Joshua Schuster
Joshua Schuster is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in Canada. His books include: What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham University Press, 2023), Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk, co-written with Derek Woods (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A forthcoming edited volume Will Alexander’s Poetics will appear in 2025 with Palgrave.
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.
Heraclitus’s fragment 92 reads: “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life.” The great scholar of the pre-Socratics, Charles Kahn, proposes this exegesis: “The opposites are one; and this deathless structure of life-and-death is deity itself.”[1] Heraclitus discerns a reciprocal logic of mortality becoming immortality and vice versa as an eternalized cycle. The fragment also indicates that mortal life is, in a way, already immortal if we understand life and death as constantly interchanging with each other. Yet as Adam Rosenthal well articulates in Prosthetic Immortalities, one must, if one can, distinguish between mortal immortality and immortal immortality, which would have no truck with anything mortal at all.[2]
Who wants to live forever? Maybe it is not a question of wanting, but rather that any form of life is embedded within indefinitely and infinitely repeatable biomechanical systems of prosthetization that enable organisms to live on. Rosenthal is careful to distinguish between ontotheological immortality (infinite and absolute presence), substance immortality (insusceptibility to change or death), and biological immortality (extending embodied life indefinitely or questioning the inevitability of death as implicated in the physiology or “logic” of life). One might add something like process immortality, which asserts some sort of endlessly ongoing process that can indefinitely extend through living beings by sublating death or negativity as “feedback” (organicism, autopoiesis, etc.).
However, all these seem to partake of the same metaphysics of vitalism. Be it immutable substance, spirit, the will, or any vitalist ontology – these run on logics of immortality that assume some sort of permanent and unconditional source that declares the immortal/mortal difference as secondary. If so, the immortal/mortal difference seemingly comes after vitalist ontotheology. But this after life has to be posited in advance, and thus difference is retroactive all along. This is what Rosenthal means by an immortal prosthetic – that which, for an organism, extends its conditions of living indefinitely in the future and yet also implicates the organism in a structure of repetition without guarantees. The function of indefiniteness is then radically resonant – it is the swinging gate, or the aporia, by which one can take the pathway to immortalist ontotheology or the pathway to finitude and biological mortality. To be a living subject means being stuck with the aporetic indefiniteness of life. The genius of Derrida’s position is that he is able to articulate how living goes on indefinitely without resorting to a vitalist metaphysics. Using this approach, Rosenthal shows that mortality and immortality are partners in deconstruction; they are both the conditions of possibility and impossibility of each other.
Rosenthal’s book is of the highest quality. For me, reading it was a revelation. I consider myself a devoted thinker of finitude, in that I think finitude makes a difference in metaphysics, that thought can be perishable as well as eternal, and that transcendentals can emerge and dissolve because they are themselves conditional within a universe that makes some conditions of possibility (such as the possibility of thought) available at certain moments. I found Rosenthal’s book utterly compelling in presenting the case that biological finitude (and this also pertains to epistemological schemas of finitude like in Kant, although this is not featured in the book) must be understood as co-originary with logics of continuity and prosthetics that extend indefinitely and are immortal in principle. The logic of life is such that life seeks to “live on” or sur-vive to ever self-surpassing horizons. Transhumanism is one current iteration of this logic, but all of biological life is implicated in it.
Rosenthal shows that just as assertions of sovereignty and continual presence of immortality prove self-deconstructing, so too do defenses of biological mortality and finitude as the foundations of existentialism (and commonly found in recent multi-species ethical theories) also prove self-deconstructive in that they are embedded in structures of living-on that are indefinitely extended and repeatable. The finite human/existential/biological condition cannot be separated from the organism’s prosthetic logic and its replicating genomes and metabolic processes that run on seemingly immortal operations of reduplication. The originary technicity of life opens it to continual extension via prostheticization.
Reading Rosenthal’s book, I had what Ben Lerner describes in his novel 10:04 as the feeling of “the world rearranging itself.”[3] This is something we all need from time to time. I mean that shuddering feeling that something you thought was fundamental no longer was in the same way. Rosenthal’s book isn’t just a polemic. He carefully examines the theoretical terrain of the implications of indefinite life in matters of science, metaphysics, and deconstruction’s own love of aporias. The chapters are crystal clear and cover immense philosophical and biological range, delving into Plato on eros, Derrida on sovereignty, Descartes on the immortal soul, and then a whole suite of 20th and 21st century thinkers and researchers of life including Heidegger, Dawkins, the Hayflick limit, Henrietta Lacks, Kant, Hans Jonas, and then a panoply of transhumanists such as Chalmers, Parfit, and Bostrom.
One of the most compelling methodological breakthroughs of this book is how Rosenthal finds that, in the pursuit of a comprehensive logic of life that exceeds the life/death opposition, the space for something after biopolitics emerges in both the thought of Derrida and the obsessions of transhumanism. Modern biopolitics works fundamentally by organizing and optimizing limited bodies, limited agencies, and limited resources. Biopolitics does not challenge the premises of finitude – it extends from what Foucault calls the “analytic of finitude.” However, there may be ways to get beyond all these limitations, perhaps beyond biopolitics itself, or at least get much further beyond these limits using biotechnologies and artificial intelligence. Transhumanism promises to leave behind the old biopolitics of suffering, scarcity, aging, and death. What comes after biopolitics might be some form of radical life longevity or singularity. But also what comes after will follow from how we understand and engage with “prosthetic immortalization” as enabled by contemporary biotechnologies that continue to be entangled with the historical (what Rosenthal calls “prescientific” and “precritical”) versions of immortality in religion, literature, and philosophy.
Although I indicated that transhumanism may be what comes after biopolitics, it is certainly the case that transhumanism is also a continuation of biopolitics as the optimization of bodies and as the process by which life is transmuted into value. Transhumanism seeks a forever life that is forever young and forever valued. There have been versions of prosthetic immortalization in the past, and while the current version issues from a sense of the novel power of biotechnology, it also reasserts the coupling of life, optimization, and value maximizing that Foucault identified at the core of modern biopolitics. The knowledge/power regime subtending this position is that more life equals more value. Biopolitics follows from the notion that life and value should be ever tied more tightly and maximally together, and that all other values should be organized around this sense of life-value. Foucault even included the pursuit of life longevity in modern biopolitics, when he stated that biopolitics situated “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.”[4]
Rosenthal’s primary focus is how any version of indefinite life will always mean a fundamental reworking of the supposed opposition of life and death through an immortalized prosthetic. Yet, as Rosenthal shows, even with the attempt to remake the life/nonlife distinction, transhumanism has to reaffirm the difference between these terms in order to reassert itself on the side of life. Rosenthal states that “what is critical is that just as soon as the opposition between life and nonlife is accepted – be it on vitalist or biomaterialist grounds – it is but a short step to the extension of the living (present), in the first case infinitely and in the second case indefinitely” (138).
The logics of vitalism and transhumanism converge on this attempt to escape the opposition of life and death, while also continually returning to this opposition. Here’s how the problem works in a nutshell on the vitalist side (Rosenthal mostly examines the biomaterialist claims for indefinite life). In a vitalist philosophy like Deleuze’s, the entire universe is the very expression of the pure flowing life of intensive becoming. Deleuze wanted to bypass, rather than deconstruct, vitalism/mechanism models by finding all entities to be compositions of flows and breaks, thermodynamic gradients, or what he called “desiring machines.” If the entire universe is alive, then there is no real death. But if there is no true death, then how can one say that something/everything is alive? Rosenthal puts it thus: “immortality (understood as insusceptibility to death) is equivalent to being dead. In the words of Blanchot: ‘Dead – immortal’” (94). For Deleuze (via Bergson, but this thinking goes as far back as Heraclitus), everything is becoming, or perhaps nothing is becoming, because the vital itself never changes. The indefinite prolongation of the life/death aporia continues.
In Rosenthal’s analysis, the process of prosthetic immortalization cannot but find that life and death are constantly converging and yet asserted to be in opposition to each other.
Ultimately, then, what we must learn to do—and what is of the greatest difficulty to do—is balance this evidence and what it betrays of the life/death opposition… with a deconstructive skepticism that neither affirms this difference as absolute nor denies this difference altogether, such as one finds with various dualisms and positivist materialisms. This opposition, as we shall see, is infinitely deconstructible, but being infinitely deconstructible, it is also infinitely resistant to deconstruction. Prostheses of immortalization thrive on this difficulty. Their survival is guaranteed by the impossibility of its success. However, so long as we insist on denying the deep ties that bind physiological mechanism to ontotheology, we will remain helpless to identify the root of the problem. (140)
I want to press just a little more on how this “infinitely deconstructible” is also “infinitely resistant to deconstruction” when it comes to the efforts of transhumanism to extend life longevity towards an indefinite horizon. Like with Deleuze, transhumanists still want access to dynamism, risk, change, and projection of future possibilities (as possibility, therefore not guaranteed ontotheologically or immortally). One should aim to achieve some transcendental release from death, but also encounter death, disjunction, or negation immanently through processes of becoming-other.
What one sees in transhumanism (and any other vitalism) is that finitude is welcome so long as it really isn’t finitude and can be controlled or sublated or absorbed into a higher system. We know that, for now, biological life must constantly moderate itself between finite and indefinitely repeatable processes (metabolism). For how long, and in what body, we don’t know. Transhumanism would see finitude as valuable only insofar as it can be converted into the ongoing valuation of life extension. What happens when one makes such demands on finitude? Is that the way out of biopolitics, or a forgetting of everything we have learned about how biopolitics works by distributing finitudes to some while promising indefinite prolongation to others? And doesn’t transhumanist immortalism, far from making death obsolete, actually expand the reach of death by consigning all non-immortalist life to perishing? Might there be another way out of biopolitics, one that views life not fundamentally as an indefinite process of projective prosthetics that must be mastered, but a process that is diverse, variable, and not reducible to the acceleration of life-value?
I wonder if centering prosthetic processes of life, be they finite or indefinite, will always lead to a life-value coupling predicated on the way that “infinitely deconstructible” is also “infinitely resistant to deconstruction.” Alongside this logic of life, perhaps another pathway would involve finding life as indefinitely finite yet provisionally capable of a plurality of transformations and alterations. Some of these transformations are variously beneficial and supportive of diverse modes of life and some are not. Here it is not the prosthetic longevity of life that is the arbiter of value or predominant logic of life, but life capable of plurality, diversity, and inventiveness, however remarkable for however long. That’s pretty much what we mean by ecology and biodiversity.
And, interestingly, it is what Foucault came to view as the bio-ethics of his work (and after he had engaged with Derrida and Deleuze) by focusing on how there could be a relationship between the knowledge/power of the biology and biopolitics of life and self-transformation. Foucault stated, “my problem is my own transformation” and that “this transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience.”[5] I wonder what happens to the logic of life if biology, processes of immortalization, and even poetics also feature this transformation of selfhood and sense without knowing where things will end up. If so, the immortalizing gesture and its technopoiesis does still make sense, but only one kind of sense.
I do not mean to pose Foucault simply against these philosophers, or against transhumanism, as if Foucault maintains a sort of ethical and epistemological epiphany that suffices to dissuade us from the radical claims of biological immortalism. It is definitely the case that we are in a new era of biological acceleration. Thinkers like Foucault will only be moderately helpful to understand this moment. But I do think that there are other approaches to the life-value coupling that are out there, approaches that may be skeptical or experimental or aesthetic or ecological (and yet no doubt embedded in various prosthetic dilemmas) no matter what contemporary biotechnology offers. These might circulate with perhaps more critical resonance at this particular moment of searching for new ways of relating to the range of logics of life. It is the wonderful way that Rosenthal’s book helps us see the world becoming rearranged that also could allow these other prosthetic possibilities to achieve a sudden transformative potential.
[1] Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 23.
[2] Adam Rosenthal, Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
[3] Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 26.
[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 139. Note also Foucault’s review of geneticist François Jacob’s Logic of Life, published in 1970, where he describes bacteria as “a reproducing machine that reproduces its mechanism of reproduction, a hereditary material that indefinitely proliferates itself, a pure repetition anterior to the singularity of the individual. In the course of evolution, the living object was a reduplication machine well before it was an individual organism.” Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 1954-1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 969.
[5] Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, tr. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 379.
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 