ABSTRACT
I n “L’Intrus” Jean-Luc Nancy describes thealienating experience of his heart transplant. Most vividly his words make sensible how
from “pain to pain, strangeness to strangeness”
his proper “I” withdraws and becomes an intru-
der. The suffering of an opened, invaded, vul-
nerable body is infinite and the image of the
tortured body of a crucified Christ almost auto-
matically comes to mind.1 And yet this religious
connotation of sacrifice and martyrdom is pre-
cisely what Nancy puts into question. The
expropriation of organs, the torments of the
body bring us not closer to God but are rather
an indication of the death of God:
Corpus meum and interior intimo meo, the
two together state very exactly, and in a com-
plete configuration of the death of god, that
the truth of the subject is its exteriority and
excessivity: its infinite exposition. The
intrus exposes me, excessively. It extrudes,
it exports, it expropriates: I am the illness
and the medical intervention, I am the can-
cerous cell and the grafted organ […]2
Nancy explains this further by adding that we
are at the beginning of a mutation where man
is going infinitely beyond man (again, implying
the death of God) and becoming what he is and
always has been, namely the most terrifying and
troubling technician who refashions nature, and
re-creates creation.3 Organ transplantation,
which is an old phenomenon but only recently
successful since the first non-rejected kidney
transplant in 1954, is one more step in this
essential and troubling characteristic of
mankind.4 In both its legal and illegal practices
in the world market of globalized capitalism
today, organ transplantation is a form of bio-
power and biopolitics in the Foucauldian
sense: where life and its mechanisms are
“brought into the realm of explicit calculations
and power-knowledge [is] an agent of trans-
formations of human life.”5
