“The Horror!”: Post- & Trans- Human Prometheis in Altered Carbon

This paper examines the myth of the Promethean hero in the Netflix series Altered Carbon (2018-2020)—comprising two seasons of ten and eight episodes, respectively —having Laeta Kalogridis as main creator. The series is based on Richard Morgan’s eponymous novel (2002), classified as "hard-boiled cyberpunk" speculative fiction. It combines the sordidness, injustice, and violence of noir genre with a futuristic setting of computerized dictatorships where digital technology is used as a tool of oppression. The study, thus, attempts to decipher the hero’s exaltation as an emissary between post- and trans- human entities, an archetype that serves to philosophize about the new conception of the human animal as a cyborg, having lost the essential connection with the surrounding biota. Transhumanism is often a scathing critique of the unbridled capitalism of an unscrupulous anthropocentrism that loses sight of the connection between body and mind/soul, which should be an inseparable part of human cognition along with posthumanism, biological post-gender, psychoanalysis, and theories of social control (Kobus & Muniowski). Therefore, the paper will focus on, namely, the transformation of fire into AI, and of human consciousness into a removable diskette that can be inserted into any type of body; on the destruction of positivism in favor of the dictatorship of the technological elite; or, finally, on the material commodification of body and spirit as elements of exchange within "cheap nature" (Jason Moore).