"Una inalienabile e indistruttibile qualità umana" Clonazione e ingegneria genetica nella riflessione di Jean Baudrillard e Jürgen Habermas

In the contemporary world some expressions of the utopian imagination in the field of genetic engineering and cloning techniques are of great importance. The theme is ancient and dates back to the City of the Sun (1602) by Tommaso Campanella to arrive at J.B.S. Haldane or Aldous Huxley and others. Sociology has been questioned and continues to question the issues raised by these techniques in the social and legal horizons and about the notions of the person they presume or question. From this point of view, it is interesting to compare two contemporary sociologists who have expressed a broad debate on these issues: on the one hand Jean Baudrillard with The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and Inhuman (2000), on the other Jürgen Habermas with The Future of Human Nature (2003). The consideration of two sociologists, very different and distant, can reveal elements of a certain interest and unexpected proximity if we focus on three aspects. First, utopia is the common background of reflections. In Baudrillard the reference is present as a general problematic context, while in Habermas it is indirectly conjured up with the reference to "chimeras" and "mythical images" and the attribution of "mental experiment" to his writing. Secondly, the reflection concerns the status of the "person": in Habermas this is done by referring to The Responsibility principle of Hans Jonas and Helmuth Plessner's studies on the body; in Baudrillard, however, this happens obliquely, within a critical sociology that moves around the theme of the end or the disappearance of the Subject. Finally, both are confronted with the question of technique and arrive, across different ways, to a similar position that offers a response to Max Weber's question of the need to "master life with technique (...) and that this ultimately has a sense".