Description
Drawing on reports gathered from hospital settings and in-depth interviews with women who have had abortions, Luc Boltanski sets out to explain the ambiguous status of this social practice. Abortion, he argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals a contradiction at the heart of the social contract: the principle of the uniqueness of beings conflicts with the postulate of their replaceable nature, a postulate without which no society would achieve demographic renewal.
This leads Boltanski to explore the way human beings are engendered and to analyze the symbolic constraints that preside over their entry into society. What makes a human being is not the foetus as such, ensconced within the body, but rather the process by which it is taken up symbolically in speech - that is, its symbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption presupposes the possibility of discriminating among embryos that are indistinguishable. For society, and sometimes for individuals, the arbitrary character of this discrimination is hard to tolerate. The contradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a grammatical categorization: the "project" foetus - adopted by its parents, who use speech to welcome the new being and give it a name - is juxtaposed to the "tumoral" foetus, an accidental embryo that will not be the object of a life-forming project.
Bringing together grammar, narrations of life experience and an historical perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh light on a social phenomenon that is widely practised but poorly understood.
About the Author
Luc Boltanski is professor of sociology at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris. His many books in English include, The New Spirit of Capitalism, On Critique and Love and Justice as Competences.
Reviews
'An utterly original treatment of an interminably discussed issue. Combining anthropological reflection with interviews, social theorizing with hospital reports, Boltanski produces an account that recasts the question of abortion, even as it cannot fail to annoy all sides in the current debate.'
Nancy Fraser, The New School for Social Research
Eva Illouz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Book Information
ISBN 9780745647319
Author Luc Boltanski
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 502g
Dimensions(mm) 230mm * 152mm * 26mm