[ book tip by Tamar Tembeck ] In this personal autopathography, Jean-Luc Nancy provides a philosophical and poetic reflection on the experience of a heart transplant followed by lymphatic cancer. His highly evocative text primarily explores notions of identity and strangeness through the motif of intrusion, with inside and outside intermingling to such an extent that they become strangely indistinguishable.

Many of Nancy's philosophical reflections found in other texts, such as those pertaining to the nature of human interdependence, the inseparability of death with life and sociability, suddenly take on a very practical dimension: to live, Nancy needs someone else to die, but he also needs doctors to assess his right to live and to grant him this right through a transplant.

The experience of identitary fragmentation and multiplication brought on by the reception of the intruder - another person's heart - is counter-balanced by the experience of the stranger already within, the cancerous cells. Nancy points out the numerous ironies in his experience of health care and medicine: his cancer arises due to a lowered immune system, which in turn was meant to curtail his rejection of the transplanted heart. Medicine tried to make the body open to an intruder and in so doing allowed internal 'intruders' to pullulate.

[ book info ] Nancy, Jean-Luc: L'intrus.