Main description:

This book addresses organ transplantation from a psychoanalytical perspective. Where other authors consider topics of informed consent, scarcity and organ trade, Zwart explores the ways in which the practice fundamentally challenges our basic experience and image of the body, revolving around issues such as embodiment, ownership and bodily integrity. In organ transplantation, the body emerges as something which we simultaneously have and are-constituting a whole, as well as a set of partial objects that can be transplanted and replaced, donated and sold.

Contents:

1. Introduction: organ recycling and embodiment2. The body as an aggregate of replaceable parts3. An ontological struggle: integrity versus fragmentation4. The real, the imaginary and the symbolic: Lacan's understanding of embodiment5. Love and the idealisation of the body6. Cannibalism and the partial object7. Another analogy: the catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart8. Types of discourse9. Commodification of organs as objects of desire10. A Lacanian assessment of organ transplantation11. Alfred Adler's concept of inferiority12. Thomas Starzl: a case history13. The transplant organ as an extimate object14. Separation and desire15. Bios and techne16. Revealing intrusions / intruding revelations17. An oblique perspective: organ transplant cinema18. Procuring the gift19. The toxicity of the purloined implant20. Crank 2: High voltage, or the purloined organ21. Depth ethics and the oblique perspective22. Encore: Middlesex and the re-makeable body