By: Samuel Taylor-Alexander

Samuel Taylor-Alexander — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 07:38:47 +0000

Yesterday I sat to compose my reply and ponder more what I felt unsettling about Anne-Marie’s analysis. The result was some six pages of thoughts and extracts from my above recent monograph. (Perhaps they will be turned into something more official at a later date.) At the centre of my thoughts was the question of the intersubjective, in particular, “the ethics of the intersubjective” as the likes of anthropologist Michael Jackson has explored. Jackson (2013:13) writes: “In developing an ethics of the intersubjective, we need a method of study that avoids prejudgments as to what is right and wrong, good and bad, and thus draws us deeply into the complexity of everyday situations.” I realise that it is exactly this complexity that Anne-Marie want’s to take us into, yet I couldn’t help but feel her approach was limited (1) by an overall focus on the “individual” human and its identity and (2) by framing the piece as a response to the concerns of publics’ vis-à-vis face transplantation. As Lesley Sharp (2006) has shown, in transplant medicine new forms of embodied intimacy emerge between recipients and donor families, transforming strangers into kin. Martindale’s post would have been strengthened by acknowledging the intimacy that accompanies organ transplantation. I have drawn analogies between between Sharp’s work and what I see taking place in face transplantation (Taylor-Alexander 2014: 37-40). Second, Jackson’s “ethics of the intersubjective” asks us to consider what is taking place in the relationships between donor, donor families and recipients. What does it mean that face transplant recipient Isabelle Dinoire has said:

I appropriated [the graft] insofar as it is I that managed to make it move. [But] forget it? No. I don’t want to and I won’t do it. She exists in me. She is and she will always be a part of me. She is my saviour, like a twin sister. This is the only way it can be […] For the doctors, it [the transplant] should be integrated, but it is still not mine. I don’t know. It is hard to explain. What I know is that I don’t want anyone to damage it, given what the donor offered me. It is too big. Now I am fighting for two!

Instead of asking “Does identity transfer take place in face transplantation?” why not instead ask “(Why) Does it matter if identity transfer takes place in face transplantation?” Why are patients encouraged to “appropriate” the graft and have it become them? Asking these question, I believe, will help us better understand how face transplantation holds the potential both to reproduce and unsettle the image of the complete body as good body that exists in contemporary biomedicine. In finishing, I should note that a number of scholars have already begun to examine how face transplantation, and on the life of patients and donor families within it, has explored the rearticulation and profound upheavals of notions of health, identity, rights, self, and responsibility that are taking place in and through the field (Delaporte 2013; Lafrance 2010; Talley 2014; Taylor-Alexander 2014).

References:

Delaporte, F. (2013). Figures of medicine: blood, face transplants, parasites. Fordham University Press.

Jackson, M. (2013). Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well- Being. Berkeley: University of California Press

Lafrance, M. (2010). ‘“She Exists Within Me”: Subjectivity, Embodiment, and the World’s First Face Transplant.’ In T. Rudge and D. Holmes (Eds.) Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work, pp. 147-162. London: Ashgate

Sharp, L. (2006). Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Talley, H. L. (2014). Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Taylor-Alexander, S. (2014). On Face Transplantation: Life and Ethics in Experimental Biomedicine. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

By: Samuel Taylor-Alexander

Samuel Taylor-Alexander — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 06:56:05 +0000

I wish to commend Ann-Marie for her important dissertation work and her realisation of the centrality of the face (and its transplantation) in current re/articulations of concerns with personhood and identity. I believe she is correct in suggesting that identity itself will not be transplanted along with the composite allograft of facial tissue. This does not mean, however, that patients have and will not experience both difficulties and pressure to a adapt to their “new faces”. The comments of Isabelle Dinoire, the first person to undergo the operation, is exemplary: ‘You know it’s yours but at the same time “she” is there … I am making her live but that hair is hers.’ In a latter post I will examine Ms Dinoire’s story in more detail; reading it alongside the published accounts of other patients and donor families suggests we need to develop a nuanced heuristic through which to make sense of the complex articulations of self, responsibility, and ethics in face transplantation. Elsewhere, in my recently published essay “On Face Transplantation” (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), I have attempted to sketch the parameters for such a mode of inquiry. In my following post, I will attempt to respond to Anne-Marie’s fine genealogy of “faciliaty” and recent work of disfigurement by drawing on this sketch.

Comments on: Recycling Faces and Identities?

By: Samuel Taylor-Alexander

By: Samuel Taylor-Alexander