Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich
fictional and cinematic tradition, "Anatomy of a Robot "explores
the political and textual implications of our perennial projections
of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and
automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible
presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and
cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to
be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human
version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people
teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant
process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political
struggle.
By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including
episodes from "Twilight Zone," the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo
Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem,
Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I,
Robot"), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle's "Physics" and
"De Anima," she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this
centuries-old discourse-- the fantasy of the artificial birth, the
fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent
artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of
artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these
investigations is the return of all four elements to the question
of what constitutes the human.
This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed,
or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of
artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and
textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people's main
cultural function, which is the political and existential
negotiation of what it means to be a person.
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