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While recent scholars claim that the human nature is of a strict essence, this presentation aims to rethink the transhumanism’s philosophical approaches of degeneration, old age and death, and to highlight the tension between the embodied finitude and biotechnical modifications.Transhumanism considers aging as a literal disease and challenges its necessity in the human being’s evolutionary process, reversing the value scale between natural degeneration and technical enhancement (More, Bostrom). Indeed, the likeness between old age and disease challenges us: both are degradation of the body functions of any living organism, bringing the prospect of death. I will first argue that those notions mobilize a new conception of health and a renewal of classical medicine (Goffette). I will then show that, for transhumanism, the healing of old age involves a radical rectification of natural deficiencies. By doing so, human enhancement intensify the notion of morphological freedom (Sandberg, Hottois) and biocultural capital (Miah), to the point of considering that biotechnical embodiment is essential, but also entirely transparent (Clark). In addition, I will debate the modalities for overtaking the prospect of death into immortality, exposing new ways of soft and hard embodiment (Bainbridge, Moravec). In this regard, the matter constituting the human affirms itself positively as an instrumental structure (Nelkin, Lindee) which rewrite the representation of the human condition.

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Jessica Lombard 1919
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