October 10, 2025 • 32 mins
🎓 Stefan Fuchs (Wissenschaftsjournalist) im Gespräch mit Silvia Bovenschen (1946-2017). Die Literaturwissenschaftlerin und Essayistin Silvia Bovenschen prägte 1979 mit ihrer Veröffentlichung "Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit" eine Generation feministischer Literaturwissenschaftler:innen. Später musste die Feministin aufgrund einer Erkrankung ihre Lehrtätigkeit an der Frankfurter Universität aufgeben und begann eine zweite Karriere als Essayistin und Romanautorin. In diesem Gespräch dreht sich alles um die Frage des eigenen Körpers und der multiplen männlich dominierten Besitzansprüche.
/🎓 Stefan Fuchs (science journalist) in conversation with Silvia Bovenschen (1946–2017). Literary scholar and essayist Silvia Bovenschen influenced a generation of feminist literary scholars with her 1979 publication Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit (The Imagined Femininity). Later, due to illness, the feminist had to give up her teaching position at Frankfurt University and began a second career as an essayist and novelist. This conversation revolves around the question of one's own body and the multiple male-dominated claims of ownership.
/🎓 Stefan Fuchs (journaliste scientifique) s'entretient avec Silvia Bovenschen (1946-2017). La spécialiste en littérature et essayiste Silvia Bovenschen a marqué toute une génération de spécialistes en littérature féministe avec la publication en 1979 de son ouvrage « Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit » (La féminité imaginée). Plus tard, la féministe a dû abandonner son poste d'enseignante à l'université de Francfort en raison d'une maladie et a entamé une seconde carrière en tant qu'essayiste et romancière. Cette conversation porte sur la question du corps et des multiples revendications de propriété dominées par les hommes.
📚 Veröffentlichungen u.a. / publications a.o. / publications, entre autres:
- Silvia Bovenschen: "Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen." Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 1979.
- Silvia Bovenschen: "Älter werden. Notizen." S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2006.
- Silvia Bovenschen: "Lug & Trug & Rat & Streben." S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2018 (posthum).
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Welcome to Audioarchiv, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers, activists,
and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:33):
Hello, the body has become the propagandistic and ideological battleground in the digital culture war of the 21st. Century is mutating. Image war.
What is real, what is artificial and why?
For medical reasons, for aesthetic, for propagandistic, for capitalist.
Perhaps it is not really new either.
(00:57):
Even centuries before, for millennia, the body was an exhibit and commodity, an anchor of identity
and a marker of belonging.
Construction workers, sailors, revolutionaries or kings, bodies were never the same as bodies.
The gaze upon oneself and others provided certainty.
(01:17):
And yet today it is different.
The individual body is to be abolished.
The utopia of a distinguishable body is obscured by propaganda.
Capital merges the boundaries, solidifies the fluid, and everything separate, vulnerable, sick,
and transient is banished into darkness.
(01:39):
Fritz Lang's machine people early on provided assistance for the amoral and antisocial visions
of the future of tech billionaires.
No, they are not concerned with abolition and destruction; they are not Stalins or Hitlers,
whose ideology was based on industrial body annihilation.
(01:59):
In the neoliberal state, the techies are concerned with total control.
Every body is planned, from birth to beyond death.
A wonderful, new idea of domination in capitalism, a beautiful, new slave world of hygienic,
antiseptic bodies, no more bloodshed, eternal peace in an eternally rewritten, healthy, pure, digitally controlled future.
(02:26):
The sick, the weak, the anxious, the indistinguishable, the individual is banished.
Only in this way can Elon Musk's unprecedented fight against the bourgeois-democratic constitutional state be explained.
As a total war against everything analog, the eternal mantra of inevitability is being propagated.
(02:48):
The religious leaders from Silicon Valley are at the same time agents of neoliberalism and mafia
bosses of the new digital profit cult.
With the help of the analog politicians trembling with fear, they penetrate every capillary of the human body.
For it is not destruction, but control that generates profit.
(03:08):
Sylvia Bowenchen, a representative of feminist literary studies, doubts the authenticity of the tech billionaires. Do they even exist?
Or are their solidified bodies, not already their own X-Ray production, interchangeable, replaceable, arbitrary?
Togetherness and empathy make us human, says Sylvia Bowenchen. Perhaps also solidarity.
(03:35):
But never the bodies, fluid or solid.
Look, the kings are naked. Ms.
Bowenchen, men's dreams of artificial women haunt Western cultural history.
Especially at the end of the 19th.
In the 19th century, European literature feverishly worked on such automaton women.
(03:59):
Today, at the beginning of the 21st.
In the 21st century, these phantasmagorical bodies have long become an integral part of mass culture.
The pop icon Madonna, as well as the computer simulation Lara Croft, showcase a new developmental
stage of technologically and media-altered corporeality. Both are highly sexualised.
(04:26):
Both represent a new conception of woman.
Both represent the ideal of fitness that goes far beyond the notion of physical capability.
Chiseled, yet somehow cold bodies despite their erotic aura, muscular androgynes alike.
(04:47):
What kind of bodies are these?
What do they say about our sexual desires?
(05:19):
With the projected bodies at the end of the 19th.
One can still make it relatively easy with the projected bodies at the end of the 19th century.
One could, so to speak, adopt an old reliable feminist critique stance and say, these are simply men's wishes.
Now, Madonna is someone who does not simply execute these men's dreams, but rather continuously
shapes herself onto this dream carousel and puts on the costumes that pass by.
And there is already an ironic, perhaps even sovereign position that seems to emerge.
(05:50):
In this regard, one cannot revert to the old model of external determination, a male-dominated projection.
That can perhaps be critiqued.
Insofar as one can say, these are wishes that the average woman can never reach.
That would thus be a kind of social critique.
But that also falls a bit short when one considers that self-invention, the self-creation of
(06:15):
humanity is an ancient dream of mankind, a general ancient dream of mankind.
And I belong to a generation that still experienced how infinitely women suffered under the
supposed fate of certain body shapes, such as large noses, small breasts, etc.
And the pure potentiality of changeability, that is, the possibility that one can simply do as one wishes today.
(06:42):
Whether one can afford it is another matter, whether one survives is another matter.
But the mere possibility does open a spectrum of wishing and realisation that one cannot simply brush aside.
I would assert that if it were not very expensive and bloodless, every woman would do it.
All these orientations of a surgical or other nature.
(07:07):
Now the number of interventions at this physical level is indeed very large, quite real.
They have called it cosmetic surgery, but there is also something beyond that which belongs
to the realm of fashion.
Tattoos are clearly on the rise.
Piercing has at least become a trend among the youth.
(07:30):
The body is thus manipulated by fashion from many sides.
What can be highlighted in this context is that the body is increasingly used directly as a
carrier for writing, for signs, symbols.
Is this, like the subscription in art history, a potentiation of the character of the image,
(07:55):
a coding of the body?
So I think bodies have always been read.
Among so-called primitives, there are already inscriptions and tattoos, and fashion has been
a form of inscription over centuries, in a certain way an inscription of the body.
That now the body itself is fashion, that is, the detour is no longer taken through its clothing,
(08:19):
but fashion has slipped into the body itself.
This is certainly a new phenomenon.
So the model is no longer just a bearer of certain clothing codes, but the model itself is the message of fashion.
This naturally provokes compulsion; if I do not conform to this body image, I have to do quite
(08:40):
a lot to gradually get there.
But it is, in that sense, simply a radicalisation of that, in my view.
This trend towards the body line in fashion, that is, the emphasis on the clear line of the
body, is in contrast to what, for example, was fashion in the 19th.
(09:02):
Century, where the fashion ultimately concerned the covering of the physical, about disembodiment.
Is this a production of a paradoxical nakedness, a nakedness that is simultaneously covered,
yet not covered at all?
What can one say about the concept of nakedness in this context?
(09:24):
Well, I think they really get to the point.
That is indeed a paradox.
On one hand, it seems to me there is a hard work on the front of denaturalisation and covering
up and removing everything that, so to speak, falls into the schemas of the creaturely.
If you think about the fact that today men are often also encouraged to shave their bodies,
(09:49):
to remove those hairs that still appear so animalistic, which used to be something only women
had to do, at least on large parts of their bodies.
So on one hand, the body is denaturalised and as such, as a denaturalised entity, it can then
be displayed again, so to speak, in its artificial form.
(10:11):
This seems to me to be a very strong moment, this disgust towards the natural body, which must
be a body, is replaced, so to speak, by the newly created artificial body, and that can then
also be undressed, because it is no longer just nature.
That means natural nakedness would be too creaturely, is too laden with...
(10:34):
Well, I already consider natural nakedness to be an ideological model.
So when some people who like to bathe naked in the sea claim that it is so natural, I am always very suspicious.
I believe nothing is more unnatural for a person of the 21st.
Century than to walk naked through society.
(10:55):
We'll continue with the interview shortly.
Like us if you enjoy it.
(11:27):
The ideal leg was presented by Marlene Dietrich, who allegedly had the most beautiful legs for
over 50, 60 years, and the legs that were displayed in the windows of stocking shops always had a certain swing.
I think he came from there.
This momentum can no longer be maintained today because women are simply much taller.
When I was young, I was of medium height, today I am short.
(11:51):
That is where it all begins.
They have simply become much taller, the girls and the boys, of course.
This also naturally changes the entire body composition.
And I can remember, 15 or 20 years ago I was sitting in a café and at the next table there were
young men discussing women, and it was pointed out that one had beautiful broad shoulders.
(12:12):
I thought to myself, something has really changed now.
This means that the natural body, also the desirable body, is constantly changing.
That doesn't exist at all.
People have always worked on the body at this construction site.
They fed their children better if they belonged to the wealthy classes.
As a result, they looked different, had better skin.
(12:33):
They intervened medically, and thus, unconsciously, people have always carried out this breeding programme.
In this respect, I would not even speak of the natural body.
I once read that in the 19th.
Century, because child labour was widespread and children were sometimes sent to the mines,
the military height requirement had to be lowered because they were so stunted.
(12:55):
They were probably rachitic and much smaller, and they needed soldiers, so they simply lowered
the entry requirement for conscription.
Who wants to speak of the natural body there?
By natural body, I mean the aspects of the body that remind us of its biological functionality
and also of its transience.
(13:16):
So, the hairiness of the body, the bodily excretions, all these elements are indeed elements
that are directly related to the functioning of the body in a biological sense.
If I artificialise the body in this way, by fabricating it, by approaching it with artefacts,
then I expel, I camouflaged these elements of the creaturely. That is correct.
(13:41):
So the problem is natural, and in this respect, they are absolutely right when they speak of paradox.
On the one hand, I believe that all this work towards artificiality is ultimately a fight against finitude.
Behind this lies the grand idea of equality among gods, immortality, and so on.
(14:01):
And at the same time, since this does not work, at least not so far, there is a process of repression
that brings with it an increased helplessness against the appearance of pain, death, and transience.
This seems to me to be the central problem.
I would no longer speak of a constant physicality.
(14:23):
I believe that bodies actually change permanently.
However, I would still speak of a constancy, for example, of pain.
Pain is an experience, even if I may vary the experience of pain itself, which I cannot extricate
from this whole concept of artificiality, which stands in diametric opposition.
These objectified, artificial bodies apparently have a special sex appeal.
(14:52):
What kind of sex appeal is that?
What is the basis of this eroticism?
Is this primarily a sex appeal that fits male needs, male fantasies?
Do women have different sexual needs than those that can be provoked by this sex appeal of the
(15:15):
inorganic, as Benjamin once put it? I do not know.
So I believe that even in these sexual concepts, perhaps the equation, perhaps the confusion
of hygiene and aesthetics prevails.
I have always watched the series Sex and the City with great interest, where everything is discussed.
(15:36):
All sexual variants are addressed, even down to how semen tastes, Atergo, and what have you,
everything that exists is brought up.
Also quite directly from the American series, quite directly.
And yet the whole thing always had something extremely artificial about it.
For my generation, perhaps also desexualised.
(15:57):
I have always wondered how one can speak so directly and also visually about sex, without it
actually having anything to do with sexuality in my eyes.
And I also believe that behind this lies the idea of hygienising sex.
In other words, to extract the element of decay, the element of finitude from it.
(16:18):
I believe that would be a general trend.
I would need to think longer about it to break it down into male and female phantasmagorias.
They say that the sex with these new body concepts, which make the boundary between the artificial
and the natural disappear, is an interface between human and machine.
(16:43):
What is meant by that?
The pleasing and perhaps problematic aspect of the whole development, in the eyes of some people,
is that we can indeed be helped regarding many ailments that our bodies are now exhibiting.
So the number of artificial joints is legion.
If our heart skips a beat, we can have a pacemaker fitted.
(17:07):
And our knees can be replaced.
We have been wearing glasses for a long time.
Now, laser surgeries can evidently also rectify defects directly in the eye, so that we might
not need these prosthetics at all.
Artificial kidneys, artificial livers, and so on.
With the new biotechnology, we are also being promised that organs can regrow according to our
(17:29):
body design, that is, stem cells. Skin, ears, whatever.
I think these are by no means phenomena that should only be viewed critically or pessimistically
in cultural terms, but each of us would be glad to benefit from them if the need arose.
This naturally also softens the old notion of the constancy of a natural body.
(17:54):
So even if people are not aware of it, the fact that this kind of medical-biological-technical
intervention is increasingly penetrating our everyday worlds, everyone might know someone who
has such a thing, will of course completely undermine the idea of a unified, inviolable, organically intact, natural body.
(18:19):
And all these spare parts that we will eventually carry around in our bodies bring us closer
to machines than to animals.
For we are always moving between these two poles, between the animal-human as the ancients depicted
him and the machine-human, to which we are evidently becoming more and more.
(18:40):
So Freud's term of the prosthetic god already hints at this.
We have always used prosthetics when our bodies have neglected us, but now this is entering a new stage.
And the problem is not only that we have to give up our notion of what our body is, but also
of what a human being is.
(19:03):
This fatefulness, being thrown onto the earth and somehow flying there and being as one is,
is also interrupted by the idea that a person can make themselves and change themselves.
An idea that fundamentally revolutionises our image of what a person is.
One could say that this is a dehumanisation. That is quite dreadful.
(19:26):
It leads to a technological ice desert.
However, one can also think of the positive aspects of the matter, such as the possibility of healing, alleviation of suffering.
The question of whether there remains a remnant of what is good and precious in the old images of humans.
Namely, that they can help themselves and others, in contrast to animals.
(19:50):
That they can also act selflessly, can act out of love.
Whether that remains seems to me much more relevant than the question of whether we can romanticise
our bodies in a certain way or not.
But it is of course related to that.
I believe that if I have only read once in a newspaper article that it is possible to turn a
(20:12):
man into a woman or a woman into a man.
That it is medically, technically possible.
If I have only read once that it is possible to clone a human being.
If I have only read once or heard that it is possible to make very specific interventions in
the body through genetic technology, then I am already, so to speak, no longer the same.
(20:36):
Then my relationship to my body is already no longer the same.
This pure potentiality, even if it no longer concerns me at all.
The awareness of this pure potentiality changes people.
We have, through new technologies, which have already been called genetic technology or the
(20:56):
so-called life sciences, but also through simulation technology, through computer technology,
possibilities of image creation, image conception, and their projection onto physicality that
one did not have before.
Would you say that these two technologies here clearly represent an avant-garde?
(21:24):
Well, I will start from the other side.
For a while, it was believed that the body would be the last refuge in these entire virtual
worlds, in these media worlds in which we move, in these entire simulated spaces, providing a constancy.
And that is now also going down the drain.
(21:44):
If we imagine that we receive reports on television about wars or moon landings or anything
else and we cannot be entirely sure whether they actually took place or whether what we see
was fabricated by Walt Disney, then we have always thought, but I am still here in my body,
that is at least still a reality of the body, my body and the bodies of others.
(22:06):
And now we must ascertain that this bodily reality is not the case either, because our thinking
and speaking about the body has long been reformed by what we have seen in the media.
So we must at least assume a mutual influence between this flood of images and our own idea
(22:26):
of our body and our sexuality.
And since it has become somewhat more widely known that sexuality is essentially a matter of
the mind, that is, a matter of our imagination and our capacity for conception and our early
visual impressions, we can no longer assume the uniqueness and naturalness of what we find there.
(22:48):
So we have already been shaken many times, I would say.
The shaking seems to imply two gestures to me.
On the one hand, this objectification of bodies towards these very hard, muscularly defined
body surfaces, which are also very differentiated, that tend to become metallic, for example,
(23:15):
what I would like to call hard bodies.
On the other hand, there is a tendency towards the virtualization of the physical through the
possibility of simulation, through holograms, through tele-existences.
Is what we are experiencing now a farewell to the body or is it somehow a hardening, a stiffening of the physical?
(23:39):
So I believe it is a farewell to bodily fate.
So the body as fate, both the hardening, the machine person, the metallic, the hard, as well as the flowing.
We will continue with the interview shortly.
Like us if you like it.
Yes, those are the two movements.
The hardening and the liquefaction.
(24:01):
Both are, so to speak, attempts to remove pain, decay, and death from the entire bodily sensation or conception.
That seems to me essentially to be the idea associated with it.
And what interests me is this solid and the liquid.
(24:21):
And so to speak, the eternal flow and the coming to rest.
This is indeed included in this model.
So the eternal movement, the flow that always flows and the absolute hardening.
Something comes to absolute rest.
And both seem to me to contain the dream of an eternal body peace.
In this respect, I would not simply dismiss it or just criticise it.
(24:45):
One can curse this whole development.
And I also believe that one can no longer speak of what one used to always speak of, the dialectic of progress.
So progress, which always brings something good, but thereby also carries a loss with it.
I believe it is really now heaven and hell.
(25:06):
So the promise on one side is, I believe, the abolition of death, the abolition of suffering.
One should not smile at that straight away.
That is, I believe, the struggle that humans have been fighting from the very beginning.
And the other side is really hell, it is truly the prospect of a terrible world, which could
also be provoked by these biotechnological interventions.
(25:29):
And it is already warning that the achievements that are possible in these sectors, with regard
to combating diseases, will then really only be accessible to wealthy people.
So one can already see the first people again with gaps in their teeth and damaged bodies that
need not be, simply because they can no longer afford to repair them.
(25:52):
Yes, I still remember from my youth, one saw all these war victims, but also those who could
not afford it, who could not afford dental prosthetics or who could not afford brain surgeries
or who had open legs due to poverty.
They were gone for a while with increasing prosperity and they are reappearing, and this could
(26:13):
of course be a consequence of this biotechnology in much larger dimensions, which perhaps will
really only be available to certain classes and certain people.
In certain countries, in certain parts of the earth.
Does that mean we will then have a two-body society? Yes.
(26:33):
What happens to that which no longer appears in these images and in these phantasmagorias, namely illness and death?
To what extent have these two elements, which certainly will not disappear and will remain part
of human fate for the foreseeable future, been banished to any social ghettos?
(26:58):
Generally, people do not die in the domestic circle anymore.
It has been the case for some time now that these matters are packaged in institutions.
However, I think that this tendency will probably become even stronger, because with this idea
of the clean, of the non-creaturely, non-vulnerable, hardened, beautified, smooth body, there
(27:23):
also arises an increasing disgust for what was once called natural, such as excretions, discharges,
blood, mucus, pus, wounds, and so on.
This will likely become increasingly unbearable, the smoother and more beautiful the image of
the healthy, young body is, the more disgusted the image of the sick, old, decaying body will become.
(27:48):
It is already being discussed in talk shows whether ugly people still have a place in public
spaces, whether fat people can still expose themselves there, for example in swimming pools.
This is an incredible brutalisation, which is also connected to the matter, one simply has to see that.
There is also a social dimension to it, which probably needs to be revisited, because I mean
(28:14):
all this work on the body, all these fitness programmes, dietary programmes, revitalisation
programmes, they are also quite expensive.
The worse I eat, the unhealthier I might look, and perhaps I will also become fatter.
I mean, why shouldn't people be fat?
Yes, I have never understood that.
(28:34):
But it is so, in one of those talk shows, it really knocked me off my chair, a young lad was
talking about how that was dead flesh that they were dragging around with them.
I don't know what led him to these thoughts, so to speak, to associate it with the inorganic,
but he really had that idea, and probably part of the image of this healthy, hardened body is
(28:56):
also that it is slim, so that it can solidify or liquefy more easily, I don't know.
These norms of a certain physical beauty, of a certain sexual attractiveness have now also captured
the male body, both the hardened muscle masses of various lone fighters in the urban jungle
(29:18):
and the androgynous tendencies that have brought a touch of effeminacy to the monotony of the three-piece suit.
They show that the male body is also subjected to a construction as an object of desire.
Is this the gaze of women themselves or is it rather an underground, perhaps even homophile
(29:42):
reconstruction of the female gaze by men?
Yes, I believe these reconstructions have always taken place.
It has always been claimed from the feminist side that there was a terror of the male gaze and
that women have therefore always overexerted themselves in their grooming, their physical and
fashion-related appearance, because they were exposed to this permanent pressure from the male gaze.
(30:05):
I believe the situation was actually much worse; they themselves had appropriated this gaze,
and when you ask women, they always say that they actually fear the gazes of other women much
more than those of men, the critical gazes of other women.
And the fact that men are now experiencing something similar contains a certain justice.
So I can partly be pleased about this, that they now also have to make an effort, that is, they
(30:28):
have to consider whether their beer belly is really just nature and enhances their attractiveness.
There is a certain justice in the fact that this is now converging, but they are completely right.
This kind of gaze adjustment has now also affected men.
And especially young men, when you talk to them, this narcissistic-autistic moment, which has
(30:51):
always characterised the gaze of women on their own bodies, is now also present in their gaze on their bodies.
I mean, we are somewhere here at the centre of the postmodern debate.
If one denies that there is such a thing as reality, if one questions the concept of nature,
(31:14):
if everything is merely a social construct or, if you like, an individual construct, then of
course a cyborg or a mutant or a mutant woman is nothing shocking anymore.
No, that doesn't shock me at all.
As far as I'm concerned, they are just cyborgs or machine people.
(31:36):
For me, the central question, I can only express this in such a pathetically general way, is
whether in these beings, however they may look, whether liquid or solid, whether partly machine
or not, there is still something salvageable that has developed over the course of human ideas
and intellectual history, that is indeed an element in a morality.
(31:59):
I don't care whether they are cyborgs.
What matters to me is whether this is for the salvation or blessing of humanity. That suffices.
And there is always the central question, will it reduce or increase suffering?
Thank you for being part of Audio Archive.
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See you next week, your Audio Archive team.
Welcome to Audioarchiv, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers, activists,
and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:33):
Hello, the body has become the propagandistic and ideological battleground in the digital culture war of the 21st. Century is mutating. Image war.
What is real, what is artificial and why?
For medical reasons, for aesthetic, for propagandistic, for capitalist.
Perhaps it is not really new either.
(00:57):
Even centuries before, for millennia, the body was an exhibit and commodity, an anchor of identity
and a marker of belonging.
Construction workers, sailors, revolutionaries or kings, bodies were never the same as bodies.
The gaze upon oneself and others provided certainty.
(01:17):
And yet today it is different.
The individual body is to be abolished.
The utopia of a distinguishable body is obscured by propaganda.
Capital merges the boundaries, solidifies the fluid, and everything separate, vulnerable, sick,
and transient is banished into darkness.
(01:39):
Fritz Lang's machine people early on provided assistance for the amoral and antisocial visions
of the future of tech billionaires.
No, they are not concerned with abolition and destruction; they are not Stalins or Hitlers,
whose ideology was based on industrial body annihilation.
(01:59):
In the neoliberal state, the techies are concerned with total control.
Every body is planned, from birth to beyond death.
A wonderful, new idea of domination in capitalism, a beautiful, new slave world of hygienic,
antiseptic bodies, no more bloodshed, eternal peace in an eternally rewritten, healthy, pure, digitally controlled future.
(02:26):
The sick, the weak, the anxious, the indistinguishable, the individual is banished.
Only in this way can Elon Musk's unprecedented fight against the bourgeois-democratic constitutional state be explained.
As a total war against everything analog, the eternal mantra of inevitability is being propagated.
(02:48):
The religious leaders from Silicon Valley are at the same time agents of neoliberalism and mafia
bosses of the new digital profit cult.
With the help of the analog politicians trembling with fear, they penetrate every capillary of the human body.
For it is not destruction, but control that generates profit.
(03:08):
Sylvia Bowenchen, a representative of feminist literary studies, doubts the authenticity of the tech billionaires. Do they even exist?
Or are their solidified bodies, not already their own X-Ray production, interchangeable, replaceable, arbitrary?
Togetherness and empathy make us human, says Sylvia Bowenchen. Perhaps also solidarity.
(03:35):
But never the bodies, fluid or solid.
Look, the kings are naked. Ms.
Bowenchen, men's dreams of artificial women haunt Western cultural history.
Especially at the end of the 19th.
In the 19th century, European literature feverishly worked on such automaton women.
(03:59):
Today, at the beginning of the 21st.
In the 21st century, these phantasmagorical bodies have long become an integral part of mass culture.
The pop icon Madonna, as well as the computer simulation Lara Croft, showcase a new developmental
stage of technologically and media-altered corporeality. Both are highly sexualised.
(04:26):
Both represent a new conception of woman.
Both represent the ideal of fitness that goes far beyond the notion of physical capability.
Chiseled, yet somehow cold bodies despite their erotic aura, muscular androgynes alike.
(04:47):
What kind of bodies are these?
What do they say about our sexual desires?
(05:19):
With the projected bodies at the end of the 19th.
One can still make it relatively easy with the projected bodies at the end of the 19th century.
One could, so to speak, adopt an old reliable feminist critique stance and say, these are simply men's wishes.
Now, Madonna is someone who does not simply execute these men's dreams, but rather continuously
shapes herself onto this dream carousel and puts on the costumes that pass by.
And there is already an ironic, perhaps even sovereign position that seems to emerge.
(05:50):
In this regard, one cannot revert to the old model of external determination, a male-dominated projection.
That can perhaps be critiqued.
Insofar as one can say, these are wishes that the average woman can never reach.
That would thus be a kind of social critique.
But that also falls a bit short when one considers that self-invention, the self-creation of
(06:15):
humanity is an ancient dream of mankind, a general ancient dream of mankind.
And I belong to a generation that still experienced how infinitely women suffered under the
supposed fate of certain body shapes, such as large noses, small breasts, etc.
And the pure potentiality of changeability, that is, the possibility that one can simply do as one wishes today.
(06:42):
Whether one can afford it is another matter, whether one survives is another matter.
But the mere possibility does open a spectrum of wishing and realisation that one cannot simply brush aside.
I would assert that if it were not very expensive and bloodless, every woman would do it.
All these orientations of a surgical or other nature.
(07:07):
Now the number of interventions at this physical level is indeed very large, quite real.
They have called it cosmetic surgery, but there is also something beyond that which belongs
to the realm of fashion.
Tattoos are clearly on the rise.
Piercing has at least become a trend among the youth.
(07:30):
The body is thus manipulated by fashion from many sides.
What can be highlighted in this context is that the body is increasingly used directly as a
carrier for writing, for signs, symbols.
Is this, like the subscription in art history, a potentiation of the character of the image,
(07:55):
a coding of the body?
So I think bodies have always been read.
Among so-called primitives, there are already inscriptions and tattoos, and fashion has been
a form of inscription over centuries, in a certain way an inscription of the body.
That now the body itself is fashion, that is, the detour is no longer taken through its clothing,
(08:19):
but fashion has slipped into the body itself.
This is certainly a new phenomenon.
So the model is no longer just a bearer of certain clothing codes, but the model itself is the message of fashion.
This naturally provokes compulsion; if I do not conform to this body image, I have to do quite
(08:40):
a lot to gradually get there.
But it is, in that sense, simply a radicalisation of that, in my view.
This trend towards the body line in fashion, that is, the emphasis on the clear line of the
body, is in contrast to what, for example, was fashion in the 19th.
(09:02):
Century, where the fashion ultimately concerned the covering of the physical, about disembodiment.
Is this a production of a paradoxical nakedness, a nakedness that is simultaneously covered,
yet not covered at all?
What can one say about the concept of nakedness in this context?
(09:24):
Well, I think they really get to the point.
That is indeed a paradox.
On one hand, it seems to me there is a hard work on the front of denaturalisation and covering
up and removing everything that, so to speak, falls into the schemas of the creaturely.
If you think about the fact that today men are often also encouraged to shave their bodies,
(09:49):
to remove those hairs that still appear so animalistic, which used to be something only women
had to do, at least on large parts of their bodies.
So on one hand, the body is denaturalised and as such, as a denaturalised entity, it can then
be displayed again, so to speak, in its artificial form.
(10:11):
This seems to me to be a very strong moment, this disgust towards the natural body, which must
be a body, is replaced, so to speak, by the newly created artificial body, and that can then
also be undressed, because it is no longer just nature.
That means natural nakedness would be too creaturely, is too laden with...
(10:34):
Well, I already consider natural nakedness to be an ideological model.
So when some people who like to bathe naked in the sea claim that it is so natural, I am always very suspicious.
I believe nothing is more unnatural for a person of the 21st.
Century than to walk naked through society.
(10:55):
We'll continue with the interview shortly.
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(11:27):
The ideal leg was presented by Marlene Dietrich, who allegedly had the most beautiful legs for
over 50, 60 years, and the legs that were displayed in the windows of stocking shops always had a certain swing.
I think he came from there.
This momentum can no longer be maintained today because women are simply much taller.
When I was young, I was of medium height, today I am short.
(11:51):
That is where it all begins.
They have simply become much taller, the girls and the boys, of course.
This also naturally changes the entire body composition.
And I can remember, 15 or 20 years ago I was sitting in a café and at the next table there were
young men discussing women, and it was pointed out that one had beautiful broad shoulders.
(12:12):
I thought to myself, something has really changed now.
This means that the natural body, also the desirable body, is constantly changing.
That doesn't exist at all.
People have always worked on the body at this construction site.
They fed their children better if they belonged to the wealthy classes.
As a result, they looked different, had better skin.
(12:33):
They intervened medically, and thus, unconsciously, people have always carried out this breeding programme.
In this respect, I would not even speak of the natural body.
I once read that in the 19th.
Century, because child labour was widespread and children were sometimes sent to the mines,
the military height requirement had to be lowered because they were so stunted.
(12:55):
They were probably rachitic and much smaller, and they needed soldiers, so they simply lowered
the entry requirement for conscription.
Who wants to speak of the natural body there?
By natural body, I mean the aspects of the body that remind us of its biological functionality
and also of its transience.
(13:16):
So, the hairiness of the body, the bodily excretions, all these elements are indeed elements
that are directly related to the functioning of the body in a biological sense.
If I artificialise the body in this way, by fabricating it, by approaching it with artefacts,
then I expel, I camouflaged these elements of the creaturely. That is correct.
(13:41):
So the problem is natural, and in this respect, they are absolutely right when they speak of paradox.
On the one hand, I believe that all this work towards artificiality is ultimately a fight against finitude.
Behind this lies the grand idea of equality among gods, immortality, and so on.
(14:01):
And at the same time, since this does not work, at least not so far, there is a process of repression
that brings with it an increased helplessness against the appearance of pain, death, and transience.
This seems to me to be the central problem.
I would no longer speak of a constant physicality.
(14:23):
I believe that bodies actually change permanently.
However, I would still speak of a constancy, for example, of pain.
Pain is an experience, even if I may vary the experience of pain itself, which I cannot extricate
from this whole concept of artificiality, which stands in diametric opposition.
These objectified, artificial bodies apparently have a special sex appeal.
(14:52):
What kind of sex appeal is that?
What is the basis of this eroticism?
Is this primarily a sex appeal that fits male needs, male fantasies?
Do women have different sexual needs than those that can be provoked by this sex appeal of the
(15:15):
inorganic, as Benjamin once put it? I do not know.
So I believe that even in these sexual concepts, perhaps the equation, perhaps the confusion
of hygiene and aesthetics prevails.
I have always watched the series Sex and the City with great interest, where everything is discussed.
(15:36):
All sexual variants are addressed, even down to how semen tastes, Atergo, and what have you,
everything that exists is brought up.
Also quite directly from the American series, quite directly.
And yet the whole thing always had something extremely artificial about it.
For my generation, perhaps also desexualised.
(15:57):
I have always wondered how one can speak so directly and also visually about sex, without it
actually having anything to do with sexuality in my eyes.
And I also believe that behind this lies the idea of hygienising sex.
In other words, to extract the element of decay, the element of finitude from it.
(16:18):
I believe that would be a general trend.
I would need to think longer about it to break it down into male and female phantasmagorias.
They say that the sex with these new body concepts, which make the boundary between the artificial
and the natural disappear, is an interface between human and machine.
(16:43):
What is meant by that?
The pleasing and perhaps problematic aspect of the whole development, in the eyes of some people,
is that we can indeed be helped regarding many ailments that our bodies are now exhibiting.
So the number of artificial joints is legion.
If our heart skips a beat, we can have a pacemaker fitted.
(17:07):
And our knees can be replaced.
We have been wearing glasses for a long time.
Now, laser surgeries can evidently also rectify defects directly in the eye, so that we might
not need these prosthetics at all.
Artificial kidneys, artificial livers, and so on.
With the new biotechnology, we are also being promised that organs can regrow according to our
(17:29):
body design, that is, stem cells. Skin, ears, whatever.
I think these are by no means phenomena that should only be viewed critically or pessimistically
in cultural terms, but each of us would be glad to benefit from them if the need arose.
This naturally also softens the old notion of the constancy of a natural body.
(17:54):
So even if people are not aware of it, the fact that this kind of medical-biological-technical
intervention is increasingly penetrating our everyday worlds, everyone might know someone who
has such a thing, will of course completely undermine the idea of a unified, inviolable, organically intact, natural body.
(18:19):
And all these spare parts that we will eventually carry around in our bodies bring us closer
to machines than to animals.
For we are always moving between these two poles, between the animal-human as the ancients depicted
him and the machine-human, to which we are evidently becoming more and more.
(18:40):
So Freud's term of the prosthetic god already hints at this.
We have always used prosthetics when our bodies have neglected us, but now this is entering a new stage.
And the problem is not only that we have to give up our notion of what our body is, but also
of what a human being is.
(19:03):
This fatefulness, being thrown onto the earth and somehow flying there and being as one is,
is also interrupted by the idea that a person can make themselves and change themselves.
An idea that fundamentally revolutionises our image of what a person is.
One could say that this is a dehumanisation. That is quite dreadful.
(19:26):
It leads to a technological ice desert.
However, one can also think of the positive aspects of the matter, such as the possibility of healing, alleviation of suffering.
The question of whether there remains a remnant of what is good and precious in the old images of humans.
Namely, that they can help themselves and others, in contrast to animals.
(19:50):
That they can also act selflessly, can act out of love.
Whether that remains seems to me much more relevant than the question of whether we can romanticise
our bodies in a certain way or not.
But it is of course related to that.
I believe that if I have only read once in a newspaper article that it is possible to turn a
(20:12):
man into a woman or a woman into a man.
That it is medically, technically possible.
If I have only read once that it is possible to clone a human being.
If I have only read once or heard that it is possible to make very specific interventions in
the body through genetic technology, then I am already, so to speak, no longer the same.
(20:36):
Then my relationship to my body is already no longer the same.
This pure potentiality, even if it no longer concerns me at all.
The awareness of this pure potentiality changes people.
We have, through new technologies, which have already been called genetic technology or the
(20:56):
so-called life sciences, but also through simulation technology, through computer technology,
possibilities of image creation, image conception, and their projection onto physicality that
one did not have before.
Would you say that these two technologies here clearly represent an avant-garde?
(21:24):
Well, I will start from the other side.
For a while, it was believed that the body would be the last refuge in these entire virtual
worlds, in these media worlds in which we move, in these entire simulated spaces, providing a constancy.
And that is now also going down the drain.
(21:44):
If we imagine that we receive reports on television about wars or moon landings or anything
else and we cannot be entirely sure whether they actually took place or whether what we see
was fabricated by Walt Disney, then we have always thought, but I am still here in my body,
that is at least still a reality of the body, my body and the bodies of others.
(22:06):
And now we must ascertain that this bodily reality is not the case either, because our thinking
and speaking about the body has long been reformed by what we have seen in the media.
So we must at least assume a mutual influence between this flood of images and our own idea
(22:26):
of our body and our sexuality.
And since it has become somewhat more widely known that sexuality is essentially a matter of
the mind, that is, a matter of our imagination and our capacity for conception and our early
visual impressions, we can no longer assume the uniqueness and naturalness of what we find there.
(22:48):
So we have already been shaken many times, I would say.
The shaking seems to imply two gestures to me.
On the one hand, this objectification of bodies towards these very hard, muscularly defined
body surfaces, which are also very differentiated, that tend to become metallic, for example,
(23:15):
what I would like to call hard bodies.
On the other hand, there is a tendency towards the virtualization of the physical through the
possibility of simulation, through holograms, through tele-existences.
Is what we are experiencing now a farewell to the body or is it somehow a hardening, a stiffening of the physical?
(23:39):
So I believe it is a farewell to bodily fate.
So the body as fate, both the hardening, the machine person, the metallic, the hard, as well as the flowing.
We will continue with the interview shortly.
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Yes, those are the two movements.
The hardening and the liquefaction.
(24:01):
Both are, so to speak, attempts to remove pain, decay, and death from the entire bodily sensation or conception.
That seems to me essentially to be the idea associated with it.
And what interests me is this solid and the liquid.
(24:21):
And so to speak, the eternal flow and the coming to rest.
This is indeed included in this model.
So the eternal movement, the flow that always flows and the absolute hardening.
Something comes to absolute rest.
And both seem to me to contain the dream of an eternal body peace.
In this respect, I would not simply dismiss it or just criticise it.
(24:45):
One can curse this whole development.
And I also believe that one can no longer speak of what one used to always speak of, the dialectic of progress.
So progress, which always brings something good, but thereby also carries a loss with it.
I believe it is really now heaven and hell.
(25:06):
So the promise on one side is, I believe, the abolition of death, the abolition of suffering.
One should not smile at that straight away.
That is, I believe, the struggle that humans have been fighting from the very beginning.
And the other side is really hell, it is truly the prospect of a terrible world, which could
also be provoked by these biotechnological interventions.
(25:29):
And it is already warning that the achievements that are possible in these sectors, with regard
to combating diseases, will then really only be accessible to wealthy people.
So one can already see the first people again with gaps in their teeth and damaged bodies that
need not be, simply because they can no longer afford to repair them.
(25:52):
Yes, I still remember from my youth, one saw all these war victims, but also those who could
not afford it, who could not afford dental prosthetics or who could not afford brain surgeries
or who had open legs due to poverty.
They were gone for a while with increasing prosperity and they are reappearing, and this could
(26:13):
of course be a consequence of this biotechnology in much larger dimensions, which perhaps will
really only be available to certain classes and certain people.
In certain countries, in certain parts of the earth.
Does that mean we will then have a two-body society? Yes.
(26:33):
What happens to that which no longer appears in these images and in these phantasmagorias, namely illness and death?
To what extent have these two elements, which certainly will not disappear and will remain part
of human fate for the foreseeable future, been banished to any social ghettos?
(26:58):
Generally, people do not die in the domestic circle anymore.
It has been the case for some time now that these matters are packaged in institutions.
However, I think that this tendency will probably become even stronger, because with this idea
of the clean, of the non-creaturely, non-vulnerable, hardened, beautified, smooth body, there
(27:23):
also arises an increasing disgust for what was once called natural, such as excretions, discharges,
blood, mucus, pus, wounds, and so on.
This will likely become increasingly unbearable, the smoother and more beautiful the image of
the healthy, young body is, the more disgusted the image of the sick, old, decaying body will become.
(27:48):
It is already being discussed in talk shows whether ugly people still have a place in public
spaces, whether fat people can still expose themselves there, for example in swimming pools.
This is an incredible brutalisation, which is also connected to the matter, one simply has to see that.
There is also a social dimension to it, which probably needs to be revisited, because I mean
(28:14):
all this work on the body, all these fitness programmes, dietary programmes, revitalisation
programmes, they are also quite expensive.
The worse I eat, the unhealthier I might look, and perhaps I will also become fatter.
I mean, why shouldn't people be fat?
Yes, I have never understood that.
(28:34):
But it is so, in one of those talk shows, it really knocked me off my chair, a young lad was
talking about how that was dead flesh that they were dragging around with them.
I don't know what led him to these thoughts, so to speak, to associate it with the inorganic,
but he really had that idea, and probably part of the image of this healthy, hardened body is
(28:56):
also that it is slim, so that it can solidify or liquefy more easily, I don't know.
These norms of a certain physical beauty, of a certain sexual attractiveness have now also captured
the male body, both the hardened muscle masses of various lone fighters in the urban jungle
(29:18):
and the androgynous tendencies that have brought a touch of effeminacy to the monotony of the three-piece suit.
They show that the male body is also subjected to a construction as an object of desire.
Is this the gaze of women themselves or is it rather an underground, perhaps even homophile
(29:42):
reconstruction of the female gaze by men?
Yes, I believe these reconstructions have always taken place.
It has always been claimed from the feminist side that there was a terror of the male gaze and
that women have therefore always overexerted themselves in their grooming, their physical and
fashion-related appearance, because they were exposed to this permanent pressure from the male gaze.
(30:05):
I believe the situation was actually much worse; they themselves had appropriated this gaze,
and when you ask women, they always say that they actually fear the gazes of other women much
more than those of men, the critical gazes of other women.
And the fact that men are now experiencing something similar contains a certain justice.
So I can partly be pleased about this, that they now also have to make an effort, that is, they
(30:28):
have to consider whether their beer belly is really just nature and enhances their attractiveness.
There is a certain justice in the fact that this is now converging, but they are completely right.
This kind of gaze adjustment has now also affected men.
And especially young men, when you talk to them, this narcissistic-autistic moment, which has
(30:51):
always characterised the gaze of women on their own bodies, is now also present in their gaze on their bodies.
I mean, we are somewhere here at the centre of the postmodern debate.
If one denies that there is such a thing as reality, if one questions the concept of nature,
(31:14):
if everything is merely a social construct or, if you like, an individual construct, then of
course a cyborg or a mutant or a mutant woman is nothing shocking anymore.
No, that doesn't shock me at all.
As far as I'm concerned, they are just cyborgs or machine people.
(31:36):
For me, the central question, I can only express this in such a pathetically general way, is
whether in these beings, however they may look, whether liquid or solid, whether partly machine
or not, there is still something salvageable that has developed over the course of human ideas
and intellectual history, that is indeed an element in a morality.
(31:59):
I don't care whether they are cyborgs.
What matters to me is whether this is for the salvation or blessing of humanity. That suffices.
And there is always the central question, will it reduce or increase suffering?
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