The Rhetoric of Enhancing the Human: Examining the Tropes of “the Human” and “Dignity” in Contemporary Bioethical Debates over Enhancement Technologies

The task of this article is to explore the current state of bioethical debates over enhancement technologies as articulated through its two dichotomous ideological camps. It aims to explain why the conservative and posthumanist movements have reached a point where they fail to engage with each other and how we can reconceptualize the bioethical endeavor in a way that does not force the public to adhere to a framing of enhancement technologies as either universally desirable or abhorrent. In order to do so, I turn to the work of Lacan and Deleuze to explain why attempts to define what is essentially human always enter what I call “tropological regress,” or the endless procession of linguistic tropes that are artificially linked to transcendental conceptions of “the good.” I aim to diagnose why conservative and posthumanist discourses on enhancement technologies find themselves irreconcilably opposed.