Ethics of the Body: Postcoventional Challenges (review)

How does one account for "body"? What constitutes a body? What makes a body "one's body"? Ethics of the Body begins with a lofty title, but the book will confine its understanding of this title within another term that is used repeatedly throughout: biomedical ethics (or occasionally, simply, bio-ethics). Indeed, one of the essays in this new collection defines bio-ethics as "regulat[ing] relations between 'self-present, autonomous, disembodied individuals' rather than bodies" (92). Bio-ethics thus understood concerns what are supposed to be the essential relations of life, but medical science has generally treated such vital relations as matters of free thought trapped in a body whose upkeep medicine is supposed to guarantee. Ethics of the Body accepts neither of these understandings, remaining in an odd liminal zone that continues to define the body as a medical function, even while interrogating the role of medicine in the definition of bodies. It is not surprising, then, that the volume's "ethics" ends up referring either to an individual doctor's relations with patients or to a law that would govern those individuals.

"The real test of bioethics is whether it is able to operate adequately in practice" (1), explains Shildrick. In this volume, however, "practice" rarely seems to concern itself with the transformation of embodied perspectives (for instance, asking how one experiences sensation in relation to perception), and seems rather to refer, on the one hand, to the "ethical" definition of the medicalized individual from a legal or medical outlook, and on the other, to the alienated experience of one's own body from the perspective of another (as when cancer patients finding themselves embroiled in all sorts of social expectations relative to their condition). "The question," Shildrick continues, "is one of . . . [the] desires of individual agents . . . uncertain as to how to proceed" (1). "What [each of the works in the collection] have in common is a commitment to a reconfiguration, rather than simple reform" (24). "Agents," it would seem, remains unfortunately constrained to mean medical professionals, and "reconfiguration" seems to be precisely the concern of the book: in it, disciplinary organizations will be only barely interrogated, and the problem at hand remains set in terms of what should be done within each discipline.

Ethics of the Body is divided into an introduction and four distinct sections. Shildrick's introduction pays homage to almost every theoretical obligation one might possibly have, from being adequate to practice, to uncertainty and the inability to truly resolve any problem, to unsaid assumptions, to being against grand narratives and concerned with borders, and to overcoming what the text sees as traditional models. A book that lived up to these promises would be quite formidable, but the individual sections of Ethics of the Body concern themselves with less ambitious topics. The first section, entitled "Critical Differences," treats of the manifestation of difference in the doctor-patient relationship (to be considered phenomenologically, although it is unclear where this gets us) and the concepts of variation within genetic "normality." "Thinking Through Crisis" conceives of the body in states of danger or decay: HIV, addiction, psychiatry (actually the "Ethics of the In-Between," although the notion of play espoused in this essay, combined with the categorical imposition of psychiatric diagnoses, offer a dangerous potential—acknowledged even by the essay, although summarily dismissed—for a sort of arbitrary, totalitarian psychologizing), and the decaying cancerous body. The notion of cancer as an intensification or acceleration (or even, if one must, mutation) of "natural" bodily processes is unfortunately not considered. Section Three, "The Challenge of Biotechnology," takes up agency, the question of how one defines an individual relative to the complexities of genetic code, and the dispersion of otherness throughout the genome (with the result that one is always already sharing bodies with an other, as how a child always shares bodily code with each parent). The final section, "Rethinking the Materiality of Embodiment," attempts to articulate an ethical mode of employing genetic research relative to perceived "abnormalities...