From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death.


Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.

David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis. 

Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.



REFERENCES:
Plato 
Homer
Descartes
Heidegger (the Dasein)
Derrida
Geoffrey Hinton
Hegel
Nick Bostrum
Dolly the sheep
David Chalmers
Aubrey de Grey
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck



Praise for the book:
“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”
—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal

“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”
—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences



Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.


The dream of indefinite life.

Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna is a book that asks why so many big bluefin tuna have vanished from the Atlantic Ocean. Author Jen Telesca notes that the term “red gold” has emerged out of the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands on the global market; for reference, in January 2019, a 613-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold at market in Tokyo for an astounding record of $3.1 million US dollars. To research this book, Telesca gained unparalleled access to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (also known as ICCAT) to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned to it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. This interview between Telesca and editor Jason Weidemann was recorded in May 2020.

More about the book: http://z.umn.edu/redgold

A transcription of this conversation is available: z.umn.edu/t-redgold

The dream of indefinite life.

University of Minnesota Press

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