Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, "Toward a Posthuman Ethics," points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being understood only as representational or as partial (meaning, as of human-extensions), and believing that such recognition should come with the presence of a fully conscious cyborg, Yi's essay postulates the real-world existence of Yod, a cyborg in Marge Piercy's He, She and It, and examines how its existence could affect three philosophical areas of the current debates on the cyborg.

Toward a Posthuman Ethics

Dongshin Yi

<1> The title of this essay, "Toward a Posthuman Ethics," touches upon two of the biggest subjects that have been at issue since the latter half of the twentieth century: posthumanism and ethics. As for the latter, Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn admit in The Ethics of Postmodernity, "For the first time since the advent of modern philosophy, ethics has become the dominant issue for philosophical reflection" (1). Posthumanism, on the other hand, is under critical scrutiny from "an interdisciplinary perspective informed by academic poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminist and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies" (Simon 2-3). By conjoining these two big subjects in the title, however, it is not my intention to address an issue twice as big in this essay. On the contrary, the essay simply points to a posthuman ethics as a goal which posthumanism and ethics should reach hand in hand.

<2> A posthuman ethics, therefore, is not the concern at hand. What concerns me now is "Toward," that is, the progression of the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics. For the present, the collaboration, which embarked on a while ago, seems to be harboring on the question of the cyborg too long, hence losing its momentum. Of course, this does not imply that the question can be exhaustively answered and set aside; it needs to be as recurrently yet productively asked as the question of the human in the progression in order to ascertain the practicability of a posthuman ethics. The delay on the question of the cyborg is mainly because it is formed as a question of representation. In order words, by presenting the implications of the cyborg in terms of ongoing cultural contexts, we are in fact re-presenting questions that have been asked of the human -- questions about social injustice, gender discrimination, ethical dilemma, etc. Thus, although thus represented questions may refresh and partially resolve the question of the human, it seems nothing new is asked in the question of the cyborg, hence there being little progression.

<3> For the progression of the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics, it is required to formulate the question of the cyborg as genuinely concerning cyborgs. However, one may be doubtful of such a formulation since there is no cyborg genuinely, or exclusively, present. After all, when Donna Haraway, among others, argues that "we are cyborgs," do we not mean the human by "we," but not the cyborg per se? The presence of the genuine cyborg is yet to come, so is the question of the cyborg, perhaps. But if we accept, again, Haraway's claim that the cyborg is "a matter of fiction and lived experience" and of the crossover between them, don't we already have the cyborg present among us in science fiction and movies? Shouldn't we be supposed to see the cyborg in fiction as present in reality, not as a representation of reality? Conforming to these questions, I want to begin this essay by imagining the cyborg in fiction as equally present in "lived experience," and will employ Yod, a cyborg in Marge Piercy's He, She and It [1], as an example of such presence.

<4> Having thus brought the presence of the cyborg into discussion, I will conduct a tripartite examination of the question of the cyborg in this essay. The first part investigates the use of the cyborg as a metaphor, and reveals a problematic project, rooted in traditional metaphysics. In the second part is considered the possibility of a cyborg ontology. The last part tries to answer if there can be a cyborg ethics. The three parts in this order reflect a hierarchy set in Western philosophy and in sum they reveal the anthropocentrism that sustains the hierarchy. The revelation in turn reveals that the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics is detained by anthropocentrism, on the basis of which the hierarchy tries to maintain its status in the question of the cyborg. Therefore, it is my argument that we should reload the question of the cyborg without the burden of anthropocentrism in order to resume the collaboration toward a posthuman ethics.

1. The cyborg is a metaphor

<5> The cyborg is a metaphor, not in the sense Donna Haraway expected it to be when she first wrote her famous "Cyborg Manifesto," one that works "for reimagining the world," where there is "the necessity for connection and community across difference without transcendence, or without folding difference into a reductive similarity" (Bartsch 7). Contrary to her expectation, the cyborg, as Bartsch and others in "Witnessing the Postmodern Jeremiad" witness, has become "a literalized, hypermasculine, and relative figure." Consequently, Haraway abandons it and turns to the vampire whose "praxis negotiates the artificial limits of language, engages the risks of its political space, and promises connections to monstrous possibilities -- all of which Haraway demands in her postmodern jeremiad" (Bartsch 7, 16).

<6> But despite Haraway's abandonment, the cyborg is still a metaphor, only this time in the sense that Jacques Derrida warns us of, because it makes "Everything [. . .] belong to the great immobile chain of Aristotelian ontology, with its theory of the analogy of Being, its logic, its epistemology, and more precisely its poetics and its rhetoric" (Derrida 236). In this sense,

Metaphor, therefore, is determined by philosophy as a provisional loss of meaning, an economy of the proper without irreparable damage, a certainly inevitable detour, but also a history with its sights on, and within the horizon of, the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning. This is why the philosophical evaluation of metaphor always has been ambiguous: metaphor is dangerous and foreign as concerns intuition (vision or contact), concept (the grasping or proper presence of the signified), and consciousness (proximity or self-presence); but it is in complicity with what it endangers, is necessary to it in the extent to which the de-tour is a re-turn guided by the function of resemblance (mimesis or homoiosis), under the law of the same. (Derrida 270)

The cyborg as a metaphor seems to receive the same kind of ambiguous evaluation in recent discussions on the cyborg, which either look for a way to make the cyborg more human-like or try to heighten the fear of the cyborg that is too human-like. In this seeming paradox that is a cybernetic reproduction of the antithesis between technophilia and technophobia, the discussions in actuality share the same foundation of the human and the same methodology of human-resemblance, thus establishing a metaphoric relationship where the cyborg ever imitates the human but never is the human.

<7> The metaphoric relationship between human and cyborg sets out a project that simultaneously serves two purposes. First, the project aims to assign, "under the law of the same," insurmountable difference and inferiority to the cyborg because it can be similar but never same to the human. Yod's exasperation as it [2] settles in its "own place" with "all the facilities humans require" is quite understandable. Yod seems to ask itself, rather than Shira, "Am I imitating behavior I can never match? [. . .] Am I pretending at something I'll always fail?" (Piercy 238, emphasis added).

<8> If the first purpose of the project involves the cyborg, it is the human to which the second purpose pertains. Examining exhaustively the concept of metaphor in philosophy, Derrida points out the presence of "one metaphor" which is "disappearing in its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the visage of Being" (Derrida 219, 268). It is "this extra metaphor" (Derrida 219) that provides metaphysics with the certainty of "[t]he correlation between knowledge [. . .] and being" (Levinas 76). In Western metaphysics, accordingly, this correlation situates the human and Being in a metaphorical relationship because the human knows Being, which is always disappearing and therefore ungraspable, only by imitating it. At the same time, the relationship provides the human with a position superior to other creatures because, as Derrida argues, "Man alone takes pleasure in imitating, man alone learns to imitate, man alone learns by imitation" (237). However, in the new metaphoric relationship with the cyborg, the human appears to be willing to give up such "pleasure" to the cyborg. Instead, by letting themselves always yet never fully imitated by the cyborg, the human now pursues a more ambitious goal of taking the place of "Being."

<9> The double-edged project of the metaphoric relationship to turn the cyborg into the imitator and the human into the imitated makes questionable the advancement of the cyborg and cyberspace signaling "The End of Man" [3]. Pointing out the problematic status of the cyborg in postmodernism as she examines the characters of Data in Star Trek and Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Viviane Casimir also warns, "Cyberspace world is a return of Cartesian and Newtonian epistemology where the entity "human-organism" reappropriates the center, the logos, the transcendental through an anthropomorphism" (279). The project furthermore makes doubtful the possibility of posthumanism that is conditioned by cyborgization and human disembodiment because these two are virtually the outcomes of the metaphoric relationship. Neil Badmington as well as N. Katherine Hayles, recalling Hans Moravec's musing on the possibility of mindloading [4], expresses a similar doubt by saying, "there is nothing more terrifying than a posthumanism that claims to be terminating 'Man' while actually extending 'his' term in office" (Badmington 16).

<10> To overcome the twofold project of the metaphoric relationship, and to get rid of its consequential questions and doubts about the cyborg and posthumanism, we may have to stop saying, "The cyborg is a metaphor." But what is it, then? And how do we understand the fact that it still imitates us? We could simply and rhetorically say that the cyborg is a metonym that leads a metaphoric way of life. However, the cyborg is "a conscious being," and as such, it should not be simply prescribed by such rhetorical terms. Its very presence as separate from the human certainly demands more than that. Therefore, it seems appropriate to examine the very presence of the cyborg to the extent of a cyborg ontology.

2. "The cyborg is our ontology"

<11> "The cyborg is our ontology," adds Donna Haraway to her passage, "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs," but she quickly changes the subject from ontology to politics by saying, "[the cyborg] gives us our politics" (150). Brief and equivocal as they might sound, her words serve to spin out two lines of thought that converge on the question of a cyborg ontology. The first line begins by questioning the status of ontology and its scope since "the late twentieth century" where cyborgs emerge also rings with "the clamor of contemporary philosophies of difference that [. . .] contend for the end of metaphysics in the name of respect for plurality and genuine otherness" and that proclaim "the very project of philosophical ontology is at stake" (Johnson, xviii). The question, thus, brings up a more direct question: is traditional ontology able to cope with the emergence of the cyborg? In doubt of such ability, the second line instead follows the steps of "contemporary philosophies of difference," one example of which is given by Monika Langer in "Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology." Langer, employing the notion of alterity in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to emphasize the philosophical and ontological field of ecology, which she calls "deep ecology," defines an ontological response to "the environmental crisis" as "a rejection of our present, predominantly Cartesian ontology, and the development of a radically different ontology" (Langer 115) [5]. Likewise, in regard to the cyborg, what is need seems to be "a radically different ontology" that is different from human ontology.

<12> The first line concerns how the cyborg comes into "our ontology." Given that humans gradually take in prosthetics and turn themselves into "hybrids of machine and organism," it seems appropriate to say the cyborg equally shares ontology with humans, and affects it. However, not all cyborgs can be placed in this category; some cyborgs are ours only when humans claim them as a property, in which case Haraway's words are to be (mis)interpreted as meaning that humans ontologically own the cyborg. In this case, the cyborg comes into "our ontology" as a slave who is nevertheless capable of subverting the master. Ollivier Dyens inadvertently articulates the case when he says in Metal and Flesh, "The cyborg directly questions the validity of human ontology. By its very presence, it forces us to consider the possibility of perfectly simulated human core attributes such as love, intelligence, conscience, and even soul" (82) [6]. Apparently, the more slavishly the cyborg imitates humans, the more seriously it affects human ontology. But in doing so, it also helps keep the metaphoric relationship with humans, thus rendering human ontology inexhaustible and a cyborg ontology impossible.

<13> The second line, on the other hand, stretches from Haraway's quick shift from ontology to politics, which can be partially explained by her understanding of ontology as deeply rooted in metaphysics and thus in logocentrism. The shift also reflects her intention to employ the cyborg as an imagery or a metaphor that "can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves," the maze in which "the relation between organism and machine has been a border war" (Haraway 181, 150). However, observing that such a metaphor accordingly leads to "the figuration of the cyborg as a potent guerilla warrior" who engages in the "border war," Ellen Mortensen in Touching Thought: Ontology and Sexual Difference argues, "it is hard to discern in what way her [Haraway's] version of the postmodern warrior deviates from previous "masculine" warriors we know from literature or myth" (Mortensen 114) [7]. Because Haraway "insists that it [the cyborg] announces a post-gender world," Mortensen criticizes, she denies the cyborg an ontological foundation that is based on sexual difference (Mortensen 114). As a result, while the cyborg deployed in the fields of technology and politics is being succumbed to the deep-rooted masculine tradition, it does not occur to Haraway that "the cyborg is ontologically most "powerful," precisely at the moments when its existence is most radically called into question" (Mortensen 116).

<14> Mortensen's insistence on providing the cyborg with an ontological status certainly opens up the possibility of a cyborg ontology that is different from "our ontology" and independent of the masculine, and anthropocentric for that matter, tradition of technology and politics. However, since she bases the ontological status of the cyborg on sexual difference that is applicable only to cyborged humans, her insistence still shows a trace of anthropocentrism. Without taking into consideration the presence of a conscious cyborg that is, as Yod explains itself to Shira, "a fusion of machine and lab-created biological components" (Piercy 70), such an ontological status is bound to be partial and unable to develop into a cyborg ontology.

<15> Although it appears to hinder a cyborg ontology, the partiality, if it is combined with the presence of conscious cyborgs that are "of machine and lab-created biological components," can provide more than a general contour of cyborg population. That is, it promises an indelible difference in the population, a difference between these two types of cyborgs that is blurry yet deep enough to be considered ontological. If there to be a cyborg ontology, it must begin by accepting this ontological difference and developing into what is expressed by Yod as companionship. Yod, as a cyborg, says, "I'm conscious of my existence. I think, I plan, I feel, I react. [. . .] I feel the desire for companionship" (Piercy 93, emphasis added). In "the desire for companionship," if we go deeper, there lies a desire for a cyborg ontology.

<16> But the desire of cyborgs at once for companionship and for a cyborg ontology is being frustrated. For example, Shira, despite keeping company with Yod, is unable to understand the desire and inadvertently disregards it.

Yod stopped and faced her. His eyes stared into her [Shira]. "Avram told me nothing. I accessed his notes. Except for Gimel, who could quite honestly be called retarded, Avram destroyed every one of my brothers."
"All the cyborgs who preceded you, you mean."
"They were all conscious, Shira, except for Gimel. Fully alive minds."
"That upsets you."
"If your mother had killed eight siblings of yours before your birth because they didn't measure up to her ideas of what she wanted, wouldn't you be alarmed?"
"You fear he'll destroy you also?" (Piercy 93)

At the end of their dialogue, by recalling the patriarchal relationship between Avram and Yod, Shira dismisses Yod's desire for companionship, which has in fact prompted the dialogue. The denial of the possibility of cyborg companionship is also prevalent in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where Deckard tells us that "An android [8] [. . .] doesn't care what happens to another android" (Dick 101). As a result, even when Rick Deckard is "capable of feeling for at least specific, certain androids" across the boundary that he thinks impassable, Rachel, the android, only "shuddered" at the possibility of empathy toward another android, Pris Stratton, and is willing to "retire Stratton" (Dick 142, 189, 195).

<17> The consistent denial of the possibility of cyborg companionship that could lead to a cyborg ontology is in line with an understanding of the cyborg as a singular entity that exists only in the metaphoric relationship with humans. Even when there are a multiple number of cyborgs, they are considered singular in unity, given no sense of difference between them and, henceforth, no possibility of plurality and companionship [9]. However, if there is an inherent difference between cyborgs, and if they, being conscious, are aware of the difference, they should be as much capable of cultivating companionship as of bringing up antagonism. This draws an attention toward companionship among cyborgs that promises a cyborg ontology. But it also calls for a measure by which they can deal with antagonism. In other words, cyborgs are in need of a way to regard difference not as a threat but as a possibility of a new relationship, which is why we have to discuss a cyborg ethics.

3. "Could there be a cyborg ethics?"

<18> "Could there be a cyborg ethics?" ask the editors [10] of Cyborg Handbook, and they imagine it as "new constructions of good and evil" that they hope may help humans to deal with "cyborgian problems" (12). It is clear from their hope that they understand a cyborg ethics as a branch of human ethics that specifically deals with cyborgs. That is, a cyborg ethics is intended to be an ethics of (that is, about) cyborgs rather than an ethics of (that is, by) cyborgs. Given that ethics in Western philosophy has a long tradition of anthropocentrism, traced back to Aristotle, such an intention is fully anticipated. Describing happiness as final and self-sufficient and, therefore, as the good in his The Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle clarifies, "It is natural, then, that we call neither ox nor horse nor any other of the animals happy; for none of them is capable of such activity" (19). And even in the presence of conscious cyborgs, it seems that ethics hardly steps aside from its anthropocentric tradition.

<19> But ethics in the age of postmodernism undergoes groundbreaking changes, moving away from its long tradition of metaphysics. As "the question of the good has preempted that of the true" (Madison 1), ethics is placed as "first philosophy" over metaphysics and ontology. In an ethics thus placed, the good is not a question of the truth but, as Levinas tells us, a question of "responsibility for the Other, [. . . ] a responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have done to the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself" (Levinas 83). Therefore, ethics is not subjected to "the law of the same" that finds the truth in the identification of knowledge with being; it is the law of difference that emphasizes responsibility and respect for the other.

<20> Insofar as responsibility and respect for the other are concerned, cyborgs are ethically exemplary. In fact, there are cyborgs which are responsible and respectful toward humans by whom they are always designated as others. Strange is that these cyborgs choose -- if truth to be told, are depicted to choose -- to destroy themselves for the sake of humans. Not to mention Yod in He, She and It, these self-sacrificing cyborgs include Terminator in Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991) [11], Andrew Martin in Bicentennial Man (1999) [12], and Data in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) [13]. Noticing the pervasive suicidal trend among cyborgs, John R.R. Christie asks why there is such "A Tragedy for Cyborgs." His answer is that "even the Good Cyborg cannot survive its narrative" because "its survival would contain the potential of machine hegemony" (Christie 5). In other words, it is anthropocentrism that, in competition with "machine hegemony," renders no place for good cyborgs in human society, in which, as Shira reminds Yod, "there is no culture of cyborgs" (Piercy 238).

<21> As mentioned above, Levinas's ethics with its emphasis on responsibility and respect for the other seems to open its ethical gate to cyborgs. By further implication that comes with its enormous impact on traditional metaphysics and ontology, his ethics also enables us to think of cyborgs neither as a metaphor nor as "our ontology" but as the presence of the other. Could it be then possible that Levinas's ethics helps overcome anthropocentrism and bring a cyborg ethics into existence? Following Silvia Benso who reads Levinas's ethics in an attempt to establish "the ethics of things" in her The Face of Things, the answer has to be no:

Although the subsumption of the Other under the category of person is illegitimate, since the Other escapes any categorization or universalization, it is certain that in Levinas the face of the other expresses itself only in the eyes of the other human being. "It is only man [and one would like to read Levinas, and the translator, say human being] who could be absolutely foreign to me" (TI 73), Levinas writes. (Benso 42)

Thus, continues Benso, "Levinas's ethics retains anthropologocentric features in its reading life still in terms of an opposition between human and nonhuman, where the human logos of ethics is the defining factor" (43).

<22> That Levinas excludes non-human beings from his ethics, even when he admits the unknowablity of the others, reveals how strong the anthropocentric tradition is in ethics, which makes it understandable why a cyborg ethics is being put off, if not denied. Nevertheless, Benso, as she tries to defeat that tradition and reach the ethics of things [14], asks a curious question: "what if things were capable of expressing an ethical signification, an alterity that goes beyond the structure of meaning within which things have been enframed -- an alterity that demands the resoluteness of an ethical response on the side of human beings?" (xxx). Then, she answers that in "the thingly side of the ethics of things," things place the demand on "human beings by their mere impenetrable presencing there" because they don't have a language (Benso 142). And this lack of language enables the ethics of things "to release such an ethics from any anthropologocentric suspicion and to recognize to things the possibility for an ethical demand" (Benso 152) [15].

<23> Assuming that things have no language, Benso's answer rather dissolves into a demand that humans be responsible and respectful for things, a demand that, considering the anthropocentric tradition of ethics, will draw little repercussion. However, if Benso's curious question can be asked on a different assumption that involves cyborgs, there could be an answer that is very much different. With a language, which is not anthropocentric but still understandable to humans, cyborgs will be "capable of expressing an ethical signification" that virtually specifies their demand, instead of intimating it. More importantly, rather than being interpreted as such by humans, the ethical signification can be constructed as such by cyborgs that are capable of setting ethical examples and, probably, of producing a cyborg ethics.

Last Words

<24> Speculating on the matter of where posthumanism should move toward, N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman states,

The posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that faction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self. (Hayles 286)

To reconsider humanism is surely a right place to start from, at least, for humans. However, since posthumanism involves not only humans but also non-human beings such as conscious cyborgs, there should be more than one place to start from on the way toward posthumanism. In other words, if the 'post' in posthumanism is to do more than just function to mean "after," if it is not to pre-position posthumanism again in a humanistic discourse that is anthropocentric, we need to understand that posthumanism is an act of posting humanism next to cyborgs that with their own ontology and ethics, will ask humans for a non-metaphoric relationship. Once the act is done, then, we, including cyborgs, are ready to make toward a posthuman ethics in order to figure out how we should relate each other.

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Badmington, Neil. "Theorizing Posthumanism." Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 10-27.

Bartsch, Ingrid, Carolyn DiPalma, and Laura Sells. "Witnessing the Postmodern Jeremiad: (Mis)Understanding Donna Haraway's Method of Inquiry." Configurations 9.1 (2001): 127-64.

Benso, Silvia. The Face of Things: A Different Side of Ethics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Casimir, Viviane. "Data and Dick's Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier." Extrapolation. 38.4 (1997): 278-91.

Christie, John R. R. "A Tragedy for Cyborgs." Configurations 1.1 (1993): 171-96.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.

Dyens, Ollivier. Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Trans. Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.

Gray, Chris Hables, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and Seteven Mentor. "Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms." Introduction. Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Johnson, Galen A. "Alterity as a Reversibility." Introduction. Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

Langer, Monika. "Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology." Ontology and Alterity in Merleau- Ponty. Ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

Levinas, Emmanuel. "Ethics as First Philosophy." The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Madison, Gary B. and Marty Fairbairn. Introduction. The Ethics of Postmodernity: Current Trends in Continental Thought. Ed. Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.

Mortensen, Ellen. Touching Thought: Ontology and Sexual Difference. New York: Lexington Books, 2002.

Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991.

Simon, Bart. "Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures." Introduction. Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 1-9.

Notes

[1] To give a brief summary, in Marge Piercy's novel, He, She and It, the world in the middle of the twenty-first century is in an impending conflict between dominant corporations such as the Yakamura-Stichen and free towns such as Tikva, one that leads to a situation where Y-S deprives Shira, who came from Tikva to work for the corporation, of the custody of her son in order to use her for information on the town, while Avram, a prominent scientist of Tikva, succeeds in creating Yod, a cyborg, to work as protector of the town. Returning to Tikva to live with her grandmother, Malkah, whose programming expertise also helps Avram to make Yod a fully conscious being, Shira falls in love with the cyborg as she teaches it human interactions. Despite its humane capabilities to be conscious and love, however, Yod's identity keeps being questioned, and, as the conflict deepens, it chooses to serve its objective as a machine by exploding itself to kill Y-S executives and resolve the conflict. [^]

[2] Although Yod claims to be referred to as a human person (Piercy 70, 76), I will refer to Yod as it in order to avoid dangers, which are the main concerns of this essay, in making such a claim. [^]

[3] That this phrase appears in numerous writings on posthumanism makes it unnecessary to give an actual citation, which probably have to give the credit to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992). [^]

[4] For Moravec's proposal, Badmington quotes Hayles from How We Became Posthuman, who says, "I was reading Hans Moravec's Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, enjoying the ingenious variety of his robots, when I happened upon the passage where he argues it will soon be possible to download human consciousness into a computer" (1). [^]

[5] Langer's main interest is in deep ecology that conducts an ontological and philosophical investigation of an environmental crisis. As with Johnson that is quoted above, her suggestion is based on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy that emphasizes the reversibility of alterity. That is, nature as alterity is intertwined with man so that man and nature are in a deep ontological relation. [^]

[6] It may be true that Dyens regards the cyborg in equal terms in this articulation. In fact, early in his book, he says, "we are cyborgs" (14). However, by consistently relating the cyborg to the human, as in "The cyborg is the implosion of our former definition" (81) or "The cyborg is a semantic transformation of the body" (82), he understands the cyborg only as a metaphor and, thus, gives it no ontological status. [^]

[7] Mortensen's argument is definitely supported by what Ingrid and others point out in their article (quoted earlier in this essay). However, I would argue that their criticism on the cyborg is based on a partial understanding of the cyborg that doesn't recognize it as "a conscious being." [^]

[8] In this essay, I refer to an android as a conscious cyborg.[^]

[9] The best example would be 'Borgs' in Star Trek episodes. [^]

[10] The question is quoted from the introduction of the book that is in fact edited by Gray with the assistance of the rest. [^]

[11] Directed by James Cameron in 1991, the movie changes the terminator (by Arnold Schwarzenegger) to a good character, only to have it destroy itself in the end after it protects human characters. [^]

[12] In this movie that is based on Issac Asimov's story and directed by Chris Columbus, Andrew, an android with unique ability, decides to die in order to be accepted as human. Interesting is that the human counsel in the movie prescribes mortality as an innate requirement to be considered human, which somehow preconditions Andrew's death. [^]

[13] AData in this movie, and also throughout TV series, brings up a lot of interesting speculations in regard to the cyborg. It seems to me the most interesting one is that while Data wants to know about humans and to be like them, it always is self-conscious of its uniqueness as a cyborg. [^]

[14] In order to complete the ethics of things, Benso examines Heidegger's philosophy, especially, his thematization of things that Levinas's ethics lacks. Probably, her understanding of these philosophers is best described by her own words: "Levinas loves, but not things; Heidegger thematizes things, but does not love them enough" (123). [^]

[15] One the other hand, Benso adds "tenderness, as the response to the demand and the properly human configuration of the ethics of things" (Benso 142). [^]