The Relevance of Michel Serres’s Idea of Bodily Hominescence for a Convergence of Posthumanism and Transhumanism: A Trans/Posthuman Body

Faced with the challenge of arguments about the relation of post-, and trans-humanism, putting forth questions on their "antagonism", or "convergence", I propose to (re-)evaluate/highlight the relevance of the thinking of Michel Serres for posthuman debates. It specifically seems to me that Serresian idea of bodily hominescence can be read as a suggestion of "convergence" of post- and trans-humanism. Starting from the assumption that the body is a crucial node of both of them in that its consideration by one and the other marks a major front of their divergence (tool body according to transhumanism, dimensional body according to posthumanism), I seem to grasp, within the Serresian theme of the hominescent body as totipotent/virtual, the idea of bodily virtuality as a point of their convergence. Following Serres's argument that, due to its virtuality/potentiality (intended as the totality of the possibilities), the body, though always involved in (technological) hybridization process, is difficult to be artificially reproduced and to be reduced to information, I assume virtuality as an "operational concept" capable of "producing" convergence of post- and trans-humanism. Such a concept allows me, in fact, to read the body (re-)invested, by technology as an infiltrative agent, of a dimensional role as hybridizer (and in this sense normalized). Through virtuality, therefore, I think to be able to understand the body as a meeting ground between trans- and post- component, in the sense that technological "intervention" no longer constitutes an enhancement of the body, but a hybridizing event not implying dis-incarnation but rather normalization of body's dimensional value; precisely such, due eminently to hybridization with otherness within a process of technological infiltration. The body normalized by such a technology is therefore a trans-posthuman body, in the sense of being contaminated by technological processes keeping it in its dimensionality. In order to better illustrate this idea, I propose to examine Serresian metaphor of the body as a trunk without branches with cultural cut twigs, which seems to me to effectively express the theme of the body as a ground/condition of hybridization, i.e., as an anthropo-techno-poietic dimension. I aim so at showing the relevance of Serres's thought to conceive, in a convergent perspective, a body, not to be strengthened, but to be normalized in its dimensionality, namely, a trans/posthuman body in a trans/posthumanist context.