Antoine Traisnel
Antoine Traisnel is Departmental Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Oxford. He is author of: Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Donner le change: L’impensé animal (Hermann, 2016), co-written with Thangam Ravindranathan; Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2015), and the translator of Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself (Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2017). At present, he is completing a manuscript titled Futureproof: The Biopolitics of Climate Survival, the second volume of a three-book exploration of the literary and technological imaginaries surrounding mass extinction.
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.
Adam Rosenthal’s Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life is a fascinating, intellectually rigorous, and surprisingly poignant meditation on fantasies of deathlessness, spanning from ancient metaphysics to contemporary transhumanist speculation. What renders the book so compelling is Rosenthal’s refusal to dismiss modern techno-utopian projects—cryonics, brain uploads, biohacking, cloning—as just either absurd or obscene. Without endorsing them, he takes these fantasies seriously by showing how they prolong a philosophical lineage that stretches back to Plato’s reflections on the soul and the generative principle of reproductive life. In doing so, he constructs a critique that is both more incisive than the familiar rejections of transhumanism as the wet dream of billionaire tech bros who cannot bear to share the fate of the rest of humanity—or of any other lifeform, for that matter—whose finitude traditional wisdom urges us to accept.
Crucially, Rosenthal frames the transhumanist desire for life-extension as not a modern aberration but a recurring feature of Western reflections on life itself. Immortality, he suggests, is a fiction embedded in the very structure of life—a phantasmatic element that resists exposure or dismissal. Even when its illusory nature is acknowledged, the gesture of renouncing immortality often surreptitiously recapitulates the very dream it claims to leave behind: that of mastering or overcoming death. Such a desire to dispel the “lure” of immortality finds a paradigmatic expression in Martin Hägglund’s theory of “radical atheism,” which assumes that a clear and decisive boundary can be drawn between the rational desires limited to mortality and the metaphysical longing for immortality. I found myself challenged, and ultimately convinced, by Rosenthal’s invitation to resist the impulse to scoff at such desires, and to view them instead as constitutive prostheses of survival, as structuring fictions that haunt the self and shape our understanding of life.
From this sustained engagement emerges a powerful historical insight. While the book’s central aim is to trace the persistence of these fantasies, it also intimates a shift in the conceptual grammar of immortality. Rosenthal identifies a moment in which the classical ideal of timeless, indivisible immortality gives way to the modern pursuit of indefinite life—aligned with broader historical processes such as secularization, scientific rationalization, and capitalist abstraction. He characterizes this transformation as “the death of immortality and the birth of indefinite life” (16)—a striking formulation that envisions the event as a revision or mutation more than a rupture.
What interests me here is not only the distinctions Rosenthal draws between two regimes of immortality—where classical discourse negates death outright, while modern discourse seeks only its perpetual postponement—but also the idiom of “birth” and “death” he uses to mark this transition. As someone deeply engaged with Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the modern governance of life, I hear in this language an echo of his lectures collected under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. That title itself signals a subtle yet consequential shift in political thought: it suggests that when “life” emerges as a central concern for power, what is being reconfigured is not only the political management of living beings, but also the very concepts of mortality and immortality—along with the mechanisms through which processes of immortalization are imagined and pursued. Central to these is the notion of reproduction, which evolves from the metaphysics of generation toward the physical process of birth. Whereas Plato’s notion of generation presupposes immortality as the necessary ground for reproduction, its modern, secular, and rational counterpart—birth—casts uncertainty on the inevitability of death. Birth is future-oriented, foregrounding the theoretically limitless potential inherent in emergence, while generation gestures toward eternity, functioning as a mechanism for preserving something immutable through acts of reproduction.
Rosenthal’s conceptual framework helps illuminate why, under biopolitical regimes, life is no longer primarily defined, in opposition to death, as a stable ontological state vulnerable to interruption—but is instead situated in relation to birth, conceived as an open-ended process of growth and amenable to continuous optimization. Within this paradigm, fantasies of immortality are no longer grounded in a belief in the primordial indivisibility of being, but rather in the radical indeterminacy—and ultimate unprovability—of life’s necessary end. Once again, the syntax of Rosenthal’s formulation—“the death of immortality and the birth of indefinite life”—echoes Foucault’s well-known chiasmus describing the shift from sovereign power to biopolitics: a transition from the right “to make die and let live” to the power “to make live and let die.”
This reframing casts into sharp relief the structural inversion at the core of Rosenthal’s thesis. In the onto-theological tradition, immortality depends on the repression or erasure of its enabling prosthesis—Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus offers a paradigmatic example, where the supplement is cast as a threat to the purity of truth. By contrast, modern biotechnological discourse operates not through repression but through deferral: it acknowledges mortality as an ineradicable possibility, yet strives to indefinitely postpone the decisive moment of death. It resists the necessity of the cut that would mark finitude—Freud’s observation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that death’s inevitability is not scientifically demonstrable is particularly resonant here. In this modern configuration, the technological apparatus—be it cryonics, gene editing, or cybernetic transfer—ceases to be a contaminant and becomes the indispensable vehicle for life’s indefinite extension. The supplement is no longer rejected but actively embraced, even exalted, as the enabling condition of a futurity that is nonetheless imagined as a property intrinsic to the organism, embedded within life itself.
In this regard, the book prompts a reconsideration of the modern concept of life itself. According to Foucault, “life” as a distinct epistemic category emerges around 1800. Prosthetic Immortalities allows us to reframe the modern “invention” of life within the broader historical arc of what Derrida calls “survival”— a figure that articulates the persistent, irrepressible, yet internally conflicted desire for immortality that underpins Western thought’s conception of life, much as Derrida’s “trace” designates the supplement of writing that conjures its opposite: speech (13). Rosenthal’s study invites us to see how biopolitics does not mark a departure from the fantasy of immortality but rather its displacement: from the negation of death to the celebration of regenerative potentialities, framed as immanent within living beings and accessible through technology.
Conversely, I wonder whether Prosthetic Immortalities might help us to situate Derrida’s work within the epistemic frame outlined by Foucault in The Order of Things. Indeed, Derrida suggests that the trace—whose arche-structure Rosenthal adopts as a framework for thinking life’s indebtedness to immortality—is originary without being grounded in an origin: it founds phonetic writing, yet simultaneously escapes the logic of writing itself insofar as this logic is beholden to presence and identity. In Grammatology, Derrida famously declares that phonetic writing will have been but a moment in the seemingly ageless movement of the trace. By contrast the trace appears as that which knows no epoch, except perhaps that of the emergence of life, construed not in opposition to death, as auto-affection or self-presence, but as essentially differing (from) death—as survival.
Might it therefore be possible to envision a genealogy of the trace paralleling Rosenthal’s genealogy of survival, reinterpreted in modernity as the pursuit of “indefinite life”? What would it entail to conceive of the trace, for example, as a byproduct of Foucault’s “life,” understood as a specifically modern epistemic construct? Modernity for Foucault is precisely the age that ushers life on the stage of history as a “sovereign vanishing point.” Life fundamentally eludes perception and manifests itself in its disappearance, as trace. It is why Foucault associates the invention of life with the advent of paleontology, one of the many sciences of the trace proliferating in the nineteenth century (e.g. ichnology, criminology, psychology, geology, etc.). My intention is not to suggest that Foucault was a thinker of the trace avant la lettre, nor that Derrida is a crypto-thinker of biopower. Rather, it is to reaffirm the vital role of deconstruction in understanding biopolitical modernity—illustrating how both thinkers illuminate our current biohistorical condition by showing that transformations can reinforce existing structures, even as they bring about significant change.
Derrida’s conceptualization of survival—not as the prosthetic extension of a life that precedes and exceeds it, but as a structural condition of what we understand to be life—gains renewed relevance in an age where biotechnologies promising indefinite life are rapidly expanding. The biopolitical regime underpinning these developments is no longer in its “birth” stage but has become the prevailing logic shaping life in contemporary Western technoscientific culture. This is evident in the fact that many of the discourses Rosenthal examines, while still carrying a science-fictional tone, are increasingly entering the mainstream. The refusal to view death as a necessity finds a troubling corollary in initiatives to “kill extinction” through genetic engineering aimed at reviving long-extinct species, alongside the growing presence of cryobanks designed to preserve biological material in perpetuity—projects that aim not merely at securing humanity’s future, but the survival of life itself.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 