Ta's Paper

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Page 1: I would insert a footnote that documents some of the controversy about organ procurement from convicted criminals and also the sensationalization of this issue in Falungong networks worldwide.

There is a thread undeveloped in your essay about the propriety of the body (in the sense of who owns it?). Does the young man own the right to dispose of his organs as he sees fit? Is this one of those murky areas between a socialist ideological system and the new legal system (the one that the people need to be instructed about)? Do the parents have rights over the body of their children in the sense of an obligated return to them for the sacrifices they made on behalf of the children (the tradition of filiality)? Does the state have rights over the bodies of its citizens? Are these competing rights clarified through this case or do they remain unresolved? You raise the question of possession a bit in page 7, but I think it needs to be elaborated as a legal point. A case of habeas corpus in the more literal sense of “who has the legal right to the body.”

You might mention that von Hagen does not just claim his exhibit as science as a new art form, moreover one in which his subjects willingly donate their bodies to be immortalized in plastic. Of course there are crossovers between science and art—both involve processes of close observation. But it bears thinking about the relative roles of art and science in legitimating this public display of dead human remains.

Page 2: the body brokers—you might mention how unreclaimed bodies or the bodies of convicts have long had a market value—going back to the Victorian era. Catherine Gallagher has quite a wonderful essay on Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which is all about the sale of bodies fished up in the Thames and also bodies for dissection and taxidermy!!! She begins with the question: Is it possible for a dead man to be the possessor of wealth? This relates directly to the propriety of the money reward in your story. I am also thinking of Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, which discusses in great detail the way that executions were used to wage class warfare in 19th-century Britain. People were hanged for quite inconsequential crimes, especially those that were deemed “crimes of property” in a new private property regime.

Page 2, first full para: I think you move a little too quickly here. You need to insert some discussion of the difficulty of obtaining voluntary organ donations in China. Are there cultural issues that complicate such a campaign (as there were in blood donation for example)?

Page 4, first full para: This last paragraph in the section needs to invoke the fetish of consent here. Can you pose it in a way that it returns with gathering force as you move through your argument (i.e., with each return)?

Page 6: Are you told whether this letter left to his mother is the same letter that is regarded as his last will and testament? Does he leave the money explicitly to his parents? Or is this left unclear? Is the text offered verbatim?

Organ donation as social sacrifice: as we discussed in class this part of the story does not quite hold together. Why would there be a money reward given to someone who has already donated his organs in ignorance of such a prospect? Your job as analyst is to note the gaps and fissures in the story itself and try to understand how these areas of murkiness work ideologically in producing a public message (i.e., those things that had to remain unclear in order for the state to extract a representational surplus value from this story).

Page 7, second full para: Whether a body has more value alive or dead connects this story with the biopolitical and the necropolitics that emerge from a neoliberal political logic. I see that you do not reference Agamben’s Homo Sacer here (i.e., he who can be sacrificed without loss) and yet the story fairly screams out for some discussion of how some bodies have value only in their application to other bodies (visions of the Frankenstein Monster).