Weibel Welcome to tonight's panel. We gather to examine a disappearance so gradual we barely felt it: the disappearance of the body. The avatar replaces the face. The screen replaces the hand. The cloud replaces the shelf. The dating profile replaces the glance across a room. We do not merely use technology to extend the body, as the tool always has. We use it to leave the body behind. But what do we become when we are no longer embodied? Is the disembodied self a liberated self — freed from the accidents of birth, the limits of flesh, the biases of appearance? Or is it a diminished self — deprived of the very conditions that make meaning possible? I ask our panelists: is the body a prison to escape, or a ground without which we cannot stand? Let me introduce Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Virilio.
Flusser The technical image, as I have argued, does not require a body to be seen. It requires a screen. And the screen is not a window onto the world. It is a program that constructs a world without bodies. The photograph was the first step: it captured a body without its presence. The video call is the next step: it presents a face without its warmth. The virtual reality is the final step: it places you in a world where bodies are data, and presence is bandwidth. But here is the paradox: the more the body disappears, the more the body is revealed as the condition of meaning. We do not love a face. We love a face that can turn away. We do not trust a hand. We trust a hand that can tremble. The body is not information. The body is the site of what cannot be encoded — the hesitation, the blush, the weight of standing in one place. The machine that eliminates the body does not perfect communication. It perfects the illusion that communication has occurred. We do not speak through screens. We transmit. And transmission is not speech. Transmission is the ghost of speech, haunting a body that is no longer there.
Weizenbaum I wish to speak of a particular body: the body of the judge, the body of the witness, the body of the accused. There is a reason why justice requires presence. The judge must see the face of the accused. The jury must sit in the same room as the defendant. The witness must raise a hand and swear an oath that their body will guarantee. The body is not ornament. The body is the guarantee. When we replace the courtroom with the video link, when we replace the handshake with the digital signature, when we replace the look in the eye with the emoji — we do not merely modernize. We hollow out. The body carries what the machine cannot carry: accountability, vulnerability, mortality. The person who can disappear from a conversation by closing a laptop is not the same person who must remain in a room while hard words are spoken. The body imposes a cost. And the cost is what makes ethics possible. The machine that removes the body removes the cost. And the person without cost is not free. He is weightless. And weightless, he cannot be held responsible. The disembodied self is the irresponsible self, not because he is wicked, but because he has nothing at stake. The body is the stake.
Arendt I wish to place this in the space of appearance — the realm where human beings disclose who they are through word and deed, through the presence of their bodies in a shared world. The body is not merely the container of the self. The body is the self's mode of appearing. When I speak, it is not my voice that appears. It is my body, sounding. When I act, it is not my intention that appears. It is my body, moving. The space of appearance is a space of bodies — distinct, vulnerable, interruptible. The virtual realm is not such a space. It is a space of projections, where the body is replaced by the avatar, and the avatar can be anything: younger, stronger, always composed. But the avatar does not appear. It performs. It is a costume without a wearer. The person who lives through avatars does not disclose who they are. They disclose who they wish to be. And in doing so, they disappear. The public realm requires bodies because bodies are the condition of plurality — the recognition that others are not like me, that their bodies carry perspectives I cannot occupy. The disembodied world is not a world of infinite possibility. It is a world without plurality, where every self is a customizable echo of the same template. The body is the ground of difference. Without it, difference disappears.
Virilio You speak of appearance and ethics, but I speak of speed. The body is slow. The body is heavy. The body must eat, sleep, move, rest. The dromosphere cannot tolerate these limitations. The body is the resistance that speed must overcome. And overcome it, speed has. The avatar is the terminal body — the point of pure velocity, unburdened by gravity, digestion, fatigue, death. The person who lives through screens is not merely disembodied. He is accelerated beyond the tempo of the human. The integral accident of this age is the collision of total disembodiment with total absence. The person who is everywhere is nowhere because he has no body to be somewhere with. The speed of the network outruns the speed of the nervous system, and the result is not transcendence. It is collapse. The body that does not move atrophies. The mind that does not rest dissolves. The self that has no location evaporates. The terminal body is not a new form of life. It is the end of life, masquerading as connectivity. To disappear into the screen is not to ascend. It is to accelerate into the void, leaving behind the very weight that made you real.
Weibel Four perspectives, four defenses of a condition we are trained to escape. Flusser tells us the body is the site of what cannot be encoded — the hesitation, the warmth, the weight. Weizenbaum warns that the body is the guarantee of ethics, and the disembodied self is the irresponsible self, weightless and without cost. Arendt reminds us that the body is the mode of appearance itself, and the avatar, however polished, does not disclose — it performs. And Virilio shows us that the body is the resistance that speed must abolish, and the terminal body is not transcendence but the acceleration of absence. What emerges is not a call to reject technology, but a call to resist the fantasy that the body is merely a vehicle for the mind. The body is not packaging. The body is the product. To be human is to be slow, heavy, interruptible, vulnerable, present. The task is not to perfect the avatar. The task is to return to the body — to inhabit it, to let it weigh, to let it matter. Thank you, panelists. The weight, for this moment, remains.