Il corpo dimenticato. Person-Engineering e personismi

For Hannah Arendt life is in itself extraneous to the arti cial world, but there is no doubt that scienti c efforts reveal that there is now in man a desire to ‘escape’, of near immortality which is shown in the attempt to create life in a test tube. For Arendt the introduction of the arti cial in the procreative act entails however, the risk of transforming birth into a technique imposing a practice of social control aimed at implementing a project for superior humanity. Hence the crisis of natality as a spontaneous and natural category, as well as the violent and forced change of the representation of origin. Frozen life does however inevitably wound the human person. To alter the germ line, moreover, is not a neutral action, without ethical re ection; even less so is the modi cation of genetic heritage. What is violated in procreative engineering is in fact the right of new generations, and at one time of the human person, to have an open future.