The current “kidney racket” scandal in the Delhi satellite city of Gurgaon--in which accusations that a man posing as a transplant surgeon ran a kidney transplant clinic for eight years, serving an international clientele and not only buying kidneys from poor sellers but extorting them--raises immediate questions about the structure of medical regulation and the epidemiology, forensics, and ethics of the kidney trade. To answer such questions, a class of experts (including Cohen) has proliferated to study and adjudicate these scandals and the everyday practices they suspend.
This talk will begin with an anatomy of the Gurgaon racket, and then turn to a series of concepts--the ‘bioavailability’ of marginal populations, the ‘operation’ as a dominant form of time under decolonization, and the 'nexus' as the persistent narrative of the limit to both civil society and the state--to help locate the event.
The second part of the talk takes the problem of publicity--of the iteration of ethical scandal and the call for global humanitarian expertise--as central to our ability to understand the time of kidney scandal. An argument is made for ‘ethical publics.’ By ethical public, the talk calls attention to the phenomenon that publics increasingly come to know themselves in the condition of their address as ethical.
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