The Human Body As a Complex System, between Organic Matter, Meaning and Alienation
The Human Body As a Complex System, between Organic Matter, Meaning and Alienation
Friday, 11 July 2025: 09:00
Location: FSE004 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Oral Presentation
The human body is a complex whole. It is composed of many parts that make up a system, and is made up of organic tissue and incorporeal thought. The body is much studied by sociology, but only as the location of processes of meaning and subjectivation, while human biological matter is regarded as inert, ‘merely living,’ and alien to all relationships. The paper argues that - when, 30 years ago, biotechnology started to use humans as a source of raw materials to be exploited - sociology was not, and still is not equipped to perceive its scope and consequences.
For the agents operating in the tissue market (donors, owners, buyers and intermediaries), the body is a collection of molecules with no point of contact with the socialised and political body that M. Foucault and B. Turner, for example, speak of. Today, we have to submit to sociological reflection a very different human body: it is flesh, not body; it is open access, i.e. available to relentless exploitation; it is made of parts but is not a whole; it is manipulated as pre-political organic matter and not qualified by the enjoyment of rights.
The paper argues that in order to address this challenge, to grasp the impact of control, appropriation and alienation that biotechnology inflicts on the body, and to attempt to limit this impact, the theoretical and empirical boundaries between biology, anthropology and sociology must be drawn in a new and interdisciplinary way. The human body does not comprise two unrelated systems (one organic and one of tought/meaning). It is a single and unique system, a total social fact that requires an innovative theoretical approach.
For the agents operating in the tissue market (donors, owners, buyers and intermediaries), the body is a collection of molecules with no point of contact with the socialised and political body that M. Foucault and B. Turner, for example, speak of. Today, we have to submit to sociological reflection a very different human body: it is flesh, not body; it is open access, i.e. available to relentless exploitation; it is made of parts but is not a whole; it is manipulated as pre-political organic matter and not qualified by the enjoyment of rights.
The paper argues that in order to address this challenge, to grasp the impact of control, appropriation and alienation that biotechnology inflicts on the body, and to attempt to limit this impact, the theoretical and empirical boundaries between biology, anthropology and sociology must be drawn in a new and interdisciplinary way. The human body does not comprise two unrelated systems (one organic and one of tought/meaning). It is a single and unique system, a total social fact that requires an innovative theoretical approach.