2026 February 27 (Fri) 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm | (In-Person) | Porté Room (S250), Second Level, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St.

Artificial Bodies, Naked Truths

Speaker: SABINE FRÜHSTÜCK, Distinguished Professor and Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Moderator: ANDREW D. GORDON, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University

Since the late nineteenth century, a range of experts have questioned the boundaries between “organic” and “artificial,” envisioning the human body as resembling or being enhanced by machines. In Jinzō Ningen (Artificial Human, 1928) the prominent intellectual Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke promised: the “invention of an artificial human would overturn traditional law.” More recently, under the impact of posthumanist technologies and claims, scholars across disciplines have suggested that we have become “posthuman” in the sense that we have crossed a threshold. One strand of critique has questioned the figure of the human implicitly produced within such claims. In Genèse (Genesis, 1982), Michel Serres mused that we might have never been human, at least not in the ways posthumanists insinuate that the human had previously been whole. This talk builds on these critiques, proposing that nowhere has the notion of the human as whole been farther from actual experience than in modern war.

Reischauer Institute Japan Forum Lecture Series