What is a little bit less known is that in its first formulation, the issue was not to distinguish human from the machine, but man from woman.
If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. We all know of Alan Turing's famous "imitation game" which should serve as the test if a machine can think: we communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question behind one of the interfaces, there is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other, it is a machine. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures liberated from Sex, and one is tempted to claim that Houellebecq's post-human society of clones is the realization of the Foucauldian dream of the Selves who practice the "use of pleasures." While this solution is the fantasy at its purest, the deadlock to which it reacts is a real one: in our postmodern "disenchanted" permissive world, the unconstrained sexuality is reduced to an apathetic participation in collective orgies depicted in Les particules - the constitutive impasse of the sexual relationship (Jacques Lacan's il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel) seems to reach here its devastating apex. The novel ends with a prophetic vision: in 2040, humanity collectively decides to replace itself with genetically modified asexual humanoids in order to avoid the deadlock of sexuality - these humanoids experience no passions proper, no intense self-assertion that can lead to destructive rage.Īlmost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed "man" as a figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the (then) fashionable topic of the "death of man." Although Houellebecq stages this disappearance in much more naive literal terms, as the replacement of humanity with a new post-human species, there is a common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual difference. Bruno ends up in a psychiatric asylum after confronting the meaninglessness of the permissive sexuality (the utterly depressive descriptions of the sexual orgies between forty-somethings are among the most excruciating readings in contemporary literature), while Michel invents a solution: a new self-replicating gene for the post-human desexualized entity. Abandoned by their hippie mother when they were small, neither has ever properly recovered all their attempts at the pursuit of happiness, whether through marriage, the study of philosophy, or the consumption of pornography, merely lead to loneliness and frustration. Bruno, a high-school teacher, is an undersexed hedonist, while Michel, his half-brother, is a brilliant but emotionally desiccated biochemist. Les particules elementaires, Michel Houellebecq's bestseller from 1998 which triggered a large debate all around Europe, and now finally available in English, is the story of radical DESUBLIMATION, if there ever was one.
Slavoj Zizek: NO SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE POST-HUMAN! Zizek/post-human perfume lacanian ink bibliographies chronology symposium messageboard sitemap links