ABSTRACT
Rapid developments in science and technology – particularly in biotechnology – have, during the last couple of decades, radically challenged many of our basic assumptions about human ontology, subjectivity and personhood. This has also caused pressure on the basic categories of our legal thought which continue ‘in the secular world the tradition based on the separation of the individual and spirit’,1 or things and persons.2 The developments have created novel risks, such as exploitation of life in biocapital, but also new possibilities to rethink some of our outdated legal assumptions which all too often have led to paradoxical and exclusionary outcomes.
