I’ve been thinking about the interesting/shocking issue of the UNC mascot’s organs tied up with sacrifice and secrecy. This may be highly tangential, but I thought of a couple of other examples in which bodies are “secretly” donated . . . and perhaps stripped of their zoe and what remains is the remnants of bios (??). Also, this may open up a space between the two deaths I was trying to talk about in class today . . .

For one, what about sperm donors? I think it very interesting that the man who donates his sperm can either request anonymity, or to be possibly notified by his offspring in the future. What does the child gain from his/her sperm donor of a father? And more specifically, is zoe located in DNA, or is it culturally initiated? What do you guys think about sperm donating in relation to bare life? I feel this matter has myriad ties to Postmodern theory in how it creates a person that (if their biological father so chooses) could possibly be relegated to status of “refugee” from a family—that is without place or knowledge of their biological ties. Additionally, this alludes to the postmodern inability to cognitively map oneself that came up so frequently in the earlier sections of the course.

The second example that life seems to be present and sacrificially so is in the Body Worlds exhibit by Gunther von Hagen (http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html)
in which corpses are, by the process of “plastination,” preserved so that millions of people can see the human body in motion. The bodies on display are anonymous—would we want it any other way? (In just the way that the UNC mascot’s identity being revealed was rather jarring, I don’t think people would want to know the ins and outs of the plastinized people.) However, do the bodies retain any thread of zoe or bios??