Page - 6 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

STREAM: Gender – Technology – Environment Rethinking the Body as a Network: Drawing Inspiration from Japanese Animated Cyborg Bodies JAKEŠOVÁ, Markéta Charles University, Faculty of Humanities; L'Équipe de Recherches sur les Rationalités Philosophiques et les Savoirs, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France Abstract There is a prevalent tendency among Japanese to be skeptical towards medical transplantations of vital organs, especially when their donors should be so-called ‘brain-dead’ persons. This is because it does not necessarily have to be the brain which (alone) ensures a person's identity and also because the ‘foreign’ parts in the receiver's body can endanger his or her integrity (cf. Ohnuki- Tierney 1994). This may indicate an understanding of the body as a compact and bounded entity, however a lot of Japanese anime movies and series offer a rather different picture. First, the differences between animal, human, vegetal or mechanical bodies are fluid and unsteady, so they change both their form and substance, and second, the bodies seem to flow between material, virtual, and dream realities without any apprehensible anchoring. This paper aims to propose an integrated understanding of these two techno-socio-cultural phenomena by using some of the philosophical approaches that draw on both Japanese and Western traditions. The philosopher Ichikawa Hiroshi describes various types of the body: some of them are not limited by the skin but rather represent a structure or a network intimately connected to their environment, other bodies included. The philosopher Yuasa Yasuo treats the well-known problems of subjectivity and body-mind unity but instead of taking this unity as the point of departure and then explaining it, he sees it as a possible goal of bodily techniques inspired by Buddhist meditation practice. Thus it seems that not only is the subject fundamentally embodied (as for example in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) but most importantly, it appears to be able to absorb and integrate into itself anything (both biological and mechanical) from its environment, and change with it. I will argue that this way of thinking can offer some alternatives to the highly individualistic Western milieu and could even be a better departure for responding to environmental issues while more justly treating all possible relations and connections between different people, biological species, and other entities. 6