The act of remembering is an affair of the heart from the very beginning: the Latin root of the word recŏrdari, ‘to remember’,means ‘putting back (re) in the heart (cor, cordis)’, i.e. passing a segment of time back to the organ that the ancients believed to be the seat of memory ‘as though the past was thus sutured […] to the heart.’

This symbolic suture f inds its concretisation today, when organ transplantation surgery sews the heart of a deceased person into the body of another, attaching it to a different anatomical structure which keeps it alive but which also seems to remember the affective, intuitive and communicative energies of the individual it belonged to. Indeed, despite the scepticism of mainstream medicine, many patients claim, not without anguish, to have changed tastes, habits and lifestyles after the transplantation of the heart or of other internal organs, as if the latter had transformed their bodies into reliquaries of the donor's memories and personality.

The cultural imaginary of organ transplantation is marked by this organic remembering which acts through the body, thus calling into question all the individual barriers that had been theorised with the discovery of cellular immunity in the nineteenth century. According to cellular immunity theory, human anatomy corresponded to a well-circumscribed organism, limited and protected by specific biological frontiers, firmly defending the identity of the individual.