I find from another mailing list that Bruce Sterling is publishing on his blog English translations of Futurist manifestos. See the original one here: <a href="http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/futurist-centen.html">http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/futurist-centen.html</a> and the Manifesto of Futurist women here: <a href="http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/the-manifesto-1.html">http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/11/the-manifesto-1.html</a>.<br>
<br>This is a good thing, IMHO, because I believe that Italian Futurism (but I should simply say Futurism, given that the first Manifesto was firstly published in France, and it quickly raised a deep international echo across the entire political board, to the point that Lenin himself stated that in his view Marinetti was the only true revolutionary in Italy), in tis opposition to all kinds of cultural and biological conservatism, has a fundamental importance in the genealogy of transhumanism.<br>
<br>While the same ideas have later emerged again and again, Futurism in fact represents the original convergence amongst the growing nineteenth-century, post-christian idea that the human status could and should be overcome; the identification of technoscience as both the means and the reason to do that, in the framework of a new epic and civilisational adventure on the scale of hominisation itself, willingly embracing what modernity was already promising; and a view of art and poetry as the process governing the very possibility of a meaningful posthuman change.<br>
<br>Stefano Vaj<br>