Embodiment and Entangled Subjectivity: A Study of Robin Cook’s Coma, Priscille Sibley’s The Promise of Stardust and Alexander Beliaev’s Professor Dowell’s Head
Tóm tắt
The essay examines Robin Cook’s (1977) Coma and Priscille Sibley’s (2013) The Promise of Stardust that dramatize the reified and disposable status of the brain-dead patients who are classified as nonpersons. The essay argues that the man-machine entanglement as depicted in the novels constructs a deterritorialized and entangled form of subjectivity that intervenes in the dominant biomedical understanding of personhood and agency that we notionally associate with a conscious mind. The essay concludes its arguments by discussing Alexander Beliaev’s (1925) Professor Dowell’s Head which depicts human subjectivity as an essentially embodied and distributive phenomenon and interrogates the Cartesian mind body dualism embedded in the dominant biomedical narratives.
Tài liệu tham khảo
The Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School. 1968. “A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death.” JAMA 205 (6): 337-340.
Aries, Philippe. 1981. The Hour of Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transposition: On Nomadic Ethics. United Kingdom: Polity Press.
-----. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2012. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad.” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris Van der Tuin, 19-37. Open Humanities Press. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Dolphijn-van-der-Tuin_2013_New-Materialism.pdf.
Beliaev, Alexander. 1925. Professor Dowell’s Head. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers.
Beauchamp, Tom L. 1999. “The Failure of Theories of Personhood,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 9 (4). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/18629.
Bryne, Paul A., Sean O’ Reilly, Paul M. Quay, and Peter W. Salsich. 2000. “The Patient, the Physician and the Society.” In Beyond Brain Death: The Case Against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, edited by Michael Potts, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges, 91-116. New York & London: Kluwer Academic Publisher.
Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: OUP.
Cook, Robin. 1977. Coma. London: Macmillan.
Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.
-----. 1999. “How the Brain Creates the Mind.” Scientific American 281 (6): 112-17.
-----. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, New York and London: Harcourt.
Dennett, Daniel. 1976. “Conditions of Personhood.” In The Identities of Person, edited by Amelie Oskenberg Rorty, 175-196. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Descartes, Rene. 1637. Discourse on Method and Meditation on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Edelman, Gerald M. 2006. “The Embodiment of Mind.” Daedalus 135 (3): 23-32.
Engelhardth, Tristram H. 1989. “Brain Life, Brain Death, Fetal Parts.” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 14: 1-3.
Evans, David W. 2000. “The Demise of Brain Death.” In Beyond Brain Death: The Case against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, edited by Michael Potts, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges, 139-153. New York & London: Kluwer Academic Publisher.
Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London & New York: Routledge.
Gaylin, Willard. 1974. “Harvesting the Dead: The Potential Recycling Human Bodies.” Harper’s Magazine 249 (1492): 23-30.
Goodwin, Dawn. 2008. “Refashioning Bodies, Reshaping Agency.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 33 (2): 345-363.
Hayles, Katherine N. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1992. “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295-337. New York: Routledge.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber.
Jones, Albert David. 2000. “Metaphysical Misgiving about Human Brain.” In Beyond Brain Death: The Case Against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, edited by by Michael Potts, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges, 91-116. New York & London: Kluwer Academic Publisher.
Kant, Immanuel and Norman K. Smith. 1929. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Boston: Bedford.
Kennedy, Greg. 2007. An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and its Problematic Nature. New York: State University of New York.
Kierans, Ciara. 2010. “Transplantation, Organ Donation, and (In) Human Experiences: Rewriting Boundaries through Embodied Perspective on Kidney Failure.” In Culture, Bodies, and Sociology of Health, edited by Elizabeth Ettore, 21-43. New York and London: Routledge.
Leder Drew. 1992. The Body in Biomedical Thought and Practices. Dordrecht: Springer, Science+Business.
Lock Margaret. 2002. Twice Dead: Organ Transplantation and Re-invention of Death. Barkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: New American Library.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. “Biomedical Horror: The New Death and the Undead.” In Technologies of Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Justin D. Edward, 84-98. New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Collin Smith. London: Routledge.
Nair-Collins Michael and Franklin G. Miller. 2017. “Do the ‘Brain Dead’ Merely Appear to be Alive?” J. Med Ethics 43 (11): 747-753. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2016-103867.
Potts, Michael, Paul A. Byrne, and Richard G. Nilges, eds. 2000. Beyond Brain Death: The Case Against Brain Based Criteria for Human Death, New York.
Rassin, Michael, Miri Lowenthal, and Dina Silner. 2005. “Fear, Ambivalence, Liminality: Key Concepts in Refusal to Donate an Organ after Brain Death”. Healthcare, Law, Ethics, and Regulation 17 (2): 84-85.
Sharp, Lesley A. 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplantation, Denatured Body and the Transformed Self. Barkeley: University of California Press.
-----. 2007. Bodies, Commodities and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desires in the Realm of Human Organ Transplantation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shildrick, Margrit. 2008. “The Critical Turn in Feminist Bioethics: The Case of Heart Transplantation.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1 (1): 28-47.
Sibley, Priscille. 2013. The Promise of Stardust. United States: Harper Collins Publishers.
Wasson, Sara. 2015. “Scalpel and Metaphor: The Ceremony of Organ Harvest in Gothic Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies 17 (1): 104-142.