X-Men : la puissance de la défaillance, entre infirmité et post-humanité

Abstract

In recent years, the transhumanist movement has been developing and has provoked as many fascinated reactions as frightened rejections. Based on the success of popular figures of mutated bodies, such as those elaborated in the X-men series, this article shows that the appeal of these bodies lies mostly in their plasticity, the superpowered body always revealing itself as a deficient body. Indeed, the image of the ‘posthuman’ body revives the primary fantasy of a fragmented body, the first representation before the alienating and necessary identification with an intact and coherent body. Some transhumanist fictions, especially the figure of the mutant in the X-men, can then help us reshape our representations of the human body, by questioning the boundaries set between monsters, the cripple, humans and transhumans, not with the aim of destroying the existing borders between these categories but rather of destroying the evidence of their outlines, which always need to be (re)constructed.

Keywords

• Kywords: transhumanism
• posthuman
• X-men
• fragment
• mutant