Mors Dei, Vita MeaHuman, Transhuman, and Posthuman Identities in the TV Series Altered Carbon and Westworld

  1. Amaya Fernández Menicucci 1
  1. 1 Universidad del País Vasco. Grupo de investigación REWEST
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ISSN: 1887-2905

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In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti argues that the perfectibility of the body and the exploitation of genetic and neural capital not only problematise the ‘nature’ of human kind, but also disrupt humanist views of the universe, effectively displacing humans from its centre, just as humanism once displaced theocentric thinking. Two recent sf TV series, Altered Carbon (Netflix, 2018-2020) and Westworld (HBO, 2016-2020), offer a complex representation of the consequences of boundless bodyenhancement, extreme mind-body dualism and the emergence of non-human consciousness in order to speculate on the ‘nature’ of the entities that might replace humanity at the centre of present and future philosophical reflections and socio-political practices. In both series, the tension between the human and the non-human results in violent conflicts that question humanist definitions of Man and God, while presenting cyborgs and AI not as alternatives to organically-generated consciousness, but as stages on a continuum along which the divine, the human and the non-human merge into posthuman versions of subjectivity, subalternity and otherness. By focusing my analysis on such dichotomies as mortalityimmortality, reality-virtuality and mind-body, as well as on the process of identity construction in both organic and inorganic characters, I intend to explore the way in which Altered Carbon and Westworld envision a world in which the self exists beyond the ‘natural’, the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘unnatural’.

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