Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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СКАЧАТЬ with each other, which progress over the span of just a few months. The first process is a forced dissociation of an ego and its old and new embodiment. The second process is the progressing disintegration of Samsa’s personality. The third process is the desynchronization of Samsa’s life, cognitive and social functionalities. The horizon of his life has been narrowed to four walls of his room, soon stripped bare of all objects by his family, and turned into a prison cell. He no longer has access to human reality. He is unable, by any means, to settle in the insect reality. However, there is also no place for him in some sort of third, transhumanistic reality between that which is human and that which is insectile. Each paragraph of Metamorphosis renews the drama: initially rebelling against his imprisoning, he finally gets even more excluded from his familiar, human habitat.¹¹⁵ At the same time, his strange embodiment does not offer him any safe shelter, any familiar housing as it is, or as it should be, with a living organism’s exterior.

The state in which Gregor Samsa finds himself seemingly bears the stamp of schizophrenia, of which the basic symptom is a duality, the loss of selfhood on behalf of doubling and the presence of two subjects in one body (dividuum),¹¹⁶ ←43 | 44→foreign and hostile towards each other. The clarity of mind and self-awareness which Samsa retains till the very end are sometimes also observed in “eloquent, educated” schizoid patients. They “are aware of what they have lost. For those patients, the new reality is strikingly different from their former one. The order of things is completely disturbed. People are no longer the same as they were before. Things and other human beings become increasingly peculiar and foreign, and ultimately lose all their connection with the patient.”¹¹⁷ And on the other hand, there is no connection on the patient’s side as well,¹¹⁸ as he is going to quickly and completely forget his past, like Gregor Samsa (but “what about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense,” he rhetorically asks).

At all costs, he is trying to rip off this preposterous guise,¹¹⁹ which isolates him from others and additionally makes them repulsed by him in the same way as vermin can. But those closest to him do not want to see a human underneath this hard shell of an insect. Would that be Gregor? Impossible: “…Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience.”¹²⁰

A man turns out to be internally and subjectively attached to his human body, which he sees as his own. This individualistic form is not only his facade and exterior layer, but also it is the embodiment of his essence; he is his body. That attachment is absolute. However, the radical post humanistic view questions its strength in the name of the decentralisation of the anthropocentric and ego-centered identity. The infinite bond exists not because of the evolution which shaped human identity as a species but also as an individual. Evolution – as proved by Hans Jonas¹²¹ – created a generic identity. Meanwhile, Friedrich Dürrenmatt believed that we, people, inherited “a prelogical and premoral brain”¹²² from nonhuman ←44 | 45→creatures. Gregor Samsa clashes with this primal brain, mind, and identity trapped in the body of an insect, which has robbed him of all traces of human mentality. It is a drastically self-alienating experience, not a return to the dark, unconscious sources of the conscious. The reshaping of a human brain and mind into an animal one is impossible, even if humanity inherited the archaic core of the mind from its evolutionary ancestors. Dürrenmatt’s stance gives us something to contemplate:

I am convinced that the brain has not changed much (das Gehirn gleichgeblieben ist). (…) However, suddenly it has become our enemy. It has played the human off against himself, pushing him towards a biological crisis (eine biologische Krise). I think that humankind is biologically endangered (die Menschheit als biologisch in Gefahr). I am not sure what it will lead to (…), now that we know that the human brain is greater than the human himself (der Mensch hält eigentlich sein eigenes Gehirn nicht aus).¹²³

      In his novel, The Heart of the Dog (1925), Mikhail Bulgakov addresses a reverse narrative towards a fictional experiment with xenotransplantation, aiming to let a dog develop unexpected, post-animal functionalities, although the original aim of that experiment was completely different:

      23 December. At 8.30 in the evening a pioneering operation performed (…) the first of its kind in Europe: under chloroform Sharik’s scrotum was removed and replaced by human testes with seminal vesicles and vasa, taken from a man aged 28 (…) the hypophysis was removed after trepanation of the top of the skull and replaced by the human equivalent from the same man (…). The aim of the operation: (…) to explore the acceptability of hypophysis transplant and its potential for the rejuvenation of the human organism,

      that is, to improve the New Soviet Man, e.g., to create new traits, including ideologies and propaganda slogans inherited as an evolutionary-progressive improvement.

Behind the satiric convention, the dog’s inside perspective combined with clinical observation is provided as the main narrative view. As a result, Bulgakov developed an anti-utopia about turning animals into highly developed psychic individuals (or enhancing any organism and subject in that way).¹²⁴

      ←45 | 46→

      The consequences of creating a post-animal dog were “incalculable.” Instant advances in the acquisition of language were observed:

He can say a great many words: ‘Cabby’; ‘There’s no seats’; ‘Evening paper’ (…) There is something almost phonographic about it; as though the creature had heard swearwords somewhere earlier on and had automatically, subconsciously recorded them in his mind and was now belching them up in wads. (…) It is as though, having been deep frozen in his consciousness, they are now thawing out and emerging. Once out, the new word remains in use.¹²⁵

      Bulgakov’s novel may be a timeless warning about enhancement and eugenics applied to both humans and animals in order to grant them a privileged status. The writer used to work as a military physician and changed his profession after the Soviet Union forced medical professionals to conduct eugenic experiments.

3.4.2 T. R. Brown’s The Face in the Mirror

      T. R. Brown’s book, The Face in the Mirror. A Transhuman Identity Crisis (2012), is admittedly not a literary artwork, but a postmodern exemplification of radical posthumanist S-F. Brown’s thought experiment about the self-identity crisis of the main character, Todd Herschel. He deals with multiple transformations. After he lost his body (his ‘entire body was amputated’) as a result of a nearly fatal car accident, his brain was removed from his corpse and implanted into a new, “neohuman” body, with no more than forty percent of human DNA. In this new embodiment, everything was new: it showed not only human, but also animal properties; it was not masculine, but feminine. Additionally, his brain’s replica had been reproduced in the software.

      Todd Herschel wakes up from narcosis, completely oblivious. This moment of awaking shows analogies with Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Todd discovers his new situation step by step, the first time by looking at himself in a mirror:

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