The Self and the Commodified Self: Biotechnologies before the Bare Life

EVERY LAW STUDENT knows that persons and things are mutually exclusive categories. Persons are subjects of rights, whereas things are objects that can be bought, sold or freely given, used, modified, and even destroyed by the persons who own them. Yet through history these seemingly inflexible and irrec- oncilable categories have been proved so malleable and amenable to hybridisations and trade-offs that their purpose, one may assume, is not so much that of drawing an impassable line as to control the processes through which ‘things’ are treated as persons and ‘persons’ as things.