Biopower, Subjectivity and Technology: A new interpretation of the body against the excesses of technical-scientific racionality.

• Grant number: 13/20731-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: February 01, 2014
• End date: January 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Aluisio Almeida Schumacher
• Grantee: Carlos Alberto Sanches Junior
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Contemporary technology has established itself as a global and expansive system marked by the proliferation of increasingly specialized and personalized devices. The issue of technology clusters around itself challenges from the domains of the social production of reality, the social practice of "science", the heteronomous production of subjectivity , the biopolitical management of consumer mass etc. A phenomenon such as genetic engineering, for example, presents challenges whose solution requires an understanding able to reorganize concepts such as "power" , "subject" and "technics", combining them into a new record . In general, opinions about the genomic challenge moves between two extreme positions: the optimistic stimulus to technical and scientific objectification of the human genome, or the prudence on behalf of individual autonomy in a context of "liberal eugenics" where manufacturing humans opens the possibility of a new type of self-reference and self-understanding of ethical subject . However , a third way can be followed: underpinned by elements of Nietzsche's philosophy, he guides us through a radically critical and analytical perspective, and it is able to be upgraded by incorporating theoretical elements from different contemporary authors such as Simondon, Foucault, Sloterdijk, among others . This third perspective reveals that the technicist interpretation of the "human body", product of social and historical processes , and the "excesses" ( hybris) of scientific-technical rationality that corresponds to it, represents the serious risk of "freezing" of emancipatory potential acquired in modernity . The objective of this research is to explore this third way, getting at the end a consistent interpretation of the phenomenon of consolidation of a technological system increasingly autonomous, selfreproductive , and whose subjectivity mechanisms seems to lead the contemporary societies to an unfettered surrender, to a self-indulgent domestication that dominates under the seductive guise of technological innovation.