A Graft, Physiological and Philosophical: Jean‐Luc Nancy's L'Intrus

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Notes

1. Throughout the essay we cite passages from Jean‐Luc Nancy's L'Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). When using quotes in English, we have used Susan Hanson's excellent translation, which appeared in The New Centennial Review, 2:3 (2002), pp.1–14, although the page numbers given refer to the French text. A new translation of Nancy's essay by Richard A. Rand is forthcoming in Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

2. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

3. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.14.

4. Jean‐Luc Nancy, 58 Indices sur le corps (Montreal: Nota Bene, 2004), §1.

5. As François Jacob explains, the early modern placement of the heart at the core of mechanist biology and thought (for example by Descartes following Harvey) is a direct result of the heart's own function as a pump. Nancy's reference to Artaud aims precisely at that: François Jacob, The Logic of Life, trans. B. Spillmann (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp.34–35.

6. Jean‐Luc Nancy, 58 Indices sur le corps, §16.

7. Jean‐Luc Nancy, 58 Indices sur le corps, §3.

8. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.16–18.

9. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.25.

10. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.21, 29.

11. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.30–32.

12. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.32.

13. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.37.

14. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.37–38

15. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.36.

16. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.35.

17. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.30, 31, 37 and especially 39.

18. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.45.

19. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.15.

20. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.15–16.

21. François Delaporte, ‘Anthropology of a Surgical First’, in anthropologies, ed. R. Baxstrom and T. Meyers (Baltimore: Creative Capitalism Press, 2008), pp.95–102.

22. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.15.

23. René Leriche, La chirurgie de la douleur (Paris: Masson, 1937).

24. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.18.

25. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.27–28.

26. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.25–26.

27. Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Living and Its Milieu’ in: Knowledge of Life, trans. S. Geroulanos and D. Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

28. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.31.

29. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.36.

30. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.17 (emphasis ours).

31. René Descartes, ‘Letter to Chanut, March 31, 1649’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol.3: Correspondence, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.370.

32. René Leriche, La chirurgie de la douleur.

33. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p.91.

34. This is what Nancy's ‘general law of intrusion’ (‘il n'y a jamais eu une seule intrusion’, L'Intrus, p.32) ultimately denotes.

35. ‘Or on chercherait en vain dans la phénoménologie un concept qui permette de penser l'intensité ou la force. De penser la puissance et non seulement la direction, la tension et non seulement le in de l'intentionnalité. Toute la valeur est d'abord constituée par un sujet théorique’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force et signification’, in L'Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1979), pp.9–49 (p.46).

36. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.14.

37. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.21.

38. Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

39. Nancy Scheper‐Hughes, ‘The Ends of the Body – Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs’, SAIS Review 22:1 (2002), pp.61–80.

40. Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper‐Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002). The exception to this perspective can be found in the work of Lawrence Cohen on bioavailability.

41. Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

42. Margaret Lock, Twice Dead, p.22.

43. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.21–22.

44. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.22.

45. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.20.

46. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

47. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

48. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.38–39.

49. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.40–41.

50. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.42–43.

51. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.44.

52. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

53. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.25.

54. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.29.

55. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.23.

56. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.21 (emphasis ours).

57. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.23.

58. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.21.

59. Jean‐Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p.99.

60. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.22.

61. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.13–14.

62. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

63. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.32. Questions of conditioning and biological programming have been of major concern to French epistemology in the past half‐century, the ‘genetic program’ being of course the major heading under which François Jacob (following the paradigm emerging in 1960s genetics, and his own contributions to it) placed the successes of the genetic revolution in The Logic of Life. Influential treatments of the questions of the program include Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), and Henri Atlan, La Fin du tout génétique? (Paris: Éditions INRA, 1999). When Nancy cites his doctor claiming that his heart was programmed to last to the age of fifty, he is playing on the figure of the genetic program, exploiting precisely a struggle between medicine and genetics on medically‐refigured patienthood (survival, subjectivity).

64. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

65. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.24.

66. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.43.

67. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.25, p.30.

68. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.25.

69. See Jacques Derrida, The Post‐Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.259 and following.

70. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.41.

71. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.14–15.

72. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.41.

73. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.45.

74. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.16.

75. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.41.

76. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.45.

77. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.13.

78. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.39.

79. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.15.

80. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.25.

81. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.17.

82. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.19–20.

83. Nancy again implicitly invokes Canguilhem, who writes ‘The truth of my body – its very constitution or its authenticity of existence – is not an idea susceptible to representation, just as, according to Malebranche, there is no idea of the soul’. See Georges Canguilhem, ‘Health: Crude Concept and Philosophical Question’, trans. T. Meyers and S. Geroulanos, Public Culture 20:3 (2008), pp.467–77.

84. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.42.

85. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.42.

86. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, pp.42–43.

87. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.41.

88. Jean‐Luc Nancy, L'Intrus, p.40.