By Monique Lauret, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst
In La revue lacanienne 2023/1(N° 24), pages 115 to 126, Éditions Érès
Each century brings with it its own sexual symptom. While the 20th century opened with Charcot's "madwomen" and hysteria, the transgender issue is now flooding the social, cultural and political space at the start of the 21st century, with its demand for freedom to choose one's gender according to individual "feeling". "Le genre (gender) est le dernier grand message idéologique de l'Occident envoyé au reste du monde1 ", writes Éric Marty at the start of his book, Le sexe des Modernes. But this ideological message is perhaps underpinned by another, more invasive one: that of transhumanism. The term "transhumanism", first used by Julian Huxley in 1957, proposes a new belief in the possibility of the human species transcending itself and beyond into its wholeness as humanity. The ideology of "transhumanism" is underpinned by fantasies of self-engendering, of mastering the creation and construction of the human body. Its project is to risk humanity's life in an attempt to gain added value through the creation of new humans with capacities enhanced by technology or hybridization with robots, "posthuman" humans, cyborgs - the most dangerous idea in the world, according to Francis Fukuyama.
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