Elisabeth Azoulay: “Beauty is also about saying who we are”

What will the beauty of the future look like? This is the question posed by the anthropologist Elisabeth Azoulay in the last volume of the work she edited, 100,000 years of beautywhich has just been published by Gallimard. A beautiful collective book on the history of beauty from prehistory to modern times, which brings together illustrations, art photos, unpublished science fiction texts, reflections from philosophers…

“We all agree to say that galloping demographics, globalization, artificial intelligence, technological progress, the collapse of gender boundaries, the fact of wanting to value age, all of this will have consequences. impact on beautynote Elisabeth Azoulay.

Aesthetic man 3.0

In 2050, we will be, according to her, in the era of “homo estheticus 3.0”. “You should know that technology follows human desire. “To have a long neck, like the giraffe women, or to deform a skull, as the Olmecs did, to give them the shape of cornbread, humanity did not wait for technology, it did it with its means since Antiquity But what we know is that from the moment the means become crazy, more and more invisible, imperceptible, painless, all recourse to technology will cease. multiply to shape our body.”

Biomimicry and silicon beings

Elisabeth Azoulay mentions, for example, biomimicry, which consists of taking inspiration from the exploits of nature, from species which have found ways to preserve their abilities and their appearance, to transpose them to humans, which is already done by cosmetic industry.

Another question, raised in the work by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk : will we be able to compete with the beauty of robots, virtual beings, these “silicon beings”named after the mineral that makes up the screens of our cell phones and computers? Will the future of beauty be an ideal of perfection and uniformity decreed by cyborgs, or on the contrary?something much more baroque, where we will accentuate our differences?

On the question of aging, Elisabeth Azoulay emphasizes that all science fiction novels push the limits of longevity. “In this great human dream, at 400 years old, we will look like someone aged 30. But what will happen between generations in a world where all traces of aging will be erased, where physical appearance won’t say who we are in relation to our own children? Is this a desirable world? We can’t go through life with people who don’t carry any trace of their identity card. is also to say who we East.”