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The Genetic Subject Reconsidered: An Argument for a First-Person Approach to Patients with Huntington's Disease

Abstract

Recent work in the anthropology of moralities has evidenced two divergent notions of the "subject". One takes the subject, or "self" to be a locus of experience, emotion, and action. The other takes the subject to be a product of contemporary regimes of truth and the occupant of various subject positions which determine her ethical and existential possibilities. These positions can be identified as a "first-person, humanist" and "poststructural" approach respectively. In this essay, I argue that although poststructural approaches can be useful, more attention to a first-person, humanist approach is warranted. Through case studies of patients in the United States recently diagnosed with Huntington's disease, I demonstrate that the particularities of each individual's first-person perspective are extremely relevant to an account of their moral experience. I contrast this approach to the poststructural account of the "genetic subject," a theoretical framework which disables an examination of these individual particularities.

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