Carrying L’Intrus: The transport-station of an organ transplant

The experience of heart transplantation shocks not only the body, but also the sense of self. As a heart transplant survivor, I find that the Ettingerian concepts of the transport-station of trauma, of wit(h)nessing, metramorphosis, and carriance provide an understanding of how—as humans—we are able to transcend the traditional notions of self through borderlinking. Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Intrus explored the limits of the self as he wrote about his heart transplant, when he was confronted with a body that relied on medical procedures, machines, and ultimately on someone else’s organ. In L’Intrus, the alienating experience of transplantation reveals the foreign in our own bodies. But living with someone else’s heart also brings out our kinship to others, the ways in which we are opened or closed to them. I will appeal to my own experience as a heart transplant survivor to foster a dialogue between two different perspectives on trauma: Nancy’s necessary acknowledgement of the way it brings forth the alienation of the self and Ettinger’s discovery of the site of trauma as a borderspace for matrixial trans-subjectivity, co-emergence, and carriance. Transplantation, as a last resort for survival, reveals the porous nature of the self, our vulnerability, but at the same time the ways we connect and carry the Other through trauma.