The Early Breakdown of the Modern Anthropos?: The Evil Demon and the Little Automaton Francine as Cartesian Cogito´s Wounds. Pos-thuman Speculations in Andres Vaccari´s La pasión de Descartes

Abstract

In the following text we will undertake a posthuman reading (Braidotti, 2015) of Andrés Vaccari ́s novel La pasión de Descartes. The story of the relationship between Descartes and the automaton Francine means a questioning of the nodal concepts of modern Western philosophy such as the “subject”, the “immaterial soul” and its secular substitute, the “consciousness”, and the very notion of “life”. Figures as the automaton Francine and its posmodern heirs, like the cyborg (Haraway), or in our 21st century the fembot Sophia, developed by Hanson Robotics, enter, from the beginning and with the Cartesian metaphysic, in the narrative of modernization, either to destabilize or to reinforce the powers of the anthropos as the main regulator of the global becoming by the Western form of life. We will dedicate these pages to go over through a scene of this story, the one of the modern subject, nowadays crossed by the announcement of many “ends” announces and too many post(humanism/human/biological/natural).