Claire Larsonneur

Two colossal research programmes have been launched recently: the Human Brain Project of the European Union (2013-2023) and the Brain Initiative of Barack Obama (2014-2026): the brain/mind compound appears set as the New Frontier for the twenty-first century and neuroscience seems bound to replace nuclear physics and biology as the key scientific field of our times.
This is quite in keeping with a reversal of our representations of the subject, increasingly identified with cerebral activity. For centuries the subject had been primarily defined by of his/her lineage, through the transmission of a name and means, or by the work he or she produced, as witnesses the notion of authorship. One could also refer to the ethical dimension of the subject, what Levinas calls the “face-to-face relation”. A pumping heart and the flow of breath were the bodily functions that signalled life, and they came to represent the subject metonymically and symbolically. But this changed after a spate of scientific research on coma during the first half of the twentieth century and the subsequent medical and legal shift in the criteria establishing death, no longer attested by the cessation of cardiac and respiratory activity but by the end of cerebral activity. This radical shift in paradigm (implemented in France by the 1968 administrative circular) may not be well known by the general public but increasingly bears upon our representations of the subject, both in the physical, the legal and the philosophical sense.
Over the same period of time, roughly from the second half of the twentieth century to now, computer science came to play a central role in our lives, first as a tool then as a conceptual template. For instance data processing or the architecture of networks are now embedded in almost all research. A new scientific field, neuroinformatics, has appeared. Digital technologies are now crucial to the smooth running of life in developed countries, shaping up economics, institutional life or even the social interaction of individuals. Symptom of this shift, a number of digital subjects/cyborgs have started to crop up in major film productions, such as Transcendence (Pfizer, 2014), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) or Lucy (Besson, 2014).