Our neo-Cartesian bodies in parts

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 78-105

  Hacking, Ian ^a,b  

^a l'alimentation et l'Environnement

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249157725     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/526088     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. See Ian Hacking, "The Cartesian Vision Fulfilled: Analogue Bodies and Digital Minds," Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30, no. 2 (2005): 153-66.
2. See Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley, 2002).
3. This amendment to HB 1274 was proposed by Georgia Congressman Doug Teper. See Doug Teper, "Georgia House of Representatives Death Penalty; Guillotine Provisions," HB 1274, introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives, 1995/1996 Sessions, Jan. 1996, www.legis. state.ga.us/legis/ 1995-96/leg/fulltext/hb1274.htm.
4. See also Cleveland Moffett, "Whose Body?" letter to the London Review of Books, 22 Feb. 2007, www.lrb.co.uk/v29/no4/letters.html#6
5. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs," SAIS Review 22, no. 1 (2002): 61.
6. Compare Commodifying Bodies, ed. Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (London, 2002).
7. See Carl Elliott, "A New Way to Be Mad," Atlantic Monthly 286 (Dec. 2000): 72-84
8. and Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York, 2003).
9. See Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, 1988).
10. See Abdallah Daar et al., "Ban Cloning, Not Its Life-Saving Cousin," Globe and Mail (Toronto), 9 May 2002, p. A27.
11. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (1797; Indianapolis, 1964), p. 84.
12. In All's Well That Ends Well, Parolles, the braggart soldier, tells his master Count Bertram, who has just vowed to go off to war rather than bed his unwanted bride, that that is a very good idea: He wears his honor in a box unseen, That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home, Spending his manly marrow in her arms, Which should sustain the bound and high curvet Of Mars's fiery steed. (William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans [Boston, 1974], 2.3.279-83, p. 520)
13. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in The Riverside Shakespeare, l. 142, p. 1706.
14. I discuss the significance of this for the concept of race in my "Why Race Still Matters," Daedalus 134 (Winter 2005): 102-16.
15. See Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (New York, 2003).
16. See Lesley Sharp, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies and the Transformed Self (Berkeley, 2006).
17. See also my review, "Whose Body Is It?" London Review of Books, 14 Dec. 2006, www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n24/hack01-.html
18. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York, 1995).
19. See Gísli Pálsson and Paul Rabinow, "Iceland: The Case of a National Human Genome Project," Anthropology Today 15 (Oct. 1999): 14-18
20. and "The Icelandic Genome Debate," Trends in Biotechnology 19 (May 2001): 166-71.
21. I use this elementary a priori anthropology to point out the absurdity of the equally a priori anthropology of the major international media, all of whom wrote about Iceland as a nation of blue-eyed, fair-haired, Nordic clones. (Yes, the word clone was used; see Simon Mawer, "Iceland, the Nation of Clones," New York Times, 23 Jan. 1999, p. A19.
22. I owe this reference, and the ones in note 15, to Gardar Árnason, "Politics of Truth" [PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2006].)
23. Fewer than half of all Icelanders have either blue eyes or blonde hair. For genetic facts, admittedly as yet incomplete, see Einar Árnason, Hlynur Sigurgíslason, and Eiríkur Benedikz, "Genetic Homogeneity of Icelanders: Fact or Fiction?" Nature Genetics 25 (Aug. 2000): 373-74.
24. See Hilary Rose, "The Commodification of Virtual Reality: The Icelandic Health Sector Database," in Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two-Culture Divide, ed. Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 77-92.
25. But also from concerned intellectuals, such as the historian of science Skuli Sigurdsson. Naturally most of his interventions are published in Icelandic, but see his letter to the editor, Nature, 19 Aug. 1999, p. 708-9
26. and "Decoding Broken Promises," openDemocracy, 6 Mar. 2003, http://www.opendemocracy.net/theme-9-genes/article-1024.jsp.
27. For less adversarial discussions, see, for example, O. M. Arnardóttir, D. T. Björgvinsson, and V. M. Matthíasson, "The Icelandic Health Sector Database," European Journal of Health Law 6 (Dec. 1999): 307-62;
28. Abbing Roscam and D. C. Henriette, "Central Health Database in Iceland and Patient's Rights," European Journal of Health Law 6 (Dec. 1999): 363-71;
29. Hróbjartur Jónatansson, "Iceland's Health Sector Database: A Significant Head Start in the Search for the Biological Grail or an Irreversible Error?" American Journal of Law and Medicine 26, no. 1 (2000): 31-68;
30. J. R. Gulcher and K. Stefansson, "The Icelandic Healthcare Database and Informed Consent," New England Journal of Medicine, 15 June 2000, pp. 1827-30;
31. and V. Árnason, "Coding and Consent: Moral Challenges of the Database Project in Iceland," Bioethics 18, no. 1 (2004): 27-49.
32. See Struan F. A. Grant et al., "Variant of transcription factor 7 - like 2 (TCF7L2) Gene Confers Risk of Type 2 Diabetes," Nature Genetics 38 (Mar. 2006): 320-23.
33. See also Daniel F. Gudbjartsson et al., "Variants Conferring Risk of Atrial Fibrillation on Chromosome 4q25," Nature on-line prepublication, 1 July 2007. Both papers list many authors from institutions in countries other than Iceland. In both cases the CEO of deCODE, Kari Stefansson, is the final author to be listed.
34. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994)
35. and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York, 2003).
36. Adam Gopnik, "The Unreal Thing: What's Wrong with The Matrix?" The New Yorker, 19 May 2003, p. 68.
37. Gopnik refers to Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981), chap. 1, and also to Daniel Dennett and to Robert Nozick, who may have invented the problem. As Gopnik implies, a full list of citations would soon get out of hand here.
38. See I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
39. I had better say that this is ironic. The perception that language is public and egos are communal goes back to Kant's day, though not to Kant. See Hacking, "How, Why, When, and Where Did Language Go Public?" Common Knowledge 1 (Fall 1992): 74-91;
40. rpt. in Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 121-39.
41. See Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991)
42. and Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.Femaleman©-Meets- OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, 1997).
43. For references, see Hacking, "Canguilhem Amid the Cyborgs," Economy and Society 27 (May 1998): 202-16.