"Slavoj Zizek welcomes the prospect of biogenetic intervention"

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n10/zize01_.html>

London Review of Books
Vol. 25 No. 10 dated 22 May 2003 

Bring me my Philips Mental Jacket

Slavoj Zizek welcomes the prospect of biogenetic
intervention

Do we today have an available bioethics? Yes, we do, a
bad one: what the Germans call Bindestrich-Ethik, or
'hyphen-ethics', where what gets lost in the
hyphenation is ethics as such. The problem is not that
a universal ethics is being dissolved into a multitude
of specialised ones (bioethics, business ethics,
medical ethics and so on) but that particular
scientific breakthroughs are immediately set against
humanist 'values', leading to complaints that
biogenetics, for example, threatens our sense of
dignity and autonomy.

The main consequence of the current breakthroughs in
biogenetics is that natural organisms have become
objects open to manipulation. Nature, human and
inhuman, is 'desubstantialised', deprived of its
impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called
'earth'. If biogenetics is able to reduce the human
psyche to an object of manipulation, it is evidence of
what Heidegger perceived as the 'danger' inherent in
modern technology. By reducing a human being to a
natural object whose properties can be altered, what
we lose is not (only) humanity but nature itself. In
this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right in Our Posthuman
Future: the notion of humanity relies on the belief
that we possess an inherited 'human nature', that we
are born with an unfathomable dimension of
ourselves.[...] 

continues:
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n10/zize01_.html>



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