Chimera Research Paper

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What does it mean to state that 'the human condition is one of never-ending monstrousness'? For thousands of years, people have believed that mankind is above all other organisms; their moral compass and overall uniqueness positioning them both at the top of the food chain and at the centre of the universe. These features have often been used to define the human condition as a state of stability, purity, and originality that cannot be altered or recreated. Consequently, animals and machines have been considered to be inferior and dissimilar to human beings due to their seemingly restricted set of functions. However, the idea of a human naturalness may be considered outdated, as it fails to consider the historical significance of human/non-human …show more content…
The hybrid is considered to be the offspring of a variety of species; a creature that combines different elements into one (Haraway, 19910). On the one hand, there is the chimera, which represents a human condition that contains a mixture of biologically different entities. The chimera calls for the corporeal irregularity of the human condition, which in turn allows this creature to be understood as a monster. In fact, an almost obligatory feature of the monster is its composition from ill-assorted parts (Baldick, 1987:13). Hence, the monstrous chimera forms a new way of thinking about the human body, where the "body as we know it is the sum total of all its separate parts" (Clarke, 2002:39). This means that the chimera pushes the human condition to go beyond the realm of individuality, so that the "directly physical notion of deformity" is used to "illustrate certain problems of the relation of parts of the whole" (Baldick, 1987:13-14). Hereby, human anxieties are propelled by the idea that the human body can be carved up into independent pieces, which contradicts the functional wholeness of the body (Clarke, 2002). Therefore, if the human is thought to be made up of individual parts that come together to form a whole, the human being is not too different from the monstrous being represented in
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