Bodies of the Future. For a Sense that Matters

Abstract

In Crimes of the Future (2022), David Cronenberg comes back to the body-horror genre, by shedding light on the body and its deformations as symptoms of an ontological degeneration of the human subject. The human body is constantly involved in a process of hybridization with technologies that strongly alter its physical traits and undermine its aesthetic abilities. This double-logic of extension and amputation of the body by technological means is reproduced by the thematic figure of the surgery that, in a world deprived of any aesthetic and pathemic dimension, becomes a key fetishist form and practice of sense-making in any social domain, from art to sex. To these surgical operations corresponds an attempt of semiurgical rewriting, aimed to give a meaning to the “internal chaos” affecting the human body. We assist to a constant tension between such a human necessity of semiotic and biopolitical control of the body and the inexorable advance of a matter that exceeds its role of static base for signification and, at the same time, is no longer reducible to a pre-signified substance. The analysis of the movie serves as a premise for a broader semiotic reflection and theoretical hypothesis: the reconfiguration of the category /nature vs. (techno)culture/ in a circularity that questions the assiological priority assumed by nature in western metaphysics, by giving credits to a body matter that has acquired the capacity of becoming sense in autonomous way.