DIVIDING LINES: SPECIES OF WRITING AND THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

Abstract

Late twentieth-century molecular biology opened-up new “interior worlds” of the body to the popular imagination of the self. The structure of DNA and its accoutrements has consolidated the contemporary view of “science” as confirmation of the irrepressible power of the human intellect. But how does “biology” account for the living body? This thesis responds to the question of the possibility of a knowledge of “life” based solely on material terms. How does biology maintain the distinction between its objects—“living matter”—and its conceptions of them? Is a “gene” a material object or a concept? The (non)structure of the trace both outlines and advises this difficulty. In its exclusion of the relation that is “embodiment” from its matrix, bioscience presents a symptom requiring interrogation. The mode of conducting knowledge-work has already been demonstrated to be at work within the aporetic structure of various “human-scientific” epistēme. Might bioscience's encounter with the limits of its empiricism divulge the movement of twenty-first century knowledge itself as autoimmune?