Matters of the Heart

Abstract

In addressing matters of the heart, I want to abandon a unified approach in favour of bringing empirical, biological and philosophical – and especially bioethical insights into conversation. My own involvement in an ongoing heart transplantation project sprang from my identification as a body theorist with an unapologetic commitment to postconventional philosophy and critical cultural theory. Plenty of empirical work already existed around the topic of transplantation, both in strictly biomedical texts that eschewed speculation and in the social sciences which was more open to providing a theoretical envelope to research data, but it was hard to find philosophical texts that reference any systematic enquiry into reported lived experience or that engage directly with clinical findings. The pleasure of working with a radically multidisciplinary teami has ensured that all those elements must be taken into account in order to work together productively. Rather than having an additive model, however, we have arrived at an approach that interweaves many areas of expertise and diverse methodologies that reflect the extraordinary complexity of the object of our endeavour. ii Heart transplantation emerged from this process as a seemingly inexhaustible source of questions. What I present here is simply a plateau of ongoing thought, not a place of final arrival.