FRANCINE WYNN, RN, PhD, Senior Lecturer Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

REFLECTING ON THE ONGOING AFTERMATH OF HEART TRANSPLANTATION:
JEAN-LUC NANCY'S L'INTRUS

Francine Wynn

This paper explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical reflection on surviving his own heart transplant. In L’Intrus (The Intruder), he raises central ethical questions concerning the relations between what he refers to as a “proper” life, that is, a life that is thought to be one’s own singular ‘lived experience’, and medical techniques, shaped at this particular historical juncture by cylcosporin or immuno-suppresssion. He describes the temporal nature of an ever-increasing sense of strangeness and fragmentation which accompanies his heart transplant. In doing so, he phenomenologically opens up the concealed of transplantation in terms of the problematic “gift” of a ‘foreign’ organ, the suffering intrusiveness of the treatment regimen, and the living of life as ‘bare life’. He uncovers and exposes the relentless uncanniness that pervades the post transplant experience, which for him is an example of our humanistic, never ending impulse, to alter ourselves. Nevertheless, Nancy offers no answer to this dilemma, but instead calls us to think about the meaning or “sense” of the prolonging of life and deferring of death, which currently drives our medical interventions.