Between the no longer and the not yet: on bios/zoe-ethics

Filozofski vestnik vol. XXIII, no. 2

Rosi Braidotti

2002

9-25

In the late postmodern era, the body has returned with a vengeance to social practices and discourses, but also to science and biotechnology and modern evolutionary theory, while at the same time being under the influence of information technologies. The body is a bundle of contradictions: a zoological entity, a genetic data bank, while at the same time remaining a biosocial entity, a kind of block of coded, personalized memories. The body is part animal and part machine, but today the dualistic opposition of the two, which has been the dominant model in our culture since the 18th century, is inadequate. Modern science and technology have in fact penetrated directly into the most intimate layers of the living organism and the structures of the self, and have dissolved the boundaries established by centuries of humanistic thinking.