Surviving Birth in One Piece: Fetus ontology and personal identity

When does a human being begin? In the recent academic debate propelled by Elselijn Kingma, the fetus is conceived as either a substance being contained in or as a part of the pregnant organism, or as a process produced by another process. If a human being begins to exist earlier than at birth, how does prenatal existence relate to postnatal existence in terms of fetus and person? In this paper, I argue that neither the substance view nor the process view can account for the structure of becoming of a single being. In two steps, I present a new model called the substantive survival view: I take from Derrida the notion of survival (traces of the past continuously informing the present), and from Harman the notion of substance (a thing irreducible to its components and effects). I argue that from the very outset, the subject must be subjected to alterity, the possibility of becoming a person in the ongoing process of becoming informed by the past, which survives in modified form as traces.