Bardziej ludzcy niż ludzie : cyborgi - androidy - replikanci

Abstract

Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto states: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” Contemporary novels, movies, TV series or computer games show cyborgs and other images of hybrids of machine and organism, as well as figures of machines resembling humans, like androids or replicants, confronting us with questions about borders between human and non-human (or inhuman). In the world of developing technology in which we need technology to express ourselves and be who we are, cyborg and android figures demand answers to ques-tions: what does it mean to be a human today and can hybrids of machine and human become a kind of superhuman? In this article I discuss two emblematic cases of androids that seem more human than their human creators: Call from Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection and repli-cants from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Both, androids from Jeunet’s movie and replicants from Dick’s novel, blur the boundaries between humans and aliens/machnines and seem a next step in evolution of men, as Michel Foucault in The Order of Things suggests that “man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”.