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In a recent paper on the undead, Roger Luckhurst talks about the redefinition of death that occurred in the 1960s, more precisely in 1968, by way of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, which changed the locus of death from the heart to the brain.¹ The means for this renegotiation of death was biotechnology, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and a new generation of artificial respirators, technologies of the body or of medico-corporate systems that lengthen the time of death at the same time that they commercialize it and commodify the body from the inside out.² This redefinition of death was due to the machine, a deliberately generic term to gesture beyond this moment of the 1960s, towards techno-culture's extensive associations with the occult, forming the missing link in ongoing processes of technologization.³ One of the main reasons the Ad Hoc Committee proposed an alternative interpretation of death was organ transplantation: the brain is the one organ that can't be transplanted.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137414595_4

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