Il SImulacro e la Copia: l'immaginario contemporaneo della vita artificiale

Starting from the opposition posed by Deleuze between the copy-icon and the simulacrum, the article analyzes some contemporary works which present us with hybrid figures of artificial beings as copies or “continuations” of human beings: the Black Mirror episode Be Right Back and the novels Permutation City by Greg Evan and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The issue under scrutiny is whether the recent instability or lability of the distinction between Copy and Simulacrum in fictional imagination is a sign of an ongoing change in the notion of identity: in other words, whether in the era of total digital mediation it is still possible to distinguish between authentic and simulated, natural and artificial entities.