Given over to demand: excorporation as commitment

Abstract

This commentary discusses a set of essays, arguing that each examines a demand for the extraction or ‘excorporation’ of organic form to supplement a lack elsewhere, whether the apperception of that lack be located in the clinic, in national or regional politics, or in big data as databases come to promise the ground of inclusion and future life. Reading through and across the essays, it proposes a conceptual vocabulary rooted in a figure of ‘commitment’ or the ‘given over’, this given over opposed to an analytics of the gift. The argument is made that the body emerges as a ground for thought and action in its being given over to another, in its commitment. An analytics of commitment addresses the relation of parts and wholes in our attending to practices of excorporation and designations of sacrifice.

Keywords:

• India
• Bangladesh
• Pakistan
• bioethics
• transplantation
• transfusion
• genomics
• bioavailability
• commitment
• excorporation

Notes

1 I am grateful for William Stafford for turning me to The Fold here and beg the reader's indulgence for this premature gesture toward the Baroque as a form of thinking that might help us address the plenitude of excorporate commitments to which these essays point us.