Introduction

Abstract

The promise of self-optimization has colonized our everyday life. Individuals are now exhorted to optimize their body, their nutrition, their sexuality, their sleep, their physiological and cognitive performance, their biological and social life. In recent years this imperative towards maximization has made deep inroads into marketing discourse, public health programmes, personal development manuals and theories of how to age well. Transhumanist thinking, with its hyperbolic discourse on the inevitable transcendence of human nature, has emerged as one of the main centres of production and dissemination of an ethics of optimization.Transhumanist discourse is based on the premise that the process of biological evolution is suboptimal, thus legitimizing research into and implementation of new optimalities that could help to ensure that humans adapt to their environment. In this view, we must optimize life in order to survive. The concept of optimization is thus normalized as a continuation of human evolution. This idea of the perfectible body [Dévédec, 2015], understood through the lens of disability and dysfunction [Katz and Marshall, 2004], reinforces and converges with the contemporary representation of the 'body project ' [Shilling 2012]. Thus it is suggested that the normality of everyday experience of a 'healthy' body has to be constructed through a set of activities of self-monitoring, self-control, and selfoptimization.1 Pre-print version of: Dalgalarrondo, S. & Fournier, T. (2019), "Optimization as morality, or the routes of the self", Ethnologie Française, 176(4).