Testo-Mania 241
me because, like you, I’m afraid of dying. What would happen if it was one of your spermatozoids infected with AIDS that contained the gene of the future savior of the planet? We ask ourselves if desire, need, obsession, shame at filtering your semen are eugenist, if a possibility for life should be eliminated because it carries a deadly virus. Yes, such a desire is eugenist—it is—and deep down, neither you nor I can bear the idea of reproduction. Not from your lineage, or from mine. Fatherhood and motherhood are always a compromise between a form of Nazi eugenics and a compulsion for repetition. But which is the most eugenicist? Producing something good technologically, or letting life fight bareknuckled with death until one of them wins? In the last analysis, if one of your spermatozoids that carried the virus succeeded in fertilizing one of my ova, if our chromosomes ended up recombining and the cell that was formed in that way managed to divide and form a blastomere that could be implanted in my testosterone-infused uterus, then we would be obliged to think of these two gametes as having passed the test of life. The body that will come to save the planet really could arise from such a monstrous and absurd act, from the opportunity for your seropositive spermatozoids to swim to the life hidden in my mutant body. From Canguilhem, whose words strike deeper than Sloterdijk’s: “Successes are delayed failures; failures are aborted successes. What decides the value of a form is what becomes of it. All living forms are, to use Louis Roule’s expression in Les poissons, ‘normalized monsters.’”1 1. George Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life (Forms of Living), trans. by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 126.