Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
awesome potency that haunts the phenomenon of human cloning lies
this astounding possibility, this fundamental shift in what medicine,
disease, and health have long been thought to be all about.
This shift seems to be something not merely unparalleled but
appalling. Thinking about just these matters, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
concludes that a “new medical paradigm: molecular medicine,” already
ongoing for the past century, has more fully blossomed over the past
several decades and is well on its apparently unstoppable way to taking
over the entire garden.
16
He insists, however, that there is a fundamen-
tal scandal at the core of this new paradigm, in the sense diagnosed by
Claude Lévi-Strauss at the core of the incest taboo.
17
Rheinberger notes
Jacques Derrida's observation that this taboo is right at the edges of, if
not actually within, the “domain of the unthinkable,” for it challenges
the very thing that makes possible the distinction and opposition between
“nature” and “culture.” That distinction, Derrida contends, has for cen-
turies been at the heart of philosophy and theoretical thinking gener-
ally.
18
Thus, the very possibility of philosophical conceptualization itself
has come under severe threat, if not actual collapse, as that distinction
itself loses its sense in the presence of this scandal.
Lévi-Strauss argues that “everything that is universal in man belongs
to the order of nature and is characterized by spontaneity, and that every-
thing bound to norms belongs to culture and is . . . relative and ...par-
ticular.” From this, he then identifies the epitome of scandal, “the incest
prohibition,” which, he thought, “escapes any norm that . . . distin-
guishes between . . . culture and nature. It leaves in the realm of the
unthinkable what has made it possible.”
19
Although Derrida has far more subtle issues in view than can be
explored here, he emphasizes that the taboo exists solely within a context
that accepted the opposition between nature and culture. The fact is,
Derrida says, the scandal is “something which no longer tolerates the
nature/culture opposition he has accepted.”
20
It is unthinkable in the
sense that it makes possible both the distinction and the opposition
between nature and culture, thereby grounding the very possibility of
philosophy and knowledge.
In the same way that the incest taboo is scandalous, Rheinberger is
convinced that there is also a scandal at the heart of the new medicine.
We may catch a glimpse of what he has in mind if we think about a key
