172 / SEDUCTION

...to know have branched out and been interiorized: esotechnical. We live in an age of soft technologies, of genetic and mental software. The prosthesis of the industrial age, its machines, still paid heed to the body in order to modify its image - and were themselves metabolized in an imaginary, this metabolism be- coming part of the body's image. But when simulation reaches the point of no return, when the prosthesis infiltrate the body's anonymous, micro-molecular core, when they force themselves on the body as its matrix, and burn out all the succeeding sym- bolic circuits such that all future bodies will be only its immuta- ble repetition - then the body and its history have come to an end, the individual being no more than the cancerous metastasis of his basic formula.

Is not the cloning of individuals from an individual X simi-lar to the proliferation of a single cell one identifies with cancer? There is a close relation between the concept of the genetic code and the pathology of cancer. The code designates the minimal formula to which one can reduce an individual such that he can (and can only) be repeated, while with cancer the same type of cell proliferates without concern for the organic laws of the whole. Thus with cloning one witnesses the repeti- tion of the Same, the proliferation of a single matrix. Formerly sexual reproduction prevented this, but today one can finally isolate the genetic matrix of identity, and eliminate all the differential vicissitudes that gave individuals their aleatory charm. Or their seductiveness.

The metastasis that began with industrial objects ends in cel-lular organization. Cancer is the disease that dominates con- temporary pathology, because it is the very form of the code's virulence: the aggravated redundancy of the same cells, or the same signals.

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Cloning is very much in keeping with the irreversible ten- dency to "extend and deepen the system's internal transparen- cy by increasing its possibilities of self-regulation and modifying its informational economy" (Querzola). All drives will be expelled. Everything interior (networks...