Normal vs Post human

In Nikolas Rose’s piece “An Emergent Form of Life?” the main contradiction that I found had to do with the issue of normalcy. He writes that previously the role of medicine was to “restore a lost normativity”.  More recently, he argues that instead of restoring a person to their “normal” state, medicine has been used to transform human capacities, augmenting the body and our abilities as humans in such ways that could potentially categorize all people guilty of taking advantage of such new advances in the field of medicine as “post human”. Later on in the article, he against refers to medicine as restoring the patient to the correct norms.

But what are we to consider the “norms” of medicine? Here is where aptemnophilia, and other obscure disorders, or rather, preferences, come into play. I would argue that there is not one set definition of normal that one can measure all human behavior to, in order to decide what procedures constitute a doctor returning a patient to their “normal state’ rather than pushing them into ‘post human’ territory. In fact, there most likely never has been one. Normal has never been in a static state, but rather is always evolving to fit the social, political, technological world that we live in now. As human society is always to be propelling forward, the idea of normal has to do so as well. It is therefore impossible to try and articulate a difference between normal and post human, because while to one person they may be two opposing ideas, to another, the two are identical. The contradiction is that what can be defined as “post human” can also to some be defined as “normal”.

Aptemnophiliacs are the perfect example of when the line between the two ideas or normalcy and post human are blurred. For those that want the surgery, the procedure is restoring them to normalcy, even if the doctor may consider them moving the patient farther away from it. The doctor could see themselves as taking advantage of today’s medical advances and using them to distort a person from being a proper, normal person. While this doctor is correct that they are taking advantage of modern technology, if the patient at hand wants the surgery, then they are helping them restore that person to their own state or normalcy. As we own our own bodies, normal can only be defined for a specific person, by that person.