The rising of extramodernity and its cultural metaphors: savages, cyborgs, and robots

The aim of the article is to analyze the notions of savage, cyborg, and robot, placing them in the historical and sociocultural context of the representations of Western modernity and its relations with otherness. It relies on an interpretative and critical method based on the discussion of a multimodal corpus (bibliographical, but also allusive to cinema and music), which takes these three figures as cultural metaphors of modern historicity that reaches up to contemporary technoscientific versions. Throughout the paper, the ideas of civilization and progress, the imaginaries of the human articulated by posthumanism and transhumanism are reviewed, and the notion of extramodernity is proposed as a way of grasping the cultural dilemmas of our time. In conclusion, the validity of an anthropological humanism different from the rationalist and Eurocentric one is defended.