Shopping in the human body store: the biopolitical logic of organ commodification in Ninni Holmqvist's the unit

Abstract

This study examines Ninni Holmqvist’s speculative novel, The Unit (2009), first published in Swedish as Enhet (2006), to argue how literary representations of organ harvesting present the human body as a marketable commodity re-defined through transactions revolving around biocapital. This essay argues that by creating various subcategories of the human, The Unit foregrounds the rapid integration of human organs into neoliberal markets of global capitalism, rationalizing legal extermination by controlling who has the right to life and who has the right to save others through ethical donations. By engaging with Foucauldian biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the homo sacer, the study examines how the state in neoliberal economies exercises invisible power over its subjects through biopower by segregating bodies based on their economic value. Besides discussing the biopolitical dynamics of organ harvesting, the study also argues how the subjects have internalized the biopolitical logic of economic productivity, negating all forms of resistance against such state-sanctioned mechanisms of violence. By further engaging with Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the study examines how the state controls the bodies and exercises power over death by deeming some bodies as disposable and others usable for economic transactions.