Emilstp Annotations

What three (or more) quotes capture the critical import of the text?

Thursday, July 18, 2019 - 2:55am

P. 61 "However, when the human body is used in a new way in a partial condition, it also acquires new connectivities to other bodies, institutions, and individuals. It creates new connections beyond previous conditions, and this process of reassembling the body can be involved in the reorganization of social relationships. Relationships inside and outside the body are becoming increasingly complicated, so it is important to face the fact that technological interventions in the body raise, not only moral questions, but also questions of a new social order that can never be properly comprehended as long as it is based on mechanical or natural metaphors of the body."

P. 68 "Seen in this light, a body can have multiple personalities, and then personality is a concept that is defined according to the practices and experiences after organ transplantation. Therefore, it is supposed that the organ and the body itself have an undifferentiated state before they are actualized as individual matter—a ‘pre-personalized state’ of the body. This state of the body as multiplicity, and materiality as well, can never be reduced to a specific social category. The gift relationship is experienced at this moment when the actors experience their bodies in their own ways, whether imaginary or material. The state of the body is not given in advance but emerges through the practices after transplantation."

P. 71 "The organ itself is multiple: it can be considered as a self, an other, or as something anonymous and abstract. There is no place for such experiences if we think of organ transplantation in the light of the individualistic ways of understanding body and person that widely pervade the modern medical system. Without these apparently irrational experiences, there remains only a generalized exchange model of organs. And that model can never explain the way both donor families and recipients gather at the events and the reason why such events continue to be organized."

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