In late -modern Western societies, body optimization increasingly follows a logic of permanent self-transgression, which seems to contradict the constitutive limitedness of human condition. In this article, a case study is used to illustrate how the unavailability that is conveyed in bodily experience is individually interpreted and psychologically processed, and how it is thereby also related to the cultural meanings and practices of limitless enhancement. Thus, the fading out and denial of limitedness also seems to become normalized insofar as they are just as culturally legitimized as they have psychological functions and affective qualities.
Television series, YouTube videos or guidebooks a long list of media testifies to the pop cultural fascination with professionally 'successful psychopaths'. This paper compares the portrayal of the character Dexter in the series of the same name with popular scientific descriptions of the 'corporate psychopath' as formulated by psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare. As the paper argues, the media appeal of psychopathy lies less in abysses of the psyche than in the character's lifestyle and the implicit question: if 'psychopaths' achieve career, status and success wouldn't it be tempting to be more like a 'psychopath'? While Babiak and Hare paint a picture of 'psychopaths' ruining companies and colleagues for their own gain, the 'corporate psychopath' Dexter is indeed a figure with positive connotations. This is mainly due to the fact that Dexter because he is a psychopath gets work done much more efficiently and his productivity also creates a supposed added social value.
Permanent improvement of the self is a pattern of cultural theory and practice that goes back to the antique philosophy of self-reflection and religious confession as well as to later economic accounting and medical reports. These techniques of notation had a deep impact on (literary) diary writing, and it is shown here how the ways of measurement have shaped self-writing in present times.The different media of self-tracking now determine the ways in which individuals turn the former daily self-reflection into collecting data every millisecond and submit themselves to the surveillance of Big Data.
This article will consider the question to what extent the proliferation of technologies for human enhancement, both inside and outside of Western civilization, seems to confirm transhumanism's self-perception as an anthropology for contemporary society. In this context, the argument is established that other discourses are required to think about the anthropological implications of aforementioned tendencies. This recontextualization becomes imperative in order to reply the normalization of emergent self-understandings in times of the last subversion of 'man' as presupposed entity.
In times of rapid technological progress, transhumanism, which strives for radical technological transformations of the human being, spreads its ideas with great publicity and media impact. Although these ideas are directed towards the future, they influence how we understand humans, bodies, and technology today. This article examines the anthropology of transhumanism and investigates the extent to which it offers approaches for the contemporary anthropology of body optimisation. The article comes to the conclusion that the understanding of the human being in transhumanism is problematic in many respects and therefore not suitable for the further development of a contemporary philosophical anthropology. Nevertheless, corrective perspectives for an anthropology of contemporary body optimisation can be derived from these problems.
