Les déserts de Pierre Ducrozet et l'Homme à venir

This article focuses on two novels written by Pierre Ducrozet. L'Invention des corps (2017) and Le Grand vertige (2020) suggest different ways of modifying the human body: by technoscience (L'Invention des corps) or as a result of environmental changes (Le Grand vertige), both aiming to create a "new kind of human being." These changes place the characters in various forms of deserts: the desert of death and political violence in Mexico, from which Alvaro escapes; the utopian desert of the artificial island that Parker aims to invent in order to develop post-human technologies; the desert of Arizona, where Alvaro and Adele flee in L'Invention des corps (2017); the Kenyan desert, where Adam Tobias attempts to rebuild the world in Le Grand vertige (2020). The new hybrid entities are built through spaces that appear free and open, like the desert, and through rhizomatic structures, a term Ducrozet himself uses to describe his novels. Composed of textual fragments and images, Ducrozet's two novels offer a reconstruction of humanity through fiction, connecting multiple geographical and temporal points. The desert is pictured as an entry into a postmodern and post-humanist humanity.