This essay utilizes the newly translated seminar by Jacques Derrida, Life Death, to formulate a theory of rhetoric linking genetic modifications and larger issues of social and environmental justice. The essay aims to demonstrate one avenue for integrating Life Death within the greater landscape of new materialist rhetorical theory as well as within the rhetoric of science. To do so, it examines the genetic impacts of lead poisoning in marginalized communities to posit how rhetoric links together research in the life sciences and humanities to explain the relationship between genetic alterations and structural discrimination.

ABSTRACT The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.