Against Hybridity

Book excerpt: One of the major characteristics of our contemporary culture isa positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruptionof cultural boundaries. Strangers, migrants and nomads arecelebrated in our postmodern world of hybrids and cyborgs. But wepay a price for this celebration of hybridity: the non-hybridfigures in our societies are ignored, rejected, silenced orexterminated. This book tells the story of these non-hybrid figuresÐ the anti-heroes of our pop culture. The main example of non-hybrids in an otherwise hybridized worldis that of deep old age. Hazan shows how we fervently distanceourselves from old age by grading and sequencing it into stagessuch as ‘the third age’, ‘the fourth age’and so on. Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-agingtechniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, atwhich point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objectsand hence commercially and socially invisible or masked. Otherexamples are used to elucidate the same cultural logic of thenon-hybrid: pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism andcorporeal death. On the face of it, these examples may seem to havenothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logicof the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism,terror, abhorrence and moral indignation. This highly original and iconoclastic book offers a freshcritique of contemporary Western culture by focusing on that whichis perceived as its other Ð the non-hybrid in our midst, oftenrejected, ignored or silenced and deemed to be in need of globallymanageable correction.