1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910814199703321

Autore

Oliver Kelly <1958->

Titolo

Technologies of life and death [[electronic resource] ] : from cloning to capital punishment / / Kelly Oliver

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Fordham University Press, 2013

ISBN

0-8232-5225-6

0-8232-5303-1

0-8232-5226-4

0-8232-5110-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (272 p.)

Disciplina

174.2

Soggetti

Bioethics

Biotechnology - Moral and ethical aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Moral Machines and Political Animals -- One. Genetic Engineering: Deconstructing Grown versus Made -- Two. Artificial Insemination: Deconstructing Choice versus Chance -- Three. Girl Powered: Poetic Majesty against Sovereign Majesty -- Four. Rearview Mirror: Art, Violence, and Sublimation -- Five. Elephant Autopsy: Optic Machinery and the Scale of Sovereignty -- Six. Deadly Devices: Animals, Capital Punishment, and the Scope of Sovereignty -- Seven. Death Penalties: Ethics, Politics, and the Unconscious of Sovereignty -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The central aim of this book is to approach contemporary problems raised by technologies of life and death as ethical issues that call for a more nuanced approach than mainstream philosophy can provide. To do so, it draws on the recently published seminars of Jacques Derrida to analyze the extremes of birth and dying insofar as they are mediated by technologies of life and death. With an eye to reproductive technologies, it shows how a deconstructive approach can change the very terms of contemporary debates over technologies of life and death, from cloning to surrogate motherhood to capital punishment,



particularly insofar as most current discussions assume some notion of a liberal individual. The ethical stakes in these debates are never far from political concerns such as enfranchisement, citizenship, oppression, racism, sexism, and the public policies that normalize them. Technologies of Life and Death thus provides pointers for rethinking dominant philosophical and popular assumptions about nature and nurture, chance and necessity, masculine and feminine, human and animal, and what it means to be a mother or a father. In part, the book seeks to disarticulate a tension between ethics and politics that runs through these issues in order to suggest a more ethical politics by turning the force of sovereign violence back against itself. In the end, it proposes that deconstructive ethics with a psychoanalytic supplement can provide a corrective for moral codes and political clichés that turn us into mere answering machines.