Book, Cyborg Philosophy: thinking against dualisms[LS]

Cyborg appears and manifests itself in contemporary culture in various ways: in cinema, in RoboCop or The Terminator, or in manga. Cyborg is incarnated in athletes involved and exposed to doping, in medical prosthetics and in fantasies of 'expanded, extended humanity' and even immortality. But Cyborg is also, and above all, a philosophical entity. This hybrid of organism and machine in fact disturbs fundamental dichotomies of our thinking: nature/artifice, human/non-human, idealism/materialism, masculine/feminine, etc. From a personal reading of the works of Georges Canguilhem and Donna Haraway, Thierry Hoquet explores the enigma of this figure: is Cyborg an instrument capable of leading us to a humanity free from dualisms, a Platonic dove dreaming of a windless sky, where it would be able to fly more freely? Or does it, on the contrary, mark our servitude to a technical system of control and oppression, the incarnation of a humanity lost in the mechanical click of steel? Thinking about Cyborg philosophically means meditating on the relationships between the machine and the organism and the possibility of combining them. It is also about thinking about the difference between sexes linked to nature and technique and, perhaps, opening the way to another way of articulating the masculine and the feminine. Understand: Cyborg arrives to disturb philosophy, due to the way he describes our condition and the insoluble contradictions associated with it. From a personal reading of the works of Georges Canguilhem and Donna Haraway, Thierry Hoquet explores the enigma of this figure: is Cyborg an instrument capable of leading us to a humanity free from dualisms, a Platonic dove dreaming of a windless sky, where it would be able to fly more freely? Or does it, on the contrary, mark our servitude to a technical system of control and oppression, the incarnation of a humanity lost in the mechanical click of steel? Thinking about Cyborg philosophically means meditating on the relationships between the machine and the organism and the possibility of combining them. It is also about thinking about the difference between sexes linked to nature and technique and, perhaps, opening the way to another way of articulating the masculine and the feminine. Understand: Cyborg arrives to disturb philosophy, due to the way he describes our condition and the insoluble contradictions associated with it.