Utopie postumanistă și parabolă politică în proza lui Sergiu Fărcășan

Posthumanist utopia and political parable in the prose of Sergiu Fărcășan

Abstract

The paper proposes a reinterpretation of Sergiu Fărcășan’s prose – more precisely, of the novels Atacul cesiumiștilor (1963) [The Attack of the Cesiumists] and Vă caută un Taur (1970) [A Bull Is Searching for You], as well as the short story collection Mașina de rupt prieteniile (1968) [The Friendship-Breaking Machine] – highlighting the ambiguity of the science-fiction scenarios, which simultaneously legitimize and undermine a totalitarian political ideology. The selected texts are built upon the constant tension between the cliché of official propagandistic discourse – in which technological achievements serve humankind and stand as a sign of its superiority, as well as of the political regime that makes them possible – and the undermining of official policy through the use of parable and the imagining of utopian worlds. The posthumanist problematic – illustrated by the confrontation between the human and artificial-intelligence systems, the matter-information relationship, the prosthetics of the human body, the state of consciousness, or the cyborgization of the narrative – serve both the discourse of technological-optimism propaganda and a set of serious inquiries developed in a political and profoundly humanistic key. The propagandistic discourse acquires posthumanist overtones, for the technological progress leads to a deconstruction of the human, both through massification and through remodelling, whether mental or physical.