. However, unlike the films and novels examined by Wald
in her work, there is a refusal to narrativize the ambiguities of biomedical and
geopolitical intrusion in which disease and intrusion begins in Asia and Africa and moves
to the West, painting “a natural history in the primordial landscape of the developing
world” while “omit[ting]…the history of colonialism and decolonization” (Wald 46).
Denis instead offers a visually dense and narratively opaque rumination on the theme of
intrusion that charts its path from the Franco-Swiss border to Pusan, Korea to Tahiti, but
offers no teleological progression of intrusion that moves from global south to north, nor
does organ transplantation take the central role narratively in mapping intrusion in a
literal sense. Denis’s refusal to follow the normative script one might imagine from the
occasion of Nancy’s writing (that of organ transplantation and illness) reflects the
recursive strategies of the philosopher’s response to how the intrus functions as marker of

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the active instability of totalizing discourses and as such, does not reinscribe the sorts of
narratives of bioscientifically sanctioned inequality Wald and Martin warn against.
During an interview in 2007 at the European Graduate School where they are both
faculty, Nancy reiterated his appellation of Denis’s film as an “adoption” of his essay.
Denis’s oeuvre has been described by critics as “fascinated by stories and images of
cultural imposition, exile, alienation, and the contemplation of the Other” (Holden) and
“replete with bodies pictured unnervingly up close in disorienting, disjointed places”
(Yue). Given our discussion of Nancy’s writings, it seems that there should be a
consonance between the work of the filmmaker and the philosopher. Indeed, this
consonance goes beyond thematic overlap: Nancy has written responses to Denis’s films,
Beau Travail and Trouble Every Day, while Denis made the short film, Vers Nancy, a
sort of prelude to L’Intrus in which Nancy discusses the themes of intrusion and
globalization. However, as film theorist Douglass Morrey points out, the theoretical and
textual conversation between the philosopher and filmmaker is marked by “an
approaching and withdrawing, a momentary proximity to the other that serves as much to
consolidate the stable identity of the one as it does to share in the identity of the other”
(11). We could take the example of Denis’s “adoption” of L’Intrus as an example of this:
while at first, according to Denis, Nancy felt the film had departed wildly from the book,
he later claimed it as his own, while Denis described Nancy’s appellation “adoption” as
inaccurate as she claimed, “I did translate exactly the book and I invented nothing that
was not in the book” (DVD Interview). There is a kind of instability around what it

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means to be faithful to an identity of the text in which Nancy and Denis engage,
illustrating the covalence that inscribes both the coalescence of their work and the reason
why we find such coalescence as readers and viewers: that they enact a disassembling of
stable identity in their work.
L’Intrus, the film, follows the character of Louis Trebor. He lives a solitary life in
the hills of Jura, on the border between France and Switzerland, accompanied only by his
two white Husky dogs. As in Denis’s other films, there is a focus on the density of
bodies, and Trebor’s aging, yet solid, fleshiness is presented to the viewer intimately.
However, despite the close visual acquaintance with his corporeality, we are at a loss for
who exactly Trebor is. We understand that he is a man with a failing heart who seems to
have an estranged relationship with his grown son and grandchildren living in the town
near his rustic cabin. He harbors an infatuation with a woman who owns a dog ranch
close to his home. As his heart condition worsens, Trebor enters into a contract to
purchase a heart transplant on the black market brokered by a young Russian woman. We
do not know how he has the money to do so, but it is clear that the funds are ill gotten,
and there is a lot of them. He goes to Pusan, Korea, perhaps to have his illicit transplant –
it is not clear - and to have a boat built for a son he has never met. Trebor says the son
lives in Tahiti, an island where he once made his home as a young man. Trebor sails to
Tahiti in search of his son, but is refused by the community, who does not wish him to
stay on the island.

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It is difficult to offer more of a summary before entering into close readings of the
films portrayal of intrusion, corporeality, and community because perhaps even more
than Denis’ other films, L’Intrus does not lend itself to linear narrative exposition. The
story is full of gaps and one is never sure if the images presented are meant to depict the
character’s worldview and actions or the spaces of their psychic interiority. As film critic
Jay Weissberg puts it, for Denis, “symbols and visual metaphors [are] juxtaposed to
maximize inner emotional conflict.” Another critic, Ed Gonzalez, describes L’Intrus as
“100% ellipses.” Denis herself explains this process:
Often we do a first draft that has no gaps and then I feel it doesn’t sound
musical or interesting to me. So then I cut, because I think it’s important to
cut before [starting in] the editing room. It’s important to cut it already in
the script. Maybe I’m wrong, but I do it because I think it’s more
dangerous, in a way. Then everyone is aware – the crew, the actors – that
there is a gap, so they don’t expect, “Well, in the next scene, I will explain
more about myself.” They know there won’t be any explanations, so they
act differently. (Smith)

As we enter into our close examination of L’Intrus the film in remembrance of its
connection to “L’Intrus” the essay, we might, in the same lyrical, metaphorical style of
Denis’s filmmaking, connect this reliance on the cut and the gap to the “gaping open”
Nancy describes as the consequence of the multiple intrusions initiated by the heart as
stranger. He describes himself as “closed open” and that this is the point at which he
becomes “my own intrus in all these combined and opposing ways” (10). Nancy states of
the enunciating “I”: “’I’ has clearly become the formal index of an unverifiable and
impalpable system of linkages.” Our viewing of Denis’s L’Intrus should remind us of this

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impalpable system of linkages as it too is like the immune system or the enunciating “I,”
a film that narratively enacts its representation of and ruminations on intrusion,
strangerness, acceptance and rejection through a discursive and aporetic presentation
through the figure of Louis Trebor. Furthermore, through the cut and the gaps that are
closed open, refusing to heal into elided cross cuts of an imagined all knowing camera,
the film puts into practice the necessity of keeping the stranger strange so we may engage
intrusion without losing the foreignness which makes it a matter of central importance
when thinking across the borders of nation, identity, and the body.
As mentioned above, Trebor’s body is presented to the viewer in fleshy detail, but
the camera does not give us an totalizing, clinical gaze. We first see Trebor about ten
minutes into the film, and he is presented lounging, naked, at the foot of a tree in the
middle of the Jura forest, accompanied by his two dogs. All we hear are the sounds of the
forest punctuated by the snap of twigs to suggest that someone is moving about nearby
and the dogs’ low growls reacting to the possible intruder. At first, we see Trebor’s body
up close, the sun illuminating his form. The camera then cuts to a shot through the
foliage, and we are placed in the position of a furtive onlooker. Trebor walks out of the
woods, and our gaze follows him to a lake where he pauses for a swim. Again, we are at
first presented with an intimate view of Trebor’s physicality as he cuts through the water.
However, when he appears to suffer a heart attack (we cannot be sure – the film never
makes explicit what illness afflicts Trebor), gasping and clutching his right arm in the
water, the camera cuts away to a shot of young man. We do not know who he is, standing

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across the lake. We see Trebor in a long shot from his point of view before returning to a
tight framing of Trebor on the bank of lake, massaging his chest and breathing heavily.
Kirsten Ostherr writes of the confluence of cinematic representation with the
discourse of global health and contagion, noting that while “cinema provided a means of
visually representing the temporal and spatial flow of invisible contagions, thus aligning
certain geographic and demographic characteristics with contamination,” (196) such
filmic representation betrayed an anxiety about the breaking down of corporeal and
national borders, producing “a paranoid fantasy of internalized surveillance and universal
contamination” (Ibid.). Denis’s presentation of Trebor shifts the camera’s role in the
anxiety over the penetration of borders in that we are only allowed access to the surfaces
of the body. While we become acquainted with Trebor’s flesh, we do not penetrate it. The
anxiety over surveillance comes in the retreat of the cinematic gaze to that of a
surreptitious intruder, one who looks across the landscape of Jura onto an obscured, but
private moment of Trebor’s life. As opposed to a cinematic experience in which we are
given full access to the body and the character of its violation, we as viewers are put in
the position of intruder precisely because we cannot gain complete access to the meaning
of Trebor’s body through the visual.
46

46
The only penetration in the film takes place through the aural, with the limited
soundtrack by Stuart Staples. He composes a leitmotif that pierces, as Denis describes it
in her DVD extra interview, the film at key moments, a wash of synthesizer, the shuffling
of drums, and three jagged guitar notes hammered in sharp succession.

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Denis interdicts the beginning of the film, all of which is staged in the borderlands
between Switzerland and France, with shaky shots of undocumented immigrants running
through the woods at night, with the slow march of tourist hikers charting a course across
a grassy meadow, and with hunters tracking their quarry through the hills. Jura is
presented as a space of intrusion, border crossings, and transgression. It is a place where
people surround themselves with dogs, fences, and other examples of the violent
technology of protection like guns and knives. It is from this point in the North that
Trebor will eventually chart a course to the South, represented by Tahiti, through the
intermediary space of Korea. The film must start in the North in order to set the tone of
these journeys of Trebor and to contextualize what Damon Smith notes as Denis’s
interest in questioning “the self-serving assumptions and prejudices of the dominant
white European culture.” He continues, “Denis’s concern is to explore the literal and
metaphorical borderlands where aliens and natives, intruders and guests go wandering,
looking for signs of home within and beyond the barriers of nation, culture, sex and
family.”
In an early scene in the film, even before we first see Trebor reclining in the forest
before his heart attack, we are presented with just such an image of a literal and
metaphorical borderland. There are a series of establishing shots of a road intersected by
a line marking the border between Switzerland and France. The camera cuts between a
shot of the French flag and then the Swiss flag, both fluttering in the sunshine. A van
driven by a man, possibly of Eastern European origin, perhaps Romani if we are to judge

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from his dress and skin color, is waved through from the Swiss side into France, where he
is stopped for a customs check. A young border patrol agent, Antoinette, leads a detection
dog around the van, insisting to the animal, “Cherche! Cherche! (Seek! Seek!)” She gives
the male driver a hard look as she orders him down from the vehicle, allowing the dog
up. The dog lights upon a small box on the dashboard that we can assume contains some
sort of contraband as the driver is led away off screen. As this is happening outside our
view, we see Antoinette speaking joyfully to the dog, play wrestling with the animal and
praising its success: “C’est bien, mon cher!”
In this scene, we see the complexity of intrusion as it plays out in the North that
characterizes the film that is to unfold. Antoinette reserves suspicion for the man who
attempts to traverse the border and faces his possible intrusion as an intruder herself,
violating the space of his vehicle, but does so through a intimate ritual with her detection
dog. The juxtaposition of affect between her interaction with a fellow human and the
animal instrument of surveillance demonstrates how porous the negotiation of
determining categories is in the borderlands of the North, as they are anxiously
interdicted through discourses of nation, race, culture, and in this case, animality and
humanity. Antoinette enacts the policing of what has to be kept in and what has to be kept
out, but not without an excess. This excess is that of the cross cutting of these discourses
that condition the internal and the external, each becoming foreign to each other and
multiplying intrusions as Nancy puts it in his determining of the intrus. Antoinette
evinces the mode through which intrusion doubles back on itself through the very

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policing of borders, producing multiple categories of strangerness through the vectors of
contact at the border between inside and outside.
After Trebor’s travels from Jura to the South come to a close at the film’s end, we
are again returned the Northern borderlands, to the scene of another woman and her dogs.
The last scene of the film follows the so-called Queen of the Northern Hemisphere, a dog
breeder for whom Trebor harbors an infatuation. She rides a sleigh through the snowy
Jura pine forest, urging her dogs on, shouting, “Allez! Allez!” The camera can barely
contain her as she speeds across the white landscape, seemingly constrained by nothing.
The film ends on a close up of the Queen’s face, spread with a breathtaking, but
frightening smile. There is, in the juxtaposition of these two scenes, the contrary position
played by the North as the space of infinite borders and therefore, a consequent
borderlessness for some. Antoinette, with her intrusive policing of intrusion, represents
the multiplication of borders, literal and figurative, that paradoxically place Jura as a
representative for the kinds of Western anxieties about foreignness and contamination
precisely at the points it is most flexible and open – the borderlands. The Queen of the
Northern Hemisphere book ends the film as Antoinette’s opposite. She is the beautiful
and terrifying embodiment of the borderless, colonizing North, born of the intrusions of
multiple others. We may see her as hearkening back to Nancy’s closed open, as she
coasts over all borders - real or imagined - through the white, snowy openness born of an
intrusion that can never be closed.

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In these two scenes that enclose the film, we begin to see how L’Intrus is an
adoption of Nancy’s essay that opens up a rumination on transplantation into a suggestive
filmic representation of borders, boundaries and global conceptions of intrusion. It is, as
Martine Beugnet describes it, a “metaphorical play on the notion of the transplant, which
simultaneously describes the effect on an individual’s corporeal and psychological
identity of the grafting of a foreign organ, and the mutation of the geopolitical body at
large, as it is subjected to an influx of outsiders” (37). Nowhere is this metaphorical play
that mixes so deftly the imagined biomechanics of organ transfer with the fluidity of
global borders between North and South more aptly depicted than in the scene with
represents Trebor’s transplantation and its immediate aftermath. As mentioned above,
Trebor purchases a heart as a cure for an unspecified, yet grave, illness. The deal is
brokered by a young Russian woman, and she is referred to as such in the film’s credits.
Trebor meets her in a Geneva hotel, warning, “I want a young heart. Not an old man’s
heart or a woman’s heart. I’m a man. I want to keep my character.” As she transfers the
money he hands her into a black canvas bag, the Young Russian Woman gives him a
vague, “Da,” in reply, her smile flimsy and betraying the trace of disdain. When he
suggests she take his medical chart with her, she shrugs, “Sure. Why not?” The scene
suggests that Trebor has not yet realized the intrusion that already lies within him with
his heart’s betrayal of himself and, as discussed above, he does not realize that intrusion
comes not through the other’s strangeness but in the process of strangerness that is
always at work within the self. Perhaps the betrayal and intrusion at work within himself

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is amplified through purchasing a black market heart, an act that violates character in his
effort to keep it. The dismissiveness of the Young Russian Woman in response to
Trebor’s efforts to define himself, psychically (“I’m a man.”) and physically with his
medical chart, mark that the coming of the intrus has already begun for Trebor, though he
does not recognize it as such.
Trebor leaves his hotel and visits a shop to purchase a luxury watch. He points out
the timepiece he likes best, and the sales woman notes, “This one is much more
contemporary.” The camera stays close to her hands, neglecting any other part of her
body as she caresses the watch, turns it over to show the inner workings of its cogs and
gears. Her hands are clad in stark, white cotton gloves. She fastens the watch around
Trebor’s wrist, “Voila.” Trebor responds, “Now I just have to pay.” The camera frames
only the two pairs of hands making contact – white gloves on bare skin. The scene stands
in for the surgical transfer of the stolen heart into Trebor’s body – the watch is the new
organ itself, the sales woman’s hands the clinical white gloves of the surgeon’s, and all of
it taking place under the auspices of a monetary transaction.
Trebor returns to his Geneva hotel room, a siren wailing in the night as he walks.
The camera cuts to a rapid tracking shot in which the Young Russian Woman and a
companion gallop on horseback across a snowy plain, dragging Trebor’s body behind
them. She dismounts and unties him, checking his pulse. He gasps, “I already paid.” She
responds, “No. You’ll never pay enough.” As the Young Russian Woman gallops away,
the scene cuts back to the hotel room where Trebor removes the watch and attempts to

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fall asleep, pausing to place a knife beneath his pillow. We are then returned to Jura
where a young itinerant woman, called the Wild Woman, peers into a frozen pond, seeing
the face of a young man beneath the surface. She is seeing the body of a man Trebor
killed earlier in the film for trespassing on his property, his corpse now contained in an
icy prison. The Wild Woman then breaks into Trebor’s cabin and bathes by the fireplace,
as Trebor’s two huskies sit by her tub. The scene then cuts to the snow covered Jura
fields where two hunters drag a bloody body wrapped in a sheet across the plain. It is the
body of the Wild Woman who we have just seen vulnerable and exposed in the bath.
Next to her body lies a perfectly resected human heart, blood red against the white snow.
Trebor’s dogs run to the heart, sniffing it curiously. Immediately, we are returned to
Trebor’s bed, but he is in a different hotel now not in Geneva, but in Pusan, Korea. An
elderly Korean woman, who appears to be blind, enters the room. She gently massages
Trebor back into movement, whispering to him in Korean, “Does it hurt?” as she exposes
the deep scar that criss-crosses his chest to the camera’s view for the first time.
Denis has said that she had at first intended not to metaphorize Trebor’s transplant
and to film an actual surgery, but realized to do so would pose a violation to both the
person being transplanted and to the film itself. She instead saw the purchase of the watch
as standing in for “fifty percent of the heart transplant,” the surgical intervention, with the
other half occurring with the massage in Pusan that represented the biomedical
resurrection of the body. L’Intrus stretches the transplant across the border between
North and South, penetrating and intruding across global borders in an allegory of the

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body’s exposure to surgical and psychic penetration and intrusion. Trebor falls asleep in
Geneva, the future owner of a new heart whose provenance he attempts to dictate. He
dreams of Jura, although to say that his punishment at the Young Russian Woman’s
hands and the murder of the Wild Woman aren’t real is to mistake the way in which
Denis uses dreams as an effective narratological instrument to illustrate the horror of the
act Trebor has just initiated. Jura, the North, is the place of violence, of murder, of a
voracious neoliberalism where even bodies can be bought and sold as easily as a watch –
but not without a psychic price. Trebor awakes in Pusan, after his phantasmatic return to
Jura, the border of his body having been crossed alongside the borders of the globe,
taking him to a space of imagined recuperation through the labor of a Korean woman.
Pusan acts as the threshold to the South, a place away from the terrible borders of Jura
whose violence against foreignness results in the motor of Trebor’s renewed life, a place
where the wound dealt to his body is first exposed for what it is – deep and troubling, a
scar that seems to mark a possible resurrection but also throbs with the violation of a
border crossed between North and South. This is the ambivalence of Pusan. Trebor is not
yet in the South of Tahiti, where he believes he may find unity, an escape from the intrus.
But such an escape is impossible, as the intrus only replicates itself within the body and
across multiple global borders.
Mediating Pusan acts as a gateway to the South narratively as well as allegorically
as it is where Trebor contracts a Korean firm to build him a ship. Though we see that he
has effectively abandoned one son, Sidney, Antoinette’s husband, who lives in Jura,

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Trebor says he is building a ship for a son, Tikki, to whom he believes he still has ties in
Tahiti. The ship is built, and Trebor sails to Tahiti in search of his estranged son. Denis
has said that her depiction of the South Seas was meant to complicate and interdict the
age old stereotypes of the islands, borne of Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson: “I
wanted to talk about how northern people always have this dream of the perfect South –
this perfect island that is paradise. So this is like that dream of the occidental, northern
human being” (LA Weekly). The complication of this dream is evident from the first shot
of Tahiti, of an ominous, purple dusk, water barely distinguishable from sky, with the
piercing theme music of the film playing in the background. The shot is held for over a
minute and we are made a bit uncomfortable as viewers – what paradise awaits across
this troubling sea? The immediately proceeding shot of the island is that of the docks, of
a Tahiti far away from the occidental dream, an industrial landscape dotted with more
cranes and cars than palm trees.
Trebor checks into a hotel before he begins his search for his lost son. He lies on
the bed, shirt opened to the waist, stroking the now fading scar on his chest. The film then
cuts from his worrying of his own cut to a brief shot from Paul Gégauff’s Le Reflux, a
film from 1965 set in Tahiti starring a young Michel Subor, the actor who portrays
Trebor in L’Intrus. Denis studs this section of the film that takes place in Tahiti with
scenes and images from Gégauff’s film, a figurative, filmic play on the idea of
transplantation, the much younger Trebor haunting his present on the island that does not
welcome him in the same way now, upon his return to the South, as it did upon his first

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venture there. The South is the space in which the violence of the border crossings and
intrusions of the North make their consequences felt, viscerally and visually. Trebor
seeks out Tikki, but is warned off by men he knew during his first visit to Tahiti: “Trebor,
your son is our son now.” They add that he does not belong on the island. While Tikki’s
mother tells Trebor that his son has no wish to see him, this does not dissuade his search.
He goes so far as to rebuild the old palm shack he stayed in many years ago, hoping to
receive Tikki there. He is aided in this construction by his friend, Henri, but even Henri
questions his return: “Louis, what are you doing here?” Tahiti does not want Trebor back.
He refuses to acknowledge the island’s rejection of him, but as he lies on the cot in his
palm shack, he again strokes the scar that runs across his chest. Trebor cannot see the
violence of the intrus in himself, but his body enunciates the trespass in his stead.
It is in Tahiti that Trebor rejects his heart.
47
He is admitted to the hospital for
treatment and again, as in the first threshold to the South in Pusan, we see a brown
woman massaging his body, moving it delicately. However, it is not resurrection that this
touch seems to herald. The scene cuts to one of men digging what appears to be a grave
with all members of the village dressed in mourning white. Trebor may not be dead, but
the South is not interested in his life. Henri takes over looking for Trebor’s son, but
instead of seeking out Tikki, he arranges for auditions of all the young village men to find

47
Again, recalling the Invisible Man in his medicalized moment of identarian crisis, in
the first scene depicting the rejection, Trebor lies feverish on his cot refusing to answer
the doctor’s questions: “When did you have your operation? You take your medication
regularly? Sir?”

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a suitable replacement. They are called before a committee that summarily dismisses
them all as either too short, too fat, too tall, too dark, or too slanty-eyed. They say things
like, “True, he looks a little bit like a white man. Still he doesn’t quite correspond.”
Finally, a young man, Toni, approaches Henri and offers to stand in as Tikki. Henri
brings Toni to the hospital, but Trebor recognizes that Toni is not his “real” son, telling
him, “Toni, you don’t belong here with a guy like me.”
Tahiti, the border over which he intrudes, is the space of the intrus in which, as
discussed by Nancy, the quality of the internal conditions the strangeness of the external.
The South rejects the coming of the intruder, Trebor, causing him to reject his heart. The
son he first rejected is, in a way, transplanted through the ministrations of Henri and the
other villagers – but only in an effort to rid themselves of the violation caused by
Trebor’s presence in the South. The attempt at the transplanted son, Toni, is recognized,
finally, as an intrusion by Trebor, but only in so far as Toni does not belong with him, not
that he does not belong with Toni. He, Trebor, is the intrus, becoming foreign to himself
in the place that is seemingly most foreign to him. He is finally forced to leave the island
when the body of his son from Jura, Sidney, washes up on the shore in Tahiti, a deep
wound down the center of his chest as if his heart had been removed. Is this another
dream, like those of the death of the Wild Woman and the Young Russian Woman
dragging Trebor across the Jura plains?
While the violence of the dreams that interdict Trebor’s transplant and his
penetration of the border between the North and the space of Korea seem contained in the

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psychic realm, here the dream of the dead son invades the picture plane of reality – Tahiti
is the place where nightmares come true, but only because of Trebor’s initial intrusion
into the South. It is Toni who accompanies Trebor off the island, on the ship in which he
sailed there, framed by the same shot of ominous deep purple darkness of Tahiti’s dusk
receding slowly away, pierced by the film’s jarring leitmotif, held for a few seconds
beyond the point of comfort for the viewer.
48
The move away from Tahiti alongside the
brutal disseverance of sons, one dead, one lost, and one rejected, complicate the borders
and boundaries we establish in the ordering of identity and community, much as we
discussed in the formulations of immunity both as historically and culturally figured by
Tauber, Martin, and Wald, and philosophically conjured by Nancy. Denis tracks this
complication in a way that is described by Beugnet as “evok[ing] anew the ambiguous
functions of lineage, ‘real’ or fantasized, in our contemporary world of closed frontiers
and border controls (since in a time where technology and medicine rewrite the
boundaries of corporeal identity, blood-ties and the name of the father continue to
establish one’s identity and legitimise claims of belonging to a particular country or
social grouping)” (39).
Denis marks L’Intrus’s “ambiguous functions of lineage” across closed frontiers
and borders constituted both geopolitically and corporeally with the figure of the Young

48
Denis has said evocatively of this purple light in Tahiti: “I saw this black island in the
dusk, for me it was like a tomb with a purple veil…I was amazed…probably the only
place in the world where I experienced dusk, sunsets, that way…for me…I thought I was
going, at dusk, this purple light, I felt I was going to die” (DVD Interview).

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Russian Woman. As discussed above, she appears in Trebor’s dream as a figure of dread
upon his violation of the borders of his own body and of the globe after his purchase of a
heart and entry into Pusan, Korea. However, this is not the first time we see her. She
opens the film, standing in the blue darkness of the Jura pine forest, christening the
events to come with these lines: “Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows,
in your heart.” I use eschatological language when describing the Young Russian Woman
for a reason. Again we have the strangeness of the external that Nancy speaks of that is
not only conditioned, but exceeded, and violently so, by the internal. Furthermore, as
Nancy so desperately diagnoses the coming violations inherent in the further intrusions of
biotechnology, the determining internal goes so far as to bring about the death of the most
imaginative form of the determining external – that of god itself: “Man recommences
going infinitely beyond man (that is what ‘the death of god,’ in all its possible senses, has
always meant)…He who de-natures and re-fashions nature; he who re-creates creation;
he who brings it out of nothing, and, perhaps returns it to nothing. He who is capable of
the origin and the end” (13). The intrus becomes the alpha and the omega and Denis
figures it as such.
Denis has said that she intended for the Young Russian Woman to be “the angel
of death” but didn’t put it in the credits out of respect for the actress, Yekaterina
Golubeva, who was very superstitious: “I never told her you’re the destiny of the film”
(DVD Interview). After her opening lines, before Trebor meets her to purchase his heart,
she appears again in a café, looking out the window upon a scene marking Trebor’s only

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interaction with his son, Sidney, and daughter-in-law, Antoinette. She watches as Trebor
forgets the name of his grandson who is named for him and dismissively shoves money
into Sidney’s hand before walking off and away from this son he knows (and eventually
towards a son he will never know). She is there in Pusan when Trebor leaves the hotel
after recovering sufficiently from the transplant to engage in a night of drinking. He
rounds on her as she follows him through the streets, shouting, “Stop hounding me. I
have a sick heart.” She spits back, “Your heart’s not sick anymore. It’s just empty.”
Finally, she is there when Trebor visits the morgue in Tahiti to identify the gruesome
body of Sidney, this time saying nothing as the mortician dons white gloves reminiscent
of the watch seller’s in order to unveil the body to Trebor. She just waits outside, flanked
by two stray dogs, and then walks away with a wry smile on her face. The Young
Russian Woman haunts every one of Trebor’s border violations, reminding him, to his
recognition or ignorance, that intrusion begins at home. She is the angel of death who
presides over Trebor’s violation of self, of the figure of his own identity through family
and corporeality, and of the borders between North and South in a discursive exposition
of the workings of intrusion that always complicate an easy recognition of community. It
is through her gaze in these key scenes of the film that we might view Nancy’s final
words on the intrus:
The intrus is no other than me, my self; none other than man himself. No
other than the one, the same, always identical to itself and yet that is never
done with altering itself. At the same time sharp and spent, stripped bare
and over-equipped, intruding upon the world and upon itself: a disquieting
upsurge of the strange, conatus of an infinite excrescence. (13)

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If the intrus is the self and by extension, man himself, it becomes a requirement of
thinking ipseity and its relation to the world that inscribes its possibility, psychically,
physiologically, and geopolitically, to continually experience the intrusion of the intruder.
As Nancy delineates the condition of intrusion at the outset of L’Intrus, the stranger must
never be assimilated or he will lose the very condition of intrusion that makes him
strange:
If he already has the right to enter and remain, if he is awaited and
received without any part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, he is no
longer the intrus, nor is he any longer the stranger. It is thus neither
logically acceptable, nor ethically admissible, to exclude all intrusion in
the coming of the stranger, the foreign. (1)
Denis, in her filmic adoption of the essay, manages to keep the stranger strange, both
narratively in her refusal to assimilate the actions of the characters into a linear story as
well as in terms of the multiple thematic border violations she presents without resolution
or further, with the worrying of the wounds dealt by the intrusion across bodies, borders,
and geopolitical boundaries.
In terms of the biomedicalized body, this refusal to engage the filmic penetration
of the intruder who penetrates (because to penetrate the intrus would be to know him,
relieving him of his strangerness) refuses the demand for a hyper-surveillance of bodies
in neoliberal formations of health management. Adele Clarke, et al., in their important
work, Biomedicalization, argue that over the course of the past 35 years, bodies have
become increasingly biomedicalized, that is, subject to “a new biopolitical economy of

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medicine, health, illness, living, and dying which forms an increasingly dense and
elaborate arena in which biomedical knowledges, technologies, services, and capital are
ever more co-constituted” (1). One major consequence of biomedicalization is the
increased surveillance of bodies for technoscientific, medical intervention – that is, a
neoliberalization of the kinds of technologies that inform how we view and consume
bodies through a crossing of their material borders. Both Denis and Nancy resist this
opening up of the body to an all-knowing gaze precisely in their relentless probing of the
multiple instantiations of intrusion and violation that do not cease or coalesce into new
technoscientific identities or commodity forms. This is the productive contradiction of the
“gaping open that cannot be closed” of which Nancy speaks – the enunciating “I” is
never legitimized through the probing of the body; it is only made more and more strange
to itself. The gaping open inaugurated by the intrus defies biomedicalization’s quest for
the optimization of health practice in which, as “regimes of risk and surveillance and
heightened responsibilities for knowledge accumulation and consumption” (40) are
engaged.
When this logic of the intrus that resists objectification or even, to an extent,
discursivity, as it poses an ever expanding theoretical limit, is expanded out beyond the
medical surveillance of body to its “intruding upon the world,” as Nancy terms it, we find
an entry into discussing the consequences of such logic to the types of global border
crossings Denis problematizes in her film. We might view globalization alongside the
conditions described above of biomedicalization with its object of surveillance and

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penetration being the world itself. How then does Denis make a film about the movement
between North and South without reifying or engaging in the violation that the film seeks
to critically represent? When writing through Derrida’s critique of globalization, Pheng
Cheah notes
The worldwide-ization of the world thus refers to ‘a becoming-world of the
world,’ an opening up that is not merely the mechanical integration of the
globe through capitalist economic structures and teletechnological
communications. Indeed, globalization is antiworld. It effaces the world as
opening by reducing it to a global marketplace. By exacerbating the
economic inequality between North and South, it impoverishes the world
(90).
In no way may we describe Denis’s L’Intrus as antiworld or effacing of the world as
opening. Trebor is the figure of the attempt of the global marketplace that fails in the face
of the opening up through intrusion of his self, both physiologically and psychically. It is,
again, precisely in the violent opening up of borders, in the tracing the scars of violation
by and through the intrus that Denis avoids a reductive impoverishment of the world in
her tracing of Trebor’s path from Jura through Pusan to Tahiti.
What this refusal of closure through the reproduction of intrusion in defiance of
technologies of knowledge production surrounding the world and the body shows is a
consonance in the work of both Denis and Nancy in respect to the rejection of the idea of
community as constituted as a closed entity through which one finds a closure of the
subject, a reinstating of the enunciating “I” who may claim identitarian membership in a
group, or a static, transparent representation of worlds and bodies that belong to one
another. As Anja Streiter puts it

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There is no representation of belonging or homecoming in the work of
Nancy and Denis. Things fall apart: concepts of identity, community and
immunity as well as of the body, the couple, the family… Their writing
and filming has become the moment and form of ex-istence, as Nancy puts
it, where they expose themselves to questions they have no answers for.
They expose themselves as well as the reader and viewer to pain they
cannot soothe, to beauty that makes no sense and to a pleasure of writing
and filming that never comes to terms with what it explores. (53)

Nancy, has, of course, engaged in in-depth analyses of the (im)possibility of community
through out his oeuvre One of his earliest and most influential works, The Inoperative
Community, discusses the political and philosophical stakes of the ameliorative
deployment of community in the face of alienation. Nancy argues that “the political is the
place where community as such is brought into play” (xxxvii) and further, that the
political as a sphere of power relations could not be so except through community. He
poses this argument through a Heideggerian lens, in which the political is “the place of a
specific existence, the existence of ‘being-in-common,’ which gives rise to the existence
of ‘being-self.’” (Ibid.) This is to say that collectivity is not something that comes out of a
grouping of individuals (that is, after the fact of the originary individual), but rather we
are always already part of “a dimension of ‘in-common’ that is in no way ‘added on to’
the dimension of ‘being-self,’ but is rather co-originary and coextensive with it” (Ibid.)
Nancy is careful not to valorize this estimation of community as a measure of bestowing
equality as if being ‘in-common’ would apply linkages of collectivity uniformly across
all individuals – such an estimation would defy the premise that there are no individuated
persons between which communal linkages are formed to begin with. Rather, Nancy’s

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point is to locate community as a necessity for thinking the political possibility of “being-
self”:
The mode of existence and appropriation of a ‘self’ (which is not
necessarily, nor exclusively, an individual) is the mode of an exposition in
common and to the in-common, and that this exposition exposes the self
even in its ‘in itself,’ in its ‘ipseity,’ and in its own distinctiveness, in its
isolation or in its solitude. Only a being-in-common can make possible a
being-separated. (Ibid.)

The problem, however, with many political deployments of the idea of community is the
closure of the political that comes with thinking community as essence. Nancy poses this
problem as the opposition between being-in-common and common being. If being-
separated or being-self is only possible through being-in-common, it is because of an
intrus-like reasoning of the interior’s relationship to the exterior; that is, a relationship to
the self that comes only through the self’s relationship to others. Nancy posits this quality
of being-self as “having access to what is proper to existence, and therefore, of course, to
the proper of one’s own existence, only through an ‘expropriation’ whose exemplary
reality is that of ‘my’ face always exposed to others, always turned toward an other and
faced by him or her, never facing myself” (xxxviii). When being-in-common, the
condition of possibility of being-self, is denied in favor of common being, this exposure
of the interior to the exterior is denied: “Being in common has nothing to do with
communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no
longer be exposed” (Ibid.) It follows that being in common may never coalesce into a
unified form, or as Nancy puts it, “being in common means, to the contrary, no longer

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having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place such a substantial identity, and
sharing this…‘lack of identity’” (Ibid.). As such, to posit community as a singularity, a
unified grouping that is conferred upon all its individuated members, evacuates
community of its salience as a being-in-common: “The community that becomes a single
thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader…) necessarily loses the in of being-in-common.
Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of
togetherness” (xxxix).
49

I would like to focus on one particular aspect of this (im)possibility of terming
community as such; that is, the stakes of a political project that loses its foundation
precisely because of the external figured as common being effaces the relationship of
interiority to exteriority between being-in-common and being-self. If, as stated above, the
self is only made apparent in being “exposed” to the in-common, then we must consider
community and its relationship to the self through the lens of intrusion and the intrus. If,
as Nancy says, “’To be exposed’ means to be ‘posed’ in exteriority, according to an
exteriority, having to do with an outside in the very intimacy of an inside,” then we may
consider the importance of attending to the border crossings between inside and outside
that are imperative in thinking a community. This conception of community would defy

49
We might link the loss of being-in-common indicated in political deployments of
common being with David Harvey’s consideration of relationalities: “Relationalities can
never be controlled (which why state and capitalist power abhors them). But
relationalities are always problematic…Relationalities, though immaterial, are therefore
far from free-floating. When they crystallize out into fixed patterns of belief and political
alignment, they constitute power nexuses of enormous significance. Accepted
dogmas…can be both dangerous and damaging in their objective consequences.” (259)

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sliding into hegemonic, essentialized thinking of the communal. We note that this form
must be denied as it subjugates the already disenfranchised through a false construct that
makes false promises of equality in a disavowal of its founding principles of not posing a
static identarian subject position to which all community members must cleave. I bring
up this attention paid to interiority and exteriority in Nancy’s determination of
community as it allows us to return to the intrus as a negotiation of the internal and
external as seen in both Nancy and Denis’s work in an effort of positing an alternative.
In summing up the central argument of Nancy’s L’Intrus, Douglas Morrey notes,
“Nancy concludes that the intruder within is none other than death, or rather what he calls
life/death (la vie/la mort), the death in life that is a necessary corollary of being (in) a
body, that is the ultimate mark or meaning of the body’s existence as such” (14). While I
would not claim that this is the conclusion of the essay, it is a point of central importance
– and a consideration that is evident in the Denis’s depiction of Trebor and his
relationship to the Young Russian Woman. Beginning in the historical period of
Descartes, Nancy locates the preoccupation of modern humanity with the cordoning off
of death from life – humanity “has revived the absolute strangeness of the double enigma
of mortality and immortality” (6). Note, however, that the intrus already penetrates the
veil between life and death as in making one strange to the other a certain violation of
borders must always be in process. Nancy locates this in himself: “The multiple stranger
who intrudes upon my life…is none other than death – or rather, life/death: a suspension
of the continuum of being, a scansion wherein “I” has/have little to do” (7).

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First let us note that again, the identity to which the enunciating “I” can never be
equivalent to has been intruded upon again, this time by the intrusion of the fraught
crisscrossing of life/death. Second, we should recognize a consonance between the
intrusion of life/death and the formlessness of being-in-common. The intrusion, the
border crossings implicit in life/death make it possible to posit the (im)possible in
community. That is, life/death disallows the codification of individuals into a static
formation of community because it inhabits Nancy’s “the infinite lack of infinite
identity,” (xxxviii), which is to say finitude, Nancy’s fundamental condition of
community. Life/death is continual border crossing and opening up that posits a
particular kind of being-self through which we can imagine the type of community Nancy
imagines as politically expedient: “Community is made of what retreats from it: the
hypostasis of the ‘common,’ and its work. The retreat opens, and continues to keep open,
this strange being-the-one-with-the-other to which we are exposed.” (xxxix) Life/death
constitutes such a retreat, such a constant opening, and a most dire exposure to the
strange “being-the-one-with-the-other.”
50

50
It should be clear that life/death does not equate to a concept of bare life. It is precisely
the continual movement, intrusion back and forth, that does not delineate an
indeterminate state of being, but rather a mutually constitutive internalization of the
external between the two terms that prevents life/death from slipping into Agamben’s
neomort: “The hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the
faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely
bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. And
since it is precisely a question not of natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo
sacer…, what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without
the commission of homicide” (165).

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Pheng Cheah provides an important link between this thinking of life/death as a
limit, much like community itself functions as a limit towards which we may think, but
never actually reach – for to reach it, as discussed above, would be to denude it of its
property of communalism by reifying it into a single entity. Cheah posits death as a limit
internal to life (an intrus to life itself, if we may term it so): "Death is a limit that life can
know and comprehend because it has posited this limit within itself, and in its knowing of
this limit as its own limit, as a limit proper to or belonging to life, life thereby transcends
this limit that is death." (330) In discussing the wages of what he terms spectral
nationality in the postcolony, Cheah goes on to discuss how reckoning with finitude
yields a political imperative premised on (im)possibility:
The experience of radical finitude is practical experience that gives rise to
imperativity and responsibility. Without or persistence in time, no
incarnational work or action and, therefore, no political event, can take
place. However, we can never be guaranteed of our own persistence in
time beyond any given instant. In each and every moment, we live only in
and through the possibility that in another instant, perhaps the next, we
might die. (389)
This is the condition of life/death as inaugurated by the coming of the intrus with finitude
as “infinite lack of infinite identity” that allows for us to think of how to engage the
political and the communal in a way that makes space for the contingency of the being-
self on the being-in-common. It is the realization of community as depicted in both
Nancy and Denis’s L’Intrus.
If community must be exposed, as Nancy contends, then both the essay and the
film L’Intrus are master texts of uneasy exposition in which wounds, scars, violations,

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borders, bodies, and boundaries are crossed, revealed, concealed, and opened up. In this
type of exposition we see the (im)possibility, but necessity of community – and because
of this ambivalent form we find the only type of community Nancy can posit as
politically possible, “the community without essence” (xl). He admits the difficulty in
forming such a community, noting that in order to apprehend it we must imagine
a bond that forms ties without attachments, or even less fusion, of a bond
that unbinds by binding, that reunites through the infinite exposition of an
irreducible finitude. How can we be receptive to the meaning of our
multiple, dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless
only make sense by existing in common? (Ibid.)

I would argue that we can be receptive to the meaning of this bond through immunity as
figured through the intrus. Ed Cohen, in his important work on the history of immunity,
asks how we
so readily accept the notion that to endure as living organisms, we must
actively and relentlessly fend off the predations of the very world that
sustains us…how and why we unreflectively believe that as embodied
beings we are essentially and necessarily – i.e., ‘naturally’ – distinct from
the lifeworlds within which we materially arise and on which we
materially depend for our existence. In other words: how did we come to
believe that as living beings, ‘the body’ separates us from each other and
from the world rather than connects us? (26)
In these questions, we see shades of Nancy’s corrective to the idea of community being
formed by individuals as opposed to the other way around. Cohen concludes his work by
asking, perhaps whimsically, “Imagine what might have happened if ‘community’ had
achieved the same biological status that immunity did. How differently might we live in

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the world imagining that our ‘commune systems’ mediated our living relations with and
in the world?” (281)
This is the sort of community that we may be allowed to think through the body if
we allow organ transplantation to function as a discourse. It is a mode of interrogation
that reveals the ways in which we are forced into particular defensive, totalizing, and
essentializing modes of being individuals alongside the problems inherent in reductive
constructs of community deployed against such conceptions of the bounded body. In
looking through the narratological negotiation of transplantation in the work of Nancy
and Denis, we find a politically sound, (im)possible imperative to ask the fundamental
question of community. It is as Nancy puts it, “How do we communicate?” (xl) It is only
through a constant, relentless, discursive relationship between the self and the being-in-
common that always already inscribes it as such that we may begin to answer this
question with an aim to understand how to receive and conceive of the stranger, the
intrus, and its effect on how we may communicate across borders and boundaries, in
order to imagine a way to live differently in the world.

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Coda: When and Where I Entered

I got my kidney transplant the day the last episode of Friends aired. I remember
because when I woke up in the postanesthesia care unit, the woman in the bed across
from me was asking why she couldn’t get a TV next to her blood pressure monitor. You
can barely get a packet of saltines in the PACU, let alone a major cultural milestone –
unless the milestone is your own father’s kidney slowly coming to life in your belly,
filtering your blood, and making you ravenous for the first time in over a year. I was
content with the saltines, although I felt a little bit like Alice in Wonderland when the
Red Queen offers her biscuits to quench her thirst. My throat was still dry and aching
from being intubated, and the huge bandage around my left wrist, purpling skin radiating
out from under it – evidence that a resident had probably been given the privilege of
doing the arterial line but then totally botched it (bodies tell tales) - made it difficult for
me to do little more than push the cellophane packet around the plastic tray on my lap.
The rumbling in my stomach was stronger than any of these impediments.
My nephrologist, Dr. Appel, was astonished. He said he never heard of a patient
having bowel sounds so soon after transplant. Back in college, my Ethnic Studies activist
friends and I played a game that I can only imagine is sickeningly endemic to certain
privileged educational institutions of the East Coast: When do you feel most brown? I
think I never felt more Indian than in this moment of resurrection through the abject – my
bowels. It is as Amitava Kumar says, “[what] represents the abstract and somewhat

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elusive quality of Indianess…it is the quality of the burlesque: the staidness of colonial
English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by proper as well as improper Indians:
this is the world where memories, with a shift in the accent, get easily transmuted into
mammaries…” (158). I was in a place where my life-long obsession with excreta could
be validated against my ambivalent relationship to the subcontinent – where my hunger
and the rumbling of my intestines were taken for a sign of good cultural connection and
the return of the good body.
I’d been sick most of my life. Not the kind of sick you see in commercials for St.
Jude’s hospital, which, incidentally, I watched obsessively after I found out I needed a
transplant, triangulating what felt like my inappropriate, selfish grief through children I
imagined needed the sympathy more. Unlike those kids, I was just sickly. Too thin, bad
constitution, whatever bug was whipping through the playground, I caught it. It got bad
in Middle School. I would feel the fevers coming on because my eyeballs would get hot,
and my saliva would feel warm in my mouth. The fevers would spike somewhere around
104; I had to be hospitalized a couple of times. If I felt one coming on, I would lie to my
surgeon father and my nurse mother that I was fine and go to school anyway. I was
defying my illness – and my parents. My father was not above forcing an MRI on me for
a headache, and he had the power to do so. “Jim? Yes, can you stay in the lab late? I’m
bringing my daughter in.” Do you know what an MRI is? It’s a picture. It’s a
representation born of injections and a claustrophobic clanging around your head and no,
my father is not a brain surgeon so he could interpret this picture no better than the look

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on my face that was written over with mutiny. We went to every specialist in the tri-state
area. No one knew what was wrong with me. They thought something was wrong with
my parents. Medical parents, hypochondriacs, over-protective Asians, these specialists
thought. I was a terrible, ungrateful child and probably agreed. Finally we met with an
ornery South African nephrologist, Dr. Bernard Kaplan, a doctor at Children’s Hospital
in Philadelphia who considered himself a maverick. He did a biopsy on my kidneys based
on little more than one journal article, a vague sense of biological determinism, and a
hunch. I remember lying in the dark hospital room as he and the pathologist looked
incredulously at the flesh cored out of my back – “That’s kidney?” What should have
been pink healthy flesh had the pallid grey appearance of fatty tissue. Dr. Kaplan couldn’t
say why. It was probably going to get worse. I was probably going to need a transplant
someday. I was sixteen.
I fought against my illness so stubbornly as a kid because I was scared of what it
might say about my identity, what sorts of allowances it made for the kind of protection
my parents, post-1965 immigrants who came to the United States at the tail end of the
visa granting program for medical professionals, wanted for their ailing, only daughter.
But when I turned eighteen, the fevers just sort of went away. My parents let me go away
for college, where I could have those mindless midnight conversations lying around a
dorm room about feeling brown. When I was 21-years-old, I took David Eng’s Asian
American Studies class, Asian/American Queer Diasporas. I read Camera Lucida for the
first time. It blew my goddamned mind. I loved the bit about Barthes’ longing to inhabit

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Charles Clifford’s photograph of a house, a place, really, titled “Alhambra.” Barthes
negotiates rocky terrain when he longs to inhabit a photograph, placing careful caveats
and riders alongside this desire:
This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric
(I do not dream of some extravagant site) nor empirical (I do no intend to
buy a house according to the views of a real-estate agency); it is
fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me
forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself…it
is as if I were certain of having been there or of going there. (39-40)
Barthes defines “the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire)” as “heimlich,
awakening in me the Mother (and never the disturbing Mother)” (Ibid.). He goes on to
quote Freud in his relating of this longing for the maternal body: there is “no other place
of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there” (Ibid.).
I didn’t know it at the time, but while I was reading Camera Lucida, my own
immune system was again attacking my kidneys, this time for keeps. By the next
semester, my body was in full renal failure. The semester after that, on April 4, 2002, my
father gave me one of his kidneys. The surgery took place at Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital in New York. I remember being led down a hallway by a very cute German
anesthesiologist. I remember that just as I went under in the operating room I was asked
what my major was. The last thing said before the chemicals hit, putting me to sleep for
nearly five hours, was “Asian American Studies? What is that?” I have other vague
memories of the day, the saltines in the PACU, the pride I felt over my over-active
bowels, the woman demanding to know if Ross and Rachel ended up together. But aside
from time taking its toll on my recollection of the actual event of my surgery, there seems

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to be some deep inability for me to know what happened that day even as I tell the story -
and I am always asked to tell the story, by others and by myself.
I asked my mother to tell me about the day of the surgery, what it was like for her:
I wasn’t really nervous at first because they said that it would be two and a
half hours before either of you were out of surgery. So, what, we, Marie,
Uncle Anil, Auntie Cynthia were sitting in the waiting room up there. But
then, I don’t know, I don’t know, how did I know? At two and a half hours
on the dot everyone got restless. Up until that point in time, I didn’t think
anything, not now they are cutting, not until that point in time. But as soon
as that point in time came, I remember getting very, very restless. Then
Benvenisty came and said everything was ok, and there was this big
weight lifted. And then it was like, who wants to eat?
The burlesque of the subcontinent cannot be contained even within the walls of the clinic.
She went on to talk about what happened after my father and I left the PACU and
were transferred up to the floor where transplant recipients and donors recover. “When
they transferred you to the bed, in that first room, you started weeping, I mean really
wept. Not just crying, I mean, really weeping, and there was nothing I could do. I think it
really hit you, the magnitude of it. None of us really thought of it, like, oh my God, this is
general anesthesia, this is four and a half hour surgery...” As for my father, after the
transplant, he too, in the sense of the Indian burlesque, became obsessed with his bowels.
“Vera,” he said to my mother, moments after coming to in the PACU, in pain, groggy,
and hoarse, “those dried apricots I ate last night are really working.” When we came
home from the hospital, he became very sensitive to cooking smells and would
mournfully tell all sympathetic callers about his problems with digestion; for his
surgeon’s alliances, the belief he must engage to do his job, that body was subordinate to

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mind. It was the only narrative filter he could find for the enormity of what had just
happened. My mother describes it like this: “I think that for Daddy it was anti-climactic.
It was like a major sense of relief for him about you and you were ok and then his focus
shifted to him so he just fixated on this one stupid thing. But it wasn’t about you, you
didn’t make it so he became all like that, no, he is always like this, you know?”
But it is no longer possible for me to believe her reassurances as the Mother in
whom I am sure I have been. While I may be sure that I have once been there, in my
Mother, I am now also quite sure that my Father is in me. This is where identity ceases to
be recognizable, where individual and community as constituted by the family are both
problem and solution, because what is the “actual history” of this body, the one that has a
kidney twice its age filtering its blood, the one that tangled genealogy and generation by
allowing my father to, in the ecstatic register of sentimentality of a health center nurse
tasked at giving my epogen shots to prepare for the exchange of body parts, “give you
life twice!”
We are our bodies, and yet we also live within them. This disjuncture is
negotiated through the stories we tell about the bodies we have and the bodies we are -
bodies and narrative are bound up in one another. One’s body is simultaneously there and
not there, at once elided and remembered through the stories that circulate around and
through it. In fact, we can go so far as to say that the body is a narrative inhabited and
lived within, but tautologically, that very inhabiting of the body is only made possible
through the process of narrativizing. The discourse of the organ transplant narrativizes

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both bodies in a particularly productive way by the forcing a negotiation of both the
literal and figurative incorporation of the body and a negotiation of self and nonself.
The bounded integrity of two bodies is breached as an organ is procured from a
donor and incorporated into a recipient. Those two breaches must be negotiated through
narratives that shore up and break down concepts of what constitutes the self, the other,
foreign and domestic, all in relation to the medically hybrid body. Peculiarly, the system
of production encountered in the organ transplant is one inaugurated and sustained by
failure. It is in the failing of one body that the organ transplant is needed and it is in the
constant guarding against the organ’s rejection - the immune system’s automatic response
to reject a foreign object from the known self - that motivates the constant, yet always
failing, process of forcing the other back into self. This is done both biologically through
anti-rejection drugs and the narratives produced to negotiate the work that the other's
organ does to break down conceptions of self - work, of course, that the other's organ also
does to also maintain the functioning of the self.
The inhabiting of the transplanted body is made possible by this narrativizing, but,
to invoke Gayatri Spivak, there is always (im)possibility. Narrative, as we have seen in
the preceding chapters, like the body, always fails. The story can never quite capture the
biology of containing an other's body part or the loss of one's organ to an other. But at the
same time, the story also exceeds the biology - this is the (im)possibility of the organ
transplant and its narrativization. What is produced in this failure and excess of the body

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and the story always trying to catch up to one another is longing, longing for the union
that is always deferred, always desired but never quite there. The oscillation between loss
and longing takes over where failure and excess cannot meet, powering and producing
the continued narrativizing of the body which is simultaneously produced by
narrativizing and its failure. This is the basic discursive rubric at work in the negotiation
and incorporation of the self and nonself through the peculiar work done by the organ
transplant.
Moving Parts has argued that the negotation of self/other forced by the transplant
instantiates a consideration of the politics of futurity. I have used Gayatri Spivak's term
(im)possibility to describe the inhabiting of the transplanted body. (Im)possibility is a
theoretical and practical hallmark of Spivak's work, and it is situated in the problematics
of writing history and attending to others who are spatially and temporally removed.
Spivak says of knowledge production around the other, we must "attend not only to the
seduction of power, but also the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference as well
as differance, that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our
projections, the undecidable in the face of which we must risk the decision that we can
hear from the other" (199). What is at stake here for Spivak is not only the material
consideration of historical and social realities of the past, but also a vigilant attention to
the possibilities and politics of the fraught future. In writing through Kant and the
paradox of practical reason, she states, "the crucial antinomy is that we must think a final

204

purpose and yet we can not know it” (22). This is (im)possibility and it begs, how do we
ever speak of others across time and space?
Moving Parts has struggled with this (im)possible imperative as it examines
multiple texts that risk hearing from the other that is now encapsulated in the self through
a narratological, discursive consideration of the organ transplant. This is why I tell you
that there is an organ that is not mine, that is 28 years older than me, filtering my blood
right now and it must be narrativized. The union between my story and my father’s
kidney may be forever deferred, but I must nevertheless engage this task of telling the
story and dismantling it in order to offer some measure of an ethically considered
negotiation of the persistence of our bodies in time. Through the discourse of the organ
transplant, this persistence constitutes the kind of knowledge production, the
narrativizing, that risks hearing from the other in an effort that we know must fail, but
nevertheless we must engage if we are ever to consider future justice as the imperative
for our story telling in the first place.

205

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Organ transplantation materially reconfigures the biological boundaries between bodies, but it also reshapes the social and ethical possibilities of using certain bodies as resources for the lives of others. In its physical reorganizing of the fleshy material of bodies, it conjures up vivid associations and rearticulations of the relationship between self and other, of the individualist Enlightenment subject, and of what it even means to be and have a human body. Moving Parts examines how associations and rearticulations like these are represented in literature, television, theater, and film. In examining the stories that circulate around the most fundamental questions about the organ transplant’s possibility, I argue that we can see how narrative constructs the body as knowable subject. Moving Parts contends that these modes of narrativizing the act of organ transfer are indicative of a pervasive preoccupation not simply with a technology that drastically reorganizes how bodies relate to one another in the materiality of their flesh, but also with the very strategies these stories deploy in order to narratologically negotiate this radical corporeal reconfiguration. I argue that the organ transplant should be understood as a discourse, a profound transformation of bodies where the objectified other is the very thing that allows for the continued life of the self. It is a discourse through which we may understand the self to always have been a precarious construct teetering between healthy and individual and ailing and contingent. In the face of a technology that demands a radical understanding of the borders of between self and other, the stories I examine in Moving Parts allow us to think a human subject that must begin beyond where the body ends in order to resist the liberal humanist discourses that produce debased others premised on corporeal difference.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kunte, Nisha (author)

Core Title Moving parts: reconfiguring corporeal difference and the human through organ transplant narratives

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/01/2012

Defense Date 05/25/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag corporeality,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,organ transplantation,Race,subjectivity

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kondo, Dorinne (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Moten, Fred (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email kunte@usc.edu,nishaku@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-82407

Unique identifier UC11289988

Identifier usctheses-c3-82407 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KunteNisha-1102.pdf

Dmrecord 82407

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kunte, Nisha

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA