Guide to singular metamorphoses

Thierry Bardini & Dominique Lestel elaborate together since the dawn of the new Millennium a positive and creative conception of the posthuman phenomenon. Lestel has been thinking for the last twenty years about the man-animal-machine hybrid communities and Bardini has been working during the same period on a history of contemporary cyberculture, in its informatics as well as in its biological becomings. Bardini is the author of Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000) and Junkware (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Lestel is the author of Les origines animales de la culture (Flammarion, 2001), L'animal singulier (Seuil, 2004) et L'animal est l'avenir de l'homme (Fayard, 2010).

After the Singularity, Homo sapiens is but a by default state. Whoever and whatever can should lose him, her or itself in the posthuman. For help, a manual of ambiguous status full of elliptic words, plagued with out of sync images. Thierry Bardini and Dominique Lestel propose here the deciphering of an ASCII and JPEG copy of the Guide to Singular Metamorphoses, eaten by mushrooms, and found in a 1973 Oldsmobile lost in a wood at the fringes of Québec. Herein, an unidentified intelligence comments fragments of the history of the posthuman, in a combat and training anthology that starts at the Renaissance, or maybe before. In their introduction, Bardini et Lestel warn the readers : « We became human by accident, we will cease to be so by defiance. »