Tracciare i corpi oltre l’umano. Dal mostro di Frankenstein a noi cyborg

Abstract

The imaginary plays a key role in the construction and perception of our body. For this it takes a long time: so it is necessary to reconstruct genealogies that show, for exemple, how a certain modernity has already observed some conflicts on the frontiers of the human.

In the Nineteenth Century, we find two archetypal figures of bodies that are beyond the human. The creature of Dr. Victor Frankenstein was born by assembling parts of dead bodies, and taking advantage of the scientific and technological advances. Count Dracula trades with the blood of human and with the animal forms. So the Frankenstein's creature and Count Dracula have opened a reflection about the power relationships that designed their and our bodies. They show how the body is the result of an continuous crossing with the technosphere and teriosphere.

The development of computers and telematics, and on this basis the emerging of the anthropo-technologies, have open an imaginary, a conceptual horizon and various practices, that have made us able to know new figures as the cyborgs, new paradigms related to the post-human, new possibilities for action on our biological life. Today the image of the body is definitely changed from the one that the humanistic tradition has released us.