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Sarah Blacker
Cultural Studies and Critical Theory Executive Committee
Major Research Project Proposal
Writing on the Body: The Graft in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida
While existing research on organ donation in the humanities focuses on
philosophical articulations of the “self”/”other” distinction in the context of organ
donation (Fox and Swazey [1992]; Ross [2002]) and cultural beliefs regarding the
sanctity of the body (Sharp [1995]; Belk [1992]), my project seeks to explore the
problems and possibilities surrounding the notion of gift-giving between strangers by
focussing on how the complexities of the gift of an organ unsettles our understanding of
the nature of individual consent, patients’ interests, and societal expectations about the
body of the one who is deemed to be the “stranger.” I argue that we need to find the
means to radically revise our very concepts of the gift; this work is already complexly
underway in the writings of Derrida (1992; 1995). In a now widely cited argument,
Derrida argues that the “pure” gift, the gift that has, in effect, given away its status even
as gift, is empirically impossible but conceptually necessary as the horizon against which
gifts of more conventional kinds appear and become meaningful. The “pure” gift is, in
other words, a counter-intuitive hazard or threat–a radically priceless “object” in a world
that is otherwise wholly given over to getting and spending, and to understanding all
phenomena as reducible to those terms. Does the mere prospect of organ donation
between strangers hint at the possibility of the “pure” gift? Does its conceptual excess
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vis-à-vis conventional, exchange-based understandings of social interaction account for
the reluctance of policy makers and physicians to embrace donation between “strangers”
(that is, those deemed “strangers” in the absence of “familial relatedness,” either through
genetics or kinship)? My project seeks to develop new languages to address the nature of
the gift and the consequences of gift-giving when the gift in question is an organ that
appears to be given solely for the sake of being-given, yet is interpreted as an intruder
inflicting violence upon the recipient.
Nowhere is the unlikely affinity between contemporary philosophy and
embodiment, theory and the question of transplantation, more complexly evident and
consequentially alive than in Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Intrus, a meditation on his heart
transplant, subsequent lymphoma, and stem cell transplant. What happens when one of
the world’s leading philosophers falls ill and reflects philosophically upon that illness?
L’Intrus, first published in French in 2000 and translated into English by Susan Hanson
for The New Centennial Review in 2002, is the ideal archive through which to explore
theory of the gift, hospitality, the “stranger,” foreignness, and distinctions between “self”
and “other.” Nancy’s text itself can be viewed as a grafting of “theory” into the body and
“life proper” in that L’Intrus is a contemporary theorist’s meditation on his own
experience of transplantation, and is thus an exceptionally rich text through which to
examine theoretical questions in a “biomedical” context.
The provocative title of Nancy’s text captures the reader’s attention even before
the very first sentence is read: the intruder. For those readers who are aware of the
subject matter Nancy addresses in his text, this title registers as curious, to say the least.
Knowing that L’Intrus chronicles Nancy’s heart transplant, it seems counter-intuitive that
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this experience would be characterized as one in which a being is intruded upon, rather
than one in which a rare and priceless gift is received, health is restored, and a life is
“saved” or preserved. Recalling Derrida’s assertion that “as good,” the gift “can also be
bad, poisonous…the gift puts the other in debt, with the result that giving amounts to
hurting, to doing harm” (Given Time 12), I view Nancy’s text as a meditation on the
ambivalent valences of the gift—including the possibility of experiencing a gift as
“poisonous” or “parasite.” In what sense, then, is the heart poisonous? The donated
heart has zero capacity to function on its own; it is entirely dependent upon being housed
within and connected to a functional human body in order to carry out its duties. This
donated heart of an other is grafted into Nancy’s body when his own heart, his original
heart, begins to fail. In order to accommodate this stranger, this other, within a bastion of
sameness, Nancy’s immune system is pharmaceutically induced into a repressed state, its
“natural” tendencies towards violence and rejection subdued. Is the donated heart not an
unexpected and undeserved gift that miraculously arrives to do the work the diseased
heart loses the ability to carry out?
Nancy’s text does not take up the question of donated organ as panacea in a
discussion of any significant length; instead, he characterizes the donated organ as a
poisonous parasite upon the “proper” body. The text does not express a great deal of
wonder and gratefulness in response to the receipt of such a vital body part from an
unknown other. Instead, the donated heart is aligned with the parasitic, suggesting that
the grafting of the other within the self inflicts great violence (psychically, at least, if not
physiologically). What is the character of this violence? It seems, from Nancy’s
account, that it is the structural changes to the body inflicted by the stranger within that
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instantiate Nancy’s grief more so than the mere existence of alterity within the
medicalized body. How is this insight instructive for our thinking of the ways in which
we theorize our own dwelling with alterity, our sense of what constitutes the body
“proper,” and what it means to be “healthy” and “whole”? Does Nancy’s account warn
against the dangers of welcoming the other solely on our own accord, of feigning a
hospitality towards the other that is actually an inhospitable welcoming only of the
aspects of the other that are beneficial to the self, while jettisoning those that might
require some compromise, upheaval, and revisions on our part?
L’Intrus is a troubling text with respect its engagement with questions of “self”
and “other,” interiority and exteriority, propriety, belonging, the “natural,” and the
“strange” or “foreign” in a medical context. Indeed, Nancy’s characterization of his own
post-transplant subjectivity as béance, or a “gaping open” (10), calls for a rethinking of
subjectivity in an age of identity-restructuring medical technology. As Anne O’Byrne
suggests, L’Intrus overturns a conception of subjectivity defined by “accessible exteriors
hiding inscrutable interiors” (178). Through L’Intrus, Nancy reveals a previously
inscrutable interior and invites us to think through the “intrusion” of the other’s organ as
a gift enacting radical dispossession. This transplant constitutes a novel form of
exchange that repels moralizing and reconciliatory gestures by provoking us to revalue
force and violence, pointing towards a relation to foreignness that more closely resembles
being-with than assimilation.
With good reason, Christopher Fynsk describes L’Intrus as both a “testimony to
suffering” and “a protest” (24) possessing a “striking asceticism, even austerity” (32).
Fynsk views Nancy’s text as a chronicle of perpetual conflict and the impossibility for
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reconciliation: a text that is, at its core, one of discomfort. However, Nancy’s account of
the “conflict” seems restrained; it is difficult for the reader to discern the nature of
Nancy’s personal experience of the “invasion.” As Fynsk points out, though L’Intrus is
Nancy’s most autobiographical text to date, Nancy “largely removes himself from the
narrative” (26). How strange and telling: a narrative that is confessional in its orientation
but somehow anonymous in its content. My project seeks also to explore how this
paradox itself constitutes an important part of Nancy’s reflection on the nature of
“intrusion” and the self’s encounter with foreignness. Reading a text that is
simultaneously rich but sparse can be a highly productive activity: that which Nancy
gestures towards, but refrains from discussing within this space, begs for critical
engagement. Nancy’s text points outside of itself with subtlety and grace at every
juncture; it is in these openings, these provocations, that this project will locate its shape
and direction. My paper will be taken up with a close reading of Nancy’s capacious text,
structured by close critical attention towards and commentary upon the modes of
expression and patterns through which we see several key theoretical concepts play out in
Nancy’s text. More specifically, the project will be divided into two sections: the first
section will trace out a framework featuring the Derridean genealogies of the key
theoretical concepts to be employed throughout my reading of Nancy’s text, namely, the
graft, hospitality, the stranger, and the gift; the second section will be comprised of my
close reading of L’Intrus, through which I will propel Nancy’s words to enact a different
type of theoretical work than they currently perform within a text that has received
remarkably little critical attention.
The very language with which we discuss identity in the context of organ
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replacement surgery is important; it is crucial that discrepancies in terminology are laid
out, even at this very early stage. As Peggy Kamuf notes, there is an incongruity in
medical terminology employed to describe the surgical procedures Nancy undergoes.
The terminology varies depending upon linguistic context: while in English, the
procedure is referred to as a “transplant,” in French, it is a “graft.” There is a significant
etymological difference between the two terms that is important to our discussion here.
The semantic journey traveled by the word “transplant” is straightforward and
uncomplicated: “transplant” is derived from the Latin transplantere, meaning “trans‘across’ and plantere- ‘to plant’, or ‘something or someone moved to a new place”
(OED). Conversely, “graft” is etymologically derived from the Greek graphion, meaning
“stylus, writing implement,” related to graphein: “write” (OED). I am interested in the
way in which the act of writing lies dormant in our every utterance of “graft” and in each
of our references to the procedure of the grafting of organs. While “transplant” implies a
straightforward replacement of one faulty or diseased organ with a healthy, functional
organ, “graft” reminds us that this procedure is not so simple or mechanical. ‘Transplant’
suggests a sterile, surgical procedure that promptly returns function to the ill patient,
while “graft” points to a surgical event that is messy, and leaves a trace, pointing to the
way in which the surgery is always-already a psychical event in excess of the visible
scars that remind us of its occurrence. Furthermore, while “transplant” suggests a total
doing-away with the old organ and its complete substitution with the new organ, “graft”
more accurately reflects the inability to ever remove all traces of the first organ from the
body, even if these traces remain solely in a spectral form. Instead, “graft” suggests a
melding together of two disparate entities, forming a lasting attachment or collaboration.
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This characterization of the surgical procedure is apt considering the ways in which the
very concept of organ grafting so radically calls into question our comfortable conception
of the individual’s absolute singularity as flowing out of a bodily integrity or wholeness
that determines one’s identity. Organ grafting, then, enacts a specific type of writing on
the body: it is writing that “renders the graftee a stranger to himself” (Nancy 9). Nancy
suggests that following such a surgical procedure, an individual can no longer be ‘at
home’ in his or her (divisible) body.1
For Derrida, the act of writing is indissociable from the act of grafting. In
Dissemination, Derrida states: “[t]o write means to graft. It’s the same word…The graft
is not something that happens to the properness of the thing. There is no more any thing
than there is any original text” (355). Here, Derrida refers to the concept of the prosthesis
and his assertion that every thesis is always-already a prosthesis (Glas 189). From this
passage we can ascertain that every text we encounter is entirely constituted by grafts. So
deeply entrenched is this process of grafting that it is impossible to locate any
homogenous substance not formed out of a merging with another. Derrida emphasizes
the covert nature of this grafting; this process of textual coalescence is imperceptible as
the incisions leave no scars behind. Derrida writes of the grafted text:
[i]t is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the
thickness of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating allogene
through which the two texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each
other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the
other and become regenerated in the repetition, along the edges of an overcast
seam [un surjet] (Dissemination 355).
In this rich passage we can identify the themes that constitute Nancy’s L’Intrus: violence,
1
It is important to interrogate the conception of bodily integrity and wholeness insinuated here when we
compare the intruded-upon body to that which is supposedly ‘natural’, ‘originary’, ‘pure’, and ‘untainted by
foreignness’. For, as Derrida reminds us, our bodies are always-already prosthetic, intruded-upon from the
beginning.
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proliferation, transformation, deformation, contamination, rejection, movement,
regeneration, and repetition.
If “[m]eaning is produced by a process of grafting” (Culler 134) and textual
grafting is “inserting one discourse in another” (Culler 135), how is this instructive for
our discussion of organ transplantation as “writing on the body”? Some of Derrida’s
texts, including Glas, embody the graft through their form: two columns of text facing
each other, continually reminding the reader that every text constantly refers outside of
itself. By making it impossible to view a text as an entirely self-contained, homogeneous
monolith, Derrida provokes us to view the text as an entity that is always-already
indebted, and in relation to, other texts. What, then, does it mean to view Nancy’s
physical body as a grafted text, an always-already prosthetic thesis? I want to explore
what it might mean to view Nancy’s grafted body as the merging of two columns of text
within one body. If we read Nancy’s body in the same way we read Derrida’s texts
featuring oppositional columns, we cannot help but work towards a radical breaking
down of the staunchly-enforced (within a medical model, at least) opposition between
“self” and “other.”
In his discussion of the graft in Derrida’s work, Jonathan Culler asserts that “[t]he
graft is the very figure of intervention” (141). We will view the bodily graft in the same
way for the purposes of this discussion: the graft for Nancy is perpetual intervention,
displacement, and struggle. Identifying the locus of the graft in a text involves seeking
out “the points of juncture and stress where one scion or line of argument has been
spliced with another” (Culler 135). In the same way, Nancy’s L’Intrus is a chronicle of
the “points of juncture and stress” arising out of the splicing of arteries. Nancy
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characterizes these points as points of béance, or “gaping open” (10). The unending
shifting and displacement within Nancy’s body is not merely the effect of the surgical
incision that ushered in the intruder. Instead, Nancy attributes the internal struggle to
“this gaping open [béance] that cannot be closed” (10). We see this structure of an open
wound repeated in Derrida’s description of the grafted text as an entity that “limps and
closes badly” (Derrida in Culler, 139).
Perhaps we should view this stubborn structural openness as the locus or
passageway of the pharmakos, or “scapegoat.” In the same way that the pharmakos is
identified as “the evil that afflicts the city” (Culler 143), Nancy characterizes his donated
heart as intruder and parasite within his body. In this way, Nancy’s grafted heart is the
scapegoat that cannot be expelled from the city since the city would promptly crumble
upon the intruder’s expulsion. Thus, the intruder is not welcomed and offered
hospitality; instead, its presence is tolerated. However, we cannot view the donated heart
alone as the graft, for as Derrida reminds us, the body as text is wholly comprised of
grafts. Throughout Nancy’s text, we observe that the “intruding” heart oscillates between
its status as remedy in the form of a gift of health and renewed life and its status as
poisonous parasite. Culler asserts that this is the paradigmatic form assumed by writing
as supplement in Derrida: “it is an artificial addition which cures and infects” (142). The
pharmakon, or “intruder” for Nancy, features at bottom an ambivalence, perpetually
morphing between two extremes as “the possibility of both poison and remedy” (143).
At the beginning of his text, Nancy characterizes his receipt of the heart of
another as a contamination rather than as a panacea for a medical affliction that imposed
severe restrictions on his physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities prior to the
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transplant. As Fynsk suggests, there is an “irreducible discomfort, even…dispossession
that comes with the advent of the strange” (25). Indeed, the intruder is discussed in
relation to a gift-through-dispossession throughout the text. The accusation of
dispossession, though, does not remain with the intruder; Nancy reveals a self that was
always-already dispossessed when he identifies his own diseased heart in its limited, pretransplant functionality, as the originary intruder: “[m]y heart was becoming my own
foreigner” (4). At the height of his illness, when the first heart becomes the intruder,
Nancy’s self is defined wholly by its technical status in the context of medicine. Though
his heart has betrayed him and is now working his body away from life and towards
death, it is this same heart that entirely shapes his identity: “‘I’ am, because I am ill” (4).
Now, the intruding diseased heart must be excised; its non-functionality necessitates the
deployment of the stranger’s heart. At this moment, Nancy’s text demonstrates a
decidedly conditional hospitality: the foreign heart is received in the absence of welcome,
and solely out of desperation, as symbolized by the violent surgical incising of flesh to
make way for the stranger. Indeed, Nancy’s text constantly evokes Derrida’s discussion
of hostipitality in the sense that the reader is never certain whether the intruder will prove
to be an enemy or an ally to Nancy as recipient. Within Nancy’s fascinating conceptual
turn in which violence and intimacy become inextricably tied to one another, we see that
distinctions made between health and illness, purity and contamination, and benevolence
and destructiveness on the part of the intruder, can no longer be relied upon. As Nancy
writes, “[w]hat cures me is what infects or affects me; what allows me to live causes me
to age prematurely” (12). This provocation reminds us that this gift of an organ must be
theorized in light of Derrida’s discussion of the gift as both present and poison.
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Is Nancy’s discussion of a medically-imposed béance instructive for our thinking
with respect to relationality between “self” and “other” and hospitality? Nancy
characterizes his receipt of the intruder in the form of a functioning heart, along with
pharmaceutical panaceas designed to repress his body’s “natural” tendency towards a
rejection of the other being grafted on to his self, as a “disturbance and perturbation of
intimacy” (2). But later on in his text, Nancy points to the possibility of an intimacy with
alterity that is facilitated by immuno-suppressant drugs that both prevent the body from
rejecting the grafted organ and allow other intruders, in the form of viruses and
infections, to enter the body. In this drug-induced state of radical opening to alterity,
“[s]trangeness and strangerness become ordinary, everyday occurrences” (9). Does this
condition mark a gesture towards unconditional hospitality? Nancy suggests that his
identity is entirely informed by his immune status; what would it mean to reconceptualize
identity as a measure of the degree of immunity we possess and mobilize in response to a
chronic proliferation of intruders? Nancy traces out an originary and unwavering
strangeness that is not solely found within, but is actually constitutive of, the self: “an
immune system that is at odds with itself, forever at cross purposes, irreconcilable” (10).
Can a discussion of a physical grafting of an organ formerly belonging to an other
instructively demonstrate a radical opening of the self to otherness, though the two may,
on some level, forever remain irreconcilable? Nancy does suggest that reconciliation
could take place, and suffering could be reduced, if only we could receive the intruder
graciously and without resistance: “the suffering is the relation of the intrusion and its
refusal” (11). It is precisely for this reason that Nancy’s text is so important: he speaks of
a seemingly “natural” biological response of the self’s violent attack on the intruding
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other, only to later insist that there can be no ideological differentiation between the two.
Nancy’s discussion radically overturns any notions of distance and incommensurability
between “self” and “other,” whether within community or without. The béance brought
forth by L’Intrus announces a radically new conception of subjectivity within which there
can be no division between “self” and “other.” The two are intricately woven together
through a surgical grafting, and in this way, the “self” not only permanently dwells with
the “other,” but both are altered and identity arises out of and is wholly determined by the
in-between: “[t]he intrus is no other than me, my self” (13).
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Preliminary Works Cited
Adamek, Philip M. “The Intimacy of Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Intrus.” CR: The New
Centennial Review 2.3 (2002): 189-201.
Belk, Russell W. “Me and Thee Versus Mine and Thine: How Perceptions of the Body
Influence Organ Donation and Transplantation.” Organ Donation and
Transplantation: Psychological and Behavioral Factors. Ed. James Shanteau and
Richard Jackson Harris. Washington: American Psychological Association, 1992.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
London: Routledge, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1981.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias: dying—awaiting (one another at) the “limits of truth.”
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Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: The University of
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Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality,” Trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock. Angelaki:
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Derrida, Jacques. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford:
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Egginton, William. “The Sacred Heart of Dissent.” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3
(2002): 109-138.
Fox, Renee C. and Judith P. Swazey, Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Freund, Peter and Meredith McGuire. Health, Illness, and the Social Body: A Critical
Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1991.
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Fynsk, Christopher. “L’Irréconciliable.” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3 (2002):
23-36.
Hanson, Susan. “The One in the Other.” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3 (2002):
203-209.
Kamuf, Peggy. “Béance.” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3 (2002): 37-56.
Komesaroff, Paul A., ed. Troubled Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism,
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Review 2.3 (2002): 15-22.
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2.3 (2002): 1-14.
O’Byrne, Anne. “The Politics of Intrusion.” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.3
(2002): 169-187.
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Schrift, Alan D., ed. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York:
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Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of
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Shershow, Scott Cutler. The work and the gift. Chicago: The University of Chicago
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Žižek, Slavoj, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in
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