ABSTRACT
This chapter juxtaposes two opposing discourses on transplant medicine in order to expose the limits of ethical and moral language in depicting organ donations. The discourse of critical medical anthropology is introduced as a paradigmatic case of dystopian discourse on medicine, technology, and society. My main claim is that this discourse transforms transplant medicine into a metaphor, a metonym for the ills of modern medicine in a capitalist society. Likewise, the utopian discourse also uses metaphors in order to extol organ donation as the apex of technology, a scientific and social triumph. Here again, the instrumentalization of the social complexities that envelope organ exchange limits the view and damages the analysis. At the end of this chapter, I suggest political economy analysis as a way out of this analytic dead end.
