| Sumario: | This article starts from the premise that, if there is something like an ethico-political imperative in cultural studies – i.e. an imperative to respond to, and take responsibility for, incalculable difference in what we term ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ – this imperative obliges us to address the most ‘vital’ issue through which difference manifests itself: the issue of ‘life’. Drawing on a number of rhetorical tropes that have played a significant role in the life sciences I want to suggest that cultural critics have an obligation to engage with the tropes of life developed both in science and in popular discourses about science. Specifically, I propose to look at the conceptualisation of the discovery of the structure of DNA and of the mapping of the genetic code through the trope of ‘cracking the secret of life’, a trope which has to a large extent shaped the dominant ideas about life, nature and ‘the human’. My engagement with the discourses of the life sciences will allow me to delineate an ‘ethics of life’, a new way of thinking about bios inspired by the work of Agamben, Butler, Foucault and Levinas. This new bio-ethics will go beyond some of the more established ways of thinking about bioethics that have been developed within the corporate world of biotechnosciences, as well as beyond the dominant positions on life within traditional moral philosophy. What is of principal interest and importance to me in this article is therefore not so much cracking ‘the secret of life’ once and for all, but rather exploring the already existing cracks in the current discourses and debates on bios and bioethics.
|
|---|