Conflict of Immortalities: Biopolitics of Cerebral Subject and Religious Life in Altered Carbon Series

Abstract

The article explores a possible conflict between practical and ethical implications of scientific and religious discourses about human nature proposed by the sci-fi series “Altered Carbon." It discusses the clash between biopolitically implemented technology and the religious life. The scientific discourse is represented by the “ideology of the cerebral subject" (F. Vidal, F. Ortega), which establishes the connection between the brain and the self. A brief examination of examples of the embodiment of this ideology in science fiction and its general logic follows. Final development of neuroscience in this series is technology of uploading self on a digital carrier, which allows to achieve quasi-immortal state by changing bodies. This technology, biopolitically appropriated and introduced by the state in individual lives, conflicts with the religious life of neo-Catholics who refuse to transfer their self after bodily death into another body. Thus, the field of collision of the intervention of the science-inspired biopower into the life of the individual and her religious life is marked by the coordinates of life and death. The article discusses this fundamental collision, its biopolitical background and its implications.