The notion of art as a separate domain, sectored off from all the other modes of thought and being, is a relatively recent invention of Western history. A growing trend of interdisciplinarization notwithstanding, the sectorization of different ontological dimensions, e.g., the strict separation of fantasy from reality, the imaginary from the real, materiality from immateriality, is deeply entrenched in the cognitive apprehension of the Western world today. Especially where it concerns human ontology itself, it seems almost impossible to escape the cordoning off of universes, and even to imagine a body/subject disentrenched from the opposition between fact and fiction, beyond the duality of mind and matter. Even if the high priests of the new religion, genetic scientists, emphasize the necessary interplay between sociocultural factors and genetic dispositions in the body’s becomings, the indisputable primacy of the latter appears to have firmly lodged itself in the Western collective consciousness.

My purpose in this paper is to draw out the critical role of art, of aesthetic creation or "public fantasies," in the actualization of the body/subject’s materiality per se. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, and the radical revisions of embodied subjectivity inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially the latter’s notion of "ontological transversality," I will argue that fantasy as much as "fact" realize the processual operations of the posthuman body/machine. I will try to show that art or the aesthetic, as essentially a mode of being, is intrinsic to corporeal production as a whole. And perhaps more urgently, in view of the complex ethical questions around the body in its rapid (bio)technological transformations, I hope to make clear that a privileging of aesthetic production in thinking, as well as making and doing our corporeality opens up a space where an ethically responsible politics of the body, of embodied praxis, may evolve.