Maxim Miroshnichenko - 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Maxim Miroshnichenko, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University.

Maxim Miroshnichenko 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'

Abstract: I am going to collide two approaches to technology in disability and chronic kidney disease: extension and incorporation. For the 4EA view, the metabolically considered living systems can include resources and processes beyond their bodies. The individual enacts autonomous self-monitoring, control of internal regulation, and exchanges. This ‘hybrid intercorporeality' exists with graded norms of vitality – health, sickness, stress, and fatigue. It is an incorporation that affords the individual to enact her sense-making through the integration of technologies, artifacts, and prostheses into her body schema. This view emphasizes the body-as-subject, in contrast to the extended cognition thesis characterized by the tendency to objectify the body. The central problem of this approach is its view of incorporation as fruitful and enabling. I want to concentrate on the case of dialysis in chronic kidney disease as painful and discomforting integration of technology. This shows the intertwinement of the lived body and biomedical body-as-object. Dialysis is prescribed for persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) – kidney failure. The patient needs to rid her blood from toxins. This leads to the need for a regular course of long-term dialysis accomplished with an artificial kidney–dialysis machine. Based on the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I will analyze their view of technology as a life-supporting machine and a trap. The patients feel disgust and abjection towards the body due to the aggressive and painful presence of equipment – tubes and needles, fluid filling the body, changes in body shape and weight, nausea and fatigue, immobility, and limited social activities. Based on the materials of the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I want to show how the incorporation of technology and bodily integrity is enacted through pain and discomfort.

Bio: I am a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University. Also, I am a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (remotely). I hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics (2019). The dissertation committee included Catherine Malabou and Adam Berg. My recent studies revolve around embodiment, disability studies, bioethics, and media theory. Currently, I am finishing phenomenological research on relations between doctors, patients, and technologies in palliative care. Also, I am conducting the phenomenological interviews with patients going through hemodialysis under the condition of chronic kidney failure.

This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?