Adam R. Rosenthal
Adam R. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of French and Global Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). He is also co-editor of “Informing Life,” a special issue of Philosophy Today (2025), with Deborah Goldgaber and Armando Mastrogiovanni, and serves as Associate Editor for the journal Derrida Today. At present, he is completing a manuscript titled Biophilology: Readings in the History of Life that asks whether the life sciences might best be considered as philological disciplines.
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.
I began work on Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life in 2016. The first traces of the book are found in a conference paper that I presented at Emory University, entitled “Poetic Language and the Matter of Survival, or Afterlives of Poetic Immortality.” If I note this earliest title of the project that would eventually become Prosthetic Immortalities, it is to highlight that the original subject that was to take me on a journey through molecular biology, transhumanism, and Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, was poetry.
I never set out to write a book about immortality. To the contrary, what I wished to do was to understand—which is to say, do justice to—what presented itself as a linguistictendency towards self-inscription, self-preservation, and self-projection.[1] As everyone knows, many of the earliest and most impactful surviving poetic texts, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics, and up through the tradition of lyric beginning with Pindar, Horace, and Ovid, and culminating with Shakespeare, Spencer, and Wordsworth, place immortality at the heart of the poetic work. This suggested—to me, anyway—that immortality might be more than a mere poetic motif or trope. Indeed, the near identification of poetry’s project with immortalization points to the latter being bound up with the very structure of poetic writing. The question thus became, not simply: What is immortality? But: What is the process of inscription whereby a project of immortalization becomes possible, thinkable, imaginable?
On the one hand: Why immortality, when it comes to poetry, or any other discourse, religious or otherwise? On the other hand: What is poetry (as an archive, a structure, a textual weave) such that it can imagine, and even write itself, as just such a projection? Is there a non-immortalizing poetry? Alternatively: Is there a non-poetizing immortality? And even: What if poetry did not just write itself as a drive towards survival, but were, in fact, a technology, a prosthesis, and even a sort of artifactual performative, capable of inventing new technologies of immortalization? What if there was nothing called “immortality” prior to the contingent invention of an archive able to sustain certain traces of itself, at the expense of others?
To summarize the above, by way of a figure borrowed from Antoine Traisnel’s work on cryopolitics: What if poetry is a kind of ark?[2] By which I understand not only alifeboat, something like the ready-to-hand equipment of survival of a population that antecedes, and is left largely unchanged by, a given technology’s fabrication, but also (to abuse a paronomasia) the sui generis ἀρχή—the principle, origin, or advent—of “arks” as well as the “survivors” borne by them. That which, in other words, renders thinkable, in inaugural fashion, the very form of the “lifeboat” as well as the “passengers” that such a flotation device makes possible. Understood in this way, the poetic-arkic-archivization and, by extension, the immortalizing prosthesis, becomes a form of translation, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term.[3]
At this point, I would be remiss not to mention how acutely the problem of extinction haunts this entire discourse. A certain fantasy or phantasm of extinction—both the death of the individual and of the group, the name and the trace—constitutes the most constant theme of this literature, beginning, once again, with Gilgamesh’s inability to mourn Enkidu, and culminating with Wordsworth’s “dream of the Arab” and, more recently, Christian Bök’s Xenotext. Does not the whole problem of immortality boil down to a crisis of mourning? And, if so, does not this explain, even if in exceedingly brutal and simplistic fashion, the breakdown in gender that we generally find among its proponents?
As Joshua Schuster has observed, concerning this very literature and both its perils and promises:
In some cases, narrating the demise of the literary has resulted, paradoxically, in initiating new kinds of creativity and legibility regarding shared ecological precarities. In other cases, the double finitudes of life and art coincide with apocalyptic perceptions and claims for the expedience of asserting nationalistic, anthropocentric, survivalist, and salvationist agendas. In all cases, these scenes of extinction are instances of the extremes of address, an address to the end of the addressability of a species.[4]
The archive of poetry, it seems to me, bears this tension of address from its very inception. Possessing both the possibility of recognizing “shared ecological precarities” and that of propagating “nationalistic, anthropocentric, survivalist, and salvationist agendas,” it articulates many of the fundamental problematics of extinction facing us today. The question remains, however, as to the extent to which one can speak of either “extinction” or “precarity,” either “death” or “finitude,” outside of the specificity of the inscriptions given to each. Which is to say, outside of the poetechnics of distinct discourses life and death. Just as there is no immortality (in the singular), but only immortalities, so too would there only be extinctions (in the plural), without a single extinction event to unify them all
So, in a way, the central insight of the book was already there, in that conference paper, even if I did not yet know it: the concept of immortality, like every immortalizing technology, like every archive, really, never simply follows a plan. Rather, every expression of immortality reinvents its referent in the process of responding to a problem that appears to precede it. Each expression, which is to say invention or conception, participates in generating the “problem” after the fact—or nachträglich, as Freud might say—that it claims to respond to. This is why all immortalities are prosthetic: they are supplemental, add-ons, artificial, which cannot but denature the natures they profess to preserve. If the great problem to which all immortalizing technologies appear to respond is that of “death,” well, then the lie at the heart of this discourse is that we have never actually known eitherwhat “death” orwhat “life” means. Nor what either might mean. Immortalizing prostheses—which is also to say, discourses of immortality, for there is no strict separation between the discursive and the technological, when it comes to immortality—play a foundational role in configuring the meaning of both terms.
So, poetry, as prosthesis, is also a kind of technique or technology. It participates in what Gilbert Simondon would call a “technical lineage.”[5] The prosthesis is the add-on, the supplement, the technology, constituted by its artifactuality (it comes second; it is never a given). But in coming second, in naming a kind of “response” to a pre-existing state or problem, it cannot but re-invent its referent: it cannot not transform that to which it is added. And this means that there is no safety net. When Homer promises eternal life, through fame, or Shakespeare, through the name or word, we have to imagine these acts as utterly new. These are after-lives that transform what it means “to live” and “to die,” just as the digital avatars, the hybrid clones, the cryogenic preservations, the indefinite senescences, and the cyber-brains that today are promised do. And they do so whether or not they are realized in fact, whether or not they are even possible to realize in principle. So soon as one lends the poem, the avatar, or the cyber-brain credit, as solutions to death—or, what amounts to the same thing, as faithful translationsof life—what “to live” and “to die” each means has already been affected, supplemented, denatured, prostheticized.
Of course, we may always opt to reject these novelties, in the name of another notion of “life” or a more meaningful mode of “being-toward-death.” We may choose to hold on to our mortality—what some might wish to think of as the very essence of our “humanity”—as the most precious thing in the world. But then it must be asked: How did this other notion, or mode, itself become naturalized? Through which acts of oblivion did either onecome to appear as more legitimate—less prosthetic—than the others? In neither case is there an absolute or insoluble kernel of “life” or “death” to which one can fall back on. There is no blueprint that precedes the invention of the technical solution. That precedes either the solution, or the object for which it is proffered as solution.The alleged anteriority of the object for which the solution is proffered is, rather, a performative effect of what Paul de Man would call “allegory.” And let’s not forget that, for de Man, “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.”[6] Which does not make death any easier to endure. It does not defang death. Instead, provocations such as de Man’s serve to acknowledge the substrate of inscription (the poetechnics or artifactual performatives) upon which anything we might wish to call “death” must depend and, with it, death’s necessary subjection, alongside life, to (textual) supplementation.
So, life and death are allegories of the prostheses that attempt to modify them, but which, in fact, generate them. Life and death become as much effects of speculative visions of immortality as they are the causes, orconditions of possibility, of those visions. I suppose that what I was drawn to, in writing Prosthetic Immortalities, was the recursive, or cybernetic structure, of this relay, which does not allow one to situate oneself on any objective or uninterested ground. It’s also why forming a response to the posthuman and transhuman present is not so simple a matter as being either for or against what is called “radical life extension.” But that doesn’t mean that we can remove ourselves from the problem. We must intervene. And we must do so to the precise extent that there is no clearcut solution, nor stable ground, upon which we could definitively decide what is best for ourselves, for our fellows, or for our planet—let alone who, at the end of the day, “we” are.
If we want to understand what’s happening today, not only as a unique event in world history, but also, and at the same time, as a link in a chain extending as far back as recorded history itself, if we want to think the structure of this “event,” which we could call the re-invention of life, or the re-invention of death, well, then what we have to do is read the performative character of the contemporary discourse of immortality with and against the philosophical, literary, and religious discourses of our inheritance. To be the flagbearer of contemporary immortalist discourse is the particular relevance of transhumanism, as far as I see it. But not only transhumanism, since, as I hope I showed in the book, every discourse that engages with human enhancement and extension, with human life, but also, simply, with life,including the biological sciences and even a certain deconstruction, participates in this problem. Hence also the interest of poetry, which names one discourse, one technology, one archive, that has, historically speaking, negotiated with these complexities and intricacies. The poetic archive, as I have argued here, is utterly technological. Yet it is no less the case that technologies of immortalization are, have always been, and will always be, poetological. Indeed, that is their interest. The source, if you will, of their enduring fascination for us.
[1] I should note that at that time I was also finishing a book about poetic performativity. I would express the relationship between the two projects thus: If the address of poetic inscription binds the archive of poetry, from its very inception, to a language of gifts and givenness, then the facticity of the inscribed (and be it within living memory or on the written page) immediately discloses poetic writing as a technic of survival and immortalization. On the problem of poetic address, see Adam R. Rosenthal, Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
[2] See Antoine Traisnel’s “X,” part of his current book in progress, Futureproof: The Biopolitics of Climate Survival.
[3] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 1: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 253-263. As Traisnel observes, the contemporary, salvific idiom of the “ark” has recently taken on a distinctly genetic focus. This biopolitical form of preservation must be read within the tradition of, yet distinct from, its archaic form, for example in Genesis. Rather than preserving living species, projects such as the “Frozen Ark” aim to salvage “genetic patrimony.” “The urgency,” writes Traisnel, “is less to prevent extinction than to extract precious data that, someday, might be reverse-engineered into a living animal…What is being secured in gene banks is not valued for what it is in the flesh but for the abstract reality it represents (the species) and for what it might become again in the future (its regenerative potential)” (X). Such a project, I would argue, is precisely translative, in Benjamin’s sense. Which is to say: transformative, performative, both exposing and inaugurating after-lives in no way previously apparent. This does not make cryopreservation desirable but, to the contrary, supplies us with a theoretical basis from which to initiate its necessary critique.
[4] Joshua Schuster, What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2023), 9.
[5] Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogrove (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[6] Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67-81; 81.On “allegory,” see “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 