Refutation of time, praise of eternity

“The invention of Morel” (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovski

Abstract

For transhumanist ideology, one of the discourses that can be associated with post-humanism, time, its passage and its consequences for human life are presented as a problem, as an obstacle to reaching the horizon of immortality. In the novel The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares and in the film Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovski, two male characters are radically isolated, one lost on an island, the other on a distant planet. Thanks to technical or metaphysical devices (a complex machine in the novel and the materialization of ideas in the film), the two men come into contact with women who no longer exist. Morel’s technical invention and the natural - but unknown and incomprehensible - force of the planet Solaris, generate new forms of existence, human bodies beyond their conventional borders. These bodies, as post-human presences, operate a suppression of distances, nullify the distant and replace it with the near, and imply both a refutation of time and a eulogy of eternity. This article seeks to identify the characterization of these phenomena of spatio-temporal approach and study their forms of representation, literary and cinematographic.