Strangeness becomes common

“The Intruder” is a short piece written by Jean-Luc Nancy in which he addresses his heart transplant and he questions the idea to what degree his heart was his own. In my last Though Experiment I discussed both my stutter and my epilepsy. I feel that Nancy harbored many of the same feelings in regards to his heart as I do towards my brain. Of course, if Nancy did not receive a transplant, he would have died. I will not die because of my speech or my seizures, but if they were to disappear I would have a very different life. In my Thought Experiment, I asked myself if I would want my stutter and epilepsy to be gone, and I found myself feeling like I would miss it. I feel like both are a part of me. Nancy feels similar, he says throughout the piece, “I become a stranger to myself.” In his case he lost his heart, an organ so associated with love, passion, personality, and self, leaving him to question what it means to survive and to live.

One of the things that perhaps hit me the most was his quote, "our real enemies are within us: the old viruses, long-time intruders, always dozing away in the shadow of immunity." I think that this statement is very true. We are always our own worst enemies. We have skeletons in our closets. And it led me to wonder if people really want to live as who they are.

What I found very interesting in “The Intruder” that I did not completely address in my piece, was this idea that “our increasing numerous peers, at the dawn of a mutation.” Years ago there was not transplants like the one that saved Nancy and there were no drugs that control seizures. People who had medical conditions often died and often died young. But now, both medication and surgery are possible and very accessible and heavily utilized. As Nancy suggests, in just a few years even more will be possible. I was intrigued by Nancy statement “humanity has ensured that the vow of survival and immortality is one of the elements of the general programme of control and possession of nature.” Our culture has sworn to prevent death, but as Uncle Pete says “with great power comes great responsibility.” Now questions like whose life do we save?

We have come so far in the fields of medicine and technology but have we gone too far? We, humans that is, are becoming so poweful and thus we have become "intruders" to ourselves and to the natural "circle of life." How do we keep ourselves in check? Because it is like Nancy says, “He becomes the one who denatures and remakes nature, who recreates the creation, extracting it from nothingness and perhaps ultimately consigning it to nothingness. He is capable of originating and ending.”