On machines and instruments (I): The automaton’s body in the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann

Abstract

Immediately after becoming interested in animal magnetism, and undoubtedly as a result of this interest, E.T.A. Hoffmann used automata as the central characters in some of his most notable works. This paper aims to show how this interest reveals the author’s critical attitude towards a conception of the human being which, developing in parallel to anatomy-based medicine, had led in the eighteenth century to a doctrine whose most complete expression is to be found in L'homme machine, by J. O. De La Mettrie. Nowadays we can see these tales, like those dedicated to animal magnetism, as a cry of alarm against one of the consequences of such a mechanical conception of a human being: the growth of «biopower», or of «biopolitics», terms coined by Foucault in his last works; but also against the risks entailed by the Promethean drive of modernity.