From Cyborgs to Organic Model and Back: Old and New Paradoxes of Gender and Hybridity

Abstract

Born during the late Scholastic period, nominalism is the philosophical theory which refuses to accept the ontological existence of general notions. It only considers particulars and asserts that no universals exist, only individual things and creatures. This stands in opposition to Plato’s world of Ideas, ideas based on an independent reality which precedes beings. For nominalism, a general concept such as ‘man’ is only a useful communication tool and does not refer to a common essence existing beyond individuals from which an abstract notion is constructed. This is one of the few doctrines emerging from scholasticism to have such a contemporary feel. As Ernst Bloch demonstrated in his Leipzig lectures, this doctrine reflected the beginning of the crisis of feudalism. 1 This order, which determined each person’s life from birth to death starts to lose legitimacy around the end of the thirteenth century with the development of commerce and urban centres. From Duns Scotus’s nominalism emerged the modern subject as a dynamic process of selfconstitution 2 and foundation of reality. Heidegger’s famous critical interpretation of the concept of subjectum will present this nominalism as a construction of the world’s image. 3 Nominalism could therefore be another name for modern individualism. This doctrine’s refusal of essences allowed so-called natural borders to be crossed. In its rejection of an essentialist standpoint, nominalism favoured the transgression of the social limits of feudal orders, of race, and of sex; or, to name it more precisely, of gender. It thereby plugs into the tradition of civil and political liberties. Nominalism’s emphasis on the singularity of each individual and its reluctance to accept groups and hierachies as universal entities opened the door to a legitimate transgression of sexual borders. The