Disturbing Bioarchives: The Case For a Hauntological Ethics.
Abstract
What is our responsibility to the absent presence of the dead and what is the nature of the encounter with those who persist in haunting us, not through personal memories but as ungraspable remainders of lives past? I approach the issue through a reflection on bioarchives, not as places of either continuing medical education or of somewhat voyeuristic curiosity but as sites that increasingly demand that we consider what kind of response is owed. In employing a hauntological ethics that refuses the distinction between the putative passivity of seemingly inanimate matter and the agency of vibrant life, the binaries of past and present; past, present, and future; living and non-living; and absence and presence are all rendered uncertain evoking instead a non-linear temporality. I offer a philosophically based review using Derrida's notion of spectrality and hauntology and the Deleuzian sense of all life as a dynamic assemblage without beginning or end, before turning to a tentative exploration of the potential of bioart as a possible bridging point to a new imaginary. In each mode, the task is to attempt an ethical reconception of the bioarchives without expectation of any final resolution. The immediate reference point is the current reappraisal in many medical institutions and museums of the status of historical biomaterials, including the preserved bones and tissues of the dead and the wax moulages taken from the diseased bodies of social outcasts.