ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Our ‘aged society’ understands that it is natural to sustain aging and delay death. However, this persistence and delay is not natural phenomenon but an artificial one caused by bio-technoscience and the political economy. The artificially sustained and delayed transformation in the elderly's body makes the distinction between the natural and the artificial more difficult. This article deals with these aspects of older people in terms of ‘post-human’ and ‘becoming an old man.’ It considers the ageing as the movement process of life, not realising the being of the old man as any entrenched essence, and the artificial things that are intervened in the aging process and in the course of death a hybrid of human and nonhuman. The political economy of life rearranges the aging body into the capital-producing process through biotechnology. The body's differential technology enables the aging process of the body to realize the logic of the procedure, and more trans-humanistic transformation leads the elderly to advocate as humanistic mechanical human. The extreme transformations of body aging result in the reproduction of the elderly as the most active post-human subjects of our time. Post-humanistic becoming an old man shows that his/her transformed bodies with scientific artifacts are a part of a series of post-humanistic ecosystems with nature.

키워드