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 afigure 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.
