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Configurations 11.1 (2003) 81-109



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Life . . . On Biology, Biography, and Bio-power in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Paolo Palladino
Lancaster University





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Figure 1
Michelangelo, The Creation of Man. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library)


A spectre is haunting western academia . . . the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.
Slavoj Zizek 1

Introduction

Let me begin to engage with Michelangelo's "Creation of Man" (Fig. 1) and Slavoj Zizek's provocative rendition of the famous lines from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by turning to yet another image, the frontispiece (Fig. 2) in Nicolas Andry's Orthopaedia, [End Page 81] or the Art of Preventing and Correcting Deformities in Children (1741). In this unsettling image, which has proved critically important in my effort to integrate years of work on the history of agricultural and medical genetics, all difference between the straightening of misshapen trees and the physical and moral education of children, with whom the orthopedist was once concerned, is erased. 2



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Figure 2
Frontispiece from Nicolas Andry, Orthopaedia, or the Art of Preventing and Correcting Deformities in Children (London, 1743). (Reproduced by courtesy of the British Library.)


If this image will seem familiar to some readers, it is because it is also reproduced in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. 3 Presumably, Foucault was particularly interested in the frontispiece to Andry's Orthopaedia because it clearly conveyed how, at some point in the eighteenth century, practices as disparate as orthopedics and horticulture were increasingly predicated on operative principles that focused on the manipulation of these different life forms' presumed common material substance. 4 Moreover, the image begs questions of agency, since it is unclear who exactly bound the tree: no human or divine form is visible anywhere in the background; the image therefore accorded with Foucault's understanding that the operation of these principles was invisible and pervasive. 5 Of course, [End Page 82] Foucault is famous for his discussions of the role that such principles have increasingly played in the production of modern social and political subjectivity. 6 Arguably, the decoding of the human genome marks the climax of the historical process that Foucault identified. 7 On the eve of this event, an editorial in the Observer noted, with mixed feelings:

Tomorrow, the first rough draft of the human genetic code will be published—one of the epic achievements of contemporary science. We will know the gene sequences that determine our mental and physical behaviour. We will have the tools that in decades ahead will allow us to understand how much of what we do is predetermined and how much is of our own free will. The moral and social implications are barely discussed. . . . In the early twentieth century the so-called science of eugenics informed Nazi arguments to justify the Holocaust. Once again we are exposed to the risk that deadly value judgments will be linked to the structure of some gene sequences over others. 8

Even if the fears evoked by this assessment of the decoding of the human genome may be misplaced, there can be little doubt that the contemporary, accelerating identification of political and social being with the contingencies of material substance signals the impending [End Page 83] death of the transcendental subject. 9 Strikingly, however, the official report of the decoding of the human genome suggests otherwise. While it warns that "the more we learn about the human genome, the more there is to explore," this highly technical report immediately seeks to reassure its readers by closing with the following lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time. 10

If the first part of these concluding thoughts on the decoding of the human genome speaks to a sense of having embarked upon a search whose end will always be deferred...

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