Between Donating and Alienating: Face Transplants and the Problem of Biomedical Objectification of Human Being

Abstract

The paper addresses some philosophical aspects of face transplantation and starts with a brief overview of more or less successful surgeries in international clinical practice. Related discussions about medical and ethical risks are also brought into the picture. The issue of the ethical and axiological grounds and consequences of face allotransplantation is placed into the context of a broader problem of biomedical objectification. The author suggests understanding the biomedical objectification in that the patient is regarded as a clinical body taken out of the psychosocial context of her/his life, considered redundant for diagnostic and therapeutic tasks. This view finds expression in various practices that alienate the patient’s subjectivity, including the alienation of her/his name, face or body from her/his personality. Within the existent donation practices, two types of biomedical objectification can be outlined, such as instrumentalisation and alienation for protective purposes. In terms of face transplant, objectification as instrumentalisation consists in reducing the face to a collection of tissues and turning it into a biomedical artifact endowed with instrumental value. In this context, the distinction between the notions of “somatic face” (facial structures) and “psychosocial face” (subject identity) is introduced. As for alienation for protective purposes, the recipient who has to adjust to her/his new face is required to detach from the donor's personality. The author concludes that face transplantation, similar to donation practices in general, may cause the tension between the rhetoric of gift-giving, essential for the development of transplantology, and the logic of alienation inherent in biomedicine.