My mother was a… cyborg. Tecnologie e soggettività ibride a confronto

Abstract

My Mother was a… Cyborg. New technologies and Hybrid Subjectivities This paper starts from the current querelle regarding the ethical and ontological status of techno-assemblages and embodied subjectivities. Critical aspects of New Technologies have been raised in a fertile debate from different perspectives, above all concerning the cutting-edge fields of life sciences and genetics. From this debate emerges how NT potentiality could act as a device to improve, enhance and exploit the embodied subject. Some of these critics lead to a dualistic understanding of the body, conceived as either natural or artificial. To overcome this dichotomy which polarize the debate, the hereby proposed essay assumes the notion of hybrid subjectivity as a category from which a deeper reflection may set off. Aiming at critically recognizing the multiple relations that the contemporary techno-hybrid subject experiences, the paper will examine different shades and declinations of the hybrid subjectivity, following the two categories of “uncanny” and “enhancement”. The argumentative process will therefore present two ongoing research lines addressing the topics of hybrid subjectivity, also known as the Cyborg: Feminist Critical Posthumanism and Transhumanism. It will be considered how these brunches of thought are respectively connected to A)a teratological idea of the Cyborg and B)an enhanced sight of the artificial hybridization and, consequently, how the two have a different conception of the subjectivity and of technology’s ontological status. The thesis is that the resulting difference could inform the debate on NT by considering the latter a contingence and not the only feature of today’s hybrid forms of life.

Keywords

• cyborg
• mother
• hybrid