Ollivier Dyens is Assistant Professor of French at Concordia University in Montreal, and also a theoretician and poet. Since 1999 he has been the director of the online magazine "Metal and Flesh".

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In this book divided into three main parts (The Crater of the Yucatán ; More or Less Alive ; The Rise of Cultural Bodies), the author presents us a "compilation of observations" on the emergence of cultural biology. Two central themes unite this mosaïc of textes : First the changing of our perception because of technologies ; second the redefinition of our life from a biological substance to a cultural manifestation. Our biological body is becoming a cultural one because of our entanglement with machines, ideas and political and sociological evolutions. The body is entering in symbiosis with culture (understood in a very broad way : in fact everything which is extra-genetic), and obliges us to redefine our ontology.

The author develops the question of the transformation of our perception especially in the first part of the book. He explains that our perception depends of course on our body, but more fundamentally depends on our biology. The organic perception of time and space is not the same as a technological one which enables us to apprehend other scales (tectonic plates for example).

The author then throughout the three different parts of the book develops a series of reflexions on cultural biology. Dyens claims that we could no longer consider life as a solely organic phenomena. Living would not have precise and absolute frontiers. Life, on the contrary abstracts itself from its organic dependency. One should consider life as an energy which is choosing its necessary supports for itself. Thus cyberspace could be regarded as "alive". The author criticizes our much too biological understanding of the world which prevents us from perceiving the essence and mystery of virtual reality.

Dyens is also underlining the fact that our new biology is escaping our biological body and enables us to integrate greater ensembles or systems. Dyens considers that we are for example interacting with the functioning of the biosphere, which he presents through a new poetical image as the "global hive". He chooses this new expression because the older ones, such as the global village or city do not sufficientely emphasize our complex entanglement with the biosphere.

The author comes back to the question of the body in the last part of his book and underlines his hybridation with machines. He analyzes through classical (Wells, Kafka and Orwell) and cyberpunk literature (Preston, Sterling) how our body escapes our biology. Machines are entering into our body and we are exteriorising ourselves into machines. This hybridation of our body is said to be a very 20th Century phenomena, because of major experiments on the body such as concentration camps, genetic intervention, political repression. The authors concludes that human beings no longer exist.

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This book is remarkable for the poetical sensibility of the author, but it raises a number of questions and remarks.

The first debate is the question of the relative novelty of the cultural body. Leroy-Gourhan, Serres and Berque have demonstrated that the body has always been entangled with technology. Dyens is aware of this thesis but still insists on the fact that our body is becoming cultural. The author thus is not responding to the fundamental question of the specificity of new technologies and how they alter our relationship to the world and others in a different way than the first technologies of humanity. "At what point does life become artificial ?" The question is raised throughout the whole book, but is given no answer. Why then claim that our ontology itself has been changed ? Would it not be more prudent to consider that our body has always been cultural and analyse like Philippe Quéau how virtual reality is relativizing our categories of classical reason (space, body, vision) and changing, perhaps not in its essence but only making more complex, certain aspects of our ontology (such as a spatial conception of being) ?

A second remark is a result from the first debate and concerns the author’s observations about artificial life. The author is proposing a very broad definition of life and discussing the frontiers of living, but is not engaging a debate with Being (of Heidegger). Isn’t this debate very fundamental for everyone who wants to speculate about the nature of artificial intelligence ?

A third remark concerns the contextualization of the reflexion of Dyens. The author is referring almost only to the theoreticians of artifical intelligence and, in an original manner, to classical and science-fiction writers. Concerning his thinking about the body he refers also to the amercian feminist Donna Haraway. One may regret that he hasn’t more explicitely compared his thinking with one of important philosophers of the body such as Merleau-Ponty, but also more recent works by Berque. Merleau-Ponty insisted on the unity of the body while Dyens is questioning it ("once opened the body disaperas"). But the author does not explicitly refute Merleau-Ponty arguments.