Introduction: Studying the Organization of the Bioeconomy

Abstract

In the Canadian movie Jésus de Montréal (1989), a young actor, engaged in a play about the life of Jesus, is killed in an accident. However, as his organs are donated to transplantations, his second coming is not as a resurrection but in the form of a distributed life; his organs are brought back to life in many different hospitals all over Montreal. The Canadian Jesus is thus ‘returning’ from death not in the form of a person coming alive but as a sort of inverted Frankenstein; in Mary Shelley’s imaginary, life emerges as a set of organs patched together and brought to life by means of electricity, but the Canadian Jesus, in contrast, comes to life through being distributed, a set of parts that, on their own, can bring back or safeguard life. Another curious second coming is the case of Joseph Paul Jernigan, of Waco, Texas, placed on ‘death row’ in 1981 after being convicted for burglary and murder. In August 1993, Jernigan was executed by injection with a lethal dose of potassium chloride (Waldby, 2000: 1). Jernigan had agreed to donate his remains to the Visual Human Project, an attempt at creating an internet-based service providing a comprehensive set of images of the human anatomy. During his life, Jernigan was described as a ‘cruel and murderous drunk’, a ‘mad dog’. After death, Jernigan was described in different terms.