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Chapter 4 - Surplus Value

Transplantation and Fungible Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2021

Sherryl Vint
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Summary

This chapter thinks through the transnational market in organ transplantation, an industry that has many economic and geographic parallels with the fertility industry. I demonstrate how it, too, is implicated in a racialized production of the human and the channeling of vitality toward lives deemed more valuable in a global organ economy. The chapter analyzes two recent novels that extend this precarious condition more widely, to argue that this generalized vulnerability to becoming commodified is central to why the liberal humanist dispositif is not only historically compromised but also contemporarily ineffective. Both Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit are premised on an expansion of the category of disposable life that is at root an economic assessment of the contribution that life can make. These novels reiterate and draw our attention to how the real subsumption of life by capital, as shaped by the transplantation industry, is rewriting how we value life in contexts that extend far beyond the lives of organ donors and recipients.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Surplus Value
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.005
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  • Surplus Value
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Surplus Value
  • Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction
  • Online publication: 16 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108979382.005
Available formats
×