Abstract

What constitutes the normative body is always and everywhere open to challenge and disruption, particularly in the era of postmodernity when contemporary forms of technological practice intervene directly in our bodies. I shall focus on heart transplantation where, followingthe graft, the recipient’s sense of self as a bounded and unique individual is necessarily disturbed, and it is clear that an outcome favourable to extended life expectancy cannot be read through clinical measures alone. My speculative suggestion is that there are many other factors in play that might be most usefully interrogated through a variety of theoretical resources relating to the strand of cultural analysis that interrogates and rejects the modernist self-other paradigm. For the purposes of this paper, however, I shall largely restrict my comments to the phenomenology of embodiment as proposed by Merleau-Ponty