Abstract

From organ transplants to genetic therapies by way of the manufacture of replacement tissue, regenerative medicine incarnates a biomedical reasoning that is unique to contemporary society. As a re-engineering of the body, regenerative medicine is the most accomplished manifestation of contemporary biopolitics: it concretely announces the emergence of what sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina calls the ‘culture of life’, in which individual existence is symbolically assimilated to biological conditions. This article will examine the symbolic and ethical issues of regenerative medicine, notably regarding representations of the ageing body. In doing so, it will place this new branch of biomedical research back into the context from which it emerged, with the goal of grasping the social and cultural suppositions on which regenerative medicine is based. The growing number of elderly people in Western societies is one such central element. This article therefore intends to demonstrate how regenerative medicine is rooted in the modern biomedical deconstruction of death, which underlies the contemporary technoscientific fantasy of indefinitely extending longevity.