This interview between Francesca Ferrando (New York University) and Asijit Datta (University of Calcutta) is an extended and exhaustive effort to weigh the pressing concerns of posthuman life, death, and philosophy in times of the Covid-19 pandemic. Philosophical discourse on matters related to dualism, humanism, anthropocentrism, during a phase when exposed human bodies are susceptible to a deadly, mutating virus itself, warrants some paradoxical attention. There has never been a more suitable age and a period to discuss the onto-epistemological anxieties against the background of biotechnological advancements. Akin to an inverse ouroboros, the latest medical equipment or a favourable vaccine for diseases is part of the reparation process undertaken to balance out the damage perpetrated by capitalism. Questions from the interviewer traverse topics involving the Anthropocene, non-human animals/others, genetic mutations, ethnic crises, ethical response towards the dead, posthumanism as spiritualism, and the posthuman multiverse. The conversation is initiated by Dr. Ferrando’s apposite response to the critical and desperate epoch facing the sixth mass extinction; she urges humans to recognize themselves as the most significant geological force impacting and contaminating the planet. The talk then shifts to the need for a harmonious ecological community and behavioural and dietary awareness of posthumanists. A major agitation in the first days of the compulsory lockdown in India had been the return of the migrant labourers and a reverse victim blaming to steer away attention from the failures of governmental policies and its impulsive decisions. Professor Ferrando rightly observes these as emanations from problems in humanization and socialization techniques and our collective negligence towards plurality. The Heideggerian understanding of technology as a revelation and Ferrando’s attachment of the concept of Brahman from the Hindu tradition bring the readers to her seminal book, Philosophical Posthumanism (2019). Spiritualism, Ferrando clarifies, is connected to post-dualism and assists in acknowledging multi-layered alterity and pluralism. Ferrando’s reply to Donna Haraway’s assertion of humans as compost conjoins her with Colebrook’s authentic human actions vis-à-vis the immediacy of extinction. Towards the end of the interview, Ferrando and Datta examine and explore the politicization of Covid deaths, mass burials, the hiding of data by governmental agencies, and the gravity of incomplete mourning as a result of these. The exchange concludes with a philosophical investigation into Nietzsche’s eternal return and a rhizomatic multiverse. Ferrando believes that the possibility that we are all networks and strings birthing multiple universes as we tread and vibrate along must propel us to act in ways that are more ethical, ecological, and interrelatonal.
In this article, I explore the Beckettian ‘arrival’ at being through writing, which is also a process of continuous self-emptying. This non-art and implosion within language position subjectivity in the zones of loss and invisibility. The paper further seeks to identify the cinematic impossibility of filming The Unnamable, since all attempts of displaying an id-entity (Basil/Mahood), a worm, or a thing, would culminate in associating visual borderlines against the effulgence of the ‘imperceptible’ narrator. The essay locates the ‘unnamable’s’ failures to return to the primordial site of the undifferentiated, and the independent narration of the voice of its indefinite histories and transcendences from spaces beyond symbolization. The moment one strives to ‘frame’ the void from which the speaker articulates and to which it returns, or locate the subject without subjectivity, the multiplicity and effluence of being get erased.
My paper talks about post-human spaces and technological afterness associated with the physiognomy of humans. Mechanical alteration in biological mechanisms is directly experienced in seizing of organic consciousness. The rupture in consciousness splits it into two distinct parts-one belonging to the disappearing human, the other to the emerging cybernetic. The new being is not another human, but (an)other human, an evolved different sameness. In the film Realive (2016) we encounter an extension of the self beyond death by re-placing it into another body. However, this enhancement diffuses all ‘natural’ responses and meaning-making vehicles, primarily the cognizance of death and mortality. In a classic Frankensteinian restoration, Marc is reanimated in 2084 through extensive methods of cryonization under the banner ‘Lazarus project’. The post-human ‘humachines’ dissolve the position of the teleological man and stretch DNA to digitality. Upgrade (2018) shows us the metamorphosis of Grey Trace, a luddite, by an installed biomechanical enhancer chip, Stem. The roach-like implant not only erases Grey’s quadriplegic body, but ironically ‘desires’ to possess and manoeuver the host’s body. Robotic consciousness in these assimilated after-humans is borrowed consciousness activated by infusing the evanescent biological particle - life. Nanotechnology, molecular machines, nerve manipulators, cameras implanted inside the brain, self-generating nanobots, artificial mechanical limbs have emerged as elements of posthuman utopia/dystopia. Paradoxically, in both the films the protagonists, after their reanimation and upgradation, try to return to their original position of death and disability. In their quest to retrieve the lived body they lose their embodied reciprocations with animals, machines and other forms of life. The mysterious, irreducible, unknown and unknowable potentiality of life is levelled and dissipated by surplus information. This paper attempts to discuss the reactions of embodied body as memory post-cryonization, and to understand limits of psychological disability and death of consciousness after technological reconstruction of the disabled body.
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