[The machine more than a machine or the automation transfigured. Julien Offray de la Mettrie's anthropology and the reinvention of the medical mechanism].

Gesnerus 67(2):163-87 (2010) PMID 21425656

In this paper I take into account an image, or concept, that of 'machine', and more precisely one of its most problematic and controversial derivations, that of 'man-machine', which are at the basis of all the representations, and in particular medical representations, of the human action as a result of an 'automatism' as well as of man as an 'automaton'. More in detail, I try to analyse the theoretical framework, the rhetorical structure and the medical derivation of Julien Offray de la Mettrie's concept of the 'man-machine', and to cast light on a double phenomenon of semantic distortion and of individuation of new shades of meaning that the semantic field of the 'mechanical' underwent in La Mettrie's thought.