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  • Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition
  • Lisa Lynch (bio)
Keith Ansell Pearson. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997. 224 pp. $65.00, $19.00 paper.

Consider the virus as metaphor: how has an entity so incredibly tiny, so liminally alive, come to serve in the past few years as a sign of Armageddon? In the AIDS-threatened, Ebola-fixated post-Cold War West, viruses are now what we are supposed to fear more than anything. They are agents of a coming plague that will spread either through human carelessness (about our national borders, our tropical rainforests, our sexual mores) or through malice (an act of biological warfare by some dictator or terrorist). Accounts of the source and scope of this plague—proliferating in thriller novels, public television documentaries, popular science books, statements from the military, newspaper articles, and the occasional feature film—all seem to agree on one thing: the virus to come will so devastate the human population that it will surely, if impermanently, throw into reverse the endless forward motion that constitutes life on this planet.

So troubling are these moralized virus tales and the xenophobia and moral policing that they generate that one is tempted to become nostalgic for the post-smallpox days of medical optimism, when viruses figured hardly at all into our vision of humanity’s future. But what if the troubling aspect of the late-twentieth-century virus tale is not the virus itself? What if the real threat is instead the narrative that surrounds the virus, a narrative of teleological biological and technological progress threatened by the very idea of viruses—a troubling vision of humanity’s future awash in the loony expectation of human perfectability, which increasingly points to human interface with technology as the agent of that perfectibility? Viruses have come to be seen as the “bug” that can disable such a techno-utoptian future (they even have their silicon correlate, the computer virus); but how have we come to envision this future as so desirable, and as so vulnerable to the virus?

Uncomfortable with contemporary narratives of techno-utopia, Keith Ansell Pearson uses the idea of the virus to interrogate the way we have come to think [End Page 119] about the future of the human. Ansell Pearson, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, begins with the proposition that the true enemy of late-twentieth-century life is the assumption that technological progress will bring about human perfection, even the transcendence of the human. Viroid Life challenges such posthuman thinking, which he attributes to misperceptions about human evolution and misplaced faith in the progressive nature of technology, through readings of the “philosophical biology” of Nietzsche and of Deleuze and Guattari. In the book’s title essay, Ansell Pearson uses the image of the virus—recast by Deleuze and Guattari as viroid life, a figure for the indeterminacy of life itself and of the complexity of the evolutionary process—to reveal the absurdity of a posthuman future, and to compel us to engage more critically with the contradictions of our present being.

The introduction to Viroid Life explains that uncritical enthusiasm for new technologies, particularly biotechnology, has brought about a belief in the emergence of a new phase in which “posthuman” beings will select their own optimal future with the aid of increasingly sophisticated machinery: “It is contended, by people who should know better, including the cyber-gurus of our deranged times, that with the emergence of biotechnological vitalism, the rise of artificial life-forms and intelligences, and developments in genetic engineering, we are now moving into a historical future in which life will exist ‘beyond’ natural selection” (p. 33). The “people who should know better,” those who champion the idea that life can move beyond Darwinian natural selection through technology, are characterized by recent figures as various as Hans Moravec, head of the Carnegie-Mellon Mobile Robot Laboratory, and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Though Moravec’s (literally) evangelical robot boosterism is hardly identical to Baudrillard’s contention that humanity is dissolving into a haze of simulation, these and other posthuman thinkers are united, Ansell...

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