Homo Crispr and the Uncanny Art of Self-Reproduction

Abstract

Selected classic 19th-and 20th-century fictional texts, I argue, function as imaginative precursors of material fusions, either by prosthetic integration in the sense of repurposed imperfection or by internalizing genetic perfection, creating homo crispr. E.T.A. HOFFMANN’s dark literary tale The Sandman (1816), MARY SHELLEY’s gothic proto-science fiction Frankenstein (1818), VILLIER DE L’ISLE-ADAM’s fin de siècle Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), and ANGELA CARTER’s carnivalesque The Passion of New Eve (1977) position the artificial other as both an externalization of the human desire for perfection in an uncanny act of autoerotic, poetic-scientific self-fertilization and as a reverse image of the composite self. They not only disrupt the perception of the other as external, but the subtexts, I contend, pre-empt this fusion of self and other that, in the logic of 21st-century discourse’s revaluation of imperfection, diversity, and dis/abilities, life sciences seek to realize with the imminent spectre of homo crispr’s dissolved material self/other boundaries.