The Fantasy of Technoimmortality and the Psychoanalytic Infinite Alla Ivanchikova "Technoimmortality," Martine Rothblatt writes, "means living so long that death (other than by suicide) is not thought of as a determining factor in one's life." Rothblatt, an inventor, the founder of Sirius satellite radio and a biomedical company United Therapeutics, and an influential member of the global transhumanist movement, is unapologetic in her belief that death, as humans have known it, will one day be overcome. Another futurist and director of Google engineering Ray Kutzweil predicts the advent of digital immortality (some form of brain uploading) by 2045.1 And Aubrey De Gray, a California-based gerontologist, is known to have proclaimed that the first person to live 1000 years had already been born. The fantasy of technoimmortality, I argue in this essay, is emerging as one of the key fantasies of our historical moment. While not new,2 it resurfaced in the midst of our turbulent present—revamped and backed by Silicon Valley venture capital—offering a positive ideation of the future and naming an object of hope for the humanity tormented by apocalyptic visions of planetary and economic collapse. Technoimmortality names a dream of significant life extension brought by scientific research: through the joint enterprise of computer science, neuroscience, synthetic biology, general medicine, and cryonics. While technologies for substantially prolonging human life, or resurrecting the cryopreserved, do not yet exist, the fantasy itself is affecting many social actors. Around the globe, numerous scientists have taken up the task of extending the life span of multiple life forms, from yeast, to nematode worms and fruit flies, to primates; artificial intelligence and brain mapping research sparks hopes of the future of digital consciousness migrating from the organic substratum of the human body to the aptly named digital "cloud." Cultural producers, in turn, have begun churning out texts, both literary and visual, that help us imagine what the future of the enhanced human would look like. Among recent cultural texts that engage with the issue of technoimmortality are TV series Black Mirror (2011–2014), Westworld (2016–2020), Humans (2015–2018), Altered Carbon (2018), Years and Years (2019), Watchmen (2019), and Upload (2020); films such as Transcendence (2014), Realive (2016), and Archive (2020), and novels such as Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Neal Stephenson's Fall (2019), and Jeanette Winterson's Frankisstein (2019), among numerous others. [End Page 64] Having entered our cultural milieu, the fantasy of technoimmortality posits new objects of desire and sets up new coordinates for affect, politics, and thought. Within psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is understood as an active process of shaping reality rather than something that opposes reality—more like transcendental schemata than an act of wishful thinking. Fantasy is a psychic configuration that creates its objects, and as Ed Pluth asserts, also creates a subject, or rather produces a "subject effect." It is within the framework of our foundational fantasies that we acquire the capacity to desire certain things, and by contrast, to reject others. Technoimmortality proponents—often referred to as transhumanists3—propose that we desire infinite life. But are we ready for such an audacious reorientation? Haven't we learned to find comfort, and meaning, in the notion of finitude? We have: the idea of radical life extension collides powerfully with the modes of thinking, feeling, and acting centered around the idea of existential, species, and planetary finitude. In contrast to what I call philosophies of finitude,4 psychoanalysis, both in its Freudian and Lacanian iterations, gives us an opening, and a basic terminology, to consider the project of radical life extension in some depth. As Joan Copjec writes: "psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of infinity. Or: the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not quite bring himself to articulate, is finally thinkable in Freud" (28–29). There hasn't been, to date, a sustained encounter between psychoanalysis and the transhumanist imaginary. Transhumanism is often dismissed by psychoanalytically informed theorists as a case of positivism, naive techno-optimism, or arcane neo-gnosticism.5 Yet, I believe that a conversation between transhumanism and psychoanalysis can be a productive one and this essay is an attempt to open up...