Alba Torrents
B.A. in Philosophy and Master's in Contemporary Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Additionally, I hold a PhD in Philosophy from UAB and a PhD in Social Communication Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC). I am currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Communication Studies at UAB, where I focus on animation and videogame studies. I also teach philosophy at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
During my doctoral studies, I was awarded a research grant from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina, where I conducted research at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CIECS) at UNC. I was a two-time recipient of the Japan Foundation grant, first during the final stages of my PhD as a visiting researcher at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and later, in 2022, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Archive Centre for Anime Studies at Niigata University.
My research and academic publications center on the analysis of science fiction anime, with a focus on its narrative dimensions and its materiality as a moving image. I explore how these elements intersect with broader questions of identity, body, and technology. My current research interests include the technical specificity of the moving image, its interaction with narrative, distribution, and consumption strategies; posthuman ontology in a globalized context and its epistemological and political dimensions; and gender studies in visual culture.
In recent work, I have engaged with concepts of historicity, agency, domination, and exhaustion within the context of Anthropocene studies. My aim is to critically rethink relationships between the human, the natural, and the technological, offering new perspectives on agency that move beyond individualistic frameworks.
Supervisors: Vanina A. Papalini and Begonya Saez
During my doctoral studies, I was awarded a research grant from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina, where I conducted research at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CIECS) at UNC. I was a two-time recipient of the Japan Foundation grant, first during the final stages of my PhD as a visiting researcher at Kyoto Seika University and the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and later, in 2022, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Archive Centre for Anime Studies at Niigata University.
My research and academic publications center on the analysis of science fiction anime, with a focus on its narrative dimensions and its materiality as a moving image. I explore how these elements intersect with broader questions of identity, body, and technology. My current research interests include the technical specificity of the moving image, its interaction with narrative, distribution, and consumption strategies; posthuman ontology in a globalized context and its epistemological and political dimensions; and gender studies in visual culture.
In recent work, I have engaged with concepts of historicity, agency, domination, and exhaustion within the context of Anthropocene studies. My aim is to critically rethink relationships between the human, the natural, and the technological, offering new perspectives on agency that move beyond individualistic frameworks.
Supervisors: Vanina A. Papalini and Begonya Saez
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (23)
Uploads
Papers by Alba Torrents
En este artículo exploraremos de forma crítica diferentes concepciones de la historicidad, la temporalidad y el cambio a la luz de la noción simondoniana de individuación, que nos permitirá imaginar otras formas de relación entre lo humano y lo natural. Nuestro propósito es presentar nuevas formas de entender la temporalidad alejadas de la visión lineal de la historia, donde el cambio es mera adición estática de una diferencia específica a un conjunto de características genéricas. Ante las críticas a la noción de Antropoceno, vemos que este nos permite problematizar la relación entre el individuo y su entorno, y nos permite imaginar un nuevo marco para afrontar la nueva situación de crisis ecológica del nuevo milenio. Entender las ecologías específicas restituyendo su temporalidad en un sentido profundo es necesario para comprender esta nueva perspectiva del «fin de mundo», es decir, como un cambio radical en las condiciones materiales de existencia de la especie humana.
アニメ的潜在性－アニメにおける時間性と物語性の限界について
本論文の目的は、アンリ·ベルクソン、ジルベール・シモンドン、ジル·ドゥルーズの哲学から抽出された概念を通じて、『魔法少女まどか★マギカ』や『少女革命ウテナ』、『Serial experiments lain』などのアニメにおける物語的要素と超物語的要素の関係を検討することである。それらの作品にはそれぞれ複雑な物語があるものの、物語的な論理から逸脱する「超物語的」要素も存在する（例：説明を伴わずに現れるイメージや色彩、音響など）。画面に絶えず「浮上する」超物語的要素や、それに伴う物語の破れ目について、正しく説明される必要がある。前述したアニメ作品を2種類の時間性の形態によって分析し関連付ける。その時間性とは、「物性的な時間」と「観念的な時間」である。前者は物語の構造に当てはまり、後者は超物語的要素に当てはまる。特に「個と環境」という一組の相違に集中したい。その一組を一つの総体として取り扱うという論点はシモンドンの個体発生の結論でありながら、個性化を超えることでもある。すなわち「アペイロン」、可能性の場として理解された決定不全である。最終的に、本論は「思考デバイス」としてのアニメがどのように機能しているかを明示することを目的としている。
Book Chapters by Alba Torrents
Furthermore, by focusing on this renewed and critical 'time of potentiality' we can read EVA as performing a posthumanist gesture: there is an inversion of the traditional ways philosophy and fiction have approached technology, materiality and agency. This inversion is mainly enacted by EVA's highlighting of its own nature as a technical object in which material agency emerges.
In this chapter, we take a look at the ways one specific medial milieu, that of manga, anime and their reciprocal influences and adaptations, has contributed to the ongoing discussions about transhumanism, posthumanism and the relationships between AI, embodiment, gender, and the limits of human identity
We focus on a minimal corpus consisting of four anime franchises: Ghost in the Shell (GitS), Serial Experiments Lain (SEL), Akira, and Evangelion . All of them are very influential works, recognised by critics and fans alike, and have had an enduring influence on contemporary science fiction inside and outside their immediate medial and cultural spheres. Furthermore, all of them are directly concerned not only with broader transhumanist and posthumanist ideas, but specifically with the roles that AI could play in a technological overcoming (or abandonment) of classical human identity. GitS is treated in special detail because, in our opinion, it presents the clearest instance of a questioning of the transhumanist ideals, as is NGE, which we consider a sort of contramodel of the same ideals, and an example of the notion of posthuman being used to dismantle traditional humanist/transhumanist dichotomies.
Through the analysis of animated films and series (mainly science fiction ones, but also fantasy-themed and historical ones), I discuss the role played by technology in the worlds of anime and its import on identity issues. My analysis is based on a dual approach: first, I focus my attention on the relationships between technology and risk as they appear in futuristic and postapocalyptic anime, pointing to the existence of an interpretation of technology in terms of danger and decay; second, I show the prevalence in a variety of genres of a more positive view of the technology , in which it appears as an element that makes it possible to transcend the limits of individuality.
Bodies without limits: Technology and identity in science fiction anime
Science fiction has been offered the possibility to deconstruct dominant discourses and explore non-hegemonic approaches, and science fiction anime is particularly characterized by the deepness with which it explores the question of the relationship between body, technology and identity. Even thought, in this sense, science fiction anime constitutes itself a theoretical body of thinking about the limits of identity, in order to explore it is desirable to have a conceptual key which allows us to decipher the more sophisticated aspects of that thought. In this chapter, without losing sight of the basic notions expressed by authors such as Deleuze and Haraway on the role of the body in anime, I will recover some specific aspects of the philosophies of Bergson and Simondon to explore how anime treats issues such as spiritual aspect of the relationship between the human and the technological, the possibility of the extension of the body and its relation to the concept of individuation, and the relationship between the concept of transhumanism and different models of temporality. As an example, these conceptual tools are applied to the analysis of some aspects of two classic sci-fi anime, the movie Akira and the series Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Conference Presentations by Alba Torrents
This rethinking of the role of human agency has become a fundamental step in rearticulating the relationships between the human, the natural and the technological. To live a livable life may soon become impossible if the geological transformation towards the end of the world carries on, while human agency seems to have escaped the human scale. Therefore, we need to understand not only what ecology means in a full sense, that is, when relationships are constitutive, foundational and not derived from the individuals who participate in them, but also what it means to have agency amidst these ecological relationships. In this context, thinkers such as Bruno Latour or Isabel Stengers have begun thinking the social from the perspective of humanness overflowing the center of the political, giving non-human agents a fundamental role in understanding all kinds of processes: from the scientific -technical to cultural and media.
Animals, beasts, robots, technical objects or aliens have played a fundamental role in Japanese animation since its beginning. Not only since post-war animation have anthropomorphic animals appeared in this type of fiction, but one of the most important theoreticians of the Japanese media, Hiroki Azuma, characterized the new otaku consumption trends that appeared in the 1990s as animalistic. Anime, then, is one of the places where animality and the non-human have had a more significant presence and where a rearticulation of the relationship between the human, the natural and the technological, so crucial in this new era of the Anthropocene, becomes possible.
In this communication I will explore how non-human agents have taken sides in the ecology of anime. In this way, the fundamental purpose is to challenge the forms of individualism and anthropocentrism so present in the discourses of late capitalism, to redefine the role of the relationship between the human and the natural and technical environment.
We intend to show how Bergon’s critique of the intellectual staticism directly affects these approaches, and how existing theoretical elements developed both by philosophers in Bergson’s tradition (Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze) and by contemporary philosophers working in the field of cognitive science (such as the proponents of enactivism) can be used to extend and correct current cognitive metaphor theories so that they explain temporal metaphors more precisely and without contradiction. In order to do so, we will first explore the use of temporal signs and metaphors in classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, showing how traditional cognitive-linguistic approaches fall short of explaining the complex metaphorical treatment of temporality in Hideaki Ano’s magnum opus, and then we will put our newfound tools (and our reconstructed cognitive metaphor theory) to use analyzing it in some detail, focusing in the way Evangelion uses both narrative and extra-narrative elements to schematize the relationships between two distinct forms of temporality, which we call product-time and and process time, and in the ways in which those metaphorical “kinds of time” are related to the subject-object dichotomy.
In Media Mix, technical objects operate jointly in a collective and interconnected individuation. Media-Mix is not only the sum of different and interconnected individual technical objects. Each combination of media possesses a specific kind of ‘intermateriality’ which plays a fundamental role on its cognitive operation.
In this article I explore how this this relational materiality can be approached in a way that does not obscure the necessary recognition of the material specificity of each individual medium. I want to shed light on some of the methodological and ontological problems we encounter when approaching media theory and, specifically, media-mix approaches to anime and the ecological nature with other medium. I will focus on anime as a technical individual which produces meaning relationally, defending the idea that to understand the individuation of media implies giving their relationships a full ontological status.
In order to do that, I will explore the idea of the genesis of technical object from a relational and material perspective. That is, although the genesis of a particular technical object could be described in itself (for example, in the case of anime, we can describe how an particular is produced without considering anything other than itself as a technical object), one can never know its true meaning, or rather the way it produces meaning, if its genesis is not approached as an open totality, i. e., analyzing it in its relationship to its environment and to other levels of reality.
In order to explore technicity in anime in media-mix, it is important to understand how technicity includes something which is not exhausted in individual objects and keeps them in active relation. We must understand the technical object anime as an object in relation or, more specifically, an object of relation, in which meaning is enacted precisely because an individuation is being carried out in a dynamic system that preexists the encounter of object and spectator.
The production of meaning in anime should be approached from this perspective. Anime as a technical object enables a meaning-producing relationship in which new forms of identification with ecological technology emerge. The process of meaning-producing, moreover, does not occur in this or that place, but it is distributed. We are not talking about processes carried out by separate individuals, but about an ongoing collective individuation.
En este artículo exploraremos de forma crítica diferentes concepciones de la historicidad, la temporalidad y el cambio a la luz de la noción simondoniana de individuación, que nos permitirá imaginar otras formas de relación entre lo humano y lo natural. Nuestro propósito es presentar nuevas formas de entender la temporalidad alejadas de la visión lineal de la historia, donde el cambio es mera adición estática de una diferencia específica a un conjunto de características genéricas. Ante las críticas a la noción de Antropoceno, vemos que este nos permite problematizar la relación entre el individuo y su entorno, y nos permite imaginar un nuevo marco para afrontar la nueva situación de crisis ecológica del nuevo milenio. Entender las ecologías específicas restituyendo su temporalidad en un sentido profundo es necesario para comprender esta nueva perspectiva del «fin de mundo», es decir, como un cambio radical en las condiciones materiales de existencia de la especie humana.
アニメ的潜在性－アニメにおける時間性と物語性の限界について
本論文の目的は、アンリ·ベルクソン、ジルベール・シモンドン、ジル·ドゥルーズの哲学から抽出された概念を通じて、『魔法少女まどか★マギカ』や『少女革命ウテナ』、『Serial experiments lain』などのアニメにおける物語的要素と超物語的要素の関係を検討することである。それらの作品にはそれぞれ複雑な物語があるものの、物語的な論理から逸脱する「超物語的」要素も存在する（例：説明を伴わずに現れるイメージや色彩、音響など）。画面に絶えず「浮上する」超物語的要素や、それに伴う物語の破れ目について、正しく説明される必要がある。前述したアニメ作品を2種類の時間性の形態によって分析し関連付ける。その時間性とは、「物性的な時間」と「観念的な時間」である。前者は物語の構造に当てはまり、後者は超物語的要素に当てはまる。特に「個と環境」という一組の相違に集中したい。その一組を一つの総体として取り扱うという論点はシモンドンの個体発生の結論でありながら、個性化を超えることでもある。すなわち「アペイロン」、可能性の場として理解された決定不全である。最終的に、本論は「思考デバイス」としてのアニメがどのように機能しているかを明示することを目的としている。
Furthermore, by focusing on this renewed and critical 'time of potentiality' we can read EVA as performing a posthumanist gesture: there is an inversion of the traditional ways philosophy and fiction have approached technology, materiality and agency. This inversion is mainly enacted by EVA's highlighting of its own nature as a technical object in which material agency emerges.
In this chapter, we take a look at the ways one specific medial milieu, that of manga, anime and their reciprocal influences and adaptations, has contributed to the ongoing discussions about transhumanism, posthumanism and the relationships between AI, embodiment, gender, and the limits of human identity
We focus on a minimal corpus consisting of four anime franchises: Ghost in the Shell (GitS), Serial Experiments Lain (SEL), Akira, and Evangelion . All of them are very influential works, recognised by critics and fans alike, and have had an enduring influence on contemporary science fiction inside and outside their immediate medial and cultural spheres. Furthermore, all of them are directly concerned not only with broader transhumanist and posthumanist ideas, but specifically with the roles that AI could play in a technological overcoming (or abandonment) of classical human identity. GitS is treated in special detail because, in our opinion, it presents the clearest instance of a questioning of the transhumanist ideals, as is NGE, which we consider a sort of contramodel of the same ideals, and an example of the notion of posthuman being used to dismantle traditional humanist/transhumanist dichotomies.
Through the analysis of animated films and series (mainly science fiction ones, but also fantasy-themed and historical ones), I discuss the role played by technology in the worlds of anime and its import on identity issues. My analysis is based on a dual approach: first, I focus my attention on the relationships between technology and risk as they appear in futuristic and postapocalyptic anime, pointing to the existence of an interpretation of technology in terms of danger and decay; second, I show the prevalence in a variety of genres of a more positive view of the technology , in which it appears as an element that makes it possible to transcend the limits of individuality.
Bodies without limits: Technology and identity in science fiction anime
Science fiction has been offered the possibility to deconstruct dominant discourses and explore non-hegemonic approaches, and science fiction anime is particularly characterized by the deepness with which it explores the question of the relationship between body, technology and identity. Even thought, in this sense, science fiction anime constitutes itself a theoretical body of thinking about the limits of identity, in order to explore it is desirable to have a conceptual key which allows us to decipher the more sophisticated aspects of that thought. In this chapter, without losing sight of the basic notions expressed by authors such as Deleuze and Haraway on the role of the body in anime, I will recover some specific aspects of the philosophies of Bergson and Simondon to explore how anime treats issues such as spiritual aspect of the relationship between the human and the technological, the possibility of the extension of the body and its relation to the concept of individuation, and the relationship between the concept of transhumanism and different models of temporality. As an example, these conceptual tools are applied to the analysis of some aspects of two classic sci-fi anime, the movie Akira and the series Neon Genesis Evangelion.
This rethinking of the role of human agency has become a fundamental step in rearticulating the relationships between the human, the natural and the technological. To live a livable life may soon become impossible if the geological transformation towards the end of the world carries on, while human agency seems to have escaped the human scale. Therefore, we need to understand not only what ecology means in a full sense, that is, when relationships are constitutive, foundational and not derived from the individuals who participate in them, but also what it means to have agency amidst these ecological relationships. In this context, thinkers such as Bruno Latour or Isabel Stengers have begun thinking the social from the perspective of humanness overflowing the center of the political, giving non-human agents a fundamental role in understanding all kinds of processes: from the scientific -technical to cultural and media.
Animals, beasts, robots, technical objects or aliens have played a fundamental role in Japanese animation since its beginning. Not only since post-war animation have anthropomorphic animals appeared in this type of fiction, but one of the most important theoreticians of the Japanese media, Hiroki Azuma, characterized the new otaku consumption trends that appeared in the 1990s as animalistic. Anime, then, is one of the places where animality and the non-human have had a more significant presence and where a rearticulation of the relationship between the human, the natural and the technological, so crucial in this new era of the Anthropocene, becomes possible.
In this communication I will explore how non-human agents have taken sides in the ecology of anime. In this way, the fundamental purpose is to challenge the forms of individualism and anthropocentrism so present in the discourses of late capitalism, to redefine the role of the relationship between the human and the natural and technical environment.
We intend to show how Bergon’s critique of the intellectual staticism directly affects these approaches, and how existing theoretical elements developed both by philosophers in Bergson’s tradition (Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze) and by contemporary philosophers working in the field of cognitive science (such as the proponents of enactivism) can be used to extend and correct current cognitive metaphor theories so that they explain temporal metaphors more precisely and without contradiction. In order to do so, we will first explore the use of temporal signs and metaphors in classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, showing how traditional cognitive-linguistic approaches fall short of explaining the complex metaphorical treatment of temporality in Hideaki Ano’s magnum opus, and then we will put our newfound tools (and our reconstructed cognitive metaphor theory) to use analyzing it in some detail, focusing in the way Evangelion uses both narrative and extra-narrative elements to schematize the relationships between two distinct forms of temporality, which we call product-time and and process time, and in the ways in which those metaphorical “kinds of time” are related to the subject-object dichotomy.
In Media Mix, technical objects operate jointly in a collective and interconnected individuation. Media-Mix is not only the sum of different and interconnected individual technical objects. Each combination of media possesses a specific kind of ‘intermateriality’ which plays a fundamental role on its cognitive operation.
In this article I explore how this this relational materiality can be approached in a way that does not obscure the necessary recognition of the material specificity of each individual medium. I want to shed light on some of the methodological and ontological problems we encounter when approaching media theory and, specifically, media-mix approaches to anime and the ecological nature with other medium. I will focus on anime as a technical individual which produces meaning relationally, defending the idea that to understand the individuation of media implies giving their relationships a full ontological status.
In order to do that, I will explore the idea of the genesis of technical object from a relational and material perspective. That is, although the genesis of a particular technical object could be described in itself (for example, in the case of anime, we can describe how an particular is produced without considering anything other than itself as a technical object), one can never know its true meaning, or rather the way it produces meaning, if its genesis is not approached as an open totality, i. e., analyzing it in its relationship to its environment and to other levels of reality.
In order to explore technicity in anime in media-mix, it is important to understand how technicity includes something which is not exhausted in individual objects and keeps them in active relation. We must understand the technical object anime as an object in relation or, more specifically, an object of relation, in which meaning is enacted precisely because an individuation is being carried out in a dynamic system that preexists the encounter of object and spectator.
The production of meaning in anime should be approached from this perspective. Anime as a technical object enables a meaning-producing relationship in which new forms of identification with ecological technology emerge. The process of meaning-producing, moreover, does not occur in this or that place, but it is distributed. We are not talking about processes carried out by separate individuals, but about an ongoing collective individuation.
There are two main facets to this paper: the study of the complexities of the visual media milieu in the age of media mix, taking into account the technological materiality of different channels of production and consumption, and the study of the way this complexities must be approached. Taking materiality and information as the key aspects of the way specific objects in media are interconnected, I explore a problem that has appeared recently in media studies: what is the right way to approach the relationships between media.
We argue that this traditional conception of love as scarce and requiring a difficult selective effort has actually been strengthened as a result of the deep influence, in recent philosophical and literary discourses, of a certain group of ontologies focused in concepts such as Negativity, Lack, and (Logical and/or Empirical) Reducibility. In fact, despite its revolutionary impact in some other regards, these ontologies may have entered in a relationship of mutual reinforcement with this Myth of Scarce Love. On the other hand, there exists an alternative ontological tradition that focuses on the ideas of difference and novelty, and in the basic notion that reality is always in excess. This tradition, which includes classical authors such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, and one of whose most accomplished recent advocates is Gilles Deleuze, enjoys a very good health today, but its practical and political implications have not been exhaustively developed. We believe that, while not being explicitly focused on the matter of romantic love itself, this thriving line of thinking provides an ontological basis through which both the metaphysics of romantic love and its ethics and politics can be rethought in terms of freedom and excess, and ultimately freed from the sway of the scarcity mentality.
We focus specifically on one of this ‘ways of thinking’ made possible by technologically themed anime: a particular style of reflection on the nature of time. We contend that the close relationship between technical form and technological content in anime -exemplified, for instance in the dialogue between the techniques of limited animation and full animation in the history of science fiction anime- has contributed to the emergence of a sui generis style of depictions of temporality in technological anime. Amongst other characteristical features, these depictions tend to highlight the difference between two fundamental aspects of temporality: the time of production or process-time, and the time-as-result or product-time. We illustrate this with a brief analysis of the treatments of temporality in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira and Ghost in the Shell, where we try to show, one the one hand, how these treatments are connected to technical aspects of animation, and on the other, how the depictions of temporality presented relate to philosophical distinctions such as that between duration and spatialised time in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and that between process and chronology in Gilbert Simondon’s works.
The fictional worlds of Japanese animation, in turn, provide a surprisingly clear and suggestive entry point to the core ideas of these theories, with works like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in The Shell and Serial Experiments Lain exploring the limits of the technological imaginary and giving profound insights on the relations between of body, technology, identity and genre."
A su vez, el análisis de estas propuestas, comúnmente reunidas bajo la etiquetas de ‘tercera generación de las ciencias cognitivas’ o ‘postcognitivismo’, muestra similitudes y afinidades de fondo con varias líneas de desarrollo filosófico paralelas a la tradición lógico-analítica. Así, por ejemplo, son claras sus deudas con la fenomenología de Husserl y Merleau-Ponty, y con el análisis existencial de Heidegger. Sin embargo, más allá de estas herencias reconocidas, las propuestas de la tercera generación comparten con otras propuestas filosóficas del siglo XX un conjunto de características fundamentales, como el rechazo del dualismo cartesiano en el planteamiento de la relación mente-cuerpo, la puesta en duda de las categorías de sujeto / objeto, y, en especial, el replanteamiento de la relación entre agente cognitivo, recursos y entorno, que conllevan, en última instancia, una revisión de la noción clásica de identidad.
Exploraremos brevemente la relación de las ideas postcognitivistas con dos tradiciones que replantean el concepto de identidad. Por un lado, la línea que denominamos ‘textualista’, que sigue la tradición del análisis heideggeriano y la desarrolla en relación con el tema del lenguaje y el texto; en ella podemos situar autores como Jacques Lacan y Jacques Derrida. Por otro lado, defenderemos la existencia de una línea paralela de desarrollo, que, incluyendo el trabajo de autores como Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon y Gilles Deleuze, elabora su revisión del concepto de identidad partiendo de una observación atenta de los desarrollos científicos y técnicos, y tomando distancia de las concepciones ‘intelectualistas’ de la percepción y la cognición.
Esta comparación nos servirá, finalmente, para plantear una propuesta de replanteamiento de algunas de las cuestiones ontológicas puestas en juego en los desarrollos postcognitivistas, en especial en lo relativo a la relación del hombre con la tecnología y con el medio transformado tecnológicamente, llevándonos a abordar la pregunta ¿qué papel tiene la tecnología en la definición de los límites de lo humano?
La popular serie Neon Genesis Evangelion, de Hideaki Anno, ejemplifica de manera especialmente relevante aspectos del imaginario japonés contemporáneo, como el tratamiento del cuerpo robótico como alternativa imaginaria al cuerpo biológico o vivido. En este tratamiento, destacan dos tipos de esquemas imaginarios: por un lado, la vinculación del cuerpo vivo con lo monstruoso y lo diabólico, relacionada con la percepción del cuerpo fenomenológico como cuerpo interno y desordenado, que correspondería a la primera y primordial relación con el cuerpo en la génesis psíquica; por el otro, la elaboración de la relación entre el cuerpo "natural" y el cuerpo robótico, en la que este último se identifica con la imagen totalizada y completa del cuerpo, es decir, con lo que en la teoría psicoanalítica correspondería al cuerpo "visto a través del espejo" o cuerpo del Otro. El cuerpo robótico representa, en términos psicoanalíticos, el mismo papel que el cuerpo externo descubierto por el niño durante durante el estadio del espejo: se trata de un cuerpo que, siendo propio, requiere un trabajo del sujeto, por el que este aprende a "situarse" en su interior: un trabajo hacia la identificación.
Máquinas
Through concepts derived from the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Donna Haraway, among others, I explore the relationship between narrative and extra-narrative elements in these animes. In these works we are presented not only with complex narratives, but also with elements that seem to escape narrative logic. Due account should be given both to the extra-narrative "floating" aspects and to specific points of rupture of the narrative. In addition, I explore the connections of these forms of narrativity with certain notions of temporality which call into question what Bergson called specialized time, a homogeneous and linear time, and bring forth forms of temporality which are closer to the idea of process: heterogeneous and not linked to a teleological logic.
Finally, I comment on how the technical object animates constitutes a form of material transduction of certain psychic processes, and how how it contributes to meaning-making in a transindividual and collective form. Taking anime from this point of view, as a transduction of certain psychic schemes, allows us to speak of it as a thinking device.