Band 17, Heft 1 - Focus: Have We Ever Been/Will We Still Be Human? Law and Literature Facing the Shifting Boundaries of Humanity and Technology

The essay moves from a conceptual dramatization of the ‘otherification’ of the human being towards the tentative solution of all the habitual juxtapositions created by modern rationality between human/non-human, organic/inorganic, life/death, natural/artificial, animate/inanimate. A new possible vision, substantiated by literature and supported by a philosophical critical thought, transfigures the same idea of matter, opening the way to a new form of materialism which acknowledges the vitality, the liveliness of the stuff and accepts infinite bio-possibilities. The horizon of a possible ‘humanistic inhumanism’ is explored through the paradigmatic and performative representation offered by Ali Abbasi’s wonderful film ‘Border’, where montage becomes a philosophical tool to question not only the concrete potentiality of a completely reversed post-human semiotic order, but also the current normalization of ethical behaviour. All these arguments foster an articulated reflection on the transformations needed to provoke a ‘regenerative apocalypse’ of Politics and Governance for the promotion of a counter-ethic of interconnectedness.

Software systems that claim to think for themselves may prove to be Frankenstein’s nightmare come true. When Amazon used algorithms to read digital letters of job applicants, it turned out that mentioning women sports in the category of one’s favourite leisure activities was detrimental to getting the job, i.e., the algorithm favoured male applicants. What if AI becomes able to and will in fact take over cars, elevators and other electronic devices with devastating results for their human owners or operators? In this article, I aim to address the differences between, and the possible clashes of the human and the AI minds (and their souls and hearts) by means of some examples, including a.o., drones, ADS (automatic driving systems) and our recent Artificial Friend, Kazuo Ishiguro’s fictional robot Klara, and I do so by focussing on the narratives involved, on the view that new technologies need a legal hermeneut. This article is inspired, firstly, by the novelist Samuel Butler and the today not so fictional question that he raised, i.e., whether “because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore it is not life at all?” (Samuel Butler, Erewhon [1872]. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1954, 175), because Butler adds that if it is considered life it could have a will of its own as well and that may lead to dire consequences also from a point of view of law; secondly, because the topic of AI also invites us to consider the interdisciplinary question why new technologies need the humanities. As the philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed, a determination of the world by the positive sciences as took place in the second half of the nineteenth century occasioned “an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people” (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy [1954], trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970, 6).

The essay stages the law at the intersections between the humanities, technology, and the production of digital space. Interactions like these are relevant in the present age, where humankind is outcompeting natural resources and changing the earth. The Anthropocene is an epoch of environmental crisis; despite this, we turn such a crisis into a process of sublimation servient to the control of the earth. Blurring the divide between the digital and the human is functional to such a process. The strategic use of the law makes climate-change policies compatible with global markets. Assuming that manufacturing digital spaces is useful to this end, the essay focuses on multimedia games. Blending real-word performances with internet- and media-related contents, they are functional to sublimation, convincing us that we can tackle climate change without rearranging our economic paradigms.

Based on adecision of the German Federal Supreme Court on the qualification of the destruction of cryopreserved sperm as bodily injury, my contribution explores the question of how law in the age of biomedicine redefines the boundaries of the human body against the background of its fragmentation and genotyping. To cope with the complexity of these processes, law makes use of both old and new techniques, thus proving to be the first technology of life ever.

Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019), was written as a contribution to the world-wide celebrations of the second centenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Evincing the characteristic excessiveness and parodic stance of the postmodern romance, it alternates two interlocked story lines. The first, narrated by Mary Shelley, is situated during her own life span and populated by Mary herself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont. The second, situated in 2018, is narrated by Dr Ry Shelley, a transgender medical doctor who sells body parts to Prof. Victor Stein, a cutting-edge researcher in Artificial Intelligence. The essay argues that for all its parodic doubleness, temporal circularity, thematic enmeshment and palimpsestic structure, the novel draws a clear-cut distinction between the Idealist conception of subjectivity endorsed by the male Romantic poets that leads to Prof. Stein’s transmodern conception of a future universe colonised by bodiless enhanced humans, and Mary Shelley’s affectively charged conception of embodied subjectivity that foreruns Ry Shelley’s posthuman conception of fluid subjectivity.

This essay discusses Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) in light of human and nonhuman relationships. The author presents us with quite a paradoxical situation, whereby what is human seems to be less human than what is said to be nonhuman. The ontological instability produced by such a peculiar paradigm generates interesting consequences in terms of fundamental rights, especially when applied to hybrid forms of life such as those represented by “Robo sapiens. ” Hence, Winterson’s novel invites a reconfiguration of the notion of rights and “legal personhood” in the context of AI systems. Robots demand that their “humanity” is acknowledged and, as a consequence to that, they also demand that they are granted rights. One could notice that Robot’s existential condition is very similar to that of slaves, precisely like slaves they are submitted to servitude, forced or bonded labour. And yet the fact that they are not “fully human”, only very similar or close to them, puts robots in a juridical position that might be compared to that of animals and the way they are presented in animal law studies.

The aim of this paper is to present some thought on Heinrich von Kleist’s Marionettentheatre-Essay , a very strange dialogue in which the German author reflects on grace and the destiny of mankind. After a brief introduction, I will discuss Kleist’s philosophical background by mentioning influences by Rousseau and Kant in order to show why he lost hope and faith and why, at a certain point, he changed his mind in favor of nihilism. The dilemmatic situation presented in his Marionettentheatre-Essay is the result of this evolution of thought, in which man is depicted with his desire to search for Heaven but damned to live his life by knowing that it is impossible to gain grace again. We exist in a place between the earth and the sky, where a purely material world or God, or even technology cannot save us.

One of the most prominent fears related to the debate on AI is the moment when it stops offering services and starts demanding from the user. Today, the dystopian scenarios represented in literature and cinema describe totalitarian regimes dominated by technology in which the individual is a system of data interpreted by the machine. It is here described a world with no politics or right, but only technology and protocols that the citizen is endured. How can a technology that claims to be human-centered and a guarantee of tailor-made services intended to support man and his well-being, as communication on AI tells us, be a source of despotism, tyranny and technological oppression? If the reason lies in a rational, impartial and impersonal application of technology to civil life, then reasoning in terms of bureaucracy can be useful to understand the limits and responsibilities of the actors involved: the citizen, the politician, the scientist, the technician, the businessman. In fact, while bureaucracy is committed to ensuring the achievement of a collective goal through implementation procedures, which verify that the interests of the individual and the community are realised in accordance with the legal principles of a given state system, we know that bureaucracy can also turn into the blind application of vexatious rules. Through the analysis of a short film series called Screening Surveillance (2019–2022), the paper investigates a bureaucratic use of technology, while the bureaucratic implementation of AI and the bureaucratic approach to the regulation of digital technologies will be discussed also in the light of recent developments in EU law (such as the two tiers of the “Digital Services Package”, and April 21, 2021 proposal for an “Artificial Intelligence Act”).

New Materialism examines the role of subjects and objects in an environment shaped by new technologies. Based on these observations and considerations, the aim was to develop a new conception of materiality in the dynamic interplay of signifying processes and material structures. In a twenty-first-century world, where the points of interaction between humans and modern technological devices are steadily increasing, this approach becomes even more relevant. From a legal perspective, however, it becomes clear that this interplay between humans and processes has only been inadequately traced so far. In order to redress this dissatisfying situation, what is needed is a contemporary law that not only recognizes new subjects as such, but also understands new processes and roles. The aim of the present paper is thus to trace these processes between subjects and objects. In a second step, the aim is to build on the theory of New Materialism to make these insights workable for intellectual property law.

The relentless contribution of women’s studies and feminist theory has shaped current academic and cultural perceptions of such a controversial subject as rape, which up to this day has received a fair share of attention but which will never cease to stimulate research, nor satisfy our enquiries. This paper aims to provide an analysis of literary and legal responses to this issue in two near contemporary tragedies: Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare and Appius and Virginia by John Webster and Thomas Heywood, a work awaiting critical consideration. The plays present diegetic and mimetic similarities and are bound by a strong intertextuality which refers to their common sources. The paper also investigates those issues relating to the visual representation and the verbal transmission of rape, problems which feature in earlier and contemporary legal statutes.