Re-visioning the ‘Human’: Evolution of Transhuman Subject in Shafi Uddin Shafi’s Machineman

Science and technology have revolutionized human existence and conventional perspectives of the universe. Today, science is not just an epistemological enquiry, but it is a vehicle for transforming human position by re-setting the traditional organizational hierarchies. There is an innate human desire to transcend human limitations and attain power. The notion of ‘ transhuman’ is one of the recent cultural expressions of the same human aspiration. Transhumanism strives for human transformation by broadening the boundaries of human capabilities, blurring its predetermined perimeters, and metamorphosing the human into something greater than the original self. As visualized in many science fiction narratives, the altered humans may act like superhumans and be capable of amazing feats. However, such speculative conceptions simultaneously envision the rise of a dystopian society. The present paper aims to investigate the idea of transhuman as an unpredictable agency and its connection to the Darwinian theory of evolutionary change. It also looks into the speculative outcome of transhumanism as a form of technological domination in the imagined future. The paper undertakes the proposed study through an analysis of Shafi Uddin Shafi’s Machineman and endeavors to examine the human-machine dialectic, located in the transhuman subject.