What is our responsibility to the absent presence of the dead and what is the nature of the encounter with those who persist in haunting us, not through personal memories but as ungraspable remainders of lives past? I approach the issue through a reflection on bioarchives, not as places of either continuing medical education or of somewhat voyeuristic curiosity but as sites that increasingly demand that we consider what kind of response is owed. In employing a hauntological ethics that refuses the distinction between the putative passivity of seemingly inanimate matter and the agency of vibrant life, the binaries of past and present; past, present, and future; living and non-living; and absence and presence are all rendered uncertain evoking instead a non-linear temporality. I offer a philosophically based review using Derrida’s notion of spectrality and hauntology and the Deleuzian sense of all life as a dynamic assemblage without beginning or end, before turning to a tentative exploration of the potential of bioart as a possible bridging point to a new imaginary. In each mode, the task is to attempt an ethical reconception of the bioarchives without expectation of any final resolution. The immediate reference point is the current reappraisal in many medical institutions and museums of the status of historical biomaterials, including the preserved bones and tissues of the dead and the wax moulages taken from the diseased bodies of social outcasts.

Technologies, both simple and sophisticated, have always played a major role in the negotiation of a range of disabilities that are assumed to impede the expression of autonomous selfhood. Whether deployed as mechanical aides to ideally normalise physical differences, as organic - and often internal - supplements to bolster the performance of body and mind, or as digital enhancements that override the supposed shortcomings of neurodiversity, the widely accepted claim is that such technologies have a clear therapeutic value. It conjures the illusion of an unproblematised sequence of more complex technologies leading to increasingly enhanced function and the advent of superior selfhood. Those who identify as having disabilities, either physical or cognitive, are assured of a better future in which anomalies are sufficiently offset to the extent that they no longer attract disvalue. My paper offers a less conventional perspective that leaves behind the desire for individual autonomy and opens up the question of the transhuman and the posthuman. Rather than focusing on the bounded self at the centre of humanist thought, I ask what is at stake when human embodiment becomes intricately entangled with non-human materialities and digital coding. It is likely that the major developments in such 'prosthetic' technologies will strongly impact the field of disability. Beyond a merely functional usage, which is likely to dominate in the short term, urgent questions arise about the extent to which the category of the human can or should be sustained as the anchor of continuing life. In exploring the practical, philosophical and bioethical implications of newly emerging technologies, I distinguish between the motivation of transhumanism, which focuses on self-perfectibility and mastery, and a posthumanism that in seeking to radically decentre the very notion of human privilege and hierarchical distinctions offers an optimistic view of disability futures.

My focus on vulnerability and bioethics – which acknowledges but goes beyond mainstream feminist ethics - will take a phenomenological perspective that understands the self as having no meaning or existence beyond its embodiment. As such we are always open, and therefore vulnerable, to the constant changes of embodied experience. The transformations in embodiment are both necessary for development and continuous over the life course, but it is only when something breaks the cycle of normative development that the intimation of vulnerability and disorder arise. Corporeal disorder operates in a highly individual and differentiated way as it manifests, for example, in the experience of disability, pain, ageing and dying. These are not exceptional moments of vulnerability in a life otherwise secure and predictable, but they do clearly set out the limits of the western imaginary, and more particularly of modern western biomedicine and conventional healthcare. In offering a critique of the positivist enterprise of biomedicine, I want to suggest a different understanding of the embodiment that has radical implications for bioethics.

Contemporary biomedical technologies surrounding deceased organ transplantation raise urgent issues regarding the temporalities of the living and the dead, the disturbance of distinctions between self and other, and the question of absence and presence.  There is no simple and stable futurity, but rather a host of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues that trouble both organ recipients and donor proxies. My claim is that heart transplantation in particular marks a fluid assemblage and intertwining of self and other at both the biological and ontological level, where personal identities and the conventional limits of life and death are deeply problematized.  Nonetheless, those disturbing and inescapable challenges to conventional binaries are rarely explored within the authorized narrative of the clinic.  

Developing technologies raise concerns that go beyond the economies of human to human or human-animal relations to open up exploration of our place in a world of both organic and inorganic effects. I explore how practices that characterize the very specific locus of dementia care could be – and are already – queered by the intervention of technological prostheses, and especially zoomorphic robots, that are increasingly supplementing conventional human support. The paper addresses the issue of techno-touch in dementia care – where the use of companion and empathy robots is becoming widespread – to think through the significance of touch as a physical event and as a metaphor for emotional engagement. In either meaning, touching and being touched must be thought in conjunction with vulnerability, not as an exposure to risk but as the threshold to an imaginary of irreducible interconnections in which self and other play no part. 

What are the implications of microchimerism in sociocultural and ethico-legal contexts, particularly as they relate to the destabilization of genetic origins? Conventional biomedicine and related law have been reluctant to acknowledge microchimerism-the existence of unassimilated traces of genetic material that result in some cells in the body coding differently from the dominant DNA-despite it becoming increasingly evident that microchimerism is ubiquitous in the human population. One exception is maternal-fetal microchimerism which has long been recognized, albeit with little consideration of the nonmedical implications. Most immediate issues concern the ongoing biomedical debate around whether microchimerism is beneficial in terms of enhancing the body's range of immunological responses, harmful in provoking autoimmune diseases, or simply neutral with respect to subsequent health. That controversy remains unresolved, but whichever way it develops, I want to extend consideration by insisting that changing biological concerns cannot be separated from sociocultural and ethico-legal effects. Once the diversity of DNA coding in a singular body has been established, relations of kinship, the identification of legal parenthood, and the operation of surrogacy laws are of direct interest. The overriding problematic asks whether our ethical and legal apparatus is able to address such newly emerging questions.