O biopoema Gênesis (1999) de Eduardo Kac: poética do desvio como potência de vitalidade

Abstract

This paper is built upon a critical reading of Genesis (1999), by Eduardo Kac. Identified as a part of biopoetry (the field that describes any work that uses biotechnology as a mean to create poetry as living beings), the biopoem is the interdisciplinary object of this research, which assembles distincts fields such as arts, communication, biology and poetry. Our goal is to investigate how mutation contributes to the organizing thinking of the text, identifying it in biology, in its relation to life, and to poetry, and its constitution in what we name as poetics of deviation. Keeping in touch with a variety of fields of thought, we grapple the text through the approach of extremes as described by Christine Mello. This paper is located within the area of Aesthetics of Communication, on the context of technological poetics, bioarts and transgenic arts. Its theoretical grounds are based on the writings of Arlindo Machado and Priscila Arantes, as well as on the writings of the foreign thinkers Christine Paul and Stephen Wilson. Our reading of the poetics of deviation takes into account the ideas of Brian Massumi, Manfred Eigen and Francis Crick, while also considering the poetry of E.M. Melo de Castro, Roman Jakobson and Haroldo de Campos. The work of Vilém Flusser on poetry and biotechnology is a key figure to produce the encounter between such areas. Through our reading of the texts, while considering the advances in genetics and the manipulation of life in its elementary stage, our paper proposes deviation as a vitality force, enabling a rescue of biology as belonging to poetry. In our lecture, the biopoem is the result of distinct mutations, what we call poetics of deviation. The ideia of Eduardo Kac’s poetry articulates the language deconstruction, and also, a certain liberation of the body as life experience, like he says: “always between the crass and the trash”, therefore, the liberation and scientism