The Immortality of Man and Bodily Transformations in the Creative Work of Anarchobiocosmists

In the early 20th century, the concepts of “historical anarchism” provided by W. Godwin, P.-J. Proudhon, M. Bakunin, and P. Kropotkin were replaced by a variety of post-classical utopian anarchist projects. Among all the heterogeneous and diverse forms of anarchist doctrine, the most unusual was the movement of anarchists and biocosmists (involving A. Svyatogor, A. Yaroslavsky, P. Ivanitsky, I. Yakovlev, G. Butorin, etc). On the one hand, they postulated the idea of liberation from statehood both on the Earth and on other planets, the total conquest of cosmos, and the establishment of interplanetary communications (“interplanetarism”). On the other, they preached overcoming the localism of human life and the expansion of the “principle of personality” before the recognition and implementation of individual immortality (“immortalism”). Denying Fedorov’s philosophy of cosmism (called the “doctrine of fathers” by Svyatogor), which was mainly based on the idea of “resurrection”, biocosmists proposed to solve the problem of biological immortality by means of bodily metamorphoses and deviations, first of all “bestialism” and anabiosis. This representation of bodily deviations was directed, from the point of view of biocosmism, at preserving life and acquiring biological, rather than symbolic, immortality, giving the person the maximum freedom and the maximum individual rights. This was reflected not only in manifestos, but also in poetry and in science fiction, partially published in 1918 in the Anarkhiya newspaper, and then in 1921 and 1922 in Biocosmism, the Moscow journal Biokosmist, the Petrograd journal Bessmertiye (1922), and some other publications. Thus, the article focuses on the representation of bodily deviations (“bestialism”, “anabiosis”, and other forms of the new body norm) as a “modus of immortality” and “biological infinity”, echoing the motif of abandoning the fixed localisation of man in space and time and the idea of establishing a new epoch of nomadism in the “biocosmic community” in the artistic and philosophical practices of anarchists and biocosmists

Art · Doctrine · Epistemology · Immortality · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Law · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy

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