Reproduction, simulation, performance. L’Ève future de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

• Main Author: Jean-Christophe Valtat
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2009-05-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: artificial creature; feminism; literature and technology; post-human; Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/2603

Whatever technophobic tendencies are manifested by the writers of the symbolist era, their practice interrogates their relationship to technology in a way that constitutes the cultural basis of our own. Such is the case with Villiers’ Ève Future. Beyond their contextual relevance (about the reproduction of appearances and motion, or the impact of recording technologies), the technologies and their potentialities used by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam are conceptualized in a way that logically predicts our own modes of interaction with a global technological environment, be it artificial intelligence, interactivity, simulation, the notion of “post-human” and the cognitive, libidinal, or gender mutations associated to it. By reading Villiers’ text with the help of present-day theory, this paper hopes to show the continuity of a cultural logic that determines our relationship to technology.