Jason Hawes
Jason Hawes is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. Drawing on phenomenology, deconstruction, and dialectics, his current research examines the relations of ontology and axiology, with a particular focus on rivers and colonial-capitalism. His master’s thesis, Mutating Carnophallogocentrism: Kantian Dignity and the Rights of Nature,deconstructed recent recognitions of rights of natural entities like rivers. His Stabilizing Boundaries with Nature (Gnosis, 2022) critiqued Marxian theories of ecological crises.And alongside l’Observatoire internationale des droits de la nature, he helped edit A Legal Personality for the St. Lawrence River and Other Rivers of the World (2023), as well as various legal bills and proposals.
Adam Rosenthal visited the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University on October 24, 2024, for a roundtable discussion of his recently published book Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). The roundtable consisted of Joshua Schuster, Derek Woods, Antoine Traisnel, and Jason Hawes. We collect here revised responses from Schuster, Traisnel, and Hawes, along with Rosenthal’s introductory remarks.
The desire for immortality traces through such ancient records that it seems to coincide with history itself. From Gilgamesh to the Great Pyramids, eternal salvation to brain emulation, from Prosthetic Immortalities to our very own symposium, this desire, Rosenthal prudently warns, is here to stay. We are always already haunted by its phantasms, chasing its metaphysical lures, and no heroic deed or technological feat, not even the slaying of God, can satiate its appeal. In this all-too-timely work, the desire for immortality weaves through tidal repressions and returns in a sea of voices, weathering waves of primordial wisdom upon modernity’s most sedimented and pressing problems. Deconstructing recent mutations in discourses of indefinite life, Rosenthal’s intervention offers a deeply charitable but serious speaking truth to power. It’s not only in dreams of religious martyrs or techno-capitalist broligarchs who wish to upload their existence to the clouds, in promises of infinite rewards, pleasures, or growth, and shadowing concerns of autonomy, fairness, or inheritance. On Rosenthal’s watch, no theory or system, no desire or taste, not a single breath—nothing is experienced let alone expressed via lips licked clean of all traces of immortality. All walks of life are found tangled in its lures.
In all such mortal cases, immortality is, of course, impossible. Ironically, exactly. Rosenthal affirms at once a necessary desire for immortality and its impossibility, and so all the more intimately the aporetic nature of it all. And more still: an originary force at play in this aporetic desire as creative or generative of life, tout-court. Only in response to a real yet impossible desire for immortality may mortal lifeforms “make sense,” be it conceptual or corporeal, human or nonhuman, metabolic or autopoietic, finite or indefinite. If one task of Prosthetic Immortalities is to deconstruct the different ways in which artifice is driven by immortality, this task is, symbiotically, that of the living. With this text, deconstruction’s interdisciplinarity is on profound display, unfolding axes of philosophy, biology, technology through currents of life. Each field animated by an insatiable taste for aporia wherever it leads or however it lures, be it hors-texte or after-life. There is no hors-texte, so there are texts. Just as there is no after-life, no immortality, so there is mortality. Texts are to truth or being as mortality is to immortality. Neither can do without, nor be separated from or reduced to the other, neither as cause or effect, part or whole, originary or final.
It is this entanglement that Rosenthal’s novel concept “prosthetic immortalities” illuminates so brilliantly. Through its kaleidoscope lens, creatures cast dancing shadows in an otherwise blinding eternity. Each mark living chiasmus, matrixes stretched across mortality and immortality, actively reflecting, repeating, embodying the aporia of life’s necessary but impossible desire. Prosthetics, in this light, may serve as life’s glue or stitching, organs or flesh, life’s “solution” to the “problem” of immortality. If life’s solutions, however, were ever linear or even delineable, not even complete but complete-able, the problems would cease to be, and so too would life. Immortality’s impossibility is, as we’ve seen, just as originary as any lived materiality. While “prosthetics” offers one possible means for a more general or essential problem of thinking or becoming immortality, “prosthetic immortalities,” in contrast, disorients particular-general, means-ends, problem-solution, arche–telos relations, attuning us to co-originarity without collapsing into mere mixture or middle ground, nor mere essence or chaos. There may be no absolute originary immortality, paired with the multiplicity of prosthetics; there are rather always already multiple instances of prosthetic immortalities.
In this way, Rosenthal artfully straddles both orientations of prosthetics (contingent, replaceable, conditional, historical, many) and immortality (absolute, irreplaceable, unconditional, immutable, one). The logic of the “always already” of life’s desire for immortality, of prosthetic immortalities, is here threaded in the spirit of chiasmus:
\/if immortality, then prosthetics\/
/\if prosthetics, then immortality/\
On one pole, insofar as there is immortality, there are prosthetics. This stake to immortality is cultivated more retroactively. There has never been immortality without prosthetics “because there has never been immortality without trace” (4), without différance. Immortality has not been fully experienced or expressed, at least neither outside finite language nor mortal embodiment, and so has always been differing and deferring across signs and prosthetics of spacetime.
Rosenthal begins in the Platonic realm, where immortality reigns over the supplemental, the crafts “thrice removed” (notably poetry), and so where prosthetics may seem least appreciated. Remarkably, we turn neither to Plato’s dialogues on the afterlife or the immutable soul, but to one of history’s most enduring works on love. Prosthetics are immediate in the Symposium’s dialogical form itself, in the nesting dolls of he-said-she-said. Plato speaks for all, many of whom are themselves speaking for others who are speaking for others. Plato recounts that Aristodemus recounts to Glaucon that Socrates recounts the lesson Diotima taught (which I recount here, in response to Rosenthal’s recounting).
Prosthetics are more deeply layered in the conceptual contrast across speeches—no claim stands on its own (the one that is many, as Rosenthal says), mirroring a history of ideas, a contextual lineage. Where earlier odes to love appealed to a genealogy of gods, to trauma-inducing “divine eugenics” (29), to a predetermined reunion or “desire to re-member dismembered parts” (27), it is only in contrast, in aiming beyond the mere reunion, repetition, or return of these isolated arbitrary states that Diotima’s lessons on life, and Rosenthal’s in turn, shine through in all their glory.
In consensus with Socrates and friends, Diotima agrees that love manifests, in one way or another, a desire for what is beautiful or good. What comes persistently into question, it seems, is less the telos and more the nature, origin or arche of love and its desire for the good:
What do you suppose, Socrates, to be the cause of this love and desire? …. If you believe that love is by nature bent on what we have repeatedly admitted, you may cease to wonder. For here, too, on the same principle as before, the mortal nature ever seeks, as best it can, to be immortal. (cited in Rosenthal, 21-22)
The arche of love’s desire appears as a seeking for immortality. The overlooked principle reminds us that love desires what is good, and does so impartially, always to the greatest extent possible, absolutely and unconditionally. Diotima confirms, we “yearn for immortality no less than for good, since love loves good to be one’s own for ever. And hence it necessarily follows that love is of immortality” (23/29). Love manifests, in prosthetic contrast, not just any engendering, not just any mere drive for one’s other-half, divine or biological, but a desire for that which is greater than any other, for the whole-iest of all wholes, a desire to live, experience, and foster what is good not just to its fullest but beyond fullness. Love dreams not merely to dissolve past borders or fulfill future needs, but to be always already without lack, to return to a time without space, space without time, to return, perhaps infinitely, without return—to be one with all that is good, or better, be the good. Love thus desires the good immortally, and so immortality. If love, then immortality.
Here, Rosenthal novelly nourishes Diotima’s “invention” of life as prostheticization. Echoing that ironic impossibility once again, Diotima admits: “Living sameness is temporary.” From birth to death one is always changing, some properties lost, some gained, not only in body, flesh, or bones, but in soul— in manners, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears. Identity persists in life only in continuously becoming anew. At the same time, however, it is only in being mortal that one might aim for immortality. Facing this aporetic impossibility, Rosenthal again finds no mere negation, shortcoming, error, or illusion, but something generative, an “incompleteness of the structure that constitutes the living, as mortal, as such” (12).
Diotima’s love lessons paint prosthetics, life’s incomplete successions, as far from arbitrary. Above and beyond mere materiality, living beings survive by actively responding to this incompleteness via teleological generation, not just any new creature in place of the old, but specifically “in the semblance of the original” (22/30/33). Life just is this striving to maintain identity, an impossible task, and in turn settling for the best of its abilities, “as best it can,” in a “process of incremental prosthetic immortalization” (13). Again, this process cannot be complete. Life “cannot but supplement its originary lack,” and so cannot but prostheticize, via supplements, simulacra, or techne (31). It is only through something like prosthetics aimed at the immortality of some earlier identity, always falling short, never quite capturing, and so thereby ever “re-inventing its referent,” that life endures. If immortality is to be lived, then prosthetics.
A fleeting affinity between Plato and Heidegger is drawn in love’s distaste for the benommen or gehemmt animal. But on Rosenthal’s reading, prosthetic immortalization is not the exclusive right or mode of humans, nor of conscious or intelligent beings. Regardless of one’s capabilities, all organisms “function according to the same logic of participation.” Birds “partake of immortality” in reproducing similar birds, just as humans might generate laws (31). Ecological and legal diversities manifest different mortal participations in immortality, different prosthetic solutions. The aporias of life, immortality, and love thus permeate all of Earth’s webs. “So do not wonder if everything naturally values its offshoot” (30/33), affirms Diotima. Every living creature always already aims for an impossible immortality, and so naturally values, naturally loves, through generations of prosthetics, and cannot exist otherwise. Evolution reads as one great love story.
What Plato “surely found so unsatisfactory” with earlier odes, Rosenthal writes, was their casting of life as “destined to remain bound to the specific conditions whereby it was produced… fixed within a closed circuit, without the possibility of history or event” (26-27). Life as prosthetic immortalization, in contrast, is a way beyond determinate identity, opening thought and spacetime for action and creativity. “Having placed the origin of love beyond the reach of any prior, historical experience of trauma or loss,” Rosenthal explains, “love may now seed itself within all the variegated, and indeed unlimited, activities with which mortal life finds itself involved” (27). Love thus marks a reorientation of origin beyond any particular historical event, but it is precisely this that gives way to the possibility of history or events proper, relations of love and finitude in the first place. The desire for immortality “already transcends” historical experiences and material embodiment, and so poses a lack, but at the same time “conditions” or grounds an arche of embodiment as such (27).
Recall that the arche of love was at first a teleological desire for immortality. But here, at the same time, it seems to be an arche of immortality, or an immortal arche, prior to history, even prior to desire, that sets the telos not only of love but of life. In ‘between’ dwell prosthetic immortalities. What Diotima shows Socrates, and Rosenthal shows us, then, is that each orientation acts as next best in expressing something true of the other. This “next best” is not a shortcoming but is generative, as a recursive or asymptotic antidote to circularity. Its truth falls not on traditionally sacred, empirical, or logical grounds—or not only these, but rather on the always already. The aporia of (im)mortality disorients telos and arche. Each entangled in chiasmus, just as “if immortality, then prosthetics” turns on “if prosthetics, then immortality” and vice versa. Each always already aims for the other. It is in this sense that the desire for immortality marks not just one end among others, but is “essentially insatiable” (27), lips always salivating, stomachs already grumbling. It manifests the aporia of teleological generation itself. The conundrum again; for mortals, immortality remains impossible, and so living, loving, beautiful prosthetics all the more timelessly urgent.
Given Rosenthal’s focus on life, it’s worth noting the inattention to autoimmunity. It is certainly no accident that we begin with Plato, with philosophy as that which beholds the “beautiful in its unalloyed, pure, immutable, and indivisible unity” (31), whereas Prosthetic Immortalities’ conclusion turns to poetry (and so too did its origins) as an equally important orientation. As Bennington puts it, in autoimmunity, the end (telos) is the end.
We are left with at least two interrelated lines of inquiry. On one hand, questions of the good. To refocus these, we might ask, what are the differences between the desire for immortality and the desire for the good? What of life and love? Following Plato, we might think and re-think our entire discourse using each interchangeably. But if Plato himself casts higher and lower forms of life, and if we want to critique broligarchic drives for indefinite life, we need some distinction. Here one might also re-think our entire discourse by interchanging predicate logic (of/for): the desire for immortality (subject) and the desire of immortality (object). What of the differences between prosthetics (noun) and prosthetic (adj.)? On the other hand, then, we face questions of identity. The teleological generation at play, even if not Platonic, cannot merely be a matter of semblance. If any prior identity was good enough, it would not need repeating. How might one value difference and repetition at the same spacetime? Or, how might difference and repetition ground value over spacetime?
The question Prosthetic Immortalities addresses, then, is not how to do away with, but how to take up this aporetic desire anew, better, but never perfectly? In différance it is the particular responses to the impossibility of immortality, the unique reaches and shortcomings, that make all the creative and normative difference. Each are, as Rosenthal has put it, a matter of poetic performativity, reinventing the referent. But at the same time, this means a letting go, as Rosenthal also remarks, a mourning, a learning to live with loss. Why return to the Platonic origin, the commonly cast narcissism of the good or beauty itself, rather than the simpler things that happen to be good or beautiful? Embracing this this loss or lack, which Rosenthal connected with allegory, and which Benjamin famously explored as facies hippocratica, is perhaps an antidote both rogue narcissistic aspirations.
In prosthetic immortalities is a repetition that both affirms and overcomes the ultimate referent, as best it can, and so via a difference of value, as a matter of teleology and identity. In resonance with Schuster’s remarks on posthumanism and value, perhaps what’s at stake is rather an originary ethics, or better yet, a co-originary prosth-ethics.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 