7 - The New French Resistance: Commodification Rejected?

Summary

French doctrine exemplifies simultaneously the simplicity of an axiom and the ambition of a mission: the body is the person, and this is one of the modern aspects of France's eternal civilising mission: to defeat the mercantilism of industrial society with the force of this idea.

Having ended the last chapter on the pragmatic note of biotrusts, I now begin the section of the book which presents two extensive applied examples. In this chapter I evaluate the first of two cases exemplifying resistance to biotechnological commodification: France. The next chapter will explore the example of Tonga, thus balancing case studies from the developed and developing world. In neither chapter, however, am I concerned only to tell the narrative of the case. Both France and Tonga offer alternative conceptualisations of what it means to be a subject and of the relationship between the human subject and the body. The official French view that ‘the body is the person’ has been dismissed as a ‘taboo’ by the French political scientist Dominique Memmi. If we lift the pejorative neo-colonial connotation of ‘taboo’, however, merely defining ‘taboo’ or ‘tapu’ as a boundary of inviolability, the possible parallel between the French attitude and the Tongan begins to become obvious, and should become clearer in the next chapter.

These two chapters are intended, then, not merely as case-specific analyses in applied ethics, but also as explorations in political theory, comparative cultural attitudes and jurisprudence.