I am not convinced that the Leib is a “lost good.” Paying attention to a significant body of feminist research which aims to further an understanding of women’s feelings and experiences while working through issues connected with “infertility” and RGTs leads me to understand that individual experiences as relating to the Leib are certainly a matter to (feminist) research (Bell 2014, Wilson 2014, Harwood 2007, Inhorn ed 2007, Rapp 1999, Franklin 1997, Nave-Herz 1989, Ginsburg 1989). Yet, none of these studies listed introduces or works with the notion of “Leib.” From my perspective, paying attention to notions of Leib can bring a crucial “tool” and critical conceptual contemplations to an analysis of biomedical developments as they relate to power, gender, race, class, and ultimately money. Including notions of the Leib creates options to challenge mainstream narrations of biomedical success and illuminates crucial individual experiences within the economic machinery of biomedical interventions, including trades in the body. Such individual experiences in turn can foster an understanding of inequalities established between people involved in biomedical practices on various levels, as they are: medical professionals, “donors,” family members, and so on.
While there are case studies showing the complex results of inequalities established within biomedical practice, such as studies on the John Moore case,28 there were, at the time of data collection for this study (to my knowledge) no interdisciplinary studies (published in either German or English) [46] using various forms of data and introducing the philosophical notion of the Leib to an analysis of biomedical practices. I strongly trust that a notion of Leib that includes ideas of non-linearity29 (for example, of time) and is thus not strictly framed as marking a transition from one state to the other, can help address imbrications of body/Körper/Leib in current times (Wils 2002). In opposition to one possible reading of Duden’s earlier work, in which Leib is a notion “belonging” within a more temporal period of the past, the “differentiation” and/or relationality I apply between body/Körper and Leib is not a historical or transformative one. I more so consider a loss of vocabulary that refers to Leib as a crucial part of the establishment of discourses activated within body centered medicine, which builds upon the denial of Leib as individually experienced entity that counteracts notions of routinely, efficiently, and orderly exchange processes involving moving bodily substances in linear time and three-dimensional space, and as part of this oftentimes between bodies (Böhme 2003).
The term “body” or “Körper” does not capture an acknowledgement of individual bodies being ultimately non-objectified or non-comparable.30 This is in part why the terms body and Körper lend themselves to support certain medical discourses that come to matter in, for example, how organ transfer is commonly framed as a process in which an objectifiable part of a body is simply transferred to another body (Schadwinkel 2011). Such discourses are however, not able to address how any medical intervention not only acts on the level of the body, but also on the level of the Leib (Sharp 1995). Alexandra Manzei emphasizes that “jeder medizinisch-technische Eingriff [verändert] nicht nur den Körper als Objekt, sondern immer auch die physische, psychische und soziale Existenz des Menschen”31 (Italics in Original, Manzei 2003: 187). Wagner, whose quote opens this section, writes about the unknown donor of the liver he received “Ich spüre Dich bei jedem Atemzug,”32 and thus connects his identity with the donor, that he imagined to have been female, through a reference to the ultimate life source, the breath, as it signifies the moment the individual (body) literally takes in environmental information (Wagner 2016: online source). [47] Every breath is a fractured moment of Einverleibung33 and in this sense connects to the social existence of the person. Thus, while the skin is the only organ that connects to the outside world and the (material) inside of a body, breath is the individual rhythmic activity that “transcends” notions of inside and outside.
Historically speaking, it is interesting in this context, as Duden lays out “that until the fifth century (and for many centuries thereafter) the eye not only sent out rays with which it saw, the eye also ‘breathed in’ what it perceived. Breathing, smell, and sight were still all of the same stuff: the breath” (Duden 1991b: 33f.). Given that it is not touch but gaze that determines medical diagnosis, the historical relationship between seeing and breathing is intriguing.
Much of Duden’s work has been translated into English, and in translations the term “Leib” in her work has frequently been translated into body (ibid). I have been present in various discussions of her work, with or without her present, in English and German, and speaking from my experience, I would say that how her writings were discussed, for example, which other authors or theories it was related to and how, was interdependent with the term “Leib” having been translated or not. In most of the literature I have been engaging with for this study, in translations from English to German, the word body is commonly translated into the word Körper. However, translating from German into English, the German term Leib is often also translated into body, with the English term body therefore capturing characteristics of both terms Körper and Leib. Thus, from my perspective, an awareness of the need to attend not only to the relationships between words used in English or German, but also to the relationship between the concepts is necessary. It is specifically important, when looking at and working with the sources used for the analysis within this study, but also when looking at how individual and social experiences are rooted and co-produced through “cultured” language and use of terminology itself.
I decided, at the beginning of this study, when formulating the questionnaires for the conversations to be held that I would be using the German term “Leib” within this study. What felt like an instinctive decision as I began my research, made more sense as time progressed. The discussions of concepts as they relate to the terms Leib or Körper in German, which were conducted in various sites, including English speaking settings, oftentimes initiated interesting and deep interdisciplinary reflections on the relationship between language, individual and social experiences, and culture.
During the same timeframe, I started to read “the same” novels in both English and German, one after the other, as a means to train my everyday English. More often than not, I felt that I had read two different stories, two different books. [48] While I thought at the beginning of this experience that I am just differently “at home” in reading German novels and that the difference between the books lies in my readership only, I soon came to understand that there is more to the phenomena of translation and the creation of meaning in different languages. I continued to use the word “Leib” in all of my English writing and oral presentations and am most certain that this decision impacted “how” I thought and wrote about developments, on how I build an argument, and where I let my analysis “wander to.” A question arising from the practice of leaving a term untranslated is, for example, what components of the analyses did leaving the term Leib untranslated allow for, or trigger? It wasn’t until 2016 that I listened and spoke to a scholar from translation studies, a field that I was only vaguely aware of until then. In a presentation, translation studies scholar Carolyn Shread talked about her decision to sometimes “not translate” a word, but to more so acknowledge “that this word is a stranger here” (Shread 2016: work in progress presentation). When listening to her “scales fell from my eyes” and I understood, that I purposefully had decided to “have a stranger” in my English research and that this stranger had on many levels fulfilled crucial tasks for this study.
Using the German word “Leib” had led to thought-provoking conversations with colleagues, which in turn led me to reflect on certain parts of my writing. Through the process of using the term, I started to acknowledge its specific history. Using the term in this study furthermore invites readers to engage with the space “in-between” the two main languages of this study. Such engagement takes place when reading the text, as one switches from reading English to reading a German word which, if one is a German speaker, invites familiarity or, if one is not a German speaker, requires that this “stranger word” be filled with meaning as it is read. Words rooted in the term “Leib” and or containing it, such as “einverleibt” or “leibliches,” also remain untranslated. This in turn makes some sentences within this study “hard to read,” yet at the same time requests bilingual attention and supports decisions to leave power to “strangers within a text” in order to foster an investigation of what is called