LA PERSONNE EN SON CORPS: L'ECLATEMENT DU SUJET

Abstract

Today, to our control of inert matter has been added the control of living matter, including the human being in all its aspects and not only in its biological identity. Faced with this "bursting" of the body, now a scientific tool as well as material for industry, and with increasing claims for subjective rights, the legislator seems left without an answer. As today's and tomorrow's laws show, the boundaries between persons and things being no longer clear, the human body wavers between subject and object, treated differently, it is said, when it is controlled by science or by public health needs, but as much governed, it seems, by economic considerations. This dual logic, in which the human body taken in its totality, identified as subject, is opposed to the human body taken as parts, conceived as pieces of property, becomes incoherent because at times it ends up using the whole, that is the subject, as if it were an object. Categories are confused concepts, such as the concept of inalienability, are also confused there is a mistaken interpretation of the concept of subjective right which, not permitting the denial of the freedom of the person or the theft of identity, cannot allow the person to set herself or himself up as an object. The author arrives at these conclusions on the status of the body in an analysis of the Civil Code of Lower Canada and of the Draft Civil Code.