Biotech Fantasia

Abstract

Biotechnology has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside a variety of formulations of 'the ethical' and in this way biotechnology has become an ideological phenomenon swept up in structuring freedom and processes of designating living beings in a full and objective manner. In the twenty-first century the mapping of the genome has provided individuals with a means of full self-objectivisation which necessitates a rethinking of the ethical content of biotechnology as human life is laid bare. This paper examines the ideology critique of Slavoj Zizek at the turn of the twenty-first century to show how a post-rational ethics can be generated when the human subject is reduced to an 'objective' phenomenon.