Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.f1c6zx>
Abstract
Advances in scientific medicine are revolutionizing the relationship to the body. One of the most radical technical advances concerns the change in the definition of death, with the medical and legal introduction of the concept of brain death. Clinical practice in an intensive care unit confronts us with these “new” subjects: those who are designated as “dead with a beating heart”, unconscious subjects on life support machines who are still breathing, visibly alive and yet declared dead. It is a matter, then, of questioning the issues at stake in this transformation of death and of the dead body, when reference points become blurred and the patients become subjects between life and death, between body and organs, between physician and layman.