Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Margrit Shildrick
Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University. She is the author of several books, most recently Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2022) as well as countless journal articles, especially in the area of biophilosophy. Her interests have always been in embodiment – now in both human and posthuman form – and in postconventional bioethics. Recent research activities have included a decade long heart transplantation project, Queer Death Studies, Disability Futurity, and the KONE funded project ‘The Meanings and Workings of the Gift’.
(together with Alexandra Urakova)
What would gift theory have been like if it were called “a theory of the present” instead? Co-authored by a literary scholar and a biophilosopher, this paper teases out theoretical possibilities that this synonymous and generally dismissed term tentatively suggests. A key idea is inspired by Derrida who in Donner le Temps (1991) emphasizes the relation of the gift to the present as a relation “to the presence of the present.” Firstly, the paper discusses a little-known nineteenth century text “About Presents” (1853) by American sentimental author Caroline Mathilda Kirkland who made one of the first attempts to draft a theory of gifting. We argue that Kirkland conceptualizes the gift as a present by emphasizing its momentous value on the one hand, and its lasting presence sustained by the obligation to keep, on the other. Then we move to the seemingly unconnected realm of contemporary organ transplantation which is at the center of Gift of Life discourse and which reiterates many earlier patterns in a striking and almost uncanny way. Powerful crossovers include sentimentality and biosentimentality, keepsake and keepsafe (graft), the ghostly presence of the donor in the gift and the recipient as the gift’s hostage. Thinking of the transplanted organ through presence, acknowledging the presence of the other in one’s system allows us to tease out the possibility of rethinking the gift/present as a form of entanglement on the intracorporeal level as opposed to debt and exchange.