The Temporalities and Spatialities of Death, Dying, and Heart Donation

Contemporary biomedical technologies surrounding deceased organ transplantation raise urgent issues regarding the temporalities of the living and the dead, the disturbance of distinctions between self and other, and the question of absence and presence. There is no simple and stable futurity, but rather a host of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues that trouble both organ recipients and donor proxies. My claim is that heart transplantation in particular marks a fluid assemblage and intertwining of self and other at both the biological and ontological level, where personal identities and the conventional limits of life and death are deeply problematized. Nonetheless, those disturbing and inescapable challenges to conventional binaries are rarely explored within the authorized narrative of the clinic.