Hospitality and ‘the Gift of Life’: Reconfiguring the Other in Heart Transplantation

Abstract

In this chapter I shall bring together two major strands that have facilitated my own trajectory through postconventional philosophy into what might now be better described as critical cultural theory. On the one hand, I draw on a very specifically feminist take on the bioethics of intercorporeality; on the other hand, I shall be invoking Derrida as the thinker always of the ‘matters of urgency that assail us’: the ethical thinker who engages tirelessly with the conundrums of the contemporary world, where technological mutation itself can deconstruct ‘what are claimed as … naturally obvious things or … untouchable axioms (2000: 45). In the spirit of Derrida’s determined provocation, and as a committed bricoleur, I have exploited and doubtless distorted Derrida’s thematic in the cause of reconfiguring the conventional understanding of the very material and highly technologised practice of heart transplantation. The context of my concerns here are two. Firstly, I have always been intrigued by the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s account of her breast cancer which she refers to as ‘an adventure in applied deconstruction’ (1994: 12); and, secondly, I am engaged in a Canadian research project called PITH — the Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart.¹ The purpose of the project, which has both empirical and theoretical dimensions, is to enquire into the multiple — though hitherto usually anecdotal — accounts of the ontological anxiety experienced by heart transplant recipients.