EXAMPLES OF DEHUMANIZATION AT THE BEGINNING OF POST-HUMANISM

REIFICATION AND DE-SUBJECTIVATION OF THE HUMAN BEING IN JORGE EDWARD’S EL PATIO

Abstract

In the next pages we will propose an analysis of the volume of stories El patio that Jorge Edwards (Santiago de Chile, 1931) composed between 1950 and 1952. Our approach aims to analyse the way in which the writer transfers to the fictional level the mechanisms that were intended to govern not only individual and social life but also the bodies and behaviours of citizens. From the theoretical lines drawn by Foucault, Braidotti and Bourdieu, among others, we will try to show how Edwards critically describes the phenomena of “forced incorporation” of dominant norms and values that the current social structure imposed as an effect of a true biopolitics of existence. The dehumanization that the author denounces refers to a form of biopolitics that manipulates social bodies to force them to assimilate a sort of “control and domination rules” (even if the subjects considers these as a “free choice”). Two forms of dehumanization can be detected: either a modality that—without leading to the creation of monsters and cyborgs—leads to the reification of the human being, especially the female; or a modality that denies the “practical experience” of the body and imposes the “forced normalization” of subjective behaviour.