Between the no Longer and the not Yet: on Bios/Zoe-Ethics

Abstract

The body has come back in late postmodernity and with a vengeance in social practices and discourses as well as in science and bio-technology, in contemporary evolutionary theory and under the impact of information technologies. The body is a bundle of contradictions: it is a zoological entity; a genetic data-bank, while it also remains a bio-social entity, that is to say, a slab of codified, personalised memories. It is part animal, part machine but the dualistic opposition of the two, which our culture has adopted since the 18th century as the dominant model, is inadequate today. Contemporary science and technology in fact have reached right into the most intimate layers of the living organism and the structures of the self, dissolving boundaries that had been established by centuries of humanistic thinking.