Abstract

I take up Derrida's metaphorical question, "Does one invent the child?" (from the mid-1980s). Given recent advancements in genetic engineering and cloning, this question takes on a more literal hue. So-called designer babies threaten to turn parents into patents in ways that assume we can control reproduction. Derrida's "deconstructive genealogy" presents a challenge to the notion of parent as patent and suggests that even in the face of changing technologies, we cannot control the chance elements of reproduction, even within the most reliable machines. Here, I turn the notions of parent and patent against themselves, which opens up alternative meanings of both, and again enables one nail to take out another. Furthermore, technologies that raise anew the question of maternity merely highlight the ways in which both maternity and paternity are always uncertain, matters of chance, and assume a problematic notion of testimony. In the end, I argue that current debates in bioethics over genetic engineering assume that we can master reproduction through technologies (whether we approve of that or not) and disavow chance, which is always operative in the machinery of life, particularly in the reproduction of life.

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