“The time is out of joint”. This famous line from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet helps to describe the impression of de-centering, of deconstruction, which we currently live and experience. This phenomenon is caused by various factors and while it is happening worldwide, partly as a result of globalization, it is perceived in different ways in the various cultures and countries in the world. We find ourselves in front of an hybrid individual, the product of different cultures blending together. Such is the novelty and the spread of new means of communication and of social organization, that we might be witnessing the rise of a new type of subject: a bearer of transformations, the extent of which is difficult to measure. The contemporary world is dominated by radically new media, virtual space, technologies that subvert the perception of our body, post-humanism tending towards the cyborg, a cult of the body and youth, new definitions of sexuality, of procreation and of the family – all this reveals to us an overflowing of the subject in the direction of a dislocated fragmentation, lying far beyond its traditional boundaries and identity.
