Technical Bodies

This article explores evolving posthumanist representations of eros, technology, and the human condition through two body horror films: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021). Popular depictions of eros and technology can lean towards a hypermasculine, obsessive, paranoid reading of the machine, usually resulting in the disintegration of desire and with it the human body. These accounts highlight the contested figure of the “transhuman,” an excessive, technologically enhanced version of the human capable of conquering death. Emerging from postmodern critiques against grand narratives of technological progress and neoliberalist development, the critique of the transhuman underscores the impossibility of a harmonious relationship between the human and the technical. While Videodrome depicts technology as an external force intervening in human body enhancement – destroying the essence of the human and its romanticized “humanity” – Titane speculates about nature/artifice and human/technology binaries, situating technology as inherent to the human condition. This paper traces the move from the transhuman character who seeks to dominate technology and encounters human destruction, to a posthuman who is able to integrate the mediation of technology as a fundamental aspect for thinking its humanness. Drawing on the reappraisal of “originary technicity,” the body in Titane becomes with technics and environment, offering a new framework for rethinking desire and eros beyond the body. In doing so, it resists earlier theories of desire as contained, and perhaps, repressed, in the subject. Ultimately, the film embodies the possibility of moving away from the all-too human theories of eros and machine to challenge some posthumanist limitations around essentialist oppositions between nature and technology. Posthumanist frameworks must envision a future where the entanglement of technology and the human serves as a starting point for rethinking the human condition, rather than a nostalgic excess it needs to overcome.