Toutes les frontières sont des conventions qui attendent d'être transcendées

Le cinéma Wachowski, le trans-humanisme et la rencontre

Denis Viennet

in: Sciences sociales et Marxisme, Le Portique 32, 2014.

Abstract

Humanity is now affected by unprecedented changes, whose acceleration proves to be prodigious and destabilizing at the same time. But these changes don’t come without an increase in misery (material, social, existential), a ruin of ideals (hopes for a better, more tolerant, more sensitive, more free humanity), suffering and death. There is a number of currents of thought in the world which belong to trans- or post-humanism. “Transhumanism” means that present-day humanity is merely transitional, and, by means of new technologies, will tomorrow be “outdated”, to a “post-humanity”, a techno-sapiens. It is through the perspective of a certain transhumanism that we will read Wachowski’s cinema, particularly the Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas, by examining their foundations, even their infancy. At the core of this inquiry is the question of the sensitive body, claimed by some “transhumanists” to be obsolete, and with it, that of the encounter, of an existence that is attentive to what comes to surprise it, to fluster it, to give it a meaning and a rare, intense and true taste: to trans-form us.