The rationale for organizing a session on this topic is especially compelling today. Our own historical moment is shaped by extraordinary technological innovation, disruptive social change, and geopolitical instability. Debates surrounding automation, artificial intelligence, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the technological transformation of human life often present themselves as unprecedented. Yet a significant precedent lies in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Second Industrial Revolution, the rise of mass politics, imperial rivalries, and new technologies such as the automobile, telegraph, radio, airplane, and machine gun radically altered the horizon of experience. The period traversed by the avant-gardes thus offers a rich archive for thinking about our own relation to futurity. This session argues that art and philosophy in this period did not merely register modern change; they anticipated many of the tensions that continue to shape the present.
The panel also intervenes in existing scholarship by placing Franco-Italian exchange at the center of conversations too often organized within separate national traditions. Its approach is historical, comparative, transnational, and theoretical. It engages modernist and avant-garde studies, particularly work on technological modernity, temporality, and transnational circulation, while also opening a dialogue with contemporary frameworks such as posthumanism and transhumanism. Rather than imposing those terms retrospectively, the panel uses them to illuminate how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts and performances already grappled with questions that remain urgent: how is the human reimagined under technological pressure? How do aesthetic forms project or complicate visions of progress? And how do artistic experiments make the future thinkable?
The session will take the form of a traditional panel with three papers of approximately fifteen to twenty minutes each, followed by at least fifteen minutes of discussion. This structure will allow each speaker to develop a distinct argument while preserving substantial time for exchange among panelists and audience members. Because the papers are closely linked by their concern with futurity, embodiment, and Franco-Italian modernity, the discussion period will be essential to drawing out both common concerns and productive differences.
Benjamin Micallef’s paper, After Futurism, Before Cybernetics: Artaud and the Adaptive Body at Rodez, reads Antonin Artaud’s late writings through the framework of cybernetics. Situating the Body without Organs in relation to electroshock therapy and adaptive biological systems, the paper argues that Artaud’s imagined future body emerges from a logic of feedback, inscription, and painful reorganization rather than from pure liberation. By placing Artaud within a longer arc extending from Italian Futurism to French Surrealism, the paper shows how avant-garde thought reconceived the body as a site of technological and philosophical transformation.
Vanessa Weller’s paper, The Art of Subversion: Feminist Futurism and the Synthetic Theater, examines Marinetti’s theorization of the “New Man” alongside the responses of Mina Loy and Valentine de Saint-Point. Focusing on manifestos, synthetic theater, and Métachorie, it demonstrates how women artists both participated in and challenged Futurism’s masculinist and militarized vision of the future. In doing so, the paper recovers alternative futurist aesthetics that rethink embodiment, performance, and social transformation from a gendered perspective.
Sara Ansaloni’s paper, ‘Il n’y a pas de futurisme’: the Geography of a Modern World That ‘Goes Nowhere’ in Blaise Cendrars, analyzes La Prose du Transsibérien as a critical reworking of futurist acceleration. Through its visual form, fractured geography, and tension between speed and catastrophe, the paper shows how Cendrars resists triumphalist narratives of progress and instead stages modernity as dispersion, disorientation, and reflection.
Taken together, these papers demonstrate both the far-reaching impact of Italian Futurism on French and European culture and the continuing relevance of Franco-Italian ways of imagining the future. The panel incorporates a diversity of voices through its range of methodologies, its variety of genres and corpora, its attention to gendered perspectives, and its transnational, multilingual scope. By placing these approaches in conversation, the session shows how historical visions of futurity can illuminate the crises, contradictions, and possibilities of the present.