Legislative proposal in Italy to facilitate contacts between deceased organ donor families and transplant recipients.

Contacts between organ donors and recipients might be possible in the near future in Italy. As suggested by The Italian Committee of Bioethics "anonymity is requested by the Italian National Transplant Centre" before transplantation anonymity shall be strict in order to grant privacy, gratuity, justice, solidarity and benefits and avoids organ trafficking. Following a period that is ethically correct and justifiable, organ donor families and recipients can meet after signing a valid declaration of consent, expressed on a template valid for the whole country. A third party within the body of the National Health Systems shall control the validity of the consent. The opinion stresses that contacts are not a right but a possibility justifiable on ethical grounds if the procedure is followed appropriately. A legislative proposal has been presented before the Chamber of deputies incorporating all suggestions made by the National Committee of Bioethics. The agreement between parties might be signed a year after transplantation. This is a long enough period of time for the recipients to fully appreciate the benefits of the procedure and for the donor families to see the effects of their decision (the opinion and the Law proposal hit the Zeitgeist, and keep Italy in the regulation of European Union).

On this side of language, pain.

Pain and pleasure, when profound, totalizing, leave one without voice. Under the violence of pure suffering, language is annihilated and therefore the protective falseness of its game vanishes. The impenetrable nakedness of our life, as pain and as pleasure, forces the thought, without protection, to the redde rationem and makes it free of the irreparable unrest due to philosophizing. We can say with Hegel that: "Pain is the privilege of living natures (...). One can say that the contradiction is not thinkable, but the living organisms, while suffering, effectively live". The relationship between pain and language assumes a link between death and pain. There would be no anxiety towards our own death if we did not have an idea of its occurrence, and no idea is possible without language. The soul is the human on the move, the continuous flow of symbolic communication, it is history, it is our acting community. Thought, love and joy are faces of this movement and are in a relation of reciprocity. I, you, we have a dialog; I, you, we love each other; I, you and we have delight in each other. Therefore anyone of us has pleasure since the others have pleasure. Physical pain breaks this essential reciprocity.