ABSTRACT
The anxieties concerning technology discussed in the previous chapter-its uncanny animism and its potential threat to the self-extend into further concerns about a technological take-over expressed in many of Levi’s short stories and articles. In the texts I now discuss, the take-over is more psychologically and physically intimate, as technologies impinge on the human body itself, on the biological processes of reproduction, birth and death, and on experiences of embodiment, which are rationalized and bureaucratized by forces beyond the control of individuals. Both this chapter and the next investigate and analyse the technologized bodies and consciousnesses that Levi depicts in his literary and journalistic writing, charting the progression from human to technologized posthuman, both voluntary and coerced, as it can be identifi ed in his work. This chapter explores two main concerns in Levi’s depictions of bureaucratized and rationalized bodies: the fear that humans will be replaced by machines, already suggested in relation to the Versifi er, and the fear that humans will-or already havebecome machines.
