What happens to thought in a cyborg body?: On Brain ships, embodiment and posthuman gest

This article uses some of the complexities occasioned by the beings Anne McCaffrey envisioned as ‘shell people’ – cyborgs whose inert bodies are encased in titanium shells while the spaceships that surround them become bodies proper – in order to address some key theoretical issues with the relation...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Hope, Alexander James
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uam.es:10486/710506
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10486/710506
https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2150292
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:posthumanism
embodiment
cyborgs
Deleuze
Filología
Descripción
Sumario:This article uses some of the complexities occasioned by the beings Anne McCaffrey envisioned as ‘shell people’ – cyborgs whose inert bodies are encased in titanium shells while the spaceships that surround them become bodies proper – in order to address some key theoretical issues with the relationship between Thought, embodiment and plasticity. It borrows from Catherine Malabou’s work on neuronal plasticity and cerebrality, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s critical engagement with the brain and their de-hierarchicalized and decentred vision of body-brain/brain-body relations from Cinema 2 and What is Philosophy? It brings these discourses into closer contact with machinic ‘assemblages’ in both Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, and one rather closer to posthuman interpretations of the term. It aims to rethink the ‘gest’ of such assemblages to consider the (oft excluded or repressed) place of the body in these kinds of becomings. It attempts to answer, ‘what happens to thought in a cyborg body?’ while at the same time considering how that thought is materially given greater complexity by the assemblage that constitutes it as something other than a molar unity