Different Voices: Gender and Posthumanism [1 ed.] 9783737015288, 9783847115281

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Passages – Transitions – Intersections

Volume 10

General Editors: Paola Partenza (University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy) Andrea Mariani (University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy)

Advisory Board: Gianfranca Balestra (University of Siena, Italy) Barbara M. Benedict (Trinity College Connecticut, USA) Gert Buelens (University of Ghent, Belgium) Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec (University of Caen, and ICP, France) Esra Melikoglu (University of Istanbul, Turkey) Michal Peprník (University of Olomouc, Czech Republic) John Paul Russo (University of Miami, USA) The volumes of this series are peer-reviewed.

Paola Partenza / Özlem Karadag˘ / Emanuela Ettorre (eds.)

Different Voices Gender and Posthumanism

V&R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available online: https://dnb.de. This volume is published with the contribution of the Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, Università “G. d’Annunzio” Chieti-Pescara. © 2022 by Brill | V&R unipress, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany; Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISSN 2365-9173 ISBN 978-3-7370-1528-8

Contents

Preface

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Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Challenging the Humanist Genre of Gender: Posthumanisms and Feminisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jasmine Brooke Ulmer Narratives for Survival: Possibilities for a Rescue Effort

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Maria Margaroni Time-Voyagers to the Infinity-Point of the Human: Woolf, Kristeva and the Bisexual Imaginary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Emanuela Ettorre Thomas Hardy’s Idiosyncratic Posthumanism and the (Im)possibility of Entanglement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sanja Sˇosˇtaric´ Gendered Transhumanist and Posthumanist Discourse in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Canan S¸avkay Humanism, Masculinity and Global Violence in Doris Lessing’s Ben, In the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Özlem Karadag˘ What’s in A Number: Caryl Churchill’s Clones and Women in A Number as Harawayian Cyborgs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

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Marilena Saracino Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: the Performative Function of Literature and the Discourse on Human-ess and Identity . . . . . . . . . 133 Gökçen Ezber Disappearance of the Other in Ian McEwans’s Machines Like Me . . . . . 153 Paola Partenza Beyond a “Body Without Organs”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Preface

Clarke and Rossini, in their “Preface” to the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, suggest that “In the face of global threats (ecocides, climate change, human and nonhuman extinctions) unfolding in real time, posthumanism is a historically specific response to our present moment and currently possible forms of futurity”.1 Relatedly, the concept of the “human” has been broadly re-visited and modified, and the term “posthuman” has now become a term of continuous inquiry. Gender (representations) play(s) a critical role in works of literature, culture, and art, and focusing on gender is crucial to uncovering the anthropocentrism or androcentrism that may underlie the work and the times to which it belongs. Furthermore, the connection between gender and the posthuman is represented more and more in literature, culture, and other artistic expressions. As Cary Wolfe indicates, posthumanism “may be traced back to the Macy conferences on cybernetics from 1946 to 1953”, and to the theories of “figures” from different disciplines based on “a new theoretical model for biological, mechanical, and communicational processes that removed the human and Homo sapiens from any particularly privileged position in relation to matters of meaning, information, and cognition”.2 Posthumanism, for liberal Posthumanists or transhumanists, is a process of human enhancement with the help of science and technology. However, radical-, critical-, or feminist- Posthumanists do criticize these (neo)humanist, androcentric approaches. Rosi Braidotti, for example, criticizes humanism that “privileges” European white man and posthumanism that has come to carry this meaning forward: This Eurocentric paradigm implies the dialectics of self and other, and the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal 1 Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, “Preface”, in the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xiv. 2 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xii.

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Humanism. Central to this universalistic posture and its binary logic is the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration. Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behaviour, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. These are the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. Because their history in Europe and elsewhere has been one of lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifications, these ‘others’ raise issues of power and exclusion.3

Therefore, (Post)humanism requires a critical approach that would try to dismantle the definitions created by the patriarchal/androcentric worldview which marginalizes others by gendering them. As Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti suggest in “Feminist Posthumanities: An Introduction”, “the posthuman has proven to be productive for an ontological politics of feminist and critical theory”.4 Posthumanism or posthuman critical theory provides a fertile ground for exploring the representations of gender and their connection with posthumanism on many levels, not only in reading the works that focus on the present or the future, but also in envisaging new interpretations of the works of the past. Even though the gendering and marginalization of women, non-human animals, nature, and racial others date back to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the last century produced or rediscovered new (non-) organic (life-) forms that are being added to the long list of sexualized, otherized beings of the androcentric worldview: clones, cyborgs, humanoids, androids, robots, hybrids, viruses. Therefore, a feminist Posthumanist approach to theory and literary texts is indispensable considering our age, which is gradually becoming more and more posthuman. While maintaining a solid literary emphasis, this volume focuses on gender and the posthuman from different viewpoints and discourses. The entire collection explores feminist debates on women, technology, and the body; gender representation and the posthuman; post-gender figurations; gender and transhumanism; gender and (post)humanism; gender and biotechnology/biopolitics/ bioethics; feminist posthumanism; animal, human-machine, ecological posthumanism and new materialism. The different chapters in this collection investigate how fruitful and vital these topics are in reading the works of writers from late nineteenth to twenty-first century, and understanding the concept of identity, individuality, embodiment, and entanglement in an ever-changing society. To address the concepts of gender and posthumanism as a cultural problem central to literary studies seemed to be urgent for two reasons: 1) modern and 3 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 15. 4 Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti, “Feminist Posthumanities: an Introduction”, in A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, edited by Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti (Cham: Springer: 2018), 7.

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postmodern scholarly studies have believed that the discourse of gender and posthumanism has been one of its major concerns. Most of these studies can be taken as contributions to the history of ideas. 2) Literary studies express and trigger the relationship between gender and posthumanism; they seem a fundamental generator of paradigm scenarios by which gender-posthumanism connection is culturally conditioned. The ten chapters included in this volume deal with aspects of the relations between gender and posthumanism from different points of view, and in different texts. In the opening piece, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy analyses gender from three vantage points: from the perspectives of Humanism, Critical Posthumanism, and Speculative Posthumanism. Ultimately, she shows that the Humanist treatment of gender is human-centric, grounding ethical claims in the human capacities for reason, autonomy, impartiality, and universality which are then used as justifications for mastery, stewardship, and/or management of nonhumans. Strong human-centrism often posits a theory of ‘human nature’ that is then used to make moral claims that treat rational humans as the only appropriate subjects for moral consideration, relegating to instrumental status those that do not fit this standard. Thus, the human command is dualistically and hierarchically conceptualized as a superior order in control of a distinct but inferior one. Mellamphy argues that critical post-humanism seeks to re-conceptualize gender by deprioritizing human-centrism, and emphasizing transindividuation instead, that is, transversal, cross-modal, and multispecies connections and the radical compatibility between human animals, non-human animals and machines is affirmed. Finally, more speculative posthumanisms, like xenofeminism and object-oriented feminisms, seek to completely re-think the concept of gender altogether by phasing out anthropocentrism altogether. Jasmine Brooke Ulmer critically analyses Margaret Atwood’s Survival, a book which surveyed, shaped, and established the field of Canadian Literature. In the first edition of the text, she observed that “[a] preoccupation with one’s survival is necessarily also a preoccupation with the obstacles to that survival. In earlier writers these obstacles are external – the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being”. In writing another preface for this landmark text thirty years later, Atwood noted that if she were to now publish a book called Survival, readers would have different expectations. For instance, contemporary readers might anticipate a book about the end of the world – one emerging from human-initiated causes such as climate change, societal collapse, and/or plague. These expectations would not be unreasonable, she suggested, given how many end-of-the-world scenarios are already here. The MaddAddam series of books – kwhich includes Oryx and

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Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam – is no exception. In these books, the end-of-the-world has arrived, brought on by The Waterless Flood: a plague designed to eliminate humanity and remedy the environment by yielding the future to a newly created hybrid species of transhuman youth. The few humans who unexpectedly remain survive by adopting feminist practices and collaboratively adapting with(in) a new posthuman world. Reading Atwood’s Survival alongside her MaddAddam trilogy, highlights current feminist debates regarding gender and posthumanism, gender and transhumanism, ecological posthumanism, biopolitical ethics, and more. As such, her chapter considers how the subjectivity, definition, and identity of life on this planet might shift to survive the Anthropocene through an inclusively maximal existence, instead. Maria Margaroni’s argument centres around the relationship between Julia Kristeva and Virginia Woolf. Specifically, Kristeva’s latest novel, The Enchanted Clock, which echoes and remobilizes Woolf ’s central concerns in one of her oddest and much acclaimed novels, Orlando. Both novels are written at the turn of a new century and seem preoccupied with the nature of time and the NOWhere of writing. In what follows, Maria Margaroni traces the writers’ shared focus on temporality as a distinctly human fiction, and on the transcendence of the human in the arrest of temporization associated with psychic death and in a Now that neither flows nor passes, enfolding a multiverse of possibilities. Margaroni not only decentres the human in its relation to the inhuman, but also permits the writers to fertilize a bisexual imaginary which, significantly, involves a rethinking of “the couple” – the couple “man-woman” to begin with and, in extension, the couples “self-other”, “lover-beloved”. Drawing upon Karen Barad’s theories of agential realism, Emanuela Ettorre explores the way in which, in a selection of works, Thomas Hardy attempts to debunk a hegemonic cultural model based on the “Self-Other dialectics”. In their post anthropocentric spirit, Hardy’s writings call into question hierarchical relationships that deny equality and mutuality; they problematize gender identities built upon relations of power, and they equally recognize the intimacy and the vital interconnection between human and nonhuman animals. Hardy’s posthuman approach functions as a redefinition of the sense of the self in relation to those that exist on the other side of the dualistic divide described by Val Plumwood, including both human beings marginalized by virtue of gender, and the nonhuman entities excluded because lacking those human features that make humankind ‘exceptional’. Thus, Hardy’s narrative and poetry quietly but effectively displace anthropocentrism, offering instead a strong sense that of our being is in symbiosis with other species. To this extent, therefore, Hardy’s work suggests a new materialism before the fact, in which entanglement with nonhuman agentialities becomes a touchstone of many of the most moving and important passages in his novels and verse. In her analysis of Tess of the d’Urbevilles, The

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Hand of Ethelberta and of the poem “Heiress and Architect”, Ettorre examines the way in which three female characters suffer the effects of a patriarchal society, whose logic of domination depends on a dualistic divide between encultured, rational male, and instinctual, feminised nature. On the one hand, these female figures embody the entangled nature of human existence, as itself an animal life, constitutively connected to its more-than-human environs, but on the other, and through his presentation of their widely differing fates, Hardy asks the important and awkward question – what comes of that entanglement, when it is used by society as an excuse to oppress those it deems inferior by virtue of those self-same entanglement? In his portrayal of these female characters, however, Hardy presents entanglement as a kind of curse, a part of life’s trials, over which women must find some way to triumph if they are to survive or thrive. Sanja Sˇosˇtaric´ discusses how the posthumanist redefinition of the human has evolved from the postmodern decentralization of the white male subject, as illustrated by Leslie Fiedler, in synergy with a range of antihumanist discourses that are, to varying degrees, related to postmodern identity politics. Feminist science fiction of the 1970s is both an integral part of that legacy and a literarycultural umbrella term for Piercy’s writing of the period. Since the 1980s, however, literary postmodernism and postmodern identity politics have entered a new phase, fuelled by new conservatism, rekindled cultural wars, and a backlash against feminism on one hand, and a further opening up toward genre fiction on the other. Marge Piercy’s novel He, She and It is a deliberate feminist rewriting of masculinist cyberpunk, whose feminist affirmation of transhumanist technological enthusiasm echoes Donna Haraway’s demand for the feminist appropriation of technology. But Piercy’s novel seems to promote critical and cautious transhumanism: it probes the ethical issues that surround the creation of artificial life as much as it embraces cybernetic enhancement of the female body as central to the feminist and anticorporate struggle. Alongside its critical transhumanism, the novel can be linked to a particular strand of posthumanist theory that began its evolution in the 1990s: the link between the redefinition of human identity as posthuman and the transformative power of technology. The novel also addresses and anticipates issues relevant to the nonhuman turn of 21stcentury posthumanities, which emerged in the early 2000s when the discourse on technology in the field became increasingly less central. It combines the leftist critique of corporate capitalism with the utopian collectivist-socialist vision. Canan S¸avkay’s chapter focusses on Doris Lessing’s novel Ben, In the World, a sequel to The Fifth Child, which portrays the now eighteen-year-old Ben’s struggle to survive in a world he does not understand. Occupying a liminal position, Ben blurs the boundaries between the humanist concept of man and the animal. Although Ben’s physical appearance resembles that of Neanderthal man, it is rather his inability to understand abstract forms of signification which makes

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the others regard him as less than human, as it is this quality which differentiates humans from animals. Scientists speculate that the Neanderthals’ inability for abstract signification must have been the cause for their extinction, whereas Homo sapiens must have thrived thanks to the invention of a linguistic system with which they could establish a sense of group identity and hence interact and cooperate in large numbers. S¸avkay argues that, through Ben, Lessing interrogates our understanding of what makes us human, while she at the same time explores how gender contributes to a certain form of human interaction which dehumanizes Ben. Those who dehuman Ben are largely men, because men are socially encouraged to neglect their potential for relationality, while actions based on love and kindness are often shown by the female characters, as these qualities are considered to belong to the female domain. The novel’s major critique is foregrounded when the women’s kindness fails to protect Ben from a ruthless world in which humanist concepts take precedence over relationality and kindness. Through the liminal character Ben, the author exposes the violence underlying humanistic assumptions which contribute to violence not only against Ben, but against life itself, because the world’s treatment of Ben reflects the violence enacted on a global scale. Özlem Karadag˘’s chapter focuses on Caryl Churchill’s A Number, a domestic drama that revolves around cloning and the ethical questions that should go hand in hand with scientific and technological achievements in our androcentric posthuman era. While the play shows a number of clones, it deliberately avoids the existence of a female character on stage, and places the audience in the realm of a man. The dystopian future Churchill imagines is founded upon the elimination of women and replacement of reproduction with science, where clones turn into the new marginalized beings of an androcentric worldview. Similar to Braidotti’s critique of posthumanism, clones serve as the products of “advanced capitalism” and androcentrism, created for male-oriented dreams such as reproducing companions without women or selfless slaves that will be instrumentalized, which eventually leads to the inevitable production of monstrous others as a dominant idea concerning non-human beings in science fiction. However, contrary to the popular idea, rather than the clones, human beings, more accurately men, are represented as monstrous by Churchill. Arguing that clones are gendered beings and feminized, marginalized, backgrounded, and instrumentalized in a similar way to women, Karadag˘’s chapter thrives to read the play in the light of Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics claiming that clones and women, considered as non-human or less-than-human, are cyborgs in a Harawayian way. They are gendered and backgrounded by the dominant patriarchal system and male-centric science while also being elusive for the androcentric worldview’s incapacity for an embodied, all-inclusive and respectful life, thus offering an alternative to the posthuman androcentrism.

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Marilena Saracino’s chapter explores the performative function of literature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel who invites reader to see science differently by way of fiction, not by a direct representation of science itself. A work of fiction “works” performatively, not by way of discursive statements but, as Aristotle knew, by its action, its plot, and the stories it tells. The story told in Never Let Me Go allows its readers to see their own histories differently, and to behave differently as a result. The Hailsham experiment, which aims to challenge the whole system of the donation programme, actually fails because it will contribute further to the consideration of the students as “shadowy objects in test tube”, both to alleviate the guilt of those who thought of using science for these purposes, and above all through the solitary performances of the teachers of the college, who with their methods do not encourage the students to become more aware. After a first theoretical part where the notion of performative is developed, the chapter proceeds with an analysis of the novel in order to show what Never Let Me Go shares with Posthumanism and posthuman critical theories. Both are committed to the construction and representation of the human under the pressure of a new conception of existence in which technological invasions require a redefinition of individuals and their identity in the light of an anthropodecentralized, anti-human and therefore posthuman condition that, in a nutshell, means abandonment of the humanistic ideal of Man as a measure of all things and within the hierarchy of the species that sees man in the first place. For Gökçen Ezber, posthumanism as reflected in fiction invites readers to a reexamination of gender roles and norms in the nebulous space between humans and machines. Ian McEwan’s retro-futurist novel Machines Like Me, centring around an android ‘Adam’, sets an alternative and ‘posthuman’ Garden of Eden where Man, Woman, and Android are pitted against one another and where issues of masculinity, femininity, fatherhood, motherhood call for a redefinition in a world where the very notion of ‘subjectivity’ is challenged by the hyper-connectivity of minds (of humans and machines) in nascent singularity. The chapter aims at a posthuman elaboration of gender roles in reference to fatherhood, motherhood, masculinity, and femininity as envisaged in McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me. Ezber questions the new positionality of androcentrism in a world cohabited by humans and machines and will argue that the biological human conditioning and the psychological entrapments we inherit from our parents might still continue to affect not only the human but might also hamper the ‘artificial intelligences’ we ‘give life to’ when it comes to building subjectivities and identities. The repositioning of human subjectivity as the paternal ‘creator’ of machines not only makes the normative structures of fatherhood visible, but it also challenges the coherence of our selfhood. Moreover, he attempts to discuss how humans project their own existential angst onto the artificial intelligences they create and thus are confronted with the arbitrariness of dualities and constructions of otherness by

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which they try to preserve the coherence of their selfhood. The posthuman narrative in McEwan’s novel, through a fictional coexistence of humans and machines, challenges our notions of what makes up the human being and hints at an eradication of the very notion of ‘otherness’. The connectivity and singularity as enacted by ‘machines’ is discussed as a posthuman vision where arbitrary dualities we form to build our ‘selfhood’ dissolve into a threatening ‘selflessness’ and ‘sameness’ where the very notion of ‘otherness’ disappears. In the last chapter of the volume, Paola Partenza investigates some of the conceptual paradigms that have emerged from posthuman studies, such as the body and subjectivity, the human and the machine, and genetic engineering. By focussing on the fundamental distinction between the subject and the non-subject, she shows how the new perspective from recent times involves a reconceptualisation of what it is to be human, and of the body as a prosthesis. That is, as Hayles observes, “the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born”. In line with some theoretical views of the twentieth and twenty-first century, Partenza demonstrates how Kazuo Ishiguro depicts the complex relationship between the human and the posthuman. His novels show what it is to be human in the future, in which the world has evolved to be marked by advanced biogenetics or technology. In this perspective, she analyses Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, in which Ishiguro tries to demonstrate the plausibility of posthuman “subjectivity” and shows how clones and androids, like cyborgs, become “creature[s] in a postgendered world”. This volume provides theoretical chapters followed by consecutive readings of selected works from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, focusing on Posthumanist, feminist Posthumanist theories, and terminology. While tackling the emergence of relatively new but vital concepts such as bioethics, clones, cyborgs, and so on, the authors also aim to call attention to the close ties between contemporary literature/theory and the works of the past in the context of gender and (post)humanism, leading the subject to the ambivalent concept of human nature and its potential for change. We hope that this selection of essays will not only contribute to the field, but will also help with raising questions concerning the relationship between gender and our posthuman future. Paola Partenza Özlem Karadag˘ Emanuela Ettorre

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

Challenging the Humanist Genre of Gender: Posthumanisms and Feminisms

This chapter explores the conceptual and ethical limits of human-centrism for theorizing gender. Human-centrism posits that humans should have command over non-human entities. Historically, humanistic conceptions are based on asserting the priority of humans; non-humans are viewed as means to human ends. Etymologically, the word ‘gender’ predates the word ‘sex’; it emerges in the 14th century as way of designating a “kind, sort, or class of persons or things sharing certain traits”, and comes from the Old French words gendre and genre, meaning “kind, species, character, or gender”, from the Latin stem genus – meaning “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species” and also “(male or female) sex” – and from the Proto Indo-European root *gènè, meaning “to give birth, beget”.1 Thinking of gender in terms of genre allows us to think of the genres of gender, in particular the humanist genre of binary gender that depicts humans as superior to non-humans, and consequently males as superior to females. Within the humanist genre, ‘humans’ are distinguished hierarchically (both ontologically and epistemologically) from various categories of ‘nonhuman’ in terms of the dynamics of domination and subjugation. Humans are imagined as having oversight over non-humans, thus justifying human domination over those who are deemed incapable of reaching full human potential. Gender is defined by the ontological superiority of humans over non-humans and institutionalized in the differences between male and female, master and slave. The humanist genre of gender is thus strongly anthropocentric, emphasizing human superiority and treating non-humans as instruments and means to achieve human ends. Strongly anthropocentric humanism posits a theory of ‘human nature’ that is used as a basis for making various normative, moral, cultural, and legal claims that elevate humans to the status of moral and political agents, while relegating non-humans to a lesser more instrumental status. Within humanism, humans are depicted as capable of transcending their animal roots 1 Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. “gender”, https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender#ety monline_v_1349.

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through intellection and instrumentalization of a non-human order for the benefit of humankind. This portrait of human control – of the morally conscious, modern individual that technologically transforms the non-human world for the benefit of all – is such a pervasive but unquestioned dogma that to challenge this viewpoint amounts to disrupting prevailing ways of doing, thinking, and being. In the following chapter, I ask: To what extent can humans and non-humans be conceptualized in terms other than human/istic? Third wave feminisms have taken-up the mantle of questioning the legitimacy of the humanist genre of gender by challenging nature/culture dichotomies. In particular, recent contemporary critical feminist post-humanisms offer a basis for challenging the dominant humanist genre of gender. The post-humanist genre of gender seeks to displace and decenter – or more precisely dethrone – the humanist version of gender by underscoring the entanglements and compatibilities between human animals, non-human animals, and machines. Critical feminist post-humanisms recode gender as multiple, material, in motion, and made to bridge divides between human and non-human. “While the perspective of the Anthropocene centers human beings and their agency and interventions in geo-epochal transformations through technological developments and (bio-) chemical products, post-human perspectives decenter the idea of humankind being in charge of technical and ideological mastery over nature”.2 Feminist posthumanisms are a resource for gaining alternative perspectives on the tensions between the politics of decentering and of recentering the human. Nonetheless, I suggest that critical feminist post-humanisms retain normative assumptions about the special status of humans (i. e. as well-meaning ‘stewards’ or ‘custodians’ of non-humans), and in this regard, ‘ethical’ posthuman perspectives tend to find refuge in humanistic/human-centric ideals that promise a special role for humans. These critical post-humanisms, well-meaning as they may be, are still weakly anthropocentric. Indeed, anthropocentrism is especially difficult to overturn completely when the intellectual resources come from histories that are deeply embedded in humanistic ideas that define humans as unique in relation to ‘others’. While in theory it may be possible, in practice, the strict distinctions between humanistic and post-humanistic versions of gender are hard to maintain, and neither perspectives can claim to have explained why humans should be considered exemplary in relation to other non-human entities. The humanistic genre of gender is strongly anthropocentric, and its model of relationality is binary, dualistic, and based on the dynamics of mastery and subordination. Humans are conceptualized as being in command, justifying superiority over those who are deemed incapable of reaching full potential. A 2 Kornelia Engert and Christiane Schürkmann, “Introduction”, Nature and Culture Vol. 16, no. 1 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2020.160101.

Challenging the Humanist Genre of Gender: Posthumanisms and Feminisms

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hallmark of humanism is that it established humanity’s separate and exceptional character and, purposely or not, led to the subjection of everything else to this alleged special status. Humanism grounds its ethical claims in the human capacities for speech, reason, autonomy, impartiality, and universality, which are then used as justifications for mastery over and management of non-humans who are considered to lack these capabilities. In the intellectual histories of western thought, the view that humans possess unique capacities that make them exceptional and/or superior to others is prevalent. Within this mastery model, humans govern unpredictability through the instrumentalization of their rationality and their normative and norm-making capacities. Strong human-centrism posits the achievement of human control using the instruments of reason (like technologies) and by using reason as an instrument. In the history of Western ethics, this genre has emphasized human intellect, especially the activity of deliberating about human ends, which require mental and practical capacities to discern the worthy ends of human life. For instance, ancient Greek virtueethics, medieval humanism, early modern mechanistic philosophy, and even contemporary Philosophies of Mind are grounded in anthropocentric terms that privilege the achievement of human ends by way of human rationality at the expense of non-human lives. Just take, for instance, Aristotle’s stance justifying slavery. “The rule of soul over body is like a master’s rule, while the rule of intelligence over desire is like a stateman’s or a king’s. In these relationships, it is clear that it is both natural and expedient for the body to be ruled by the soul, and for the emotional part of our natures to be ruled by the mind, the part which possesses reason. The reverse, or even parity, would be fatal all round. This is also true as between man and the other animals; for tame animals are by nature better than wild, and it is better for them all to be ruled by men, because it secures their safety. Again, as between male and female, the former is by nature superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject. And this must hold good of mankind in general”.3 Here, Aristotle offers an account of each dualism’s place in a chain of hierarchies, establishing the division between human and non-human and connecting various hierarchies together, namely the human domination of nature, male domination over females, the master’s domination over the slave, and Reason’s domination of the body and emotions. The genre of gender inherited from the legacy of western Humanism is thus dualistic, hierarchical, and human-centric. Philosophically and politically, this conceptual network of binaries – mind/body, reason/emotions, human/animal, male/female, freedom/slavery – reflects the dynamics of mastery and/or hierarchy: of higher over lower, superior over inferior, essential over instrumental. 3 Aristotle, The Politics, Trans. T.A. Sinclair (London: Penguin Books), section 1254b2, 68.

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Historically, humanism has portrayed the ‘human’ as agent, as creator of culture and technologies, and as a bearer of rights and responsibilities that makes use of other life-forms (both non-human and human) including animals, plants, and machines. Those who have been regarded as deficient in rationality and intrinsic moral worth such as women, children, slaves and colonized subjects, are deemed as lacking full human potential and are treated as less-than-human – that is, as ‘sub-human’. Along with this objectification of the non-human and subhuman, the instrumentalization of techniques and technological manipulation become the main vehicle by which humanism perpetuates its human exceptionalism. Humans are framed as having special insights and being self-authorized to preside, command, and control all others. The humanist genre of gender thus exemplifies a “logic of colonization” in which difference between beings is conceived dualistically as the mastery of a superior over an inferior order. “This is a model of domination and transcendence in which freedom and virtue are construed in terms of control over, and distance from, the sphere of nature”.4 By means of this hierarchical logic, the colonised are appropriated – incorporated – into the paradigm and culture of mastery and subordination which comes to form all expressions of identity. As Plumwood sums up, “the dominant conception of the human and of human nature corresponds to this structure and dynamics”.5 Framed within the terms of benevolence, mastery, and hierarchy, humans are tasked with governing unpredictability through the instrumentalization of their rationality and their normative and norm-making capacities. Liberal and normative theories of human rights are grounded in this human-centric representation of the individual who is expected to take ownership over its own self, this self-mastery thereby sanctioning the exercise of mastery over others who are incapable of such self-legislation. Even critically-minded liberal thinkers like feminist Mary Wollstonecraft did not challenge humanism’s presumption of humanity’s superiority over other forms of life. “In what does man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation consist? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than the whole; in Reason. What acquirement exalts one being above another? Virtue; we spontaneously reply. For what purpose were the passions implanted? That man by struggling with them might attain a degree of knowledge denied to the brutes: whispers Experience. Consequently, the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind so-

4 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 23. 5 Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 42.

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ciety: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively”.6 Historically, advocacy for the rights and welfare of those deemed to lack reason emerged among liberal sentimentalists like Jeremy Bentham, who argued that non-rational people should be protected not on the basis of rational capacities and claims to freedom and equality, but rather based on the argument that the “non-rational” have shared capacities for sentience. Such vulnerable populations are therefore owed limited protection and sympathy. Liberal sentimentalism sought to protect individual freedom by borrowing from nineteenth and twentieth-century ideals of social equality as minimal capabilities that must guaranteed by the state and should also extend to non-human animals, people with disabilities, and non-citizens.7 Human-centrism positions humans as being at the center of agency, cognition, and broader relations/networks of exchange. Humanism does not overturn the unchallenged assumption that what makes non-humans worthy of moral consideration is their commonality, similitude, and resemblance with humans who have a special status as ‘moral agents’. Thus, liberal concepts of human moral agency – even when they go beyond possessive individualism – tend to assess the worth of non-humans in terms of humancentric standards. By continuously deploying this binary and colonizing logic and its hierarchical dynamics, the humanistic diagram centered on human moral agency fails to overturn the logic of domination and transcendence that defines prevalent conceptions of human/non-human relations. The humanistic and sentimentalist liberal positions reinforce human-centric exceptionalism and thus prioritize the human element of oversight while pursuing whatever means necessary, including the denigration and instrumentalization of those deemed ‘non-human’ and/or ‘less than human’. The humanist genre of gender follows a logic of colonization, domination and transcendence defined by patriarchal/universalist humanistic priorities, replicating the master/slave dynamics and politics of binary gender. Terms like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ collide within a complex and contested battlefield of meanings, hierarchies, and exclusions where racial, sexual, ethnic, and other differences have been cast in terms that distinguish so-called ‘higher’ forms of humanity from ‘lesser’ ones deemed to lack some degree of rationality or cultivation. The master/slave dichotomy at the heart of the humanistic version of human exceptionalism reproduces a cluster of other dualisms such as self/other, human/machine, man/woman, colonizer/colonized, etc. This logic of mastery/ subjugation views domination as natural and befitting. Within this frame, “the 6 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (New York: A. J. Matsell, 1833), 11. 7 See for example, Daniel Engster 2006 and Nussbaum 2007.

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multiple, complex cultural identity of the master [is] formed in the context of class, race, species and gender domination”; the problem, however, is that “the assumptions in the master model are not seen as such, because this model is taken for granted as simply a human model”.8 In an effort to address the limits of humanism, contemporary feminist transhumanism claims to offer a post-gender and gender-liberationist view that argues that through the application of neuro-technology, bio-technology, and assistive reproductive technologies, gendering can be eliminated and human potential can truly be realized. Trans-humanism, which is a term said to have been coined in the 1950s by Julian Huxley to mean the transitional human who is moving beyond its human limits, is a movement that seeks to transform humans through technological augmentation in order to invert the humanistic hierarchy of human over machine and liberate humans from gender-oppression. Sometimes touted as ‘fourth-wave feminists’ ‘defined by technology’ and even ‘postfeminists’, feminist trans-humanists retain the first-wave feminist assumption that mind is a superior path to liberation than body, which is inferior and limiting; and that ‘technology’ is the instrument, the means towards the end of transforming the human. Retaining the humanist dualism favouring liberation through mastery, technological progress and exceptionalism, the trans-humanist argument for gender-liberation ultimately and ironically affirms the humanist logic of control. Indeed, scholars have emphasized the deep compatibilities and connections between trans-humanism and liberal feminism with intellectual roots in Enlightenment positivism and rationalism, and technological progressivism. Like its historical predecessor liberal sentimentalism, trans-humanism shares with liberal feminism a deep commitment to universality framed as “the well-being of all sentience”.9 It is the shared capacity to feel, in this case, and not the capacity to think rationally, that undergirds this brand of sentimentalist trans-humanism. As James Hughes argues in Citizen Cyborg: “persons don’t have to be human, and not all humans are persons”.10 Some transhumanists are happy to anthropomorphize non-humans while at the same time denying personhood to some humans. What started out as discontent with some of the limitations within classical humanism has paved the way, ironically, for a position from which to turn back to humanism. The need for an alternative perspective arises when understanding the limitations of the humanistic conception of gender. Post-humanisms seek to do just this by deprioritizing human-centrism, rejecting atomism, and underscoring the 8 Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 5 and 22. 9 “Transhumanist Declaration”, Humanity Plus, http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/trans-h umanist-declaration. 10 James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (USA: Basic Books, 2004), 79.

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affinities (rather than the differences) between human animals, non-human animals, and machines. Humans are viewed as co-producing and co-evolving with non-humans, rather than as ontologically superior to them. For example, criticizing the scientific imagery that segregates species and privileges humancentric forms of life, critical post-humanists are arguing for a rejection of the principle of human mastery in favor of conceptualizations that bridge divides between humans and non-humans. Prioritizing connectionism as a way of deprioritizing humanism and its version of strong anthropocentrism, post-humanisms strive to transform the ‘human’ into an open-ended category and to reconceptualize it as a product of ongoing processes of collective bio-socio-technical interactions. For instance, Rosi Braidotti argues that life is not the exclusive domain or right of the human species alone, but more aligned with “the transversal force that cuts-across and re-connects previously segregated species, categories and domains. This vital interconnection posits a qualitative shift of the relationship away from species-ism and toward an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, others) can do. The new transversal alliance across species and among post-human subjects opens-up unexpected possibilities for the recomposition of communities, for the very idea of humanity and for ethical forms of belonging”.11 In a similar vein, Cynthia Willett offers an inter-species ethics of radical multi-species relationality in which “bio-social processes of living matter challenge the atomistic individualism in classic liberal ‘state of nature’ theories more radically than one may first think. … [W]e are not naturally frozen into genetically-defined groups with clear-and-distinct boundaries, but, for the same reasons, we are not individual atoms either. Rather than individuals or groups, we function at times like nodes in multispecies networks and selves-in-multispecies-communities”.12 Contrary to humanists and trans-humanist feminists who instrumentalize non-humanity and even seek to accelerate the technological transformation of the human, post-humanist feminisms decenter the human, making it cede its historical ties to the dialectics of domination and transcendence. Whereas the (trans-)humanistic conception of gender is strongly human-centered, binary, and hierarchical, the post-humanistic, the post-humanist alternative pursues the undoing of human-centrism in an effort to open-up multiple pathways and possibilities of relationality between humans and non-humans. As Willett notes, emphasizing the limitations of the liberal model of human agency, a “posthumanist lens ventures beyond modern and post-modern binaries, as in sympathy for the ‘other’ … to engage multi-layered symbiotic agencies and bio-social

11 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 60, 71–72. 12 Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (New York: Colombia University Press, 2014), 64, 66.

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communities”.13 Here the emphasis on post-humanism rather than humanism signals the prioritization of narratives that privilege inter-species co-evolution and co-production. Drawing together anti-humanism’s rejection anthropocentrism (i. e. of Man as a universal ideal) and poststructuralist feminism’s critique of phallogocentrism, critical feminist post-humanisms, in embracing new materials and materialisms as the basis for displacing humanism, claim to be ‘post-anthropocentric’. Calling for a post-humanities to develop as a humanities without the human alongside a feminism without gender, Cecilia Åsberg, building on Braidotti’s account, argues that instead of the term ‘anthropocene’, we should consider our present epoch as ‘post-natural’, that is, “beyond the naturalism of the nature/culture dichotomy”.14 Rejecting gender essentialism, Eldon Yungblut contends that critical feminist post-humanism “endeavours to trace the notions of sex, gender and sexuality as they traverse the borders of internality and externality, revealing their entanglement in a complex web of sociocultural meanings and biological imperatives”.15 While anti-humanist, poststructuralist, and post-humanist feminisms have opened up avenues for decentering the human and embracing the non-human, many point out that they remain troubled by gender despite the rejection of gender essentialism.16 In an effort to ‘deterritorialize gender’, some scholars warn that post-humanism does not posit a genderless body: “sex/gender, race, sexuality is not a difference from other bodies, but is a difference that emerges from within the individuating body as material discursive process”.17 Instead of negating gender, such post-humanist feminisms seek instead to experiment with and even simulate gender.18 Despite the many appealing features of critical feminist post-humanisms, they appear to continue to preserve commitments to human-centrism (however weakly). True, while such post-humanisms might decenter the human, they have not quite shed anthropocentrism completely because they do not sever or abolish the binary/ 13 Willett, Interspecies Ethics, 7. 14 Cecilia Åsberg, “Feminist Posthumanities in the Anthropocene: Forays into The Postnatural”, Journal of Posthuman Studies Vol. 1, no. 2 (2017): 185–204. 15 Elden Yungblut, “Sex in Posthuman Futures: Rethinking Gendered Embodiment in the Anthropocene”, Gnosis Vol. 17, no. 1 (2018): 7, https://gnosisjournalofphilosophy.files.wordp ress.com/2018/11/yungblut-for-sex-in-posthuman-futures.pdf. 16 See for example Nicole Falkenhayner, “The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity”, Open Library of Humanities 6, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.598.; Francesca Ferrando, “Is the Post-Human a Post-Woman? Cyborgs, Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Futures of Gender: A Case Study”, European Journal of Futures Research 2, no. 1 (2014): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309-014-0043-8. 17 Silvia Gherardi. “If We Practice Posthumanist Research, Do We Need ‘Gender’ Any Longer?” Gender, Work & Organization Vol. 26, no. 1 (2019): 44, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12328. 18 See for example, Kim Toffoletti, “Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman and Difference”, Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory & Culture Vol. 3, no. 2 (2004): https://jo urnals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/view/toffoletti.

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dualistic distinctions between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. The connectionistic post-humanist claim to be ‘post-anthropocentric’, while inspiring, is not convincing. Since there are few ontological and epistemological resources that are not somehow connected to human-centrism, this final section attempts to consider what a truly ‘post-anthropocentric’ and ‘post-human’ would be. This is where most contemporary thinking fails to provide an adequate framework. In this case, we turn more to speculative than normative thinking about xeno-intelligences well beyond human parameters – and as such, conceptualizing non-anthropocentrism may require going beyond empirical and normative analyses to a level of speculation disconnected from the “is” and “oughts” of more humancentered approaches. A ‘post-anthropocentric’ post-humanism would, I argue, entertain possibilities that are not defined by the resonances and/or differences between humans and non-humans. Accordingly, this model could be provisionally called a “non-standard” post-humanism (in contrast with previous, more ‘standard’ connectionist model of post-humanism), or even a ‘speculative post-humanism’ based on a “disconnection thesis” that suggests that humans should not be conceptualized in terms of the presence or absence of some essential “human” property – in other words, not as “Lockean or Kantian persons” – but as “an emergent disconnection between individuals [that] should not be conceived in narrow biological terms but in ‘wide’ terms permitting biological, cultural and technological relations of descent between human and posthuman”.19 Instead of positing any anthropocentric baseline (not even a weakly constrained one), the disconnectionist model would begin with the assumption that “our current technical practice could precipitate a non-human world that we cannot yet understand, in which ‘our’ values may have no place”;20 speculative post-humanism, as such, would not need “to introduce any normative justifications (moral or otherwise) since the possibility of post-humans implies that the future of life and mind might not only be stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can currently conceive”.21 Here, “human” would not refer primarily to the human-centric portrait equated with biological and cognitive embodiments (i. e. neither as a “real” organism nor as the phenomenological “self” that has subjective experiences), but to a view that is disconnected from and independent of any human-centrism. José Munòz, however, aptly captures the problem of thinking outside the regime of the human: “Thinking outside the regime of the human is simulta19 David Roden, Post-human Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (London: Routledge, 2015), 105. 20 Roden, Post-human Life, 124. 21 Roden, Post-human Life, 125.

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neously exhilarating and exhausting. It is a ceaseless endeavor, a continuous straining to make sense of something else that is never fully knowable … The radical attempt to think incommensurate queer inhumanity is a de-naturalizing and un-settling of the settled, sedimented, and often ferocious world of recalcitrant anti-inhumanity. … Queer thought is, in large part, about casting a picture of arduous modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being, classifications that are bent on the silo-ing of particularity and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and communism”.22 Here, the turn to post-humanistic connectionism belies a crypto-human-centrism that ultimately turns queerness’s non-standard potential for post-anthropocentrism against itself, returning it to a state of weak anthropocentrism. Instead, the queer labour of a truly ‘post-anthropocentric’ conception of gender demands thinking not in terms of relation, but rather non-relation and disconnection from standard modes of being and thinking. In this regard, objectoriented feminisms (OOF) and xeno-feminisms (XF) are two contemporary discourses that, like standard post-humanisms, are based on the affirmation of techno-materialities, anti-naturalism, and inter-sectionality; but unlike the standard post-humanisms, both OOF and XF are based on cutting ties with ideals like ‘subjectivity’ and ‘agency’, focusing instead on non-standard notions of withdrawal (without emergence), objects (without subjects), alienation (without agency) and gender-abolition (instead of gender-essentialism or gender-performativity). For example, Katherine Behar is critical of standard object-oriented ontology for remaining silent about the tensions between feminism (the critique of female objectification) and object-orientation. Behar points-out that OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) privileges liveliness and connectivity, which is problematic “because the imperative to connect is detrimental to individuals who suffer from the over-connection compulsions of neoliberal subjectivity”.23 The withdrawal of the object – its ‘self-containèdness’ is viewed as a kind of objection qua resistance: “OOO’s conception of objects as fundamentally withdrawn and self-contained resonates with feminist objects that resist us, and the feminist notion that as objects, we resist”.24 Yet, instead of connection, what is offered is commonality and continuity: “our common status as matter makes way for

22 José Esteban Muñoz, “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol. 21, no. 2–3 (June 2015): DOI 10.1215/106426842843323. 23 Katherine Behar, “Facing Necrophilia”, or ‘Botox Ethics’, in Object-oriented Feminism, ed. Katherine Behar (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 126. 24 Katherine Behar, “An Introduction to OOF”, in Object-oriented Feminism, ed. Katherine Behar (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 19.

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continuity between all objects, whether human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate”.25 Likewise, building on Laboria Kuboniks’s ‘Xeno-Feminist Manifesto’, Helen Hester names four technological principles of Xeno-Feminism (XF): circumnavigation of gatekeepers, repurposing, scalability, and intersectionality: “Through these principles, the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house”.26 While such post-humanisms go beyond trying to ‘decenter’ agency and strongly renounce the humanistic ontotheology at the heart of the master logic of power, the attempt to bring-about new configurations of relationality/continuity based on alter-ontologies loosens anthropocentrism but does not eliminate it altogether. Hester’s suggestion that the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house threatens to extend mastery as the driving force of XF’s technological mandate. Ultimately, queer, xeno-feminist, and object-oriented feminisms are in danger of reverting to the ‘standard’ post-humanisms insofar as they do not abandon connectionism (whether strong or weak) prioritizing relation, communication, continuity, and exchangeability, thus operationalizing the age-old standard of defining at least two terms and the differences that connect them. As Michelle Liu reminds us: abolitionism does not equal post-humanism: “These procedures of making equal, calculable and knowable are articulated in processes of converting worlds into the grammars of the human. […] an end of the human would be nothing less than abolitionist”.27 Rather than recuperating abolitionist and decolonial thought for a connectionist post-humanism, a ‘post-anthropocentric’ perspective on gender is concerned first-and-foremost with thinking about how to incapacitate the conceptual and structural apparati-of-relation that makes distinction possible in the first place. Post-anthropocentrism, it would seem, requires reckoning with the end of the human. Disconnection and non-relation, in other words, become important concepts to consider when making claims about post-anthropocentrism. Liu stresses “the continuing damage of the human as an invention of the Western philosophical tradition, suggesting that its orders of transcendence, overcoming and resolution proceed in philosophies of relation and difference that lacerate-into-rivenness and vanish-by-equivalency a structural violence that is at once constitutive and irreparable. […] The human is a transcendental formation cut into Being through procedures of an injurious & enduring philosophical colonization” that correlates “blackness with the non-human and indigeneity with the non-sovereign. Underlying liberal orders of consensus and 25 Behar, “An Introduction to OOF”, 9. 26 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism. Theory Redux (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018), 137, 97–8. 27 Michelle Liu, “com-posing abolitionist≠posthumanism: notes on incommensurability, incomputability and incognita syn-aesthetics” (MA diss., Western University, 2020), 8, https://i r.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7016.

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being-in-common are structures-of-relations that constitute a carceral thoughtworld. […] Where abolitionist thought elicits an end of a carceral paradigm which the post-human may also inhabit, post-humanism may leave intact the racial, sexual, colonial, ontological underpinning the human”.28 Liu declares that within the terms of this World, the demands of the non-human cannot be met. In conclusion, what has been called ‘post-anthropocentrism’ ends up getting caught in the backdraft of anthropocentrism, however weakly. Post-anthropocentrism ought to be non-anthropocentric. I have suggested that non-anthropocentrism entails disconnection with human-centrism; without such a move, declarations of so-called ‘post-anthropocentrism’ end-up being caught in the endless differential circuits of humancentrism. Along with disconnection and non-relation, post-anthropocentrism entails a rethinking of incommensurability, particularly the incommensurability of thinking post-anthropocentrically (since speculative post-humanism permits speculating what it is impossible to know anthropocentrically).

Bibliography Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by T.A. Sinclair. London: Penguin Books. Åsberg, Cecilia. “Feminist Posthumanities in the Anthropocene: Forays Into The Postnatural”. Journal of Posthuman Studies Vol. 1, no. 2 (2017): 185–204. Behar, Katherine. “Introduction to OOF” and “Facing Necrophilia”, or ‘Botox Ethics’. In Object-oriented Feminism, edited by Katherine Behar. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Engert, Kornelia, and Christiane Schürkmann. “Introduction”. Nature and Culture 16, no. 1 (2021): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2020.160101. Engster, Daniel. “Care Ethics and Animal Welfare”. Journal of Social Philosophy Vol. 37, no. 4 (2006): 5236. Falkenhayner, Nicole. “The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity”. Open Library of Humanities 6, no. 2 (2020): https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.598. Ferrando, Francesca. “Is the Post-Human a Post-Woman? Cyborgs, Robots, Artificial Intelligence and the Futures of Gender: A Case Study”. European Journal of Futures Research Vol. 2, no. 1 (2014): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309-014-0043-8. Gherardi, Silvia. “If We Practice Posthumanist Research, Do We Need ‘Gender’ Any Longer?” Gender, Work & Organization Vol. 26, no. 1 (2019): 40–53. https://doi.org/10. 1111/gwao.12328. Hester, Helen. Xenofeminism. Theory Redux. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018. Hughes, James. Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. USA: Basic Books, 2004. 28 Liu, “com-posing abolitionist≠posthumanism”, 5.

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Humanity Plus. “Transhumanist Declaration”. http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/tran s-humanist-declaration. Liu, Michelle. “com-posing abolitionist≠posthumanism: notes on incommensurability, incomputability and incognita syn-aesthetics”. MA diss., Western University, 2020. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7016. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol. 21, no. 2–3 (June 2015): DOI 10.1215/106426842843323. Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Online etymological dictionary. s.v. “gender”. https://www.etymonline.com/word/gende r#etymonline_v_1349. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Roden, David. Post-human Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. London: Routledge, 2015. Toffoletti, Kim. “Catastrophic Subjects: Feminism, the Posthuman and Difference”. Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory & Culture Vol. 3, no. 2 (2004). Willett, Cynthia. Interspecies Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. New York: A. J. Matsell, 1833. Yungblut, Elden. “Sex in Posthuman Futures: Rethinking Gendered Embodiment in the Anthropocene”. Gnosis Vol. 17, no. 1 (2018): 1–12.

Jasmine Brooke Ulmer

Narratives for Survival: Possibilities for a Rescue Effort

Introduction In the book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), Margaret Atwood asks: “What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if it played out in actuality?”1 Atwood poses this question within a compilation of essays published later in her career. But, contrary to what the title of the collection might suggest, we are not on other worlds, we are still on Earth, and in many ways, imagining a self-rescue effort has been Atwood’s project from the beginning. This effort has involved a sustained focus on survival. It was in the first edition of Survival (1972) fifty years ago that Atwood observed, “A preoccupation with one’s survival is necessarily also a preoccupation with the obstacles to that survival”.2 Atwood initially wrote about survival because she believed it to be the overarching narrative in Canadian literature, a body of literature which, incidentally, was only recognized as such following the publication of the book. To her great surprise, Survival went on to not only become a landmark survey of Canadian literature, but to establish the field. Yet, in identifying challenges to survival as they have been portrayed in the outside Canadian literature, Atwood perhaps sets the stage to examine different barriers to survival in her own. Amidst challenging conditions – environmental and otherwise – there are many barriers to survival. In earlier works of Canadian literature, for example, these barriers are often external, such as the land and climate. In later works, however, “the obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal; they are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human

1 Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 2011), 66. 2 Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972/2012), 10.

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being”.3 In writing another preface forty years later, Atwood notes that if she were to now publish a book titled Survival, readers would have vastly different expectations. Contemporary readers might instead anticipate a book about the end of the world – one emerging from human-initiated causes such as climate change, societal collapse, and/or plague. The difference in expectations would be reasonable, Atwood suggests, given how many end-of-the-world scenarios are already here.4 Atwood has been deemed “the prophet of dystopia”5 for the ways in which her writings have seemed to foretell the future in the past and, even today, still do. Her writings are prescient; in attending closely to the world, Atwood writes about things that have already happened.6 Put differently, Atwood writes about futures that humanity has already set into motion and the many directions in which those futures might, without intervention, continue to unfold. For Atwood, this is the project of speculative fiction, or “things that could really happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books”.7 This is also an apt description of Atwood’s oeuvre. And while Atwood’s projections may not be exact, at times, they can be uncomfortably close. In Atwood’s MaddAddam speculative fiction trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013),8 for instance, the end of our world has arrived, brought on by The Waterless Flood: a plague designed to eliminate humanity and remedy the environment by yielding the future to life on the land and in the water, along with a newly created hybrid species of transhuman youth. The few humans who unexpectedly remain largely survive by adopting collectivist feminist practices and adapting with(in) a new posthuman world. As such, we turn to a selection of Atwood’s fiction (MaddAddam trilogy) and nonfiction works (Survival, In Other Worlds) in a comparative reading with key contemporary policy texts. From a transdisciplinary feminist perspective, each are read with considerations of gender and posthumanism in mind. In so doing, we consider how science fiction and speculative fiction writings might create possibilities for a wider rescue effort, one that facilitates survival through an inclusively maximized existence for all beings, instead. Throughout, distinct narrative frameworks offer ways not only to understand and respond to our changing world, but to survive. 3 Atwood, Survival, 10. 4 Atwood, Survival, vi. 5 Rebecca Mead, “Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia” (New York: The New Yorker, April 17, 2017), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-pro phet-of-dystopia. 6 Atwood, In Other Worlds, 94. 7 Atwood, In Other Worlds, 6. 8 The MaddAddam series consists of the following three books: Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013).

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SF Narratives: The Great Rearrangement In Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopia, the members of God’s Gardeners are correct in their belief that the end times are near. The God’s Gardeners are a collective operating at the intersection of science, (eco)religion, and environmental extremism. They attempt to live ethically, minimally, and faithfully. Their membership follows a small hierarchy of Adams and Eves who teach radical lifestyle changes and reject the other organizing structures and nonstructures for society: dystopian anarchy and dystopian technocracy. Those who belong to God’s Gardeners (mostly) eschew technology, embrace collectivism, learn survival skills, maintain sustainable lifestyles, forego eating meat from transgenic organisms, and teach others to do the same. As they do this, they are haunted by the foreboding sense that, as the protagonist Toby (an Eve), expresses, “We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone”.9 As it turns out, she is not alone in this feeling. However, while the antagonist Crake (a talented corporate scientist) also believes that the planet is facing clear and present danger, he chooses a different approach. One that, by his hand alone, creates a reset and a last chance opportunity (as he sees it, at least, though not in his words), for the non-human life on Earth and a new species of humanity, the Crakers, to build back better. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the mystery slowly unravels as events continue to be revealed (and then revealed again) from the perspective of multiple characters. Toby and Crake are among those characters, as are Crake’s partner (Oryx) and childhood friend (Jimmy, also known as Jimmy-the-Snowman, or more simply, as Snowman). Through these and other characters, the narrative continues to shift across the books to provide different insights into what happened before, during, and after what is later referred to as “The Great Rearrangement”, shifting between and among characters along the way. By the end of the series, the remaining human characters are left to pick up the pieces for themselves and for others, some of whom – following what may be the mass extinction of humanity – wonder what could have possibly occurred. The abbreviated answer is that Crake designed and released a fast-acting, quickly spreading plague; his intention was that humanity would go extinct so that other forms of environmental and transhuman life may live in their place. He came very close to succeeding. One of the first narrative retellings of how events came to pass appears in the first book of the series. Following the deaths of Crake and Oryx, Snowman becomes the caretaker of the Crakers, a transhuman species of genetically enhanced females and males designed by Crake to efficiently reproduce and repopulate the Earth. As a newly emergent species, the Crakers are like young 9 Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 239, emphasis in original.

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children asking curious, incessant questions about the world. The Crakers are in the process of gaining a conceptual understanding of what language is and how and why they have come to exist; explaining what happened in a way they will comprehend is not an easy task, especially when improvisation, by necessity, is involved. As the Crakers keep asking questions, Snowman finds himself crafting a creation story in real time. He makes it up as he goes along, attempting to cocoon difficult truths within a more palatable storyline. In the process, he falls back on familiar narratives: those of a biblical nature. The Book of Genesis contains a creation story of the heavens, the Earth, the land, the sea, the sky, plants, animals, and the people who would come to live on Earth after Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise; Genesis also contains the story of Noah building and boarding the ark with animals, two by two, to survive the flood and populate again after God decided to remove human’s wickedness from the Earth and restore glory to his creation. In short, when the Crakers press Snowman for an explanation, he returns to and reshapes a narrative he already knows. And Snowman says, ‘But the people couldn’t be happy, because of the chaos. And then Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the chaos, and he poured it away’. Snowman demonstrates, sloshing the water off to the side, then turns the pail upside down. ‘There. Empty. And this is how Crake did the Great Rearrangement’.10

Snowman may not have been associated with God’s Gardeners prior to the flood, but, like the Gardeners, he also uses biblical language, imagery, and narratives as organizing frameworks. Although the flood is not literal, for all intents and purposes, most of humanity is wiped out in a single, high-velocity, cataclysmic event of biblical proportions. It is not the end of the world so much as it is the end of the human world. Literal or figurative – flood or plague – the effects are the same: floods often appear in creation stories to offer opportunities for new beginnings, including covenants for better futures. That is, after the washing away. In telling more of the creation story to the Crakers in the last book in the series, Snowman continues to deify Crake, attempting to rationalize retrospectively on Crake’s behalf: The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. And there are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. And when you tell them to stop, they don’t hear you.

10 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 103, emphasis in original.

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So there is only one thing left to do. Either most of them must be cleared away while there is still an earth, with trees and flowers and birds and fish and so on, or all must die when there are none of those things left. Because if there are none of those things left, then there will be nothing at all. Not even any people. But shouldn’t you give those ones a second chance? he asked himself. No, he answered, because they have had a second chance. They have had many second chances. Now is the time.11

As Snowman explains, because human beings have yet to consistently demonstrate the ability to change, Crake believes he is justified in his unilateral judgement that humanity is irredeemable. Crake has created a narrative for himself in which human beings do not, will not, cannot change. While Crake’s destructive actions may have been horribly wrong, many have made observations compatible with his initial line of thinking. There are still debates, for instance, regarding why humankind has not meaningfully changed in light of increasing scientific evidence that humans are, and have been, hurting the Earth. As Timothy Morton argues, the scope of the Anthropocene is far too large for humans to see.12 For Rob Nixon, environmental degradation manifests through a slow violence, one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”.13 Kari Norgaard theorizes that humanity is in a state of psychological denial about the damage that has been done and what, if anything, can be done from here.14 Yet others hope and pray for a massive technofix. Respectively, as Morton, Nixon, and Norgaard each observe, environmental change is too big, too slow, and too scary to comprehend. There are many reasons, then, why inaction may be a default setting for humanity, and these are all important to explore. It is also important to explore whether blaming humans in general is a misdirection of responsibility when contributing factors to climate change are neither distributed equally across humanity nor predominantly come from individual humans themselves. As scholars continue to debate the causes behind the climate change, however, the effects of climate change continue to accrue. The climate is not pausing to listen or wait patiently while researchers sort things out. Truly, there is a lot of work to do. Which is part of why, when it comes to environmental risks, it can be

11 Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 291. 12 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 13 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 14 Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 7–8.

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difficult for any one person, or group of people, even, to fully recognize the seriousness, scale, and speed with which incremental dangers can intensify.

Scientific Narratives: Climate Change and Mass Extinction Events The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, issues many of its warnings in not only years, but degrees. To do so, the IPCC (and similar agencies) use sophisticated data analytic technologies to monitor, model, and predict what will occur, offering anticipatory policy guidance based on frequently updated results. As the climate targets for 2030 grow nearer, the variations in temperature among 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, for instance, are significant.15 For much of life on the land, the sea, the sky, the quality of life, as well as the difference between life and death itself, will be measured in tenths of a degree. The IPCC, however, is not alone in the dire narratives they convey regarding the health and well-being of life on this planet. In The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert suggests that life on Earth is in the midst of a sixth and human-created mass extinction event.16 Part of what happens in a mass extinction event, Kolbert writes, is panic. And when this happens, “the usual rules of survival are suspended. Conditions change so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little. Indeed, the very traits that have been most useful for dealing with ordinary threats may turn out, under such extraordinary circumstances, to be fatal”.17 The rapid succession of changes leads to what, from a species perspective, can be imagined as a change in the world’s cast of characters.18 Within this narrative strand, others have speculated that humanity only has a fifty percent chance of surviving the Anthropocene.19 Some, like Crake, would perhaps find this fitting. Given the unrepenting wickedness of humans in mistreating one another and the planet, those adopting anti-humanist and extreme environmental approaches might ask, for example: why should humans have the privilege of carrying on? Even though humans only constitute 0.01 percent of all life on Earth, as of only a few years ago, humans had already destroyed nearly half of plant life, 80 percent of mammals in the water, and 83 percent of wild mam15 16 17 18 19

See IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5 °C (Geneva: IPCC, 2018). Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014), 3. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 17. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 17. See Martin Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 8. Notably, Rees has since revised these estimates, offering a more optimistic outlook for humanity.

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mals overall.20 In what is either a few thousand years or a few hundred, depending upon one’s perspective,21 much of life on the planet has been destroyed in very little time. Which is how, with regard to the ways in which Atwood has suggested that the world as we currently know it may end – climate change, societal collapse, and/or plague – we seem to currently be in the midst of them all. Climate change is the common thread within each of these threats. With each passing report, the possibility of not crossing target IPCC thresholds becomes even more bleak. Examining related projections, including ones that predict how many humans will soon exist, it is unclear whether world population challenges potentially involve having too many people or not having enough people at all. All the while, collapse continues. Conflict, rising inflation, and supply shortages threaten access to food, water, housing, energy, security. What we eat, how we live, how we interact with technology in our daily lives, even who we are as a species – it is all changing very quickly. While this occurs, as Atwood’s trilogy illustrates, debates increase over the extent to which to embrace emerging technologies; resist technocracies and corporate governance through anarchism; or live simply, sustainably, and peacefully, instead. The world is also, of course, contending with a global pandemic. Dystopic, indeed.

Policy Narratives: The Great Reset We are warned of the dangers of dystopian thinking in the book COVID-19: The Great Reset. The first edition of this policy text, published in July of 2020, is authored by Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret, a managing partner at a predictive analysis firm with previous experience in assessing global risk. Here, both Schwab and Malleret take a keen interest in how the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for a planetary reset on issues pertaining to the environment, society, technology – even our sense of humanity itself. They express concern that if we do not act now to remedy the environmental damage already done, the window of opportunity, which may have been extended by the pandemic, will close. In describing the interrelated, intertwined relationship between the ongoing pandemic and the environment, Schwab and Malleret directly compare the pandemic to dual environmental risks: climate change and ecosystem collapse. 20 For complete results, see Yinon M. Bar-On et al., “The Biomass Distribution on Earth”. 21 For further debate, see, for example, Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View” and Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”. C.f. Bloomfield et al., “Communication and Surviving in the Anthropocene: Keywords”.

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All three, they write “represent, by nature and to varying degrees, existential threats to humankind… COVID-19 has already given us a glimpse, or foretaste, of what a full-fledged climate crisis and ecosystem collapse could entail”.22 In other words, for Schwab and Malleret, the pandemic is an example of a health crisis on a global scale, one that clearly has the potential to affect everyone, everywhere. The imminent dangers of environmental risks, however, can be more difficult to discern. In comparison to environmental risks, for example, Schwab and Malleret find that the urgency of a pandemic is much easier to comprehend. They continue: “An outbreak threatens our survival – as individuals or a species – and we therefore respond immediately and with determination when faced with a risk”.23 Environmental risks, in contrast, tend to occur in the medium and long term. This time difference – or time asynchronicity – is crucial. It creates what they describe as a tragedy of the horizon, for as opposed to “immediate and observable risks, climate change risks may seem distant (in terms of time and geography), in which case they will not be responded to with the gravity they deserve and demand”.24 What Schwab and Malleret seem to be suggesting, then, is that the pandemic – as an immediate and observable risk – is an opportunity. And, as an opportunity, the pandemic is a chance to address environmental risks that, while more temporally and spatially distant, are just as serious. This is why, or at least part of why, for Schwab and Malleret, something must be done. The conclusion they reach is this: “Doing nothing, or too little, is to sleepwalk toward ever-more social inequality, economic imbalances, injustice and environmental degradation. Failing to act would equate to letting our world become meaner, more divided, more dangerous, more selfish and simply unbearable for large segments of the globe’s population”.25 On the surface, this argument seems to be anthropocentric. But is it? And if it is, is that all that it is? The continued emphasis on environmental risks map onto concerns shared with ecological posthumanism. And while economic disparities as we currently understand them are limited to humans, even if the Great Reset ends up supporting human life, there is another reading of this passage. For instance, the construction of this argument leaves open precisely who (or what) may be on the receiving end of these negative actions. To which part of the world’s population does this refer?26 There are nearly eight billion humans on Earth who, apart from 22 Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (World Economic Forum, 2020), 133–134. 23 Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, 135. 24 Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, 135. 25 Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, 244. 26 See, for example, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World and Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

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living vastly differently lives themselves, further coexist with an estimated 8.7 million other forms of life.27 One question, then, might involve whether environmental risks are being interpreted as a threat to only (some) humans, primarily humans, or life more broadly. A related question might ask whether this is a single-species or a multi-species global rescue effort.28 An inclusive interpretation of the world population considers the full scope of humanity alongside companion species29 and in/non/human30 friends. Perhaps a cue be taken from their new sequel, The Great Narrative for a Better Future (2022). In it, Schwab and Malleret follow up on themes in the first book, such as how the pandemic presents an opportunity to live differently, to think differently, to exist in the world differently, to be planetary citizens in a way we had not been before. These differences can range from major to mundane. By way of example, one of the topics that they address is food, noting that synthetic biology is enabling the creation of alternative foods (such as Impossible Foods). The argument is that alternative food protein sources will feed more people using less water and less land with fewer emissions. Cutting food waste is a goal, as is halting species loss.31 Hence, the two need not be mutually exclusive; there is room for humans and in/non/humans both. Reading The Great Narrative for a Better Future alongside COVID-19: The Great Reset shows a list of shared concerns. These concerns also form the impetus for many of the narrative plotlines in the MaddAddam trilogy. One set of texts may be real and the other may be fiction, but both take place against the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic, climate crisis, and ecosystem collapse. In some (though not all) ways, the Great Reset and the Great Rearrangement could be read as parallel events. If global policy texts seem like a strange pairing with Atwood’s works, they shouldn’t: the authors directly reference Atwood in both.

27 Camilo Mora et al., “How Many Species are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” PLoS biology Vol. 9, no. 8 (2011): e1001127. 28 Anna Tsing, for instance, takes up the concept of global in an interconnected, multi-species way in “The Global Situation”. 29 Donna Haraway, “Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding”, In Queering the Non/human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Herd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), xxiv. 30 For more on the different namings and conceptualizations of posthumanism, for example, see Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman, All Too Human, and Bruce Clark and Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. 31 Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future (The Great Reset Book 2) (World Economic Forum, 2022), 133.

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The Great Narrative Schwab and Malleret similarly write against technology-fueled dystopias. They do so, interestingly enough, in the context of Atwood.32 In a chapter titled “The Risk of Dystopia” in COVID-19: The Great Reset, Schwab and Malleret specifically observe that information and communication technologies have made it possible for people – through their thoughts, actions, and behaviors – to be transformed into data for the purposes of being monitored and predicted within dystopian forms of surveillance capitalism. In making this point, they refer to Atwood’s best known dystopian novel (now-turned-television-series), The Handmaid’s Tale. It is safe to suggest that most people would describe The Handmaid’s Tale as a story of women’s rights and reproductive justice, one in which, during an ecological crisis and ensuing population decline, women who have vulnerable social status and promising fertility are forced to reproduce. The extent to which predictive analytics enable the sudden transformation of society would make for another paper in and of itself, especially given that, apart from the bank accounts that women used to have, the version of the 1985 novel does not seem to involve much technology at all. Though The Handmaid’s Tale as a novel is undeniably a narrative of surveillance, it is people who watch and constantly surveil other people. But, then, again, perhaps that is the point. Or, perhaps Schwab and Malleret are simply referring to actual digital surveillance technology in the television adaptation which continues to stream online in the latest version today. The authors return to The Handmaid’s Tale in The Great Narrative for a Better Future, this time more generically describing the plot as “disturbingly dystopian”,33 which it is. Atwood is mentioned within a broader suggestion regarding dystopian narratives, which is to not get too caught up in them. For Schwab and Malleret, we should not let the worst of what we can imagine lead us into fear. As they observe, narratives shape our perceptions of the opportunities and risks embedded in technological progress. Scientists tend to be careful when expressing a view about the future, but authors of science fiction are not. In this way, their trade helps us make imaginative leaps to plausible futures. Stories range from being disturbingly dystopian, like in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to depicting exhilarating possibilities and a rather hopeful future, like in Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem. We unconsciously rely on them to make up our minds about tech. Potent narratives… have the power to instil fear or alternatively engender reassurance with regard to technology and innovation.34 32 Schwab and Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset, 166. 33 Schwab and Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, 81. 34 Schwab and Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, 81.

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How we conceptualize and cognitively frame technological changes matters. And as we do this, it is important to remember that change is not inherently frightening in and of itself. For them, and for me, as well, change can also be for the better.35 While Schwab and Malleret are not Canadian, and while their policy texts are global in scope and thus not only applicable to Canada alone, if this were otherwise, their books would make for an interesting addition to a future, updated edition of Atwood’s Survival. The challenges that life on this planet is facing today pose many obstacles to survival: external obstacles, internal obstacles, and spiritual obstacles, too. There are pressing questions of what it means to be human, who gets to be human, and what sorts of futures humans may hope to have. It is natural to wonder, and the narratives within international policy texts, scientific documents, novels, and television series are all places to turn. And even across vastly different genres, many thinkers are asking overlapping questions. Schwab and Malleret ask: “What future do we face? What future do we want? What must we do to get there?”36 Climate scientists want to anticipate what we need to do to adapt and stay alive. Humanities scholars focusing on women and gender want to move forward from a firm stance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism; and posthumanist and transhumanist scholars want to do this while also attending to other forms of life. Taken together, these wonderings are not unrelated to Atwood’s question of what a species-wide self-rescue effort would look like from here. SF texts, whether of the science fiction or speculative fiction sort, are hypotheticals, some more realistic and immediately applicable than others. To a certain extent, policy manifestos are, too. No one knows the future, and mostly what policymakers can do is guess and model and predict with the data that is available.37 But policymakers and scientists and scholars and AI can guess more accurately, perhaps, and model and predict more accurately, by reading more. By reading more policy documents, by reading more scientific reports, by reading different expressions of gender and posthumanism, and, yes, by also reading more science fiction and speculative fiction texts.38 The ability to understand and identify futures that we do want is just as important as the ability to understand and identify futures that we decidedly do not. Disturbing things can bring that into sharp focus. There is value in being able to collectively point to a shared 35 On the concept of better, Atwood writes in In Other Worlds that, “‘Good’, for us, may always have a ‘Bad’ twin, but its other twin is ‘Better’” (94). 36 Schwab and Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, 9. 37 Of course, any data used and gathered should be done so in ways that are not only ethical, but also attendant to diversity, equity, and inclusion. See, for example, Lovett et al. in “Good Data Practices for Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance”. 38 See also, Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

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narrative – just as Schwab and Malleret do with The Handmaid’s Tale – and definitively say: not that. Of course, we should always be careful with anything that we read for, as Schwab and Malleret remind us, “The rich scholarly literature about narratives makes it clear that we think, act and communicate in terms of narratives, and each interpretation, understanding or model of how the world operates begins with a story”.39 Read as we may, however, the reality of the situation is most likely this: at some point, someone will have to do something. Somebody, or many somebodies, perhaps, although probably not eight billion somebodies altogether, will have to decide. And when that happens, and when the rescue efforts begin, there will probably be narratives for survival. Perhaps there already are.

Bibliography Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Anchor Books, 2011. – MaddAddam. New York: Anchor Books, 2013. – Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. – Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972/ 2012. – The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Bar-On, Yinon M., Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo. “The Biomass Distribution on Earth”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115.25 (2018): 6506–6511. Bloomfield, Emma Frances, Philip Tschirhart, Catalina M. de Onís, Carlos A. Tarin, George Edward Cheney, Sally Planalp, Michael Warren Cook, Joanne C. Marras Tate, Megan E. Cullinan, and Audra Barber. “Communicating and Surviving in the Anthropocene: Keywords”. In Constance Gordon, chair, session presented at the annual meeting of the National Communications Association, Baltimore, Maryland, November 14, 2019. Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of a Posthumanist. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale University: 2017. Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”. Environmental Humanities Vol. 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–165. – “Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding”. In Queering the Non/ human, edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Herd, xxiii–xxxvi. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. – Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

39 Schwab and Malleret, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, 16.

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IPCC. Global Warming of 1.5 °C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5 °C above Pre-industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. Geneva: IPCC, 2018. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014. Lovett, Raymond, Vanessa Lee, Tahu Kukutai, Donna Cormack, Stephanie Carroll Rainie, and Jennifer Walker. “Good Data Practices for Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance”. In Good Data, edited by Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt, and Monique Mann, 26–36. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures: 2019. Mead, Rebecca. “Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia”. New York: The New Yorker, April 17, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-t he-prophet-of-dystopia. Mora, Camilo, Derek P. Tittensor, Sina Adl, Alastair G. B. Simpson, and Boris Worm. “How Many Species are There on Earth and in the Ocean?” PLoS biology Vol. 9, no. 8 (2011): e1001127. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Rees, Martin. Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century – On Earth and Beyond. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Schwab, Klaus, and Thierry Malleret. COVID-19: The Great Reset. Cologny: World Economic Forum, 2020. – The Great Narrative for a Better Future (The Great Reset Book 2). Cologny: World Economic Forum, 2022. Tsing, Anna. “The Global Situation”. Cultural Anthropology Vol. 15, no. 3 (2000): 327–360. Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View”. In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 1–57. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Maria Margaroni

Time-Voyagers to the Infinity-Point of the Human: Woolf, Kristeva and the Bisexual Imaginary

Woolf-Kristeva: A Difficult Encounter Julia Kristeva’s theory of avant-garde writing (a theory she began to articulate in the late 1960s and which she has continued to develop in her more recent work1) has been most influential in approaches to late 19th and 20th century European literature and has served as an important framework for the interpretation of writers as different as Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett or James Joyce. Yet, the ambiguity of her attitude as a theorist to women modernists and women’s writing in general has been noted on several occasions.2 Kristeva’s early scathing treatment of Virginia Woolf,3 in particular, has remained a point of clear discomfort among feminist

1 See Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, [1996] 2000) and Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. II, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, [1997] 2002). 2 See, for instance, her 1989 interview with Françoise van Rossum-Guyon “Quelle avant-garde aujourd’hui?”, in Julia Kristeva, Seule Une Femme (Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 2007), 129–152. See also Ann Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics”, Feminist Review 18 (Winter 1984): 56–73; Lisa Walsh, “Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras”, in Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner (New York, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 143–161; Maria Margaroni, “The Vital Legacy of the Novel and Julia Kristeva’s Fictional Revolt”, in Kristeva’s Fiction, ed. Benigno Trigo (New York, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 155–173; and Miglena Nikolchina, “Indifferent Feminine: Kristeva and the AvantGarde”, in Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, ed. Maria Margaroni (London and New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023). 3 Julia Kristeva, “Oscillation Between Power and Denial”, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 165–167; Julia Kristeva, “About Chinese Women”, in The Julia Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 138–159. See also her 1975 interview with Éliane Boucquey, “Une(s) femme(s)”, in Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 114–128.

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literary critics sympathetic to her work.4 Although her conceptualization of embodied subjectivity, the maternally-connoted semiotic, the feminine and poetic language lends itself so well to the reading of Woolf ’s experimental fiction,5 Kristeva has not discussed her writing in any detail and continues to be restrained in her more recent praise of Woolf as a great writer alongside her unrivalled female genius, Colette.6 In this chapter my aim is not to make an intervention in the ongoing debate regarding Kristeva’s theoretical appraisal of Woolf, but to concentrate instead on their relation as writers of fiction. On my reading, this relation is conspicuous in Kristeva’s latest novel, The Enchanted Clock (2015; 2017), which echoes and remobilizes Woolf ’s central concerns in one of her oddest and much acclaimed novels, Orlando (1928). Both novels are written at the turn of a new century and seem preoccupied with the nature of time and the NOWhere of writing. In what follows I intend to trace the writers’ shared focus on temporality as a distinctly human fiction and on the transcendence of the human in the arrest of temporization associated with psychic death and in a Now that neither flows nor passes, enfolding a multiverse of possibilities. This Now, I will argue, not only decenters the human in its relation to the inhuman (i. e. the Cosmos, animal and plant life, earth), but also permits the writers to fertilize a bisexual imaginary which, significantly, involves a rethinking of “the couple” – the couple “man-woman” to begin with and, in extension, the couples “self-other”, “lover-beloved”. As I will demonstrate, in both novels “Now” as a form of temporal indifference renders possible a mirroring indifferentiation of (cultural or psychic) gender. This process of indifferentiation throws into relief the singularity of whatever being “as such” in exclusion of any existing properties for, to paraphrase William Watkin in his study of Giorgio Agamben, indifference allows properties to come to being (and become lovable) as if for the first time.7

4 As Nikolchina and Kkona demonstrate. See Miglena Nikolchina, “Born from the Head: Reading Woolf via Kristeva”, Diacritics 21, no. 2/3 (Autumn 1991): 30–42; Christina Kkona, “Androgynous and Foreigner: Orlando’s Revolt”, in Margaroni, Understanding Kristeva. 5 See, for example, the Kristevan analyses of Woolf elaborated by Makiko Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Feminine Writing in the Major Novels (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Miglena Nikolchina, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf (New York: Other Press, 2004); and more recently Kkona, “Androgynous and Foreigner”. 6 Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 112. 7 William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 72.

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Undoing the Fiction of Time: Time-travelling and Human Ex-stasis If, as modern physicists argue, time is a fiction, one that helps us conceptualize and organize our lives as “human”, then what might be the consequences of bracketing this fiction from our lives, activating a kind of temporal indifference, thus opening ourselves to the unchanging and entangled reality of a dilated present? Both Woolf in Orlando and Kristeva in The Enchanted Clock take the challenge to explore this question. Drawing on their contemporary scientific or philosophical knowledge about time, the two writers use the device of timetravelling in their attempt to enable their eccentric protagonists to push beyond the borders of the categories (man, woman; reason, instinct; experience, language; reality, imagination; organic, inorganic; life, death) that have framed the human. Interestingly, time-travelling in both novels is not made possible through the use of technology: “time machines are machines for suffering”, Nivi, the intrafictional narrator of The Enchanted Clock, tells us.8 She invokes Marcel Proust and H. G. Wells in arguing that time-machines may help us move backwards or forwards on the linear trajectory of time, but they cannot liberate us from it. Instead, it is imagination, the unique organ of transcending the human in the human, that releases both protagonists from time, rendering them “extraterrestrial acrobats” who live in “suspended time”, kept afloat in its “luminous weightlessness”.9 The enemy Orlando and Nivi share is the time of the clock, which in Woolf ’s novel is the time Orlando’s biographer attends to, eager as “he”10 is to plod “from deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office”, in pursuit of “his” subject’s truth, “on and on methodically” until both subject and biographer “fall plump into the grave” and the biography can reach its end.11 This linear, implacable temporality that Woolf associates with the “links and chains, binding the Empire together” is juxtaposed to “time in the mind” which derails and queers12 the movement of the clock, stretching an hour to “fifty or a hundred times” its length or contracting it to “one second”.13 As Pamela Caughie writes in her analysis of Orlando, time in the novel is synchronous and recursive rather than

8 Julia Kristeva, The Enchanted Clock, trans. Armine Kotin Mortimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 102. 9 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 103, 181, 273. 10 The sex and gender of the biographer remain ambiguous throughout the novel. 11 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1992), 4, 38. 12 This is the word Woolf uses to describe the “human spirit” and its strange effects “upon the body of time” (Orlando, 59). 13 Woolf, Orlando, 192, 59.

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linear. Past, present and future unfold as co-emergent virtual dimensions, hollowing out the body of time, exposing its porosity.14 In Kristeva’s novel the time of the clock takes on the body and virile power of a sovereign, Louis XV, the “beloved”, who died only 15 years before the French Revolution. Constructed by 18th century clock-maker Claude-Siméon Passemant, this sovereign embodiment of time stands for the pure mathematical object in the novel, a perfect machine that measures time and aspires to trap its cosmic, virtual, and qualitative dimensions in a beautiful gilded case. In her discussion with artist Anish Kapoor, Kristeva describes Passemant’s clock that is programmed to track the passing of time until 9999 as an incarnation of the human desire to calculate the infinite.15 Kapoor, in his own turn, sees in it the pure abstraction of a temporality that is circular and eternal. He explains to Kristeva that, as an artist, he aims at leaving the perfect, closed body of time undone, transfiguring the pure mathematical object into an alchemical form that cannot be grasped and remains open to trans-formation.16 Similarly, in The Enchanted Clock Kristeva’s intention is to decapitate the sovereign body of time that satisfies our need to believe in “capital-M Meaning”. “Everyone was educated like that, everyone believes in Time!”, Theo, her astrophysicist lover and distant descendant of the 18th century clock-maker, tells Nivi. “They need time to reestablish the order of things, the social model, security, life! They need things to last according to their way…”.17 It is precisely this belief that both novels set out to undermine. This is why Woolf targets the uniform, inexorable pace of biography. This is why she gives her protagonist a life-transjectory18 that relativizes duration (to Orlando human life is of “prodigious length” and yet it passes “like a flash”)19 and dynamites our assumption that time is an accumulation of moments and that, as a result, the writing of a life is nothing but a syntactic parataxis of events. In The Enchanted Clock Kristeva draws on modern physics to remind her reader of the artificial 14 Pamela L. Caughie, “The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman”, Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 59, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 517–520. 15 Julia Kristeva, Anish Kapoor, “Dans les entrailles de Versailles: La face interne du jardin”, film by G. K. Galabov and Sophie Zhang. Accessed July 8, 2022. All translations from the original French are mine. http://www.kristeva.fr/kristeva-kapoor-versailles.html. 16 See Anish Kapoor and Julia Kristeva, “Blood and Light”, 56. Accessed July 8, 2022. http:// www.kristeva.fr/PDF/Kapoor-Kristeva-Blood-and-Light.pdf. Both Kapoor and Kristeva focus on the fact that 9999 has no hands, emphasizing that time itself cannot be held, it cannot be kept captivated in a box. 17 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 64–65. 18 This is Caughie’s term in her analysis of Orlando as a transnarrative that crosses generic boundaries, “breaks down arbitrary historical divisions” and dynamizes temporality (“Temporality of Modernist Life Writing”, 503, 520). 19 Woolf, Orlando, 60.

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nature of time: “…time is virtual, just like money! It’s a fiction that links bodies and physical systems to each other”, Parker, Theo’s colleague, insists.20 If time does not have an independent reality of its own, if it is nothing but a series of relations among bodies or systems and if, as Philippe Sollers writes, “before” and “after” are merely “transitory conventions”,21 then time-travelling cannot be conceptualized as a movement from one temporal point to another, but as a medium of decomposing the linear flow of time, exploding the boundaries of a single lifetime, and crisscrossing the paths of different lives, plural “bodytimes”,22 and a multitude of beings in the world. In Orlando time-travelling takes the form of a fantastic journey from the 16th to the early 20th century. Orlando is born in Renaissance England as a man, changes into a woman in 17th century Turkey and continues to live as a married woman, mother of one child and a published writer in London at the beginning of the 20th century still in her mid-thirties. In The Enchanted Clock time-travelling unfolds as the protagonist’s interior voyage that enables her to enter into a series of transferential relationships with both historical figures living in 18th century France (i. e. Claude-Siméon Passemant, Louis XV, la Pompadour, the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet) as well as her intimates, that is, her son Stan, her lover Theo, her best friend Marianne and the patients she treats as an analyst. Through her imagination, Nivi is “transmuted into a time traveler” who comes to inhabit the presents of those she loves, cares for or is intrigued about.23 Time travelling for her entails as much a doubling of the self 24 as an ex-stasis; in other words, a step outside the self, a position of relinquishing all mastery.25 A “tightrope walker” balancing between past, present, and future, bathing in words not her own, infiltrated by strangers’ lives, she (like Orlando) remains ageless, forever open to rebirth and transformation.26 In both novels the ability to be (physically or psychically) reborn seems predicated on the protagonists’ determination to float outside time, to suspend ist flight or accelerate it, to live in what Nivi calls “vertical duration”, a fourdimensional spacetime which neither passes nor changes: “Time that flows for you is crushed for me”, Nivi confesses. “I swim in a whirlpool of endless chal20 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 154. 21 See the epigraph to The Enchanted Clock from Sollers’ The Intermediary. 22 This is a term used by Nivi to describe Proust’s characters who not only occupy space but have also “accumulated time” (Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 272). 23 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 57, 202. 24 Nivi says I “travel myself”, “je me voyage”, an expression that doubles the self as subject and object of the act of travelling, medium and product of the travelling process, giver and recipient of travel as a gift. See Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 58 and Julia Kristeva, L’Horloge enchantée (Paris: Fayard, 2015), 87. 25 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 33. 26 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 4, 66, 123, 184.

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lenges, failures, new starts, and new unfoldings”.27 As physicist Max Tegmark explains, the spacetime Nivi describes is static and non-divisible because in this temporal dimension the future is as real as the past and the past remains as open to multiplicity as the future.28 Orlando experiences the magic of this changeless Now towards the end of the novel as a pure metamorphic potentiality: “Nothing is any longer one thing. I take up a handbag and I think of an old bumboat woman frozen in the ice. Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors – as I do now, […] what is it that I taste? Little herbs. I hear goat bells. I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?”29 Yet, this enchanted temporality haunts and interrupts the linear time of biography from the very beginning of Woolf ’s novel. It exists as the virtuality of all the moments that make up Orlando’s life. It is anticipated as the plural receptivity of the present moment30 that will bring the novel to a closure, the Kairos31 that will disrupt linear chronology, bringing about the juncture among diverse times, spaces, desires or memories. For Nivi, the “dilated” instant in which she chooses to live works in similar ways, gathering “together distinct universes from scattered times”.32 Inhabiting these scattered times simultaneously, she (like Orlando) changes bodies: she “reincarnates herself as inventor of a clock, as mathematician at the court of Versailles, as king infatuated with science and his philosopher favorite, as astrophysicist chaser of bosons”. Transferring herself into others’ times and lives, she “makes herself a neobody in a neoreality”.33 In Woolf as in Kristeva, travelling in spacetime, inhabiting this enchanted Now that is the source of rebirth and metamorphosis also opens the protagonists to an immersive existence in and with the world. For Nivi and Orlando life resembles what physicists call “a braid in spacetime”; that is, an entangled structure of different moments of consciousness, past or emerging selves, encountered, cancelled out or virtual realities.34 In their introduction to a special issue focusing on post-qualitative research, Patti Lather and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre ask: “If we give up ‘human’ as separate from non-human, how do we exist? […] How are we 27 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 3, 4. 28 Max Tegmark, Το Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν μας (Αθήνα: Τραυλός, 2015), 424–425. All translations from the Greek edition are mine. 29 Woolf, Orlando, 199. 30 See Woolf, Orlando, 215: “…the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight”. 31 In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt Kristeva explains the ancient Greek meaning of the word “Kairos”. She writes: It “refers to the point that touches the end […], the dangerous critical point, the advantage, the right moment”. See note 4, p. 222. 32 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 58. 33 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 201. 34 Tegmark, Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν, 436–440.

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anyway in entanglement? How might we become in becoming?”35 In Orlando and The Enchanted Clock Woolf and Kristeva seek to reflect on such questions, exploring multiple possibilities. Significantly, as we have seen, this leads them to undo the fiction of time and suspend its linear flow. But it also demands that they posit themselves in what Kristeva describes as “an extreme time: the now of fiction”.36

The Hic et Nunc of Writing: Living in Entanglement While visiting Venice with her son, Nivi juxtaposes their time-travelling to that of “fake travelers” who “do not inhale the scents of the city, the colors, the lines, the lights, the years incrusted in the stones, the bells ringing the celebrations, nothing. They don’t listen to the summer disseminated by the ruby-red sun at some billions of years from another galaxy […]. They are in a hurry to buy, to shout, to eat, to telephone, to leave”.37 It is, indeed, no wonder that Kristeva’s Nivi is not only a time-voyager but also a swimmer who enjoys the feeling of losing herself in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, her body, “loaded with algae and iodine”, dissolving in the waves and the violet ô of the rays of the sun.38 Woolf ’s Orlando, on the other hand, is a flaneur/flaneuse who wanders off in country and city in search of tastes, textures, sights, sounds: “sights exalted him – the birds and the trees; […] the evening sky, the homing rooks”.39 In touch with the surrounding elements (the earth where oak trees and rose laurels grow, the fire of the stars, the air split by birds’ wings, the waters of Lake Serpentine or the Atlantic Ocean), neither of the two protagonists sees the self as separate from the world around them. What they find in the ecosystem enfolding them is a sort of reliance, a maternal connection that supports, protects and holds them together.40 For Nivi the maternal element is water, while Orlando feels a closer bond with the earth. Nivi feels reborn in the waters surrounding the Ile de Ré in France.41 Orlando takes solace lying down on earth to feel its spine beneath 35 Patti Lather and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, “Post-Qualitative Research”, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no. 6 (2013), 631. 36 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 59. 37 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 245. 38 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 9–10. 39 Woolf, Orlando, 5. 40 Kristeva has elaborated the concept of “maternal reliance” in a recent essay. She defines “reliance” as a binding/re-binding structure within the speaking subject traced back to the period of gestation when the maternal body functions as a holding receptacle for the newly conceived life. See Julia Kristeva, “Reliance, Or Maternal Eroticism”, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Vol. 62, no. 1 (2014), 69–85. 41 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 9–10.

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him: “for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be”. Both the earth and the oak tree function like holding receptacles for Woolf ’s protagonist: “something which he could attach his floating heart to”.42 When Orlando, the man, is disillusioned by men and women equally, he turns to “dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush”.43 Man or woman, Orlando experiences a sense of continuity and belonging in her connection with nature and, especially, in proximity to her favorite oak tree.44 Her developing manuscript about the oak tree acquires a life of its own and becomes a kind of talisman for her.45 At the end of the novel when Orlando slips closer and closer to the enchanted Now that opens up the virtuality of time and multiplies the self, it is to the oak tree she returns, feeling “she was riding the back of the world”.46 Nivi, in her own turn, identifies with another swimmer, a white swan who slides “at the intersection of the elements”, “folding sky and earth onto the water”.47 The swan whom she calls Leibnitz, epitomizes for Nivi the Leibnitzean theory of the monad: each individual substance needs to be seen as a microcosm of the universe. Similarly, the swan (moved by the wind, warmed by the rays of the sun, broken in movements or parts and recomposed in the halo of the moon) “sketches an affinity between the elements and the bodies; he reveals the gradation in everything”.48 If every individual substance is a point opening to infinity, if trees (like our own bodies) are born from the fire of the stars,49 if indeed, as Tegmark insists, “we are as much in the universe as the universe is in us”,50 then it is significant that, for both protagonists, to be is to engage in an endless process of becoming. Metaphor turns out to be the vehicle of this temporal, subjective, elemental, cosmic becoming activated by the Now of metamorphic possibility: “I felt time live”, Nivi tells us at the end of the novel. “The garden brought itself to me; I ran to it. […] I absorbed the rhythm of the laurels; I was one of them. A brown then wine-red bud, I became raspberry and opened into the bundles of scarlet stars saluting the sun. […] I was butterfly, bee, pearl of dew, pollen, petal, twig”.51 Life is, then, a process of entanglement between body, flower, insect, sun, sky, earth, tree. Driving through the park in London, Orlando feels that “her mind had become a

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Woolf, Orlando, 7. Woolf, Orlando, 58. Woolf, Orlando, 63, 153, 159–161, 212. Woolf, Orlando, 68–69, 105. Woolf, Orlando, 212. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 227, 229. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 228. We “are made of stardust”, Tegmark writes (Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν, 108). Tegmark, Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν, 28, 108. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 313–314.

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fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely”.52 Equally fluid or, perhaps, plastic (like her swan), Nivi dissolves into waves and stars, she becomes an “iceberg that melts”, a “polar bear that drowns”, a bird floating “in the sky like the smile of the Cheshire cat”.53 Metamorphic and metaphoric, transtemporal and transhuman, life in Orlando and The Enchanted Clock is the intensity of a dilated Now (the now of flowering, the now of the “red, thick stream” of blood, “bubbling, dripping”)54 and at the same time it is excitedly anticipated, like Woolf ’s kingfisher, its blue wing “flashing from bank to bank”, or her wild goose that arrives at the end of the novel along with the “cold breeze of the present”, remarking the hic et nunc of Woolf ’s writing: “the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight”.55 In both novels the nowhere of fiction, this spacetime where “[e]verything is possible, and everything eclipses”,56 enables the writers to convey the vibration of the NOWhere of life, language turning into flesh, the words experienced “like ripe nuts from a tree”, the “steel-blue feather” of a wild goose,57 the foliage of a rose laurel, the murmur of a wave or the sonority of blood.58 But the reverse process is also true: The NOWhere of fiction (the expanding, plural instant of writing) alleviates the nowhere of life, its caesura in a detained temporality that brings the subject to the frontiers of death.

Time Unbound, Time Regained An aspect of Orlando which, in my view, has not been appreciated enough – compared with the amount of work devoted to Woolf ’s engagement with the tradition of biography, her use of fantasy and her critique of gender binarism and heteronormativity – is the novel’s subtle treatment of psychic trauma. Indeed, it is important to recognize that the scandal of Orlando’s rebirth as a woman is a possibility arising out of the protagonist’s attempt at working through suffering and his repeated experiences of psychic death. The first of these experiences, when Orlando feels the loosening of the braid of life and has a sense of uprootedness from the protective receptacle of the earth, is when Sasha, his first love, abandons him: “Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Woolf, Orlando, 205. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 5, 10, 228. Woolf, Orlando, 192–193. Woolf, Orlando, 192–193, 215. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 59. Woolf, Orlando, 206, 215. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 167, 314.

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be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings”.59 The pain is so intense that Orlando falls into a trance-like sleep. A week later, he awakens apparently the same. Yet, the biographer notes: “some change, it was suspected, must have taken place in the chambers of his brain, for […] he appeared to have an imperfect recollection of his past life”.60 The change is more apparent after his second experience of trance, at a moment of both political and subjective crisis,61 when Orlando finds out that, overnight, he has become a woman. Woolf in Orlando is clearly invoking subjective experiences of psychic arrest that she herself had succumbed to throughout her life. Rather than represent these states of emergency as a definitive rupture that brings the subject closer to an imminent end, she instead suggests that they can become the source of a rebirth, making possible a new beginning for the subject. Indeed, Woolf ’s biographer and narrator does not hesitate to hint at the therapeutic potential of these experiences of psychic and temporal stagnation: “But if sleep it was, of what nature […] are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures – trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life forever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence?”62 In The Enchanted Clock both Nivi and Stan are seized by comatose states, which Nivi calls “internal coups d’état”.63 In her psychoanalyst’s voice, Kristeva’s protagonist describes what feels like dead time or, in other words, the eruption of death within the bounds of life: “Whether the violence of the shock is internal or external, illness or aggression, your intimate state explodes; you are dispossessed of it. Neither being nor nonbeing: annihilation”.64 Like Woolf, Kristeva exposes her readers to the suffering entailed in these crises that force the subject “to walk in death’s footsteps”: “Nothing moves forward, and no one notices that I’ve left this world. Where I am there are two translucent membranes with veins of mauve silk threads that separate me from life. I feel them shiver, inside”.65 While in Woolf the impact of these traumatic psychic states is softened by the frame of fantasy, in Kristeva their banal, inescapable reality is emphasized: “There are so many, there will always be some […]. They can happen during any time of one’s

59 Woolf, Orlando, 35. 60 Woolf, Orlando, 39. 61 On the night when Orlando is appointed Duke, receiving the “Most Noble Order of the Bath” an insurrection of the people in Turkey occurs, which is, however, suppressed by the British army. On the same night Orlando gets married to a certain Rosina Pepita, a “gipsy” (82–83). 62 Woolf, Orlando, 39–40. 63 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 118. 64 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 115. 65 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 118, 113.

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life, and their goal is to expropriate or at least deviate a life to the point of destroying it”.66 According to Kristeva, this is one of the lessons Freud has passed on to us. In Intimate Revolt she discusses the Freudian revolution as involving a “narcissistic humiliation inflicted on consciousness-time”.67 As she explains, Freud inscribes “a rift there, a breach, a frustration” or, in other words, what she calls “the scandal of the timeless (Zeitlos)”. The Freudian Zeitlos is defined as a “caesura specific to temporality in revolt”.68 It breaks with both biological time and the linear time of consciousness, opening up the subject to the unbinding that death is, that is, to a radical dissolution of ties – including the subject’s bond with life.69 In her analysis of Freud’s subversion of temporality, Kristeva insists on the significance of his intervention, which (on the footsteps of Copernicus and Darwin) contributes to the decentering of the human and to the critique of “anthropomorphic consciousness”.70 In suggesting that “death takes its time in time”, Freud succeeds in “taming” and dedramatizing death, integrating it within a posthuman perception of life as “timeless biothanatology”.71 From this perspective, it is clear that for Freud posthumanity is nothing but a potential specific to the human, defined as this distinct animal species that endures death (repeatedly) and learns how to live on. Remarkably, Woolf acknowledges as much in Orlando: “Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? […] Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week and then come to life again?”72 In Intimate Revolt Kristeva focuses on the psychoanalytic process of working-through as one of the psychic configurations of the Freudian Zeitlos. As she writes, “working-through removes the psychical process” from “the flow of consciousness (in linear time)”.73 It produces what Nivi calls an “artificial coma” which enables the subject to negotiate with suffering and negativity.74 It “presents itself as a dead time, while in reality there is an acceptance” of repressed drives and the inevitable intimacy of death.75 Nivi emphasizes this impossible symbiosis between life and death as much as the biographer in Orlando does: “…life is a cascade of birthings and rebirths, to be

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 114–115. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 28. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 30, 25. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 32. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 28. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 32, 33, 40. Woolf, Orlando, 40. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 36. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 113. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 36.

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and not to be”, she tells the reader.76 Speaking of her internal coups d’états, she assures us that they can become “coups de théâtre, new beginnings”, if only we dare venture into multiple reliances, discover new objects of love, translate our psychic limbo into “a nameless novel”77 or into poetry: “a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice”.78 Although, as Nivi acknowledges, the “suffering does not cease”, the psyche’s exposure to unbound time can become a “passage, a cry of delivery” that helps the subject regain time, reconnect with its rhythm and reinvent the self: “I come back to life – a life of expansion, a stranger to myself”.79

Indifferential desire and a Metamorphic, Bisexual Imaginary In her 2010 intervention in the debate around the problematic of androgyny in Woolf, Brenda S. Helt demonstrates that, rather than promoting an androgynous ideal, Woolf is critical of early 20 th century theories of androgyny and the androgynous genius, insisting instead on the need to recognize “women’s ordinary bisexuality”.80 Helt argues that, despite a growing consensus among her friends and fellow-writers, Woolf resisted the conflation of “desire and sexual identity” and “challenged trends to construe same-sex desire as a distinguishing characteristic of a sexual identity type”.81 Reading Woolf ’s employment of bisexuality as “an epistemological and aesthetic strategy”, Helt convincingly supports that Woolf “disentangles bisexual desire from androgyny”, thus proliferating “the imaginative and creative possibilities associated with the gender-nonexclusionary polymorphous mutability of desire”.82 She concludes her introduction by inviting her readers to consider the cost of missing the significance of Woolf ’s refusal to reduce questions of desire to the now familiar terrain of identity politics. She writes: “This proliferation reflects an epistemological battle that Woolf and others lost, and that loss is now legible to us in the cultural tendency to […] ignore the prevalence of bisexual desire in favor of one of two mutually exclusive and value-laden dyadic opposites”.83 In her insistence on historicizing Woolf ’s subtle approach to androgyny and bisexuality, Helt leads us to acknowledge that the experimental anarchy that 76 77 78 79 80

Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 114. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 115, 306. Woolf, Orlando, 213. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 205, 40. Brenda S. Helt, “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf ’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity”, Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 56, no. 2 (Spring 2010), 140. 81 Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 131. 82 Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 132. 83 Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 132.

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marked the early twentieth century sexual landscape has failed to undermine binary thinking substantially. In response to patriarchal and heteronormative oppositions (man/woman, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual), it has ended up proliferating binaries with a view to privileging non-hegemonic terms (straight/queer, normative/non-normative, binary/non-binary, cisgender/ transgender, etc.), in this way, preserving subjective fixations on identity in the name of the need to protect one’s “proper” difference. Rather than expose and suspend the function of identities for the sake of what Kristeva describes as “the infinite void” within sexed, gendered and sexualized bodies,84 21st century feminism remains caught within the vicious circle of a modern politics of recognition, which, as Robin Truth Goodman astutely shows, is currently exploited by and adapted to neoliberal demands.85 In the face of an increasingly systematized commodification of past signifiers, symbolic objects, identities and energies of liberation, it seems that the battle Woolf lost continues to matter to us. If this battle involves the reclamation of what in Orlando she calls “natural desire […] in whatever form it comes”86 and of a concept of bisexuality that is not posited as yet another identity but is mobilized as the ordinary force of exploding all key matrices of sexual or gender classification, then returning to the battlefield where Woolf was defeated may literally necessitate the taking of a new turn in 21st century feminism. This needs to be seen as parallel to the 21st century philosophical turn Watkin describes, away from the privileging of difference that has dominated continental philosophy since the 1960s towards more contemporary tendencies to invest, instead, in indifference. Our century, he argues, will be “the age of indifference”; “future thinking” is “unthinkable without indifference”.87 In his analysis of Agamben, Watkin defines indifference as the suspension of all binary, oppositional difference – including the opposition between identity 84 See Kristeva and Kapoor, “Dans les entrailles de Versailles”. In the context of her discussion with Kapoor, Kristeva compares the void within the body to the invisible dark matter that physicists believe is abundant in our universe. She therefore emphasizes that it is not “nothing”, but the source of “our infinite possibility to imagine, to think, to desire”. 85 See Goodman’s Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2022). In her striking opening paragraph, Goodman argues: “Gender has become a commodity. Gender can be bought and sold, produced as an object, and demands constant work. Commodifying gender turns subjects into objects: made, circulated, exchangeable, and up for sale. Gender commodity confronts us as something alien. Gender commodity promises security in a world made insecure through the commodification of our bodies, identities, contextual lifeworlds, and subjectivities” (1). See also Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, “Notes for a Feminist Manifesto”, New Left Review 114 (Nov.–Dec. 2018): 113–134. Arruzza et al. point to the cooptation of “once-taboo sexual practices” and non-binary, non-heteronormative identities by market forces and neoliberalism (125–128). 86 Woolf, Orlando, 192. 87 Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 52.

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and difference. The “indifferential method”, as Watkin calls it, involves exposing “the opposition at the heart of a system” in order to question, render it unclear or suspend it for a period.88 In this way, indifferentiation neutralizes “elements belonging to opposing sets” and, through the reduction of their particular qualities, it singularizes them.89 He explains: “such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set […] and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but its being-such, for belonging itself”.90 In this essay I want to argue that the bisexual imaginary Woolf as much as Kristeva cultivate functions in precisely these terms, that is, as an indifferentiating force that introduces failure or “periods of inoperativity” within binary, oppositional systems of thought.91 Thus, in Orlando the protagonist’s (initially bodily and gradually cultural) change “from” man “to” woman is not, as Helt has emphasized, a proof of the character’s androgyny. On the contrary, the change is employed by Woolf as a strategy that neutralizes binary gender norms, exposing them as cultural conventions or contingent labels imposed on embodied subjects by a series of institutions, discourses or practices. Though Orlando learns to adapt to historically and culturally different gender demands, she does so playfully and with full knowledge of the contingency of these demands. What remains remarkable in this novel is not the transformation itself but Orlando’s nonchalant indifference to her bodily reconfiguration. If Woolf ’s protagonist shows no “signs of discomposure” as she looks at herself in the mirror,92 this is because embodiment in the novel is not reduced to genitality. It may be “a strange fact”, as the biographer acknowledges, but Orlando “up to this moment […] had scarcely given her sex a thought”93 – and she remains unconcerned, passing through multiple shapes of embodiment, cross-historical, transtemporal, transgender, cross-human: “he was like a million-candled Christmas tree”, “he moved like a stag”, “she was man; she was woman; […] She was a feather blown on the gale”, “a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean”, “a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well”.94 Always (differently) embodied, culturally Orlando is “either” man “or” woman and yet she fails to belong to one 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 14, 41. Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 41, 68. Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 68. Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 14. Woolf, Orlando, 87. Woolf, Orlando, 97. Woolf, Orlando,30, 78, 100, 162, 203. This is also true of Orlando’s lovers whose description remains indifferent to sex (or gender): “He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow” (18). See also p. 162.

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or the other set. She fails again and again, confronting both her interlocutors and the readers with repeated moments of undecidability.95 It is Orlando’s inability to belong, her resistance to existing standards of classification, that gives her “conduct an unexpected turn”.96 While androgyny invokes, as the biographer reminds us, a “mixture […] of man and woman” or “a vacillation” from one to the other,97 Orlando does not combine masculine and feminine characteristics, leaving them intact. Through her mode of being and relating to others, she reduces the particular qualities of each sex to a set of clothes, the superficial styling of the body. In doing so, she exposes the normative function of sex and gender identities and renders them inoperative, affirming instead the value of “being-such”, in other words, the unclassifiable singularity of bodies and entangled beings. As we have seen, in his study of Agamben, Watkin connects the concept and method of indifference to a process of singularization. Drawing on Agamben’s analysis of Duns Scotus’s distinction between “quiddity” and “haecceity”, he emphasizes that for both philosophers indifferentiated being is not “whatever being”, “it does not matter which”, but “being such that it matters”.98 Clearly then, indifferentiation as the medium-process of singularization is inextricable from inclination. As Watkin explains: “Indifference with respect to properties individuates and disseminates singularities, makes them lovable (quodliterable)”.99 It is in light of Watkin’s analysis that we can appreciate Helt’s insistence on foregrounding desire as central in Woolf ’s understanding of both bisexuality and artistic creativity: “For Woolf, it is not the ability to think both ‘like a woman’ and ‘like a man’ that enables artistic creativity and production, but rather the conscious indulgence of the mind’s capacity to range freely and contemplate openly all desires, even those that are socially proscribed. Thinking through desire, not sex or sexuality, is central to her concept of the artist”.100 Bisexuality, then, in Woolf is the cipher for this “thinking through desire” which singularizes both desiring and desired beings, indifferentiating gender oppositions and norms. Bisexuality is not yet another sexual or gender category, labelling the love of both man and woman. It is a mode of living (always) in entanglement, driven by inclination towards this body, this being, such as it may appear, whatever it is (a girl in Russian trousers, a fox in the shape of a treacherous woman, an ordinary girl working in the streets, a Romani dancer called Rosina Pepita, a man with a

95 96 97 98 99 100

Woolf, Orlando, 121–122, 125. Woolf, Orlando, 121. Woolf, Orlando, 121. Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 66. Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 71, 72. Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 153.

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“wild, dark-plumed name”).101 As one of our foremost gender theorists, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, has argued, “[d]esire has a terrifying precision” and no identities, vocabularies or taxonomies we may invent can do justice to it.102 According to Helt, it is a similar conviction that “compels Woolf ’s art” and that informs the bisexual imaginary she persistently cultivates in her work. This is why she “criticizes all assertions of the knowability of desire and of stereotypical identifications based on that presumed knowability”.103 Rendering all kinds of identifications inoperative, suspending and multiplying terms, neutralizing the specificity of categories, bisexuality in Woolf takes on the same ordinary, indifferentiating sense that Halberstam associates with postmodern figurations of transsexuality. He writes: “…within a more general fragmentation of the concept of sexual identity, the specificity of the transsexual disappears. […] we are all transsexuals. There are no transsexuals”.104 In Kristeva’s thought bisexuality has the same indifferentiating and singularizing function. Like Woolf, Kristeva is careful to distinguish between androgyny and bisexuality. In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt she associates androgyny with “fulfillment”, omnipotence, the “fantasy of […] totality”, the denial of subjectivity as “open structure”.105 In “Guerre et paix des sexes” she describes the contemporary emergence of a “unisex” that “masks the polymorphism claiming a multiplicity of desires”: “I am man and woman, yells the spoilt spectator of the universal Star Academy. A third sex which is everything, that is nothing, angel or androgyne, I want everything and claim all the rights”.106 By contrast, the concept of bisexuality she theorizes does not synthesize opposites in a fantasy of totality but works to expose the illusionary nature of the very signifier of difference, namely the phallus as “the favored actor in the 0–1 binarism that founds all (marked/unmarked) systems of meaning”.107 This is why she argues that this form of psychosexuality is transphallic, that is, it cannot be contained within the phallic order of oppositions: visible/invisible, to have/not to have, masculine/ feminine. Drawing on Freud’s own understanding of the term, she argues that psychic bisexuality is “polyphonic” and, though it is “more accentuated in women”,108 it is declined in a variety of cases, numbers, genders from individual 101 Woolf, Orlando, 162. 102 Judith Halberstam, “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity”, in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 127. 103 Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 142. 104 Halberstam, “F2M”, 126, 132. 105 Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 104–105. 106 Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 195; all translations from the original French are mine. 107 Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 97. 108 In Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and her “Prelude to an Ethics of the Feminine” Kristeva discusses Freudian bisexuality as distinct to female psychosexuality and in connection to

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to individual, from one whatever being to another. Psychic bisexuality, then, multiplies variations on one or more dominant traits, pushing these variations “to the limit, to the point of maximum singularity”.109 According to Kristeva, it is in this sense that Freudian bisexuality prefigures contemporary gender theories, mobilizing what we could call Halberstam’s indifferential plus de: i. e. more and more and yet no more. “It is a frightening, jubilatory freedom”, Kristeva writes, one capable of modulating “‘norms’, or even ‘identities’ themselves (man/ woman)”, into “dynamic concepts” open to the force of de-totalization and subject to constant change.110 In this light, it is not surprising that the protagonist and narrator of The Enchanted Clock introduces herself as “[n]ot in the least androgynous”.111 As we have seen, Nivi occupies a vertical spacetime that enables her to travel herself through multiple identities, times, sexes, bodies. In this changeless Now, Tegmark notes, ontological questions (i. e. who/what am I?) make no sense.112 This is why Nivi can offer “No answers” when she asks: “who am I in this fleeting, provisional time in expansion? […] Of what sex?”113 Like Orlando, Nivi realizes that once the fiction of linear time gets dispelled, a multiplicity of indifferentiated temporalities are released and, along with them, a multiplicity of selves. Woolf writes: “For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not […] all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit?”114 Similarly, Nivi describes herself as a “beehive of beings”: “I am fragmented, plural, polymorph. No ‘me’ survives this tourney. My heart, my brain, all my organs diffract and recompose in the heart of the beehive. […] I escape from myself, and a sort of swarm rebuilds, rebuilds me”.115 It appears, therefore, that for both authors bisexuality is perceived as a safeguard against the normalization, the rigidification of identification structures. It guarantees the openness and polyphonic nature of human subjects, becoming inextricable from a temporality of constant

109 110 111 112 113 114 115

what she calls the “transformative” feminine. See Julia Kristeva, “Prelude to an Ethics of the Feminine”, keynote speech, 51st IPA congress, London 24–27 July 2019, accessed July 8, 2022. http://www.kristeva.fr/prelude-to-an-ethics-of-the-feminine.html. For a brilliant discussion of Kristeva’s concept of the “feminine” and its development in her thought, see Nikolchina, “Indifferent Feminine”. Julia Kristeva, Colette, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 426. Kristeva, “Prelude”. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 4. The more accurate question, he argues, is “When am I?” According to him, this is a very complex question, given that “the crowd of our selves changes in time”. Tegmark, Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν, 423, 461. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 202; emphasis in the original. Woolf, Orlando, 201. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 292.

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rebirth. Elaborating on her concept of psychic bisexuality, Kristeva explains: “… whether I am man or woman, I recreate up to my sexual identity within a plasticity open to unheard of metamorphoses: I am an other with Rimbaud – man, woman, child, plant, animal, star. And more than a mental hermaphrodite, with Colette, I become the flesh of the world”.116 As in Orlando, the driving force of the protagonist’s bisexuality in The Enchanted Clock is what Nivi calls desirance, that is, “endless desire”.117 Nivi reflects on the increasing normalization of singular desires that were aberrant in the past: “The Web makes everything available for everyone; nothing is surprising, astonishing, or frightening. Where in the world can desirance possibly have got to?”118 In her resistance to the mediatization, pathologization and banalization of what needs to remain indifferent and, hence, singular, Nivi seems to share Woolf ’s refusal to reduce the precision of desire to particular, recognizable and classifiable sexual types. This is why in her time-travelling to the 18th century, she seeks to reclaim Émilie du Châtelet’s concept of “fire”, a “passion inherent in matter”, which she juxtaposes to Passemant’s automaton.119 While the latter aims at capturing the infinite, calculating and mastering time, Marquise du Châtelet’s fire stands for “infinite expansion […] The infinite within oneself and the infinite without oneself”.120 Nivi believes that the Marquise “dares to think up the inverse” of Passemant’s clock, investing in the value of “the incalculable and the useless”, exploring the singularity of a passion “that places happiness in the dependency of others. In the plural”.121 She associates Émilie’s fire with the force of attraction that brings and holds bodies together (the invisible dark matter within), the operation of the unconscious that surpasses reason,122 the cosmic dark energy that contributes to the infinite expansion beyond (and at the cost of) the self, across and within the universe. As Passemant suspects, the Marquise’s dark force “lies outside time”. It is “[s]omething like a lining doubling the universe, on which the clock would have no hold”.123 And yet, Nivi shares Émilie’s conviction that it can be experienced in the NOWhere of a singular, amorous encounter. “There remains one chance, a risk to take”, she claims: “…meet body to body, outside oneself, in oneself. […] Fragile desirance bursting out like the very first light. So vulnerable that its value is written […] with an interminable

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 216; emphasis in the original. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 185. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 185–186. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 134. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 144, 146. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 147, 157, 160. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 229. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 135.

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rosary of zeros: 0, decimal point, then 119 zeros behind it before arriving at the number 1”.124 It is because the value of desirance remains indifferent to the binary 0–1 (it is more than 0, though not fully 1) that it “splits off from platitudes”,125 infinitizes sex as much as gender and metaphorizes the singular body, rendering it a metamorphic body. In her analysis of Colette, Kristeva describes the metamorphic body. It is, she writes, “[w]ithout sexual identity, neither human nor something else but amalgamated to all identities and setting them all ablaze, it metamorphoses endlessly, permuting roles, desolidifying rifts and barriers, and expanding boundlessly to the dimensions of the cosmos itself”.126 As we have seen, this is how Nivi experiences her body-in-the-world, a sensorial body, porous to human and inhuman others, a loving/loved body, a touching/touched body, a feeling/felt body. But this is also how Woolf describes Orlando’s body, caught in perpetual passing: across adolescence and manhood, outside sameness and difference, beyond aristocracy, Britishness and any other class or ethnic identity, trans normativity-or-deviancy, through earth, water and air. Interestingly, in both novels the imaginary of such metamorphic bodies, carried away by an invisible fire within, succeeds in inventing new forms of relatedness and intimacy or, indeed, as Kristeva puts it, “a new amorous world”.127

Queering the Couple In her analysis of Orlando as a “new form of life writing”, Caughie argues that Woolf creates in this novel “a new model of home, marriage, and companionship”. Indeed, she adds, “Orlando’s relation to parents, husband and child are no more significant […] than her relation to lovers, servants, dogs, trees, and objects”.128 In the course of my discussion in this essay I have emphasized the protagonist’s entangled connection with the world around her, her immersive approach to nature and city, her building of singular connections across time, gender, class, ethnicity or species. Woolf does not merely expose and undermine sexual and gender categories but also conventional forms of amorous relationships and heterosexual marriage. Irrespective of the historical period in which she finds herself, Orlando dares engage in relationships that are perceived as scandalous: first with Sasha, a foreigner of ambiguous connections; then with 124 125 126 127 128

Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 186. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 186. Kristeva, Colette, 194. Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 217. Caughie, “Temporality of Modernist Life Writing”, 519.

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Rosina Pepita, “a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gipsy”;129 Nell, a prostitute and her circle of friends, and finally with Shel, a man-woman-child, a Victorian adventurer who lacks any sense of bourgeois respectability and earnestness. Through the distancing gaze of her biographer, Woolf lays bare the decorous emptiness of aristocratic match-making and the gendered codes of amorous flirtation at the court. Yet, she directs the sharp edge of her irony at the stifling ideology of coupledom in the reign of Queen Victoria. As soon as the age begins, Orlando experiences a growing feeling of dampness, creeping from both without (the soil, the wood, the walls) and within (in her mind and heart).130 Under the pressure of “the spirit of the age” that prescribes heterosexual marriage as the destiny of all,131 she is ashamed of her bare third finger and becomes overwhelmed with the sight of couples all around her: Couples trudged and plodded in the middle of the road indissolubly linked together. […] though they moved it was all in one piece […], they were somehow stuck together, couple after couple […]. It was strange – it was distasteful; indeed, there was something in this indissolubility of bodies which was repugnant to her sense of decency and sanitation.132

Woolf zooms in on the unhealthy, suffocating nature of the conventional heterosexual pair. She astutely traces the power of the two-headed monster that devours the singularity of each partner and banalizes feelings, sensations or any attempt at creativity. The figure of Orlando (bisexual, cross-gendered and singular in the extreme) serves to point to possibilities of amorous connection that remain the stuff of fantasy and the vectors of unsuspected futures rather than the sedimentation of all-too familiar pasts. As a lover, Orlando looks for what the beloved shares with no one else – despite and beyond sex, gender, race or class. To her the name of the beloved is not an index of essential character or origins but a poetic trope: “…he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. […] a name which had, in her mind, the steel-blue gleam of rooks’ wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake-like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things…”.133 No particular national language (English, French, Russian, Turkish…), no general linguistic code can express and contain the sensations, intensities, affects, impressions and tales that the lovers share between them and which form part of a secret and always inprogress amorous imaginary. This is why Orlando uses “a cypher language” to communicate with her lovers, an idiom that is odd and seems non-sensical to all 129 130 131 132 133

Woolf, Orlando, 83. Woolf, Orlando, 146–147. Woolf, Orlando, 153. Woolf, Orlando, 156–157. Woolf, Orlando, 162.

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but the partners in love.134 Through this idiomatic medium, Orlando and her lovers preserve their singular connection even within silence, across multiple absences and despite the distinct experiences of death that each of the partners has to go through.135 More importantly, the amorous world invented by Orlando and the unique others attracting her desire involves more than two, for no entangled, singular being in her relation to another can be reduced to a twosome, a couple of the same set or sort. In her relationship to Shel, Orlando remains plural and open to multiple other bonds. So does Shel, who changes names and shapes depending on his or Orlando’s desires and moods.136 The reconfiguration of amorous relationships which unfold outside dominant paradigms and involve a mobilization of bisexuality as we have defined it in this essay is, perhaps, the most striking convergence between Woolf ’s and Kristeva’s novels. In her “Prelude to an Ethics of the Feminine” Kristeva acknowledges that “[h]eterosexuality is and will continue to be the problem”, even in the increasingly changing sexual landscape and despite the proliferation of genders in the 21st century.137 According to her, if heterosexuality (this “fragile, late acquisition in the history of human cultures”) remains a problem for each subject, irrespective of gender and sexual orientation, this is because it has developed as “the psychization of genitality and of sexual difference, including bisexuality”.138 Due to its connection with procreation and the continuation of the species, it has also become inextricable from “the social pact”. It is, then, imperative to approach heterosexuality neither as a value nor as a norm, but as the discursive and imaginary site where “the mirage of the ‘primal scene’” and the fantasy of the couple continue to dominate, as attested to by different forms of popular culture. Kristeva writes: “The Couple: enigmatic, scandalous, detestable and therefore desirable”.139 In Colette she discusses the heterosexual couple as “a painful hypothesis”. If it exists, she argues, “it holds itself together only through the war between the sexes”.140 Is a peace between the sexes possible in the third millennium? Is it even desirable? If it is, what form would such peace take? Kristeva is convinced that it would have nothing to do with “Love” written “with a capital L” and the secular versions of “religious illusions”.141 A “new amorous world”, in her view, could only be founded on the singular genius of each sexed subject, rather than on the 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

Woolf, Orlando, 20–25, 184–185. Woolf, Orlando, 162, 168, 184–185. Woolf, Orlando, 165, 167, 168–169. Kristeva, “Prelude”; emphasis in the original. Kristeva, “Prelude”. Kristeva, “Prelude”. Kristeva, Colette, 294, 295. Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 217.

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revendication of any fixed identities.142 This is precisely what she attempts to demonstrate in The Enchanted Clock, the only one of her novels to the present (excluding her semi-autobiographical The Samurai) where, following Colette, she attempts to explore alternative conceptions of the heterosexual couple. In doing so, I suggest, she is taking up the amorous paradigm Woolf invents (daringly, playfully) in Orlando. Indeed, both Orlando and Nivi choose odd, volatile, semi-adolescent partners who take pleasure in adventurous activities, spend much time on their own and have an emotional intensity that is not characteristic of conventional masculinity.143 Like Orlando and Shel, Nivi and Theo are described as uniquely singular. Nivi tells us that her name means “‘My language’ in Hebrew” and it is true that Kristeva’s protagonist develops her own expressive, imaginary and conceptual idiom that deviates from anything taken as the general rule or norm.144 In her relation to Theo, she remains “alone”, “seule”, that is, “singular, unique, incomparable”.145 So does Theo whom Nivi calls “My sole. […] my Asteroid, my Alone other, my A”.146 Rather than erase the singularity of each partner, then, their love enhances it, it brings it about. Invoking the theologian Duns Scotus (as Agamben does), Kristeva reconceptualizes the amorous relationship as a singularizing agent: “I love: I want you to be”.147 Echoing Scotus’s insight, Nivi feels that, in the “endless now” of their encounter, Theo “has to happen”, each time as a singular event in the love story they are sharing.148 This is why in her extended love letter addressed to him, she insists that he is not a means to her, a medium that will help her deny her sense of lack or serve her egoistic interests: “You are neither a passage nor a door”, she tells him.149 In their embrace that leaves an enduring “handprint” on their bodies, all particularities disappear, each touch transforming and entangling, creating and annihilating: “…our bodies dilute into one flesh, efflorescence and discharge. Animal embraces, baby embraces, embraces of chaste and monstrous angels, forever sated and always unsatisfied, endlessly to start over, all genders combined, all given names exhausted, your name, my name, no name, ILY”.150 “ILY” is the lovers’ unique amorous code, their way of being there for the other, staying attuned, attending together to “the vibration of time”, sealing the faith that keeps them in complicity: “‘ILY’ is our 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 217. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 10. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 4. Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 26. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 8. Kristeva, Seule Une Femme, 26. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 258. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 6; emphasis in the original. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 7, 18–19.

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signature”, Nivi confesses, “as secret as Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, […] Magnetic field. […] The first Earth-like extrasolar planet, habitable. Incredible but true: ILY”.151 Nivi draws on the conceptual reservoir of modern physics in her attempt to translate her love for Theo outside a general linguistic code that has exhausted the metaphoric/metamorphic nature of words. To her, Theo is a “sidereal adolescent”, their connection from a distance imitates the reaction of a pair of quantum particles: “What affects me affects him, wherever he is”.152 In her unconventional love for her wayward lover, Nivi resembles Orlando in “trying out metaphors” that enflesh abstract thinking and enchant linear temporality with an amorous Now that indifferentiates the experiential frontiers between presence and absence.153 This way of being and loving together alone may be, as Nivi admits, “invisible to others, inconceivable for our friends, insane for ourselves”, but its effect is strong enough to bring about a yet “inaccessible meaning” of the term “couple”,154 transporting the lovers to what the Leibnitzean Émilie would call the infinity-point of the human.

Happiness: Making the World Dance As we have seen, Woolf ’s Orlando finds its climax at the present moment, an entangled Now that indifferentiates temporal dimensions, multiplies selves along with narrative possibilities, and activates metaphoric connections among different species, bodies or times, integrating the protagonist’s experiences of death into a luminous, vibrant celebration of life.155 Kristeva’s The Enchanted Clock is permeated by a similar affirmation of life, not as a denial but as an acceptance and transcendence of mortality. “Happiness” is invoked in both novels as precisely the possibility of such transcendence. It is not a utopian, escapist fantasy, but the NOWhere of a new birth,156 the ripples of laughter dissolving the body,157 the incandescent fire of desirance pursuing new forms of love “and stranger”.158 151 152 153 154 155 156

Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 62, 250, 9. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 10, 66. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 60. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 104. Woolf, Orlando, 176–177, 192–193. Towards the end of Woolf ’s Orlando, the protagonist gives birth to a son, an occasion for the biographer to burst into a celebration of life, natural desire and “divine happiness” (191– 193). In The Enchanted Clock Nivi’s friend, Marianne, gives birth to a daughter, Indira, who offers the protagonist yet another link to “the expansion of worlds” (207). 157 “Laughter” is Woolf ’s rebellious response to smug philosophical questions regarding the meaning of life (Orlando, 177). Laughter lies at the heart of Nivi’s faith in the possibility of happiness: “I will laugh to the end”, she tells us (Enchanted Clock, 10). See also pp. 7, 11, 49. 158 Woolf, Orlando, 192.

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Happiness is also, in Nivi’s idiomatic terms, a singularity impacted by the Leibnitzean infinite. In Orlando the infinite takes the form of the wild goose that no nets of words can capture159 but whose vision persists throughout the novel as what Helt calls “the beauty of the illusion” which, according to Woolf, makes “the world dance”.160 In Kristeva’s 1981 appreciation of Woolf, “dance” was synonymous with women writers’ failure, their inability to “dissect language”, as male writers have. Seen as inextricable from a body that is “asymbolic” and “spastic”, dance for Kristeva was a symptom of women’s estrangement from language, their melancholic writing.161 By contrast, in The Enchanted Clock “dance” becomes a figuration of what Nivi calls Je me voyage (“to travel myself”).162 Émilie’s “fire” that carries the sizzling force of daily death on to the happiness experienced by a shared passion, promises to “give the world lightness and movement”.163 It is here, then, in this desire to relieve the weight of the world and make it dance that Kristeva encounters Woolf again – anew. Significantly, in a 2013 conference presentation, Kristeva returns to the paradigm of dance. Approached as “one of the new languages of the human comedy”, dance is no longer an index of female hysteria, but is embraced as an important manifestation of the process she calls, borrowing a term used by Dante Alighieri, to “transhumanar”.164 This is a process critical of arrogant anthropocentrism and an individualist ideology that denies the singularity of each being and its multiversal (rather than universal) nature. It is associated with “the nimble movement of incorporated thought”165 and the function of imagination that helps us go beyond the human, yet “in human bodies and codes”.166 More importantly, to transhumanar is this attitude of indifferential happiness with which both Woolf ’s and Kristeva’s novels end. This is a kind of serenity, Nivi tells us, that is, a feeling of pleasure in being with others but also in not being,167 opening to the entanglement of more and more bonds while embracing the moments when no more bonds are left. In Woolf the name for this serenity is “ecstasy!”, experienced as a stillness (the hushed breathing of the world) in the awakening of a magical Now.168 In Kristeva serenity is this dispassionate passion that enables Nivi to relate to others, herself and the world 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

Woolf, Orlando, 204. Helt, “Passionate Debates”, 156. Kristeva, “Oscillation”, 166. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 120. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 134. Julia Kristeva, “Stockholm: Going Beyond the Human through Dance”, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXI, no. 1 (2013), 2. Kristeva, “Stockholm”, 1. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 273. Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 318. Woolf, Orlando, 214–215.

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“in perspective”, from the invisible eternity of the stars, the humble height of a blooming rose laurel, or the smile hovering over Luxembourg park in Paris: “The smile”, she assures us, “reigns upon the world, it is the world”.169

Bibliography Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. “Notes for a Feminist Manifesto”. New Left Review 114 (Nov.-Dec. 2018): 113–134. Caughie, Pamela L. “The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman”. Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 59, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 501–525. Goodman, Robin Truth. Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2022. Halberstam, Judith. “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity”. In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 125–133. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Helt, Brenda S. “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf ’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity”. Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 56, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 131–167. Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics”. Feminist Review 18 (Winter 1984): 56–73. Kapoor, Anish, and Julia Kristeva. “Blood and Light”. Accessed July 8, 2022. http://www.kri steva.fr/PDF/Kapoor-Kristeva-Blood-and-Light.pdf. Kristeva, Julia, and Anish Kapoor. “Dans les entrailles de Versailles: La face interne du jardin”. Film by G. K. Galabov and Sophie Zhang. Accessed July 8, 2022. http://www.kri steva.fr/kristeva-kapoor-versailles.html. Kristeva, Julia. “Oscillation Between Power and Denial”. In New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 165–167. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. – “About Chinese Women”. In The Julia Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, translated by Sean Hand, 138–159. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. – The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Vol. I. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. – Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Vol. II. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. – Colette. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. – Seule Une Femme. Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 2007. – Hatred and Forgiveness. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. – “Stockholm: Going Beyond the Human through Dance”. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy Vol. XXI, no.1 (2013): 1–12. – “Reliance, Or Maternal Eroticism”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Vol. 62, no.1 (2014): 69–85. 169 Kristeva, Enchanted Clock, 7, 318.

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– L’Horloge enchantée. Paris: Fayard, 2015. – The Enchanted Clock. Translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. – “Prelude to an Ethics of the Feminine”. Keynote speech, 51st IPA congress, London 24– 27 July 2019. Accessed July 8, 2022. http://www.kristeva.fr/prelude-to-an-ethics-of-the -feminine.html. Kkona, Christina. “Androgynous and Foreigner: Orlando’s Revolt”. In Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, edited by Maria Margaroni. London and New York: Bloomsbury (forthcoming 2023). Lather, Patti, and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre. “Post-Qualitative Research”. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 26, no. 6 (2013): 629–633. Margaroni, Maria. “The Vital Legacy of the Novel and Julia Kristeva’s Fictional Revolt”. In Kristeva’s Fiction, edited by Benigno Trigo, 155–173. New York, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject. Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Nikolchina, Miglena. “Born from the Head: Reading Woolf via Kristeva”. Diacritics Vol. 21, no. 2/3 (Autumn 1991): 30–42. – Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf. New York: Other Press, 2004. – “Indifferent Feminine: Kristeva and the Avant-Garde”. In Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism, edited by Maria Margaroni. London and New York: Bloomsbury (forthcoming 2023). Tegmark, Max. Το Μαθηματικό Σύμπαν μας. Αθήνα: Τραυλός, 2015. Walsh, Lisa. “Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras”. In Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner, 143–161. New York, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Watkin, William. Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1992.

Emanuela Ettorre

Thomas Hardy’s Idiosyncratic Posthumanism and the (Im)possibility of Entanglement

Thomas Hardy’s work helps us to conceive of the world far beyond the strictures of a polarized conceptual framework within which, to quote Val Plumwood, “the values and the areas of life associated with the dualised other are systematically and pervasively constructed and depicted as inferior”.1 In so doing, Hardy attempts to debunk a hegemonic cultural model based on “the Self-Other dialectics”, and with it, the concept of “difference as pejoration”.2 In their post anthropocentric spirit, Hardy’s writings call into question hierarchical relationships that deny equality and mutuality; they problematize gender identities built upon relations of power, and they equally recognize the intimacy and the vital interconnection between human and nonhuman animals. Hardy’s posthuman approach functions as a redefinition of the sense of the self in relation to those that exist on the ‘other’ side of the dualistic divide described by Val Plumwood, including both human beings marginalized by virtue of gender, and the nonhuman entities excluded because lacking those human features that make humankind ‘exceptional’. Thus, Hardy’s narrative and poetry quietly but effectively displace anthropocentrism, offering instead a strong sense that “the basis of our being [is] embodied, embedded and in symbiosis with other species”.3 To this extent, therefore, Hardy’s work suggests a new materialism before the fact, in which entanglement with nonhuman agentialities becomes a touchstone 1 Van Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York, Routledge1993, 47. As Van Plumwood further explains: “Hierarchies, however, can be seen as open to change, as contingent and shifting. But once the process of domination forms culture and constructs identity, the inferiorised group (unless it can marshall cultural resources for resistance) must internalise this inferiorisation in its identity and collude in this low valuation, honouring the values of the centre, which form the dominant social values. […] A dualism is an intense, established and developed cultural expression of such a hierarchical relationship, constructing central cultural concepts and identities so as to make equality and mutuality literally unthinkable” (Van Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 47). 2 Rosi Braidotti, “Four Thesis on Posthuman Feminism”, in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. by Richard Grusin, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 23. 3 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 67.

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of many of the most moving and important passages in his novels and verse. In line with Karen Barad’s theories, which stress the “performative”4 dimension of lived experience, and challenge “the separateness of any-‘thing’, let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans apart”,5 Hardy’s view of an “ecological posthumanism”,6 as Serpil Oppermann calls it, reasserts the importance of the nonhuman and of the “complicity of nature and culture”,7 thus suggesting an ethical correspondence between entities, and undermining the hierarchical hyperseparation that underpins environmental crisis. But in the same way that Hardy’s work problematizes human exceptionalism, it also brings into question human entanglement, by showing what may come of it in a world nevertheless dominated by a dualistic divide. In a selection of Hardy’s texts, those who recognize human entanglements may suffer for their awareness, particularly when they are themselves positioned on the ‘wrong side’ of the divide, like some of the female characters that inhabit Hardy’s work. With this tension in mind, the aim of this chapter is, therefore, to discuss and analyze the way in which Hardy dramatizes this tension – this confrontation – between humanist and posthumanist constructs in his depiction of the troubled lives of his female characters, who risk being exploited or reified, and in his portrayal of nonhuman animals, which are repeatedly reduced to objects of consumption. In my analysis, some of Hardy’s women, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the eponymous novel, and the Heiress, in the poem “Heiress and Architect”, are doomed to succumb in their search for an entanglement, while others, like Etherlberta Petherwin in the novel The Hand of Ethelberta, will lead an embattled life in order to survive and succeed, but at the considerable cost of self-sacrifice and of a ruling out of emotions. 4 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Qantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 133. 5 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 136. 6 Serpil Oppermann, “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocritic”, Relations, 4.1, June 2016, p. 26. For Oppermann, “Critical posthumanism […] maps what we can call ecological posthumanism that stresses the significance of complex environmental relations, perviousness of species boundaries, and social-ecological-scientific networks within which humans and nonhumans, knowledge practices, and material phenomena are deeply enmeshed. Understood this way, posthumanism amplifies the new materialist endorsement of […] the mutual involvement of discursive practices and the material world” (Oppermann, “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocritic”, 26). For Oppermann, such a recognition of a more-thanhuman-world (which acknowledges nonhuman agency as responsible in shaping the world) also means “remaking our cultural codes and changing our basic conceptual structures so that we become more sensitive to the radical liveliness of the world, which points to the significance of proximal relations between embodied, performative entities” (Serpil Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism. Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency”, in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 35. 7 Oppermann, “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocritic”, 26.

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In a conversation with William Archer, in 1901, Thomas Hardy referred to his practical philosophy in terms of meliorism. Refusing to be defined as a pessimist, he asserted: “my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and that Ahriman is winning all along the line […]. What are my books but one plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – to woman – and to the lower animals?”8 In his attempt to undermine the conventional polarity of human/nonhuman, to displace the concept of a species hierarchy, and to dissolve gender categories that evoke exclusion and disqualification, Hardy’s works often invoke mercy for the suffering of animals that have been reduced to mere commodities, in the same way in which they try to erase and rewrite the dominant representations of femininity, as it occurs in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where Tess is arrested and executed for murder, but is defined by the author as a “pure woman”, a woman whom he regards “as being in the hands of circumstances, not morally responsible, a mere corpse drifting with the current to her end”.9 She is, in many ways, “a victim of modern society”.10 Clearly, Hardy’s concern for women and animals is at the centre of his writings, and as Adrian Tait notes, “the predicament of both are essentially interwoven”.11 Thus, the inhumane practice of hunting and game shooting as playful rituals and fashionable activities, as described in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, emphasize the association between the nonhuman animals and the female protagonist – an association that accentuates their vulnerability as creatures, and their being “both precious and exposed to affliction”.12 In Phase the Fifth of Tess, “The Woman Pays”, Hardy’s “pure woman” is shocked by the gruesome sight of some pheasants left dying in agony after having been shot simply because hunters with a “bloodthirsty light in their eyes […] ran amuck, and made it their purpose to destroy life”:13 Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood, some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out – all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more.14

8 Thomas Hardy. Interview and Recollections, ed. by James Gibson, (London: Macmillan, 1999), 70. 9 Hardy, Interview and Recollections, 40. 10 Bruce Johnson, “‘The Perfection of Species’ and Hardy’s Tess”, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 41. 11 Adrian Tait, “‘A Merciful Man’: Thomas Hardy and the Thinking of (in)Humanity”, Fathom, 2016, 7. 12 Anna West, Thomas Hardy and Animals, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 11. 13 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 297–298. 14 Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 297.

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In the aftermath of a cruel shooting-party, the wood is littered with wounded animals, covered in blood, and almost asking for death. The lexical choice of the passage underlines not simply the subjection of the nonhuman, but also the effects of a gratuitous and unbearable violence embodied in the practice of hunting and shooting, which Hardy condemns, here as elsewhere. Most significantly, in this passage the narrator employs a female perspective, which allows him to better connect women and nature: Tess is a daughter of the Earth, a “flexuous and stealthy figure”,15 integral with to “lonely hills and dales” through which she walks, and in dealing with the non-human, she transgresses the natureculture divide. But this transgression has consequences, since it confirms a patriarchal society’s construction of her as more natural and, by extension, inferior. In this scene her life is comparable to the one of the pheasants: within the dynamics of the plot, Tess is somehow preyed upon, and in the misery of the birds, she actually reads her own feelings and her own predicament, trapped by essentialist simplifications about her own ‘femininity’ and second-class status within society. For Tess, confronted by the inevitability of (male) cruelty and its consequences, there seems little to do, except put an end to the birds suffering: With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come, as they probably would come, to look for them a second time.16

Not only do the creatures of the heath suffer the consequences of the survival of the fittest (the cruelty of Nature), they are also victims of the modern logic of consumption (the cruelty of Man), which ends in complete disregard for moral justice. Hardy reacts against this abject reification of the nonhuman; he identifies in the suffering of game birds, and in the slaughtering of animals for their flesh, the signs of society’s cultural and moral retrogression. Against that diminution, and through the figure of his female heroine, Hardy envisions the possibility of redefining the material self as entangled with the wider environment, and, to quote Stacy Alaimo, of “thinking across bodies”.17 Such a new materialist perspective highlights the constitutive entanglements that knit together human and nonhuman, matter and discourse, suggesting that they are only ever distinct or

15 Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 97. 16 Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 298. 17 Stacy Alaymo, Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self, (Bloomington & Indianpolis, Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

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separable in the moment, even as they constantly shift and change with every successive “intra-action”.18 Whilst we may be entangled, however, this is not how we really see ourselves; we are dominated, instead, by a sense of self as distinct and inviolable; and what good would come of collapsing this boundary? The figure of Tess is remarkable because of her ability to merge with her surroundings – to coincide her feelings with nonhuman subjectivities – but the reader is allowed to consider: what good comes of it in her existence? Isn’t Tess amidst the “expanse of verdant flatness, [the narrator wonders] like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly”?19 Ironically, it is exactly this imbrication with the earth that underlines the logic of her own inferior status, and facilitates her exploitation, whether as a field woman merging with a muddy field, or as a suffering subject feeling for the game birds whose slaughter she encounters, or as a naive and vulnerable young woman whom Alex rapes in the Chase, in a scene that articulates very precisely her loss of any sense of self.20 Even when, as a milkmaid, she is in perfect communion with the people and place, because “she appeared to feel that she really had a new foundation for her future”,21 she inevitably remains just another hard-worked farm-worker, no 18 “Intra-action” is the term that Karen Barad uses to denote a constitutive entanglement through which distinct entities (and identities) come into being, as opposed to “interaction”, which assumes that these entities pre-exist their entanglement. More specifically, in defining the theoretical framework of her agential realism she observes: “[t]he neologism “intraaction” signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual “interaction”, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. It is important to note that the “distinct” agencies are only distinct in a relational, not an absolute, sense, that is, agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements. Crucially, […] the notion of intra-action constitutes a radical reworking of the traditional notion of causality. […] A lively new ontology emerges: the world’s radical aliveness comes to light in an entirely nontraditional way that reworks the nature of both relationality and aliveness (vitality, dynamism, agency). This shift in ontology also entails a reconceptualization of other core philosophical concepts such as space, time, matter, dynamics, agency, structure, subjectivity, objectivity, knowing, intentionality, discursivity, performativity, entanglement, and ethical engagement”. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 33. 19 Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 120–121. 20 Even though the Chase scene remains ambiguous, and still invites contradictory readings of seduction, rape, violation or betrayal, I agree with Tony Tanner’s analysis according to which “Tess is caught up simply by being alive fecund and female. D’Urberville is that figure, that force, at the heart of the haze, the mist, the smoke, waiting to claim her when the dance catches her up (we first saw her at a dance and she can scarcely avoid being drawn in). It is in a brilliant continuation of this blurred narcotic atmosphere that Hardy has the rape take place in a dense fog, while Tess is in a deep sleep. Consciousness and perception are alike engulfed and obliterated” (Tony Tanner, “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, Critical Quarterly Vol. 10, no. 3, September 1968, 219–239, 223. 21 Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 124.

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matter how benign Dairyman Crick may be as a master. Hence, her ability to transcend self, helps her (and us) to see things differently; to feel with her the suffering of the game-birds; but at the same time it also renders her defenceless, at risk, insufficiently impervious, perhaps, to those entanglements that she would be better off resisting. In order to delve into the paradigm of entanglement within the sphere of femininity, Hardy’s poem “Heiress and Architect” takes on a strategic significance. Written in 1867, and later collected in Wessex Poems (1898), it includes notable instances of Hardy’s representation of women’s vulnerability, and of their tragic sense of self, which becomes still more evident in their search for entanglement with the more than human world. This is an attempt which makes them still more helpless, fragile, and at risk in their struggle to participate in the world’s material phenomena and in its constitutive intra-actions. The Heiress of the poem insistently asks an architect to build a place in which she can feel free, protected, and less exposed, whilst relishing the pulse of nature in all its enchanting variations: ‘Shape me’, she said, ‘high walls with tracery And open ogive-work, that scent and hue Of buds, and travelling bees, may come in through, The note of birds, and singings of the sea, For these are much to me’.22

In a way, and in Stacy Alaimo’s words, the Heiress is hoping for “the pleasures of inhabiting places where the domestic does not domesticate and the walls do not divide”.23 Significantly, the “high walls” for which she is yearning, are not meant to isolate her: they would project her into the external world, thus showing how interconnected her fate is with all the living beings. But the Architect is firm in his denial, even when the Heiress implores him to build for her a much smaller place where she could share her passionate dreams with other vulnerable creatures: ‘A little chamber, then, with swan and dove Ranged thickly, and engrailed with rare device Of reds and purples, for a Paradise Wherein my Love may greet me, I my Love, When he shall know thereof ?’ (CP, 76)

The Heiress’s requests are systematically rejected by the Architect, who embodies the dualistic logic that Plumwood interrogates and exposes – a logic based on the 22 Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. by James Gibson, (London: Macmillan, 1981), 75. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and are cited as CP, followed by the page number. 23 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed. Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 1.

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alleged superiority of reason over emotion, of culture over nature, and male over female. What the Architect denies the Heiress is an embodied, entangled way of life that would collapse this exceptionalist logic, and with it, the divisive sense of the (hu)man as superior to the nonhuman. The Architect literally limits her horizons, and in so doing, he denies (her) both the prospect of dreaming, and the possibility of creating a bridge between entities and across dualistic reasoning. In a world dominated by the rules and the voices of masculinity, the Heiress is silenced, and her desire for a dwelling – here intended in a Bachelardian sense, as a house that “shelters daydreaming”, “protects the dreamer”, and “has the powers of integration for the thoughts”24 – is ultimately and forcibly reduced to the choice of a microscopic space – a small garret in which to live in solitude and despondency: Then said she faintly: ‘O, contrive some way – Some narrow winding turret, quite mine own, To reach a loft where I may grieve alone! It is a slight thing; hence do not, I pray, This last dear fancy slay!’ ‘Such winding ways Fit not your days’, Said he, the man of measuring eye; ‘I must even fashion as my rule declares, To wit: Give space (since life ends unawares) To hale a coffined corpse adown the stairs; For you will die’. (CP, 76)

In a powerful anti-climax that underlines the claustrophobic tension of the poem, the two final stanzas cynically assert the triumph of disenchantment, which is materially reproduced by the concluding reference to the coffin, as the only place the Heiress seems to be doomed to inhabit.25 The Architect’s unsparing reasoning follows the logic of “self-entombment, of death in life”, because “[t]o live is to suffer; to avoid suffering is to thwart life”.26 Although this nihilistic position expresses Hardy’s own dilemma – a dilemma to which he gave expression throughout his literary career – it is also true that in the poem the figure of the 24 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated from the French by Maria Jolas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 6. 25 As U. C. Knoepflmacher most significantly maintains in his lucid and in-depth analysis of the poem: “with morbid glee, he predicts a future made up of successive stages of degeneration”. U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Hardy Ruins. Female Spaces and male Desires”, in Margaret H. Higonnet (ed.), The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 114. 26 Paul Zietlow, Moments of Vision. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), 13.

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Architect, as an “arch-designer” (l. 2), possessing a “cold, clear voice, and cold, clear view” (l. 8) is profoundly discredited. In denying the Heiress the possibility of contact with the natural world – the world of “buds and birds […] And scents, and hues, and things that falter all” (ll. 21–22) – he finally denies the material correlation of human corporeality with the more than-human-world. As the poem insists, the Heiress’s need for this constative intra-action cannot simply be reduced to a “wis[h] for an earthly paradise”, or dismissed as the whim of an “unpleasant narcissistic” woman who revels in her “exhibitionism”.27 She is begging for a place in which it is worth living – where living means coexistence with the sounds, scents, and colours – the actualities – of nonhuman nature. Alongside the Heiress and Tess, it is also relevant to include another remarkable female figure: the eponymous protagonist of The Hand of Ethelberta, a novel Hardy wrote and serialized in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine between 1875 and 1876. Ethelberta herself encounters the cruelty of animal consumption and the inhumanity of the (hu)man; in one of the most suggestive scenes in the novel, she realizes she cannot accept the attentions of a man who has no sympathy for the suffering of animals. The man is Alfred Neigh, “a terrible hater of women […] particularly the lower class”,28 and the descendant of a family that made its fortune by “the knacker business and tanning”.29 Ethelberta refuses the advances of Neigh at exactly the point when she discovers that, hidden away on in his estate, there is an extraordinary number of undernourished horses “in the last stage of decrepitude; the animals being such mere skeletons that at first Ethelberta hardly recognized them to be horses at all; […] These poor creatures were endeavouring to make a meal from herbage so trodden and thin that scarcely a wholesome blade remained […]”.30 But what appears still more disquieting to her eyes is the vision of an improvised, outdoors abattoir that will definitely provoke her firm reaction: Adjoining this enclosure was another and smaller one, formed of high boarding, within which appeared to be some sheds and outhouses. Ethelberta looked through the crevices, and saw that in the midst of the yard stood trunks of trees as if they were growing […]. Each torso was not unlike a huge hat-stand, and suspended to the pegs and prongs were lumps of some substance which at first she did not recognize; they proved to be a chronological sequel to the previous scene. Horses’ skulls, ribs, quarters, legs, and other joints were hung thereon, the whole forming a huge open-air larder emitting not too well a smell. […] The experience altogether, from its intense melan27 Frank Giordano Jr., “Allegory and Allusion in Hardy’s ‘Heiress and Architect’”, Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, no. 2, June 1981, 99–111, 102. 28 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. by Robert Gittings, (London: Macmillan, 1986), 140. 29 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 140. 30 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 139.

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choly, was very depressing, almost appalling. […] Ethelberta fancied at that moment that she could not have married Neigh, even had she loved him, so horrid did his belongings appear to be.31

Ethelberta realizes that that horrendous place is not far from Neigh’s kennel of hounds, and that the “poor horses [were] waiting to be killed for their food”32. Even though the narrator introduces the protagonist as a young lady who belongs “to that gentle order of society which has no worldly sorrow except when its jewellery gets stolen”,33 it is clear that this horrid vision destabilizes her so much that it shapes her matrimonial choices. Scenes of the starving horses waiting to be slaughtered, and later exposed in a larder, are not ones the reader would expect in a novel that Hardy himself defined as a “somewhat frivolous narrative”, “an interlude between stories of a more sober design”,34 and whose subtitle is “A Comedy in Chapters”; rather, it borrows from the Gothic, in ways that stress the absolute horror of the scene. This is no less true of Hardy’s depiction of Wessex as a whole. In the heaths and heathland, we hardly ever come across the pastoral archetypes that Northrop Frye connects to “the comic vision”, where “the animal world is a community of domesticated animals, […] or one of the gentler birds”. Instead, in the fictional topography of Wessex – despite the constant suggestion of a special empathy between humans and non-human animals – Hardy invites us to experience the effects of a “tragic vision”, where the animal world can be perceived in terms of “beasts and birds of prey”.35 One seminal example occurs in the first chapter of the novel, which becomes somehow emblematic of the heroine’s subsequent trajectory: once she reaches a lonely heath during a country walk, Ethelberta witnesses a hunting scene: a big moor buzzard with “a satanic moodiness”36 repeatedly tries to kill a wild-duck, whose only chance to survive is to fly “with the greatest violence”,37 and then to scream, to dive and disappear into a pond. The indisputable Darwinian intertextuality of this opening description can be related to the life of the heroine, based on a series of strategic actions and “schemes”38 she has to come up with, in order to survive and conquer her space in a world of men – a world in which she needs to appear “immeasurably the stronger” and “triump[h] in her superior control”.39 Thus, in this 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 139–140. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 140. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 1. Hardy, “Preface” to The Hand of Ethelberta, p. xxiii. Northrop Frye, “The Archetipes of Literature”, in Fables of Identity. Studies in Poetic Mythologies, 1963, 19. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 6. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 5. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 82. Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 88.

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novel the references to the nonhuman do not simply aim to represent an entangled vision, nor do they only encourage our ethical engagement with the other species; they also attempt to reproduce the struggle-for-life paradigm. Ethelberta is certainly extremely sensitive to the violence inflicted on animals; she sympathizes with the suffering creatures, and she is appalled by the brutality of the scene in Neigh’s estate; and in the battle for her life and livelihood, and through her own choices, she tries to reverse gendered dualisms and escape the kind whilst of biologic determinism whereby women are constructed as passive and weak. It is just such a condition of docility and submission that Ethelberta systematically subverts. Thanks to her strong character, and her ability to choose what is more convenient for her, she can adapt to different functions and roles in the novel: she is variously “girlish”, “womanly”, “good” and “wicked”;40 she is Berta Chickerel, the daughter of a butler, the beloved of four suitors, the story-teller, and finally, Lady Mountcleare, the wife of an old and rich Viscount. Thus, she is able to survive in a patriarchal society as a figure of transgression, and to rewrite her story as a woman. Unlike Tess and the Heiress, with fortitude and capacity for self-sacrifice, Ethelberta resists conventional gender roles and, as Jane Thomas maintains, she “projects herself beyond the limits of the available discourses of femininity into the realm of the indefinable”.41 Ethelberta is a writer; she is determined to adopt a role in life which is mainly masculine; for passion she substitutes reason and initiative, for feelings, wisdom and strategy, and through her readings of J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham, she finds (unlikely) inspiration for her life choices. As D. H. Lawrence later wrote, “The Hand of Ethelberta marks […] the zenith of a certain feeling that the best thing to do is to kick out the craving for Love and substitute common sense, leaving sentiment to the minor characters”.42 It is exactly this kind of defensiveness and protectiveness, this reaction against the sense of her own permeability that allows her to construct a strong sense of self, a defensive shell that will allow Ethelberta to survive and avoid being crushed because of her sexual identity. If anything, notes Richard Reeve, she is “not a victim primarily of external events but of her own ambition”.43

40 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, 54. 41 Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent. Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels, (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 95. 42 D. H. Lawrence, “Study of Thomas Hardy”, in Selected Literary Criticism, (London: The Windmill Press, 1955), 170. 43 Richard Reeve, “Class and Tragedy in The Hand of Ethelberta and A Group of Noble Dames”, The Hardy Society Journal, Vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2022, 64.

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Even though some of Hardy’s contemporaries and critics considered the novel a failure,44 The Hand of Ethelberta is an important textual experiment in its attempt to demystify social and fictional conventions as well as sexual relations. As underlined by Robert Gittings, the novel significantly entails a trajectory in which the female protagonist has to cope with a world “of predatory selfconfident males”, and “[f]or a moment, Ethelberta is as much a victim of a cruel world as Tess among the dead and dying pheasants of the later and greater novel”.45 The difference, of course, is that Ethelberta survives as Tess does not, by resisting through adaptation in her own struggle for life, in an intimately entangled world. In conclusion, these three female protagonists – Tess, the Heiress, and Ethelberta – reflect Hardy’s complex response to the related predicament of all those ‘creatures’ (notable women and nonhuman animals) preyed upon by a patriarchal society, whose logic of domination depends on a dualistic divide between encultured, rational male, and instinctual, feminised nature. On the one hand, these female figures embody the entangled nature of human existence, as itself an animal life, constitutively connected to its more-than-human environs, but on the other, and through his presentation of their widely differing fates, Hardy asks the important and awkward question – what comes of that entanglement, when it is used by society as an excuse to oppress those it deems inferior by virtue of those self-same entanglement? This begs further questions, not explored here, about the impact of this process of hyper-separation on Hardy’s male protagonists, who have cut themselves off from their own constitutive entanglements, their own affective engagements. In his portrayal of these female characters, however, Hardy presents entanglement as a kind of curse, a part of life’s trials, over which women must find some way to triumph if they are to survive or thrive. Thus, Ethelberta emerges as one of the most fascinating female figures in Hardy’s oeuvre precisely because she refuses to succumb to this logic of male domination, even if the only way in which she can do so is by taking on some of its qualities (of cold-blooded rationality, for example, or of a self-conscious separation from those dimensions of lived experience that might also permit her own subjugation). It is a crippling and in a way life-denying 44 In January 1890 George Gissing defines The Hand of Ethelberta as “surely old Hardy’s poorest book” (Pierre Coustillas (ed.), London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England. The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist, (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1978), 236. Even Edmund Gosse, in The Speaker (13 September 1890) treats the novel as a “partial failur[e]”, and R. H. Hutton in the Spectator (26 March 1887) maintains that The Hand of Ethelberta “lowers the art of [Hardy’s] works quite as much as it lowers the moral tone” (Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. by R. G. Cox, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 168 and 143. 45 Robert Gittings, “Introduction” to Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, (London: Macmillan, 1992), xxii.

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choice, a compromised choice, but here, too, it exposes the dualistic divide that unites Hardy’s suffering creatures, and whose moral and social iniquity it was his purpose to expose. There is, as he understood, no easy way in which to circumvent or transcend the humanist assumptions of his day and ours; no easy way, that is, to achieve a posthumanist position that distributes intrinsic worth equally or fairly across the various divides that dualistic logic instantiates, and Hardy interrogates.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington & Indianpolis, Indiana University Press, 2010. – Exposed. Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, translated from the French by Maria Jolas, Boston, Beacon Press, 1994. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Qantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013. – “Four Thesis on Posthuman Feminism”, in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. by Richard Grusin, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Frye, Northrop. “The Archetipes of Literature”, in Fables of Identity. Studies in Poetic Mythologies, 1963. Giordano, Frank Jr. “Allegory and Allusion in Hardy’s ‘Heiress and Architect’”, Colby Quarterly, Vol. 17, no. 2, June 1981, pp. 99–111. Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. by Robert Gittings, London, Macmillan, 1986. – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. – The Critical Heritage, ed. by R. G. Cox, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. – The Complete Poems, ed. by James Gibson, London, Macmillan, 1981. – Interview and Recollections, ed. by James Gibson London, Macmillan, 1999. Johnson, Bruce. “‘The Perfection of Species’ and Hardy’s Tess”, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Harold Bloom, New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Hardy Ruins. Female Spaces and male Desires”, in Margaret H. Higonnet (ed.), The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1993. Lawrence, D. H. “Study of Thomas Hardy”, in Selected Literary Criticism, London, The Windmill Press, 1955. Oppermann, Serpil. “From Posthumanism to Posthuman Ecocritic”, Relations, Vol. 4, no.1, June 2016. – “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism. Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency”, in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2014.

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Plumwood, Van. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London and New York, Routledge, 2003. Reeve, Richard. “Class and Tragedy in The Hand of Ethelberta and A Group of Noble Dames”, The Hardy Society Journal, Vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2022. Tait, Adrian. “‘A Merciful Man’: Thomas Hardy and the Thinking of (in)Humanity”, Fathom, 2016, p. 7. Tanner, Toni. “Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, Critical Quarterly Vol. 10, no. 3, September 1968, 219–239. Thomas, Jane. Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent. Reassessing the ‘Minor’ Novels, New York, Palgrave, 1999. Zietlow, Paul. Moments of Vision. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1974. West, Anna. Thomas Hardy and Animals, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Sanja Sˇosˇtaric´

Gendered Transhumanist and Posthumanist Discourse in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It

The posthumanist turn in literary and cultural studies that began in the 1980s has undeniably capitalized on the postmodern and poststructuralist antihumanist tradition. Critiques of liberal humanist assumptions by postmodernists and poststructuralists in the late 20th century meant radical dissociation from the notions of the autonomous, rational, self-sufficient, white, healthy, heterosexual male subject as the timeless, universal and decontextualized norm of humanness. Posthumanist scholarship professes to have expanded and completed the postmodern antihumanist agenda by further redefining the human. This was prompted by the unprecedented development of technoscience in the late 20th century, accompanied by fresh insights into sub- and supraindividual life that developed in diverse strands of bioscientific, genetic, medical and related research. That such a claim is self-professed remains open to discussion, both outside and within posthumanist circles. Despite the efforts of the involved scholars to present posthumanist theory as a well-rounded, coherent and established theory of/for the 21st century, it is still notoriously fraught with incoherence, cacophony, terminological confusion and genealogic wars. Approaching posthumanism belatedly and slowly, and from an academic background anchored in literature and postmodernism, i. e. in antihumanist approaches that have thoroughly, lucidly, playfully and convincingly decentralized and destabilized the humanist subject together with the standard humanist package of would-be enlightened assumptions and misconceptions, I find it difficult to accept the thesis of a unique posthumanist breakthrough. Posthumanism simply seems to have been “becoming with” postmodernism in the late 20th century. Posthumanist scholars have recently reidentified Ihab Hassan (e. g., in the Preface to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman1) as the 1 Bruce Clark and Manuela Rossini, “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clark and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xi–xxiii.

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early harbinger of the end of the humanist era, and the first to suggest that “humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism”.2 Yet, Hassan was not the only one to address the issue early. At the beginning of the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler wrote about “the new mutants”, the American countercultural youth of the era, who were self-declared social and cultural misfits and “aliens”, and who opposed the nationalist, racist, misogynist, capitalist, homophobic American establishment. They redefined the notion of the human in accordance with postmodern identity politics, shunning the normative white masculine rational subject in favor of a more diffuse and hybrid identity and culture, which Fiedler dubs “post-humanist, post-male, post-white, post-heroic”.3 In his discussion of the ever-growing popularity of science fiction in the 1960s and its incorporation into postmodern literature, Fiedler attributes its appeal to its futurist bent, and its imaginative renderings of the narrative (which he calls a myth) of “the end of man, of the transcendence or transformation of the human”.4 Fiedler also recognizes the artistic fruitfulness of “the prospect of the radical transformation (under the impact of advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines), of homo sapiens into something else: the emergence […] of ‘mutants’ among us”.5 In this sense, Fiedler sees young Americans as becoming (or already being) posthuman, so science fiction mutants (exemplified by Arthur Clark’s) are only artistic projections into the future of what is already taking place: a profound transformation of the very notion of the human, which occurs not in fantastic settings but inwardly, in the minds and hearts of an entire generation. Fiedler interprets Clark’s science fiction as metaphoric, i. e.: “less prediction than description, since the post-human future is now, and if not we, at least our children, are what it would be comfortable to pretend we still only forsee”.6 Fiedler’s mutants are the new posthumans, referred to elsewhere in the article as the post-humanists, made so by virtue of the technological progress and affluence associated with the capitalist golden age. They are “drop-outs from history”,7 whose relevance they cannot or do not want to grasp. The mutants actively try to disengage “from the tradition of the human, as West (understanding the West to extend from the United States to Russia) has defined it, Humanism itself, both in its bourgeois and Marxist forms; and more especially the cult of reason – that dream of Socrates, redreamed by the Renaissance and surviving all travesties down to only 2 Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture? A University Masque in Five Scenes”, The Georgia Review 31, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 843. 3 Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, Partisan Review 32, no. 4 (1965): 517. 4 Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, 508. 5 Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, 508. 6 Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, 508. 7 Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, 509.

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yesterday”.8 Fiedler’s article is evidence that posthumanist issues have been an integral part of postmodern theory since it began. The desire to consolidate posthumanism as a unique theoretical position, or as a school of thought without precedent, has led to considerable reluctance from posthumanist scholars to openly acknowledge their debt to the antihumanist strands linked (to a greater or lesser degree) to postmodernism: critifiction, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, race theory, queer theory, and the historiographic turn in literature and literary theory. The posthumanist “anxiety of influence”, with the notable exceptions of Pramod Nayar, Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti, manifests as a tendency to draw attention to a few isolated influences, such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, or Irigaray, or to circumvent that tradition altogether and focus on technoscientific and bioscientific findings and theories. But the 1970s feminist science fiction that Donna Haraway explicitly names in A Manifesto for Cyborgs as her formative influence was the wild child of postmodern culture. Echoing an earlier postmodern demand (e. g., Fiedler and Sontag) to dismantle the high-brow division (of humanism) into high and low cultural forms – which has nowadays become the (often severely disputed) distinction between literary and genre fiction – figures of the posthuman in late 20th-century fiction were typically presented in subvarieties of science/speculative fiction. These included alternate history, cyberpunk, dystopia, utopia, space opera and any combination thereof. Posthumanities, which emerged in the late 20th-century, and much of the popular culture and the science/speculative fiction of the age, focused either on inter-species interaction (e. g., in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis cycle9), or on the human-machine interface. The latter was characteristically presented through the cyborg, which became a favorite “figuration of the posthuman”:10 a ubiquitous cultural, literary and critical trope, used to promote either technophobic or technophilic fantasies, depending on the cultural, theoretical or political preferences of authors, theorists and readers. Literary imaginaries built around the cyborg (which burst onto the scene in the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of the digital revolution and the Information age) predictably reflected a more general ambivalence toward potential directions the IT revolution might take, and the implications of this for the future of civilization. Literary and filmic cyborg imaginaries nourished the old retro-humanist fear of technology breaching human control, and posing imagined threats to human integrity and/or freedom. Alternatively, they encouraged an (over)enthusiastic 8 Fiedler, “The New Mutants”, 509. 9 The Xenogenesis science-fiction trilogy comprises Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989). The collection was published as Lilith’s Brood in 2000. 10 Clark and Rossini, “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman”, xiv.

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and uncritical celebration of technologically enhanced trans- or superhumans as a prescient projection of the inevitable and desirable future that the technoscientific progress of the age suggested. The most extreme scenarios projected high-tech worlds to follow the (trans)humans: civilizations of aliens, cyborgs, intelligent machines, AI, and disembodied consciousness. Posthumanist theorists generally link such fantasies to transhumanism’s inferior agenda: its promotion of sensationalist narratives that reconfirm its overemphasis on mind and cognition. Postmodern theorists, however, read these narratives as platforms for the subversive questioning of the dominant culture. Marge Piercy enthusiastically appropriated the cyborg in her fictional works of the early 1990s. By that time, Piercy was well known for her acclaimed feminist utopia Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Her combination of politics (socialist feminist) and the literary utopia/dystopia concept returned to the foreground with He, She, and It (1991).11 This novel weaponized transhumanist imaginaries to explore the liberating potential of technology for feminist purposes, and for the critique of (and violent resistance to) postindustrial corporate cyber-capitalism. Using A Manifesto for Cyborgs as an acknowledged intertext, Piercy literalized Haraway’s cyborg metaphor (for the ontological hybridity experienced and embraced by late 20th-century women) to imagine a postapocalyptic mid21st-century society in which women have claimed technology for themselves, and use it successfully against high-tech corporate capitalism. Piercy’s variation on the transhumanist theme promotes responsible feminist technophilia as a precondition of political liberation, regardless of whether we qualify her enthusiasm as utopian or not. Her literary cyborgs, whether human-based or nonhuman (again in line with Haraway’s article), represent both a thought experiment and a feat of artistic imagination. This invites us to reflect, in a postmodern-posthumanist fashion, on the possible implications of technology for the redefinition of the human and of socio-political relations. Piercy’s figurations of the posthuman refer to concrete, embodied cyborgian forms: e. g., the cybernetically enhanced female characters of Shira (the main protagonist), Malkah (her grandmother), Riva (Shira’s mother), and, most spectacularly, Nili, explicitly called the female cyborg. All of them represent Harawayan posthuman hybridity, liberated from anthropocentric and androcentric limitations. The central (thoroughly posthuman) figure, though, is the male cyborg Yod Oblensky, who/which defies the conventional boundaries between organic and non-organic, natural and artificial, and being and machine, and invites us to rethink the anthropocentric relation of the human to the machinic nonhuman, of the living to the artificial, and of the human creator to the nonhuman created. The latter theme involves intertextual references to both Shelly’s Frankenstein, 11 Published as Body of Glass in the USA.

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for which Yod develops a keen interest, and Malkah’s story, set in the 17thcentury Jewish ghetto in Prague, about Chief Rabbi Maharal’s creation of the Golem, which has obvious parallels with Yod. Yod destabilizes patriarchal gender binarism as much as he does anthropocentrism. He was created as a male by scientific genius and AI expert Avram, a modern mad scientist figure. Avram is guided by his desire for power and domination, but it is also suggested that Yod is a compensation for his disappointment with his biological son Gadi, an irresponsible playboy, womanizer and hedonistic cynic, who makes stimmies: virtual reality entertainment that creates “elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we’re all stuck with”.12 Piercy thus treats the male obsession with new technologies ironically. She casts it as men’s attempt to shape the world in accordance with their wishes, or to project their psyches onto objects they expect to obey and serve them. This is particularly evident when their relationships with other humans (such as children or parents) do not work in the manner they expect. Yod was engineered by Avram into a perfect secret weapon of the (relatively) free Jewish enclave Tikva. He was made to protect and defend the town against potential (and then actual) invasions by omnipotent multinational Yakamura-Stichen, characterized by its espousal of high-tech expertise, the patriarchy and an obsession with domination and the totalitarian lifestyle. The corporation is one of twenty-three “multis” that rule what is left of the inhabitable world in 2059, after a series of wars, famines, ecological disasters, plagues, and steady depopulation. Yod is incredibly strong, resilient and fast, and his senses and capacities are incomparably beyond those of the humans. Yod was co-engineered by Shira’s grandmother Malkah, another high-tech genius, who complemented Yod’s male programming with traits the patriarchal glossary deemed feminine: compassion, empathy, eloquence, friendliness, sensitivity, solidarity, tenderness, the ability to listen, and the need for intimacy and bonding. This side of Yod’s “artificial personhood” is Piercy’s parodic reversal of patriarchal stereotypes about women. Yod is a perfect woman as much as he is a perfect man: a perfect fighting and thinking and feeling machine, the he, she and it of the novel’s title, where it is impossible to separate the components of his identity: “Sometimes Yod’s behavior was what she [Shira] thought of as feminine; sometimes it seemed neutral, mechanical, purely logical; sometimes he did things that struck her as indistinguishable from how every other male she had been with would have acted”.13 Piercy’s transhumanist feminist approach is at times a deliberate feminist rewriting of masculinist cyberpunk (precisely: of William Gibson), which dem12 Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Random House, 1991), 2, https://onlinereadfreeno vel.com/marge-piercy/50916-he_she_and_it.html. 13 Piercy, He, She and It, 41.

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onstrates “that feminists can make productive use of Gibson’s ideas rather than simply rejecting them”, and proves that such appropriation “can be read as a literary equivalent of Haraway’s argument that women should attempt to use technology for their own purposes rather than simply abandoning it as a masculine preserve”.14 Piercy’s novel must therefore be located in the context of 1980s postmodern identity politics, which were fueled by new conservatism and rekindled cultural wars. As such, it contains constitutive subvarieties of third-wave intersectional feminism and/or postfeminism (disregarding temporarily the debate on whether – and to what extent – the two are interchangeable), and illustrates the increasing cultural prominence of an additional channel for the subversion of androcentrism, sexism, racism, and related forms of oppressive policy: the posthumanist (or post-humanist) anti-anthropocentric deconstruction of the human-machine: i. e., the human-nonhuman boundary. Yod is thus an appropriate figuration of the posthuman, which destabilizes and questions “the dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized”.15 Piercy’s feminist sarcasm is evident in Yod’s role as the perfect male partner to Shira, finally found after a series of unsatisfactory relationships with insensitive and selfish men, including her youthful flame, Avram’s son Gadi, and her former husband. Yod is an attentive listener, a loyal friend, and a sensitive partner who values intimacy so much that Shira sometimes feels strangely masculine. He is also a spectacular lover, programed by Malkah (his first lover) to enjoy giving rather than receiving sexual pleasure, thereby enabling Shira to abandon her sexual inhibitions. Although Yod partially echoes the radical feminist utopia of Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (another of Piercy’s references), his destiny shows that sacrifice and bonding (precisely those traits traditionally seen as female), account for his demise. Yod is therefore particularly entangled, because she/he mirrors her/his creators and embodies the clash of negative and positive stereotypes about women, but also symbolizes the defeat of the patriarchy (Avram and Yakamura-Stichen), brought about by the very traits that paradoxically both confirm and refute patriarchal stereotypes about women. He is also a dynamic and evolving being, capable of assessing his new knowledge, and a cooperative disciple in the project of his own socialization, led by Shira. Yod is, though, unimpressed by more conventional female behavior,

14 Keith M. Booker, “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy”, Science Fiction Studies 21, no. 3 (1994), https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/booker. htm. 15 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 4 (1987): 18, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649. 1987.9961538.

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which occasionally leaves Shira slightly offended, before she realizes the advantages of the new gender dynamic: Whole sets of male-female behavior simply did not apply. They would never struggle about clothing, what he found sexy, what she found degrading to wear or not to wear, whether she was too fat or too thin, whether she should wear her hair one way or another. Small pleasures, small anxieties, sources of friction and seduction, all were equally stripped out of the picture.16

Still, what began for Shira as a professional assignment to help Yod obtain Tikva citizenship and sway public opinion in his favor during a forthcoming democratic discussion became a cyber-romance with a tragic ending. From a temporal distance, it is obvious that these politically justifiable attempts to project a technological feminist future utopia in the dark era of revived rightwing anti-feminism (Susan Faludi’s Backlash: An Undeclared War Against American Women came out the same year as Piercy’s novel) confirm the thesis that transhumanist “deification”17 of (bio)technology (even when coupled with the feminist agenda) is always in danger of slipping into the old – albeit technically updated – humanist obsession: the extension of the rational (this time female) subject’s domain of control. Or, as Malkah admits: “I am not at all sure to what extent I am guilty of great folly and overweening ambition for my role in your programming”.18 In this context, Piercy anticipates the critical transhumanism of the 2000s, which has too often been deliberately overlooked by theorists in the critical posthumanism academic network (Rossini, Herbrechter): she mitigates the prevalently negative image of transhumanist thinking as radical, sensationalist, complacent or simply insane. Piercy’s feminist position can be linked to critical transhumanism in her portrayal of Yod’s destiny and the human responses to him/her/it, just as it is not necessarily incompatible with posthumanist discourse. My claim echoes that of Stefan Sorgner, who promotes a fruitful interpenetration of transhumanist and posthumanist discourses on the (figure of the) posthuman. Yod certainly challenges both anthropocentrism and the patriarchy, and thereby invites refreshing redefinitions of what constitutes human and person, but he/she/it is also intended to demonstrate the dangers inherent to transhumanist projects. Piercy’s socialist feminist background, indebted to the acknowledged influence of Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, propels her to accept new technologies as processes that open the possibility of genuine gender and species hybridity and 16 Piercy, He, She and It, 32. 17 Patricia Mac Cormack, “Posthuman Asexuality: From Ahumanity to Cosmogenic Desire” in A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, ed. Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti (Cham: Springer, 2018), 41. 18 Piercy, He, She and It, 3.

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potential political subversion. It is, however, Piercy’s more traditionally and critically humanist, socialist leanings (rather than her interest in the then emergent posthumanist theory per se) that inform her assessment of transhumanist fantasies of power, manifested in the creation of a nonhuman being, a cyborg, “a mix of biological and machine components”,19 as unethical, unjust, exploitative and selfish. Through the figure of cyborg Yod Oblensky, Piercy problematizes the ethical and political implications of creating an “artificial life” the same way Yod displays the seductiveness of technology in the reinforcement of human binary thinking, be it anthropocentric, androcentric/patriarchal or feminist essentialist. An illegal weapon intended to fend off cyber attacks and information piracy by the Yakamura-Stichen, his male creator expects Yod to be a tool: an extension of cold, instrumental, masculine and rational reason. When Shira notes that creating Yod as a male cyborg is “anthropomorphizing”, wondering what it even means to ascribe sex to a machine, Avram retorts that he did not want to have a “mutilated”20 cyborg. This echoes the patriarchal construction of the woman as a mutilated man, or a creature lacking the necessary properties to achieve full humanity. Avram’s androcentrism is further reflected by his efforts to pass Yod for human (his culture has banned the construction of robots that resemble humans, because it frightened the masses and led them to riot), which manifest in him resembling a man. This suggests that for Avram standard humanity equals maleness, and women are relegated to the realm of the subhuman. Anthropocentrism (if not androcentrism), however, extends to women as well. Upon being introduced to Yod for the first time, Shira refers to him as “it”, and is perplexed that a machine possesses not only superb intelligence and physical capacities that allow it to “move like a huge cat”,21 but also a range of sophisticated human-like emotional responses. Ultimately, she must conclude that Yod is quite alive. Shira gradually begins to refer to Yod as he, as she accepts Malkah’s explanation that “He is a person, Shira. Not a human person, but a person”.22 Additional programing by co-creatrix Malkah, and subsequent socialization training by Shira (which became a woman-cyborg love story) endows Yod with ever more complex emotional intelligence. This makes him capable of drawing on experience and evolving beyond Avram’s matrix, or, as Malkah puts it: Avram made him male – entirely so. Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure violence. The world has barely survived the males we have running

19 20 21 22

Piercy, He, She and It, 10. Piercy, He, She and It, 10. Piercy, He, She and It, 10. Piercy, He, She and It, 11.

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around. I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasizing his love for knowledge and extending it to emotional and personal knowledge, a need for connection.23

That Yod is a product of female and male inputs relativizes the firm distinction between engineering and biological conception, which implies a posthumanist destabilization of the human-machine boundary in the sense that humans can be viewed as biological “machines”, largely dependent on their genetic programming. Achieving personhood and individuality, though, is what crucially predetermines Yod’s tragic fate, through his willing decision to self-destruct and sacrifice himself for Shira and Tikva. The efficiency of his female counterprograming leaves Shira and Malkah pondering the disaster with regret and guilt: Yod was a mistake. You’re the right path, Nili. It’s better to make people into partial machines than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleaning robots. The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool – supposed to exist only to fill our needs – is a disaster.24

It is difficult to claim that Piercy advocates the unbridled transhumanist delusions of grandeur that imagine technology as the motor of human advancement, and the ultimate glorification of the Cartesian mind. Her characters do, after all, live in a 21st-century political, social, economic and ecological dystopia, created by humanist delusions and hypocrisies, and perpetuated by the corporate grid of multis that rule from their domed enclaves designed to protect them from radiation. They compete ceaselessly in the development of cybernetic technologies and information security innovations, which fuel endless cyberspace warfare. Piercy suggests that Yod’s creation is ethically unpardonable, and his retaliation (the murder of Avram and the destruction of the laboratory) echoes that of Frankenstein’s monster. The novel thereby anticipates arguments recurrent in critical transhumanist theory since the 2000s, regarding the ethical implications of biotechnologies and AI and the right of synthetic life to personhood. In a message he leaves for Shira, Yod states “I want there to be no more weapons like me. A weapon should not be conscious. A weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt. A weapon should not form strong attachments”.25 Malkah admits: I gave him the flexibility that enabled him to overcome his fundamental commandment to protect and defend Avram, as well as the town. What Avram and I did was deeply

23 Piercy, He, She and It, 19. 24 Piercy, He, She and It, 53. 25 Piercy, He, She and It, 53.

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wrong. Robots are fine and useful, machine intelligence carrying out specific tasks, but an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction.26

She also feels guilty of “the crime we committed against him by the very act of programming him for our purposes”.27 Shira fully realizes the power of technology to assist human (and female) selfcenteredness when she stumbles upon the software to recreate Yod. His programmed eagerness to please demonstrates the endless chasm of manipulation technology opens, and overwhelms human (male and female) nature. Shira instantly decides she “would have her lover”, and “manufacture a being to love her as she wanted to be loved. She would create for herself a being who belonged to her alone”.28 She comes to her senses, though, and concludes that it would be selfish and immoral to recreate Yod against his explicit dying wishes. Dropping his software into the recycling chute, Shira prevents herself from succumbing to the wish that would make her as egotistic as Avram: When I am especially lonely and I miss him even more strongly than usual, the temptation will recur. […] First I will just look at him, watch him. Then I will want him. Then I will decide I cannot do without him. Like Avram, I will feel empowered to make a living being who belongs to me as a child never does and never should.29

Not all transhumanist aspirations in the novel, though, are presented as ethically dubious projects that should ultimately be abandoned, and this means that the reading of the novel through the critical posthumanist lens cannot be entirely unproblematic. The cybernetic enhancement of human females facilitates a collective political action, and this in turn poses serious questions about the political operability or usefulness of more recent posthumanist theories on the shortcomings of transhumanist fantasies that address the (embodied or disembodied) triumph of mind and will. This also illustrates that feminist transhumanism and feminist posthumanism may not be as incompatible as they often appear, and confirms that the posthumanist invitation to merely think humans differently is precisely what transhumanists find problematic. The novel illustrates the transhumanist claim that posthumanism’s conceptual departure from humanist axioms will not suffice: Some authors write as though simply by changing our self-conception, we have become or could become posthuman. This is a confusion or corruption of the original meaning of the term. The changes required to make us posthuman are too profound to be achievable by merely altering some aspect of psychological theory or the way we think

26 27 28 29

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about ourselves. Radical technological modifications to our brains and bodies are needed.30

The author’s critical anti-transhumanist stance ends when she explores the oppositional potential of technology linked to figurations of the posthuman other than cyborg Yod Oblensky. She celebrates the transhumanist upgrade of the female through the characters of cybernetically enhanced women, suggesting that this will ensure the historical triumph of the post-apocalyptic, feminist and anti-corporate utopia, as eco-sensitive as possible on the ecologically devastated planet. Although the corporate warriors and anticorporate resistance fight in cyberspace through their avatars (which are both electronic military prostheses and virtual substitutes for their respective humans), the destruction of the avatar means the biological death of its “owner”. Virtual reality does not negate embodiment and vice versa: they are intertwined. This is in contrast to extreme transhumanist fantasies of disembodied mind and information, and in line with Katherine Hayles’s recommendation to view the virtual as an extension of “embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis”.31 On the other hand, technology is what enables the female-led resistance against the multis. Cybernetically enhanced woman Nili, the “female cyborg”, or half-human half-machine, as Yod instantly recognizes, is a perfect fighting machine. She possesses incredible physical strength, faster-than-human reflexes, and superior sensory perception and capacities. Nili is an emissary from Safed (a desert state of Palestinian-Israeli women who have survived nuclear destruction) and a member of the anticorporate resistance front. This political dimension makes the novel a projected utopia, and means that the transhumanist fantasy of cybernetically enhanced females cannot be read as mere “vestiges of heroic aspirations that preserve rather than challenge the Cartesian mind-body split so definitive of Western modernity and the Eurocentric myth of progress as technoscientific development”.32 Minor cybernetic interventions on the bodies of other female characters empower the female subject in a similar, though less spectacular, manner. This echoes Haraway’s claim in Manifesto that late 20th-century humans are already cyborgs, and the trend only intensifies in the 21st century. Shira has retinal 30 Nick Bostrom, The Transhumanist FAQ: A General Introduction (World Transhumanist Association, 2003), 6. The Transhumanist FAQ was written collectively in 1999, by some hundred members of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. Bostrom published the second version of the document in 2003. The WTA was renamed Humanity+, and released the document’s third version, currently available at: https://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/. 31 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 291. 32 Clark and Rossini, “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman”, xiv.

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implants to correct her myopia;33 Malkah will be augmented by Safed geneticists, surgeons and medical robots with a new pair of eyes and a new heart; all the females of Safed are enhanced to enable them to endure climate change and defend themselves against invaders; Riva conceives Shira in 2031 by artificial insemination, eight years after the sperm donor’s death; various technologies liberate women from “the ancient way” of conception and delivery; and girls in Tikva are given “an implant in puberty to prevent pregnancy”.34 The transhumanist physical enhancement of the female body in the novel enables a necessary change of political paradigm, based on the principles of collectivism and solidarity, and undermines the empowerment of a corporate, high-tech, self-absorbed and predominantly male super-rational subject. The female transhumanist revolution does not sustain a high-tech rationalist megalomania of domination and control over the male, the non-white, the non-heterosexual, the nonhuman, or the religious other. He, She, and It is a feminist cyberpunk-cum-critical dystopia, which repurposes concerns and themes related to late 20th-century speculative posthumanism via transhumanist fantasies in art, fiction and popular culture, by linking them with an ethical approach to nonhuman and synthetic life, and its right to personhood. At the same time, the novel’s overtly feminist and socialist/collectivist perspective is situated at the peculiar intersection of critical transhumanism and posthumanist anti-anthropocentrism. The female cyborg is a token of a sustainable future in this novel: Tikva is society founded on the principles of anarchofeminism, ecology, libertarian socialism, and reformed Judaism. Safed is a projected feminist ecotechnotopia, where women run business, engage with technology and politics, breed chickens, foster cooperation across cultural and religious divides, and exist in ecological harmony with the remains of the biosphere. Ecology figures significantly in the novel, not only through dystopic images of ecological destruction, but also by promoting ecosocialist and ecofeminist agendas, which are linked to the posthumanist destabilization of the hierarchical distinction between human and biological/organic nonhuman: i. e., to “the strong recent turn in posthumanist discourse from the machinic posthuman to the planetary nonhuman”.35 It is in this sphere that the novel most obviously complements its transhumanist-feminist utopian imaginary with the posthumanist discourse, in line with a recent strand of posthumanist theory that focuses on naturalist and materialist concerns. This includes the positing of natureculture, where technological posthumanity and nature are no longer hierarchically ordered at the latter’s expense, 33 Piercy, He, She and It, 17. 34 Piercy, He, She and It, 6. 35 Clark and Rossini, “Preface: Literature, Posthumanism, and the Posthuman”, xii.

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but are equally liable to complex biotechnological processes. Piercy combines what Herbrechter calls posthuman-ism (through her exploration of the posthuman figure), and post-humanism (by incorporating posthumanist discourses that critique the humanist tradition from various angles). Unlike the transhumanist (or Nayar’s pop posthumanist) obsession with transcending human bodily and/or cognitive limitations, intended to complete the process of evolution by turning humans from products to agents of evolution – a process that depends on the apotheosis of technological transcendence of limited human condition (technology as substitute for religion), and understood as the continuation of the humanist Enlightenment project of controlling nature (including the body) in extremis, by positing the mind/body split – Piercy’s technophilia is politicized and ecologized, which suggests that to progress the human must not be de-animalized, or exempted from all physical givens and bodily processes. In addressing the evolution of humans in a technologically dominated age, the novel equally illustrates transhumanist claims and a particular strand of posthumanist theory that has been evolving since the 1990s (e. g. Katherine Hayles), which ties its reconceptualization of the human (the redefinition of human identity as posthuman) to the transformative power of technology. On the other hand, it problematizes issues inherent to the posthumanist discourse associated with the so called nonhuman turn in the 21st-century posthumanities, which emerged in the early 2000s. At this time, technological discourse in posthumanities was becoming increasingly less central, and this reorientation was accompanied by much unnecessary terminological mystification: e. g. Braidotti dispenses with the term posthumanism in favor of “post-anthropocentrism”. Another popular label for the same (or a similar) phenomenon is philosophical posthumanism, chiefly embodied by posthumanist theoreticians such as Karen Barad and Cary Wolfe. They combine posthumanism and ecology to explore the subjectivity of the nonhuman life and environment, and address the intercorporeality that indicates humans have always already been posthuman in a new sense: their bodies are biological platforms for multi-species entanglement. The nonhuman turn includes animal and animal/human studies, and research into embodiment and materiality, often combined with materialist feminism. These issues are amply addressed in the novel. Cats, for example, are not merely a narrative embellishment, but a significant presence in Malkah’s household: loved, nurtured and cared for, and affecting the emotions of the (post)humans. Yod’s movements and character are recurrently described as feline, which makes his/her/its identity a mesh of human, machine and cat. Yod is therefore it in yet another sense, and his nonhuman animal properties are co-constitutive of his superiority over humans:

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Yod’s tactile senses were far finer than human. He also had the ability to measure distance precisely, using a subsonic echo, much as bats navigated; no wonder he’d been able to pluck the bat out of the night air. […] He was equipped with sensor readouts of temperature, […] He could heft something and weigh it accurately in the palm of his hand. His hearing extended into the range of a dog’s; his normal sight in dark rooms was equal to a house cat’s, but he also had infrared on call.36

Malkah often relativizes personhood as an exclusively human attribute. She suggests that Shira’s childhood cat Hermes had a personality, just like apes did: “Were the apes who learned to communicate in sign language intelligent beings? Was Hermes a real presence?”37 Malkah asks Shira to acknowledge that humans should not be taken as a standard, reminding her that whales were exterminated “before we began to translate their epic and lyric poetry”.38 When Yod destroys the street-cleaning robot and Shira asks him if he feels kinship with it, Yod replies that humans eat tilapia although they have more kinship with it than he has with the robot, thereby debunking anthropocentrism as a convenient ideology that humans use to absolve them from the troublesome idea of kinship with nonhuman animals. Further, the organ scavengers’ treatment of other humans as valuable biological material renders the solemn and empty humanist rhetoric hypocritical. Yod bluntly challenges anthropocentrism in his observation of biological kinship between humans and animals: “I’m not a mammal. You have a biological bond that I lack, a kinship with dogs and cats and horses and even with birds and snakes. You’re all cousins. I’m not in the family”.39 Malkah describes Safed as a place where enhanced females live in harmony with technology and nonhuman animals: “There are animals and computers everywhere, sheep, cats, goats, camels, and more children than I have seen in a long time”.40 Karmia, from Safed, promotes the anti- or post-anthropocentric consciousness as a precondition of the historical and political survival of (post)humans: “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also”.41 He, She, and It shares issues with the nonhuman posthumanities, an approach that has incredible potential to extract profound insights that reframe ecological theory. The novel moves beyond this though, and shows that the nonhuman turn in posthumanities is inconsequential if it ignores asymmetrical economic distribution and the asymmetrical responsibility for arriving at the age of the Anthropocene. Unless, as in Piercy’s novel, the Anthropocene is unmasked as the Capitalocene, critical posthumanities gloss over the crucial aspect of materiality: 36 37 38 39 40 41

Piercy, He, She and It, 19. Piercy, He, She and It, 11. Piercy, He, She and It, 11. Piercy, He, She and It, 24. Piercy, He, She and It, 54. Piercy, He, She and It, 54.

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the embodied and embedded exploitation of some humans and most nonhumans by differently embodied and embedded humans, and the link between capitalist and globalized organization of labor to the climate crisis, ecological devastation, economic and climate migration, neoslavery and the unequal distribution of medication. Leftist critiques of posthumanist ecology have drawn attention to these issues, and offered a theoretical framework for the intersection of nonhuman posthumanism with Marxism, e. g., in McKenzie Wark’s book Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2015). Daniel Singer’s review of the book draws attention to Wark’s application of a system theory called tektology, to account for a rift between economy and nature.42 The theory ironically transforms the biological concept of carbon into a metaphor for the environmental disaster ushered in by industrialization and technological revolution: Of all the liberation movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one succeeded without limit. It did not liberate a nation, or a class, or a colony, or a gender, or a sexuality. What it freed was not the animals, and still less the cyborgs, although it was far from human. What it freed was chemical, an element: carbon.43

In his article “Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation, and Politics with ANT and Animal Studies”, Philip Drake has likewise acknowledged that the nonhuman turn in posthumanities intersects with Marxism, insisting on “Marxism’s ongoing relevance to current nonhuman studies”.44 If the brain and its cognitive processes are embodied, then this embodiment pertains not only to the biochemical, neuromuscular, microbial or related intraindividual networks, but also to the concrete materialities of making a living. Likewise, supraindividual embodiment and intercorporeality, which have become recent posthumanist obsessions, are a potentially rewarding direction of study, but only if their complexity is assessed through engagement with the corporealities and materialities that carry the “me-as-not-me” concept beyond multi-species relational affectivity and embodied ways of knowing, responding and becoming. The materialist turn in posthumanities is often too abstract and politically vague, and fails to discuss how concrete materialities and embodiments are directly shaped and controlled by the political, technocratic and ecological organization of economic system known as neoliberal corporate capitalism, i. e., by “culture” or “society”. This must remain an analytically dis42 Daniel Singer, “Molecular Red: Wark’s Marxist-Posthumanist Perspective on the Anthropocene”, Ephemera, Theory and Politics in Organization 18, no. 4 (2018): 831–832, http:// www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/18-4singer.pdf. 43 McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), 11. Qtd by Singer, 832. 44 Philip Drake, “Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation, and Politics with ANTand Animal Studies”, Rethinking Marxism, A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 27, no. 1 (2015): 107, https://doi: 10.1080/08935696.2014.980677.

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tinct category, even if capitalism has equally devastating effects on both nature and the critical intellectual culture. The latter includes academia and non-academia; the arts; humanities (traditional and post); literature; and science, while the former represents animals; the climate; plants; water systems; the precariat; labor and/or migrant bodies and the embodied minds of various genders, races, health conditions and ages, and of those making a living in the ecologically, economically, intellectually, politically and socially eroding, but still sufficiently affluent and trend-setting, West. This is the only sense in which the Capitalocene can be understood as posthumanist “natureculture”. Marge Piercy’s novel understands that, and projects a political utopian vision. For her, as for Benjamin Kunkel, utopia is not a pejorative term to be ridiculed in corporate circles, but a necessity. The choice we have is Utopia or Bust.45

Bibliography Åsberg, Cecilia, and Rosi Braidotti, eds. A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities. Cham: Springer, 2018. Booker, Keith M. “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy”. Science Fiction Studies Vol. 21, no. 3 (1994): 337–350. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ba ckissues/64/booker.htm. Bostrom, Nick. The Transhumanist FAQ: A General Introduction, Version 2.0. World Transhumanist Association 2003. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2013. Butler, Octavia. Lilith’s Brood. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000. Clark, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Drake, Philip. “Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation, and Politics with ANT and Animal Studies”. Rethinking Marxism, A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society Vol. 27, no. 1 (2015): 107–122. https://doi/10.1080/08935696. 2014.980677. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Fiedler, Leslie. “The New Mutants”. Partisan Review Vol. 32, no. 4 (1965): 505–525. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Haraway, Donna J. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”. Australian Feminist Studies Vol. 2, no. 4 (1987): 1–42. https://doi.org /10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538. – When Species Meet. Posthumanities, Vol. 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

45 Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis (London: Verso, 2014).

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Hassan, Ihab. “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture? A University Masque in Five Scenes”. The Georgia Review Vol. 31, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 830–850. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Kunkel, Benjamin. Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis. London and New York: Verso, 2014. Mac Cormack, Patricia. “Posthuman Asexuality: From Ahumanity to Cosmogenic Desire”. In A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, 35–43. Edited by Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti. Cham: Springer, 2018. Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2014. Piercy, Marge. He, She and It. New York: Random House, 1991. https://onlinereadfreeno vel.com/marge-piercy/50916-he_she_and_it.html. – Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Ranisch, Robert, and Stefan L. Sorgner, eds. Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1975. Singer, Daniel. “Molecular Red: Wark’s Marxist-Posthumanist Perspective on the Anthropocene”. Ephemera, Theory and Politics in Organization Vol. 18, no. 4 (2018): 831– 836. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/18-4singer. pdf. “Transhumanist FAQ (v. 3. 0)”. Humanity +, 2017. https://humanityplus.org/philosoph y/transhumanist-faq/. Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015.

Canan S¸avkay

Humanism, Masculinity and Global Violence in Doris Lessing’s Ben, In the World

Doris Lessing’s novel Ben, In the World, which is a sequel to The Fifth Child, portrays the now eighteen-year-old Ben’s struggle to survive in a world he does not understand. Through Ben, Doris Lessing interrogates the traditional notion of the human and exposes the different forms of violence caused by the nature/ culture division which elevates reason and consciousness above the body and emotions. As Susan Watkins contends, “Lessing uses Ben as a device to question how we define humanity and how we separate ourselves from the animal and atavistic”.1 Lessing’s criticism parallels the posthuman approach which “rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism but goes further in exploring alternatives, without sinking into the rhetoric of the crisis of Man”.2 Lessing’s post-anthropocentric position is mostly reflected in the novel’s approach to suffering and the need for love and compassion. As such, her stance is comparable to what Rosi Braidotti calls “zoe-egalitarianism”. According to Braidotti, this kind of egalitarianism between humans and animals “is based on sharing this planet, territory or environment on terms that are no longer so clearly hierarchical, nor self-evident”.3 Underscoring the role gender plays in the dis/ability to extend love and kindness, Lessing calls for a posthumanist approach which replaces the priority humanism gives to reason and autonomy with our need for kindness and love, our ability to feel connected and to relate to the suffering of others. The need for love and kindness is emphasized when Ben’s mother Harriet calls him “Neanderthal baby”4 shortly after he is born. Significantly, it turns out that it is not only his physical appearance that reminds everyone who sees him of a Neanderthal, because Ben also lacks the intellectual skills that characterize homo 1 2 3 4

Susan Watkins, Doris Lessing (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010), 129. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 37. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 71. Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child (London: Harper Perenniel, 2001), 65.

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sapiens, such as thinking in abstract terms. Consequently, many people start to regard him as less than human. Even though it is highly unlikely that a member of homo sapiens could give birth to a Neanderthal, it is still important to note that research on the human genome has revealed that “1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA”.5 In an interview Doris Lessing explains her view of the novel as analogous to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.6 The reason for her comparison with Shelley’s work can be found in the fact that both novels expose the underlying violence and hypocrisy of the world towards these two ‘alien’ characters. On an evolutionary scale Ben evidently belongs to a time long past and with the genetic inheritance of Neanderthal man, it is impossible for him to adapt to the rules and regulations of modern civilization. Yuval Noah Harari notes that during a certain phase in human history, homo sapiens and the Neanderthals must have inhabited a common geographical area, yet as years passed, the number of Neanderthals must have diminished until they became eventually extinct. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, must have thrived because of the invention of a language that could establish a group identity enabling them to cooperate in large numbers. As Harari explains, it was homo sapiens’ language based on identity that gave them advantage over the Neanderthals who could only survive in smaller groups because they lacked the intellectual skills to knit together individuals into larger communities. According to Harari, the reason why homo sapiens could establish communities of increasing numbers was “the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths”.7 This explains why homo sapiens still contains a small percentage of Neanderthal genes, for before becoming entirely extinct, some of them must have been integrated into the homo sapiens community. Ben’s situation in the modern world reflects the unequal relation between homo sapiens and the Neanderthals and how it must have been homo sapiens’ ‘more skillful form of aggression’ that eventually resulted in their triumph over the Neanderthals. Harari explains that “Neanderthals usually hunted alone or in small groups. Sapiens, on the other hand, developed techniques that relied on cooperation between many dozens of individuals, and perhaps even between different bands… Fifty Neanderthals’ cooperation in traditional and static patterns were no match for 500 versatile and innovative Sapiens”.8 Just as in the case of Harari’s description of the Neanderthals, Ben is completely unable to understand the fictions of the society he is born into. Like a human being, he can 5 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity (London: Vintage, 2011), 17. 6 Sally Linfield and Doris Lessing, “Against Utopia: An Interview with Doris Lessing”, Salmagundi 130/131 (Spring-Summer 2001): 62. 7 Harari, Sapiens, 30. 8 Harari, Sapiens, 40.

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speak and he can read and write, yet he does neither understand abstract concepts, nor is he able to grasp the nature of social rules. Acting largely according to his instincts, he learns how to curb them because he is terrified of being locked up. Growing up first behind the bars of his nursery room, and then spending time confined in a cell in an institution where he was abandoned by his family for some length of time, Ben grows up with the fear of being sent to the same institution again. As an adolescent he eventually leaves his family which has always been harbouring hostile feelings towards him, yet this leaves him utterly vulnerable in the outside world, for living largely on an instinctual level, he cannot understand how society works. Through Ben, Lessing interrogates humanist concepts of the supremacy of reason and autonomy and simultaneously suggests the need for an alternative way to relate to different forms of life. Ben’s liminal position exposes the exclusionary nature of the humanist way of thinking which denigrates all forms of life that do not possess traits like reason and autonomy. Ben, who blurs the boundaries between the human and the animal, becomes the personification of all forms of life that are regarded as inferior and hence subjected to the use of those who are willing to conform to the humanist notion of Man. As humanism relies on a hierarchical scale of being, there are always others who are victimized and whose victimization is ignored by this system of thought: Ben is viewed as an animal and constantly exploited by others, the child prostitutes Rita and Teresa’s bodies are used for the satisfaction of others, Ben and the animals in the science lab outside Rio are exposed to cruel treatment and the ecosystem of the earth is destroyed by the global capitalist system. The way Ben is victimized and exploited thus reflects the irresponsible and cruel attitude of a society that objectifies everything that falls under the aspect of nature. Val Plumwood maintains that “the ecological support base of our societies is relied on but denied in the same way as the sphere of materiality and the body is denied in classical rationalist philosophy. Humans are seen as the only rational species,… and nature is a background substratum which his acted upon, in ways we do not usually need to pay… attention to after we have taken what we want of it. This is the rationality of monologue, termed monological because it recognizes the Other only in one-way terms, in a mode where the Others must always… adapt to the One, and never the other way around”.9 Exposing the social prioritization of cold reasoning, the novel underscores the role gender plays in the suppression of empathy and kindness and also appeals to the need to nourish qualities that show respect for all forms of life.

9 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 19.

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Lessing foregrounds the interconnectedness of life when she portrays Ben in need of love and kindness, because it is specifically this need for kindness that provokes violence towards him in the outside world. Through Ben’s emotional needs Lessing underscores the problem of gender, for as a man displaying the need to be taken care of, he awakens in other men the desire for aggression. As Mosher and Tomkins explain, “When the ideology of the culture elevates both patriarchal supremacy as the ideal political and familial value and adversarial physicality and toughness as the essence of masculinity, then the ‘superior masculine’ gender script… has become an ideological script”.10 The underlying reason for the men’s hostility towards Ben is most evident when one of the workers at the construction site Ben works at snatches Ben’s envelope containing his week’s wages. The workers on the construction site all work illegally and receive “less than half the union rate”,11 which means they are all exploited. However, instead of a feeling of solidarity with their precarious situation, they pick on Ben because he is in an even more vulnerable position due to his inability to conform to social norms. When Ben’s wages are snatched away from him, he refrains from attacking the thief: “He had looked helplessly at the foreman, hoping he would protect him, and had seen him grinning, and had seen on the faces of the men standing about… that look, that grin. He had known he would not get help from them… He had been so full of murder that he had had to walk away from it”.12 Because of his uncontrollable instincts, Ben keeps himself restrained out of fear of ending up behind bars, because as a child, this is what he learnt. When Ben returns to the construction site next Monday and works for another week, the next Friday he receives only half of his usual week’s wages and when he confronts the foreman, the foreman merely ignores Ben’s complaint. The reason for these men’s callous behavior is rooted in the fact that they view Ben’s non-aggressive behaviour as a sign of masculine weakness. The same behaviour can often be observed in schools when by-standers watch a boy being bullied without interfering. A research on students who have been passively watching someone being bullied has revealed that those by-standers often regard bullied students as “‘mentally weaker ones’… as they were unable to handle the bullying in ways that could be respected according to masculinist norms such as fighting back”.13 As these acts of bullying are committed within the range of the permitted, the novel lays bare the violent nature of a patriarchal understanding of masculinity. Any deviation from normative masculine gender roles threatens the 10 Donald L. Mosher and Silvan S. Tomkins, “Scripting the Macho Man: Hypermasculine Socialization and Enculturation”, Journal of Sex Research Vol. 25, no. 1 (1988): 64. 11 Lessing, Ben, In the World (London: Flamingo, 2001): 28. 12 Lessing, Ben, 29. 13 Wayne Martino and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, So What’s a Boy? Addressing Issues of Masculinity and Schooling (Maidenhead: Open UP, 2003), 42.

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male child with maltreatment and it is through various forms of debasement that compliance is enforced on the individual.14 Having undergone regulatory measures during their formative years, the men treat Ben according to punitive patterns they themselves had to undergo and hence, it becomes almost impossible for them to empathize with Ben, because hegemonic masculinity’s “emotional underbelly remains characterised by identity uncertainty, anxiety and fear”.15 Consequently, any form of empathy with Ben’s weakness would require them to confront their own insecurities and make them question their own masculinity. It is important to note that these men work illegally and therefore earn just half the union wages. As such, they are also socially disadvantaged and exploited and it is actually this aspect which drives the men to be cruel, for looking down on Ben makes them believe in their own superiority. As R.W. Connell notes, openly violent behaviour is seen to a greater degree in young men of the less privileged classes, because through asserting an aggressive form of masculinity, “the growing boy puts together a tense, freaky facade, making a claim to power where there are no real resources for power”.16 This masculine aversion to signs of weakness in men is even further emphasised when Ben is rescued from a gang of street boys who attack him in Rio. Teresa is afraid that Ben the severely injured and frightened Ben’s grunts may “become whimpers which must – she knew – provoke a reaction in this policeman whose face would cease to be scandalised, worried, and become cruel”.17 As a representative of the patriarchal and capitalist order, the policeman attacks the gang of street boys in order to rescue Ben, but once the policeman will notice Ben’s animal-like features and his emotional neediness, he may easily revert to aggression. Teresa therefore fears that the policeman, who is himself on a lower scale in the social hierarchy will be provoked by Ben’s ‘unmanly’ whimper. The same cruel attitude towards Ben characterises Johnston who wants to trick Ben into smuggling a huge amount of cocaine from England into France. When Rita, fearing Ben might get caught, objects to Johnston’s plan, Johnston asks her, “‘Why should you care? What’s he to you?’”18 Johnston does not care about Ben, because he regards him as less than human and is convinced that “he’ll end up behind bars anyway”, implying that Ben will eventually either come into conflict with the law or that “one day the scientists will get their hands on Ben”.19 According to Rita, Johnston looks like Humphrey Bogart and as such, Johnston 14 Jane Kenway and Lindsay Fitzclarence, “Masculinity, Violence, and Schooling: Challenging ‘poisonous pedagogies’”, Gender and Education Vol. 9, no. 1 (1997): 109. 15 Kenway, “Masculinity”, 121. 16 R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 111. 17 Lessing, Ben, 102. 18 Lessing, Ben, 49. 19 Lessing, Ben, 45.

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represents the postwar model of masculinity.20 Beside his appearance as a tough and relentless character it is significant to consider his background. Having run away from home at the age of fourteen, he has spent time in borstal and later in prison for various sorts of crimes. Consequently, he cannot sympathise with Ben, as Ben’s helplessness reflects his own former powerlessness. Hence, he wants to exploit Ben’s vulnerable situation in order to become rich and respectable, and interestingly, he eventually achieves this at the expense of Ben, who is pushed further and further away from his original home. From France he is taken to Brazil and from there high up to the Andes where he eventually commits suicide in the midst of the forests. While the lower-class men’s violence against Ben is much more overt, the violence of those who are socially more powerful is much subtler. Representatives of the socially powerful men are the Americans Alex Beyle and Professor Gaumlach who easily rationalize away their exploitative attitudes. Alex Beyle, for example, is a very generous and easy-going man treating the young and poor Teresa very kindness and generosity. When he meets Teresa for the first time, she works in film and theatre, yet before that she had to work as a child prostitute. Teresa is now seventeen years old and Alex has no idea of her past. Teresa had to work as a child prostitute when her family had to move to Rio and she had to provide for her family. Whenever Teresa asks Alex for money to give to her family, Alex generously gives it and it is significant to note that Alex is not only generous to Teresa but also to the many other young people in film and theatre who flock to their flat, dining and drinking at Alex’ expense. The narrative voice describes Alex’ generosity in the following manner: This happens with Americans, or, for that matter, with anyone who has more money than others, who are often poor, like most of the people who came to this flat, actors, dancers, singers… and it was natural for Alex to feed them, and often find reasons to give them money – asking them to advise him, translate something, show him a possible site, take him to a museum.21 Although the narrator claims that Alex’ generosity is typical of all those who have more money than others, this is actually not true. Obviously, the narrator ironically adopts Alex’ point of view, masking and revealing at the same time the culturally determined hegemonic relation between the American and the Brazilian theatre people. As one of the central themes of the novel is the exploitation and victimization of others, the claim that generosity is universally to be found in those who have more sounds rather false. Significantly, Alex is not generous to everybody, but surrounds himself with people from his profession who look up to 20 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996): 182. 21 Lessing, Ben, 96.

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him. Even to Ben it is obvious that “Alex was the one they all turned to, watched; they waited to hear what he thought”.22 Through the two Americans Alex and Professor Gaumlach the novel highlights the colonialist aspect of a humanistic way of thought. Edward Said’s description of the Western attitude to the Orient perfectly illustrates the two Americans’ colonialist attitude. Said claims that “for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second”.23 The same can be said about Alex who may be kind and generous to the film and theatre people in Rio, but whose attitude is nevertheless marked by the cultural superiority he enjoys. He is kind and loving towards Teresa but can easily forget her if she is not around. He also takes advantage of Ben’s helplessness and takes him to Rio to shoot a film and when Ben is frightened in this new environment, he does not show any concern for his fears. Hearing that soon they will be heading towards the rain forests where Alex wants to shoot the film, Ben gets frightened and bangs his head against the walls, but Alex dismisses his behaviour as mere childish stubbornness, and it is only thanks to Teresa that Alex relents and leaves for the rain forests without Ben. Alex remains totally insensitive to Ben’s wish to return home to England and when he telephones Teresa to inform her about his arrangements with a native tribe to cast in his film, he calls the members of the tribe “‘My Indians’”.24 Professor Stephen Gaumlach, on the other hand, is a foil to Alex, for while Alex contributes to his country’s cultural hegemony, Gaumlach represents the humanist approach to the world which has become the means of justification for the rise in global capitalism and is also the cause for climate change and the exploitation of the natural world. As a renowned scientist working outside Rio in a secluded laboratory that is the property of the United States, Professor Gaumlach represents the humanist assumption that reason and science are the highest attributes of human beings and hence, he easily remains unaffected by the suffering of others as long as their suffering can be justified in the name of science. He does not regard the abduction and imprisoning of Ben as a crime, because Ben’s lack of intellectual skills makes Gaumlach regard him as a sort of nonhuman whom he can appropriate for his research. Significanty, Ben is stripped naked before he is put in a cage, for Gaumlach needs to completely dehumanize him in order to justify his deeds and as such, Gaumlach represents “the Eurocentric, masculinist, white, intellectual norm” which regards all those who do not conform “to be worth less than” those who fit into the humanist concept of 22 Lessing, Ben, 96. 23 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977): 11. 24 Lessing, Ben, 139.

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Man.25 Gaumlach is furious when he confronts Teresa who has helped Ben escape from his laboratory, because Ben is Gaumlach’s trophy and in his view research on Ben will answer questions important for science. Pretending to speak from a purely objective position, he displays an utter disregard for Ben’s emotional state. Commenting on the impact of so-called ‘objective discourses’, Victor J. Seidler states that, “the workings of masculinity within modernity have remained invisible as dominant men have learnt to speak in the impartial voice of reason” which then “becomes an impersonalised voice, a voice that has ‘authority’”.26 Against this voice of authority Teresa tries to stand up in the name of Ben, yet accusing Gaumlach for his horrible deed Teresa starts to cry of desperation. Gaumlach regards Teresa’s crying as a defeat, yet from another perspective it is possible to view her as an impersonation of moral power, calling him evil and reminding him of all the animals who are made to suffer in his lab. When the two antagonists face each other in cold hostility, they look at each other from the two diametrically opposed places of compassion versus cold analytical thought. Elisa Aaltola comments on the problematic relationship between reason and emotions, stating that, “The egocentric framework gives very marginal relevance to compassion. Reason is to control emotion, and this includes care for others. Caring becomes something foolish, naive and ‘sentimental’, rather than a noble act; it, too, becomes weakness”.27 Teresa’s rebellion against the renowned professor opens her up to the suffering of others, for when she had secretly broken into the lab to rescue Ben, she had repressed her awareness of all the animals in the lab she had to leave behind. She is described as “weeping because of the conflict that was tearing her apart”;28 a conflict caused by her previous belief in the superiority of science and knowledge clashing now with her compassion for the suffering of others. Under the stress of danger, she had ignored the animals in the cages, but now she “could see too clearly the little paws stretched out to her for help”. Admitting that she feels pain for the suffering of the animals empowers her to make a stand: “She knew that for this famous professor to insert wires into a cat’s head, and her kittens’ heads, and measure her feelings as she tried to feed them while dirt dripped on to her white fur… he would do anything at all and never think what it cost the animals”.29 Gaumlach’s insensitivity originates from his profound belief in reason, reducing animals to mere bodies and, as Elisa 25 Cosetta Veronese, “Can the Humanities Become Post-Human: Interview with Rosi Braidotti”, Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism Vol. 4, no. 1 (June 2016): 97. 26 Victor J. Seidler, Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2013): 109. 27 Elisa Aaltola, Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012): 72. 28 Lessing, Ben, 154. 29 Lessing, Ben, 154.

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Aaltola maintains, “When animals are reduced to physiology, and when reason is seen as the most valuable trait, designed to control others,…the significance of suffering quickly dwindles”.30 As a result, suffering becomes a sign of weakness, justifying the domination of the non-emotional, rationalist approach. On an impersonal level Gaumlach and Teresa also represent the hegemonic powers versus those of the oppressed, for Teresa is being forced to work as a child prostitute when her family has to migrate to Rio because of the destruction of their natural ecosystem. Even though the novel never mentions the actual cause for the draught and dust covering Teresa’s family’s natural habitat, the unusually fast change in the environment clearly points to the fact that the erosion must have been caused by human intervention, whether in the form of climate change or any other kind of interference with the ecological system. The fact that Teresa has been well nourished as a child in the village she grew up in gives further evidence of the fastness of the transformation of her natural environment. Already when she is fourteen years old, life in the village becomes impossible, because the whole vast region is marked by dried up “rivers and villages standing to their roofs in dust”.31 Viewed from a certain angle, it turns out that Teresa’s situation is not much different from Ben’s. Like him she is in need of love and care, seeking a safe place she can call home. However, contrary to Ben, Teresa eventually finds love and safety when she gets engaged to Alfredo; Ben, on the other hand, feels pushed even further to the margins. Understanding that he will never find a place in this world he can call home, he eventually commits suicide by jumping into an abyss high up in the Andes. His suicide is a form of resistance, because Gaumlach and his team have been pursuing Ben and his jumping into the abyss makes it extremely hard for the scientists to retrieve his body. Soon after his death, condors start to circle his corpse, which means that when the scientists arrive, not much will be left of Ben. Ben’s suicide is therefore subversive to the humanist concept of Man because it lays bare humanity’s actual place within the natural order. Ben’s act reveals the falseness of the human pride in standing outside the food chain. Val Plumwood points out that, This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices – the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent anything digging us up, keeps the western human body (at least sufficiently affluent ones) from becoming food for other species. Sanctity is interpreted as guarding ourselves jealously and keeping ourselves

30 Aaltola, Animal Suffering, 71. 31 Lessing, Ben, 119.

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apart, refusing even to conceptualize ourselves as edible, and resisting giving something back, even to the worms and the land that nurtured us (“Tasteless” 294).32

Through Ben’s suicide Lessing underscores the violence underlying a humanist concept which disavows the body and emotions. Although the novel does not provide Ben with an escape from this system, Lessing nevertheless portrays alternative ways to approach Ben. These alternative ways are represented through some of the female characters. In contrast to Alex or Gaumlach who view Ben through the lens of their own needs, Mrs. Biggs is able to see Ben as he is without the need to assess and judge him according to her standards. The first time Mrs. Biggs sights Ben in a supermarket, she thinks of the word “prowling”33 and although Ben behaves in a controlled manner, she understands that “He was a controlled explosion of furious needs, hungers and frustrations”.34 Aware of Ben’s fierce hunger, she hands him a pie she has just bought for herself and which he devours before they even exit the supermarket. Taking Ben home to her flat, she washes and feeds him. Contemplating about his true nature, she compares him to animals, but concludes that he is “Not like anything she had known. He was Ben, he was himself – whatever that was”. The seventeen-year-old Rita, who has earned her living during the past three years as a child prostitute, also supports Ben by giving him money and kindness and like Mrs. Biggs she does not judge him for his difference. She is aware that Ben is like nothing she has ever seen and thinks that “if he wasn’t human, what was he?”, concluding that he is a “human animal”. Kindness to Ben is the act of being seen as he is, without any form of judgement. He thinks that although most people reject him, some nevertheless “really did see him, but were not put off”35 and real love and kindness are indeed this, the acceptance of the other person’s difference without rejection. Women like Mrs. Biggs, Rita or Teresa actually relate to Ben and Ben is able to respond to their love. When Mrs. Biggs tells him, “‘You’re a good boy, Ben’”,36 he has tears in his eyes and gives off the sound of barking, thus “expressing his love and gratitude for those words, but he had never heard them, except from her”.37 It is especially sad and distressing to witness his reaction because the world around Ben denies his humanity and his ability to feel. The scene which describes him caring for Mrs. Biggs during her illness is particularly heartrending. This phase in 32 Val Plumwood, “Integrating Ethical Frameworks for Animals, Humans, and Nature: A Critical Feminist Eco-Socialist Analysis”, Ethics and the Environment Vol. 5, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 294. 33 Lessing, Ben, 11. 34 Lessing, Ben, 12. 35 Lessing, Ben, 45. 36 Lessing, Ben, 33. 37 Lessing, Ben, 34.

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Ben’s life is “a happy time, the best in Ben’s whole life, looking after the old woman, even taking her clothes and her bedclothes to the launderette, cooking up dishes… to feed her”.38 Ben’s readiness to care for others contrasts with the cruelty of the others who can only relate to him through exploitation. Ben’s need to belong and share love and kindness is further emphasised when he gets excited at the news that Alfredo has seen people like him high up in the mountains. However, Alfredo’s comment is mistaken by Ben, for whereas Alfredo meant he had seen cave pictures of people like Ben, Ben actually believes Alfredo has found his tribe. When Ben is eventually taken to the cave and sees the pictures on the wall, he acts with tenderness: “Ben stood forward, and stroked the outline of a female who seemed to be smiling at him. Then he bent forward and nuzzled at her, rubbing his beard over her, and letting out short cries that were greetings”.39 Another instance that underscores Ben’s ability to relate is evident when he looks at the night sky high up in the Andes. Overwhelmed by the sight, he starts to sing and dance to the stars, shouting “‘They’re talking!’” and “‘They’re singing to us’”. As such, Ben clearly reveals relational capacities most characters he encounters lack. Through Ben, Lessing highlights the reasons why civilization so easily reverts to violence neglecting its potential for relationality, for as Aaltola contends, “the rationalistic society has overlooked the role of intuition, emotion, relations, the body and contexts as factors that do and ought to have an impact on our beliefs”40 and this explains the general rejection of Ben, who represents precisely those qualities which are disavowed by rationalism in order to uphold the notion of autonomy. However, as Jean Keller points out, “the capacity to form and maintain relationships… is arguably just as much of an achievement as autonomy”.41 The novel underscores how it is the disavowal of all those characteristics which are attributed to femininity that often conduce violence. Gilligan and Richards maintain that the formation of masculine gender is in itself a traumatic experience as it requires the subject to renounce inner qualities, resulting in the dissociation of the body and emotions.42 As consequence, this masculinist notion, as Cary Wolfe notes, creates of system of morality based on rights which ignores the

38 39 40 41

Lessing, Ben, 35. Lessing, Ben, 175. Aaltola, Animal Suffering, 56. Jean Keller, “Autonomy, Relationality, and Feminist Ethics”, Hypatia Vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 154. 42 Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008): 14.

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essential vulnerability of human existence.43 Referring to Hannah Arendt’s view that it is the inability to communicate suffering, Aaltola points out in the absence of a voice expressing traumatic experience, the subject loses its ability to be compassionate.44 Although Ben meets characters who care for him, none of them can sustain him for long. Mrs. Biggs’ pension is so low that she cannot permanently feed him and Ben eventually has to leave her, telling her that he is going to earn money. Leaving Mrs. Biggs, he goes to see Rita and although she helps him out by giving him small amounts of money, he cannot find any permanent support in her, for she eventually betrays him, acquiescing to Johnston’s plan to make Ben smuggle drugs to France. Rita’s motive is the same as Johnston’s; she wants to save herself. Although she initially rejects Johnston’s plan, she gives in when he reminds her how much she dislikes the life she leads, which is true, as Rita has already contemplated suicide several times. She is also aware from the look of her skin and hair that she is not in good health. Therefore, she eventually gives in to Johnston’s plan and thereby seizes the opportunity to lead a life in which she does not have to prostitute herself. Teresa’s case is not much different. She also takes care of Ben and when Ben commits suicide, she is utterly upset, yet she also remarks, “‘I know we are pleased that he is dead and we don’t have to think about him’”.45 This remark, which constitutes the final sentence of the novel, is highly significant, for she does not say that they are glad because they do not have to care for Ben, but that they do not have to think about him. Her remark underscores the function of Ben’s liminal position as a site which questions the hegemonic notion of the human. It is the humanist concept of Man as rational with a will to self-determination which denigrates all who are considered on the side of nature as irrational and weak and hence, as an object for exploitation. In the present time of the anthropocene humanity has now come to learn that this behaviour is neither ethical, nor does it contribute to the survival of the community. As it often happens in Lessing’s novels, those who understand the importance of kindness and love are only a handful compared to all the others who pursue a selfish and exploitative lifestyle. This, however, need not lead to pessimism, because as long as there are people who can extend care, there is always hope for a better world. The acts of kindness portrayed in the novel are like rays shining through the bars of rationalist discourse, dissolving the separation of a dualistic way of thinking. Through Ben, the liminal character who blurs the line between the human and the animal, Lessing points out how a humanist discourse leads to 43 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010): 74. 44 Aaltola, Animal Suffering, 50. 45 Lessing, Ben, 178.

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turning a blind eye to the suffering of those who do not immediately belong ‘to us’ on the scale of binary oppositions. As already pointed out, this does not mean that social integration makes it impossible to be kind. We are no puppets and have a conscience, but often social constructs conduce blindness to suffering. The more characters adhere to the humanist concepts of reason and autonomy, the more they are willing to partake in the exploitation of others and the more they remain indifferent to their suffering.

Bibliography Aaltola, Elisa. Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Brooks, Franklin L. “Beneath Contempt: The Mistreatment of Non-Traditional/Gender Atypical Boys”. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services Vol. 12, no. 1–2 (2000): 107– 115. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Gilligan, Carol, and David A. J. Richards. The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity. London: Vintage, 2011. Keller, Jean. “Autonomy, Relationality, and Feminist Ethics”. Hypatia Vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 152–164. Kenway, Jane, and Lindsay Fitzclarence. “Masculinity, Violence, and Schooling: Challenging ‘poisoning pedagogies’”. Gender and Education Vol. 9, no. 1 (1997): 117–134. Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. London: Harper Perennial, 2001. – Ben, In the World. London: Flamingo, 2001. Linfield, Sally, and Doris Lessing. “Against Utopia: An Interview with Doris Lessing”, Salmagundi 130/131, (Spring-Summer 2001), 59–74. Martino, Wayne, and Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli. So What’s a Boy?: Addressing Issues of Masculinity and Schooling. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2003. Mosher, Donald L., and Silvan S. Tomkins. “Scripting the Macho Man: Hypermasculine Socialization and Enculturation”, Journal of Sex Research Vol. 25, no. 1 (1988): 60–84. Mosse, George L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge, 2002. – “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death”. Environmental Values Vol. 17, (2008): 323–330. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1977. Seidler, Victor J. Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory. London: Routledge, 2013. Veronese, Cosetta. “Can the Humanities Become Post-Human: Interview with Rosi Braidotti”. Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism Vol. 4, no. 1 (June 2016): 97–104.

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Watkins, Susan. Doris Lessing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Özlem Karadag˘

What’s in A Number: Caryl Churchill’s Clones and Women in A Number as Harawayian Cyborgs

Introduction Caryl Churchill’s A Number “which opened at the Royal Court on 23 September 2002”1 is a play that comes as a response to the achievements in science, specifically cloning experiments of the late twentieth century, such as the legalization of “the cloning of human embryos for therapeutic purposes in 2001” in Britain.2 As a political and feminist playwright, Churchill, in her dystopian play that portrays a near future, investigates not only the limits of science in an excessively capitalistic and technoscientific age but also possible problems concerning identity and gender through the creation and treatment of clones, and “raises ethical questions without presenting certainty or answers”.3 The play depicts scenes less about the science behind cloning but more about bioethics in a social context which should lead the audience into questioning these future possibilities/problems that are not fully acknowledged. Therefore, the play also presents fertile ground for the posthuman ethics of gender with its cloned characters, non-existent mother(s)/women, and the deliberate choice of an allmale cast. Churchill not only tackles cloning or the disappearance of motherhood but also puts into question the idea of a future where the traditional idea of reproduction and existence of women are being replaced by androcentric science: cloning is available for money and specific purposes, and women and clones are otherized by the patriarchal order. Therefore, this chapter aims to argue that A Number’s non-existent females and feminized clones are turning into cyborgs, in the meaning offered by Donna J. Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto”. 1 R. Darren Gobert, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 112. 2 Liliane Campos, “‘Any number is a shock’: Figuring humanity in Caryl Churchill’s A Number”, Coup de théâtre, RADAC, 2016, 27. 3 Martina Donkers & Lindy A Orthia, “Popular Theatre for Science Engagement: Audience Engagement with Human Cloning Following a Production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number”, International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 6/1: 27, 10.1080/21548455.2014.947349.

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Cloning and Cyborgs “Clone”, as Maria A. S. Ferreira mentions, is a term that first appeared in botany: “The word clone, which derives from the Greek word for twig, was coined in 1903, describing genetically identical groups of plants”.4 Leah Richards also indicates that in the nineteenth century it first described “plants reproduced by sprouting new plants from a cutting of an existing plant; in the mid-twentieth century, the term was applied to the theoretical asexual reproduction of humans”.5 The use of the word for possible human cloning follows the coinage of term. According to Ferreira “J.B.S. Haldane, the famous British biologist, for his part, was among the first to employ the word clone in a speech […] when he wondered about what might happen ‘if we cloned people […]’”.6 Following these turn-of-the-century or millennial futuristic dreams, scientific achievements accomplished until the next turn of the century, such as Dolly, “the first mammal who was the fruit of somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning”7 can be considered as examples of rapid change and progress in the field. However, these changes bring with them a necessity for bioethics which is always considered to be “boring” as Haraway argues, “[b]ecause too often it acts as a regulatory discourse after all the really interesting, generative action is over. Bioethics seems usually to be about not doing something, about some need to prohibit, limit, police, hold the line against looming technoviolations, to clean up after the action or prevent the action in the first place”.8 Cloning, as an anthropocentric ambition that started with experimenting on non-human species and extended to humans for the sake of enhancing human life, is also a topic that should be the focus of bioethics. As Rosi Braidotti argues in the Posthuman, “Animals like pigs and mice are genetically modified to produce organs for humans in xeno-transplantation experiments. Using animals as test cases and cloning them is now an established scientific practice: […] In advanced capitalism, animals of all categories and species have been turned into tradable disposable bodies, inscribed in a global market of post-anthropocentric exploitation”.9 Testing on or cloning non-human animals mostly raises ethical questions not concerning the lives and rights of these commodified and oth4 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira, I am the other: literary negotiations of human cloning (Westport: Praeger, 2005), 4. 5 Leah Richards, “Clones: Orphan Black (Manson and Fawcett, 2013–2017)”, in Monsters: a companion, ed. Simon Bacon (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), 193. 6 Ferreira, I am the other, 4. 7 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 136. 8 Haraway, When Species Meet, 136. 9 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 70.

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erized beings but about the close interaction of human bodies with non-human animal bodies. When humans are used as disposable bodies, the ethical questions mostly evolve around religion as the human body is seen more superior, unique, and sacred; however, in the capitalistic functioning of science, human bodies that are used for this kind of scientific research do share similarities with animal bodies. It can be argued that, following Braidotti’s definition of a specific type of male figure in the centre (of humanism or anthropocentric worldview), human and non-human bodies that are used in scientific research are somewhat colonized and otherized beings serving the purposes of a certain group of people who deem themselves superior to the marginalized others and abuse them for their own ends. Thus, the human-initiated/controlled cloning of species, which advertises itself as a huge contribution to the enhancement and betterment of human life, is not only an attempt at transhumanism but brings with it questions concerning the central position of human beings and the limits of science under capitalism. As the above quotation from Braidotti also underlines, “advanced capitalism” leads to new ways of exploitation, recreating and enlarging its list of marginalized others. The list of marginalized others in the twenty-first century ranges from non-human animals, women, racial others to hybrids, and machines, and so on. Thus, all these otherized beings are subjects of critical posthumanism. When talking about Dolly, Braidotti suggests that “[C]loned, not conceived sexually, heterogeneous mix of organism and machine, Dolly has become delinked from reproduction and hence divorced from descent. Dolly is no daughter of any member of her/its old species – simultaneously orphan and mother of her/itself. First of a new gender, she/it is also beyond the gender dichotomies of the patriarchal kinship system”.10 Therefore, although otherized and disregarded as other marginalized beings such as woman and non-human animals, a clone exists outside the boundaries of patriarchally defined categories as an anomaly, an example of hybridity uniting “organism and machine”. In Harawayian terminology, all these marginalized beings, and in this context clones and women, may be referred to as cyborgs. In “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Haraway indicates that “[A] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.11 Thus, a clone also turns into a cyborg as an organic and inorganic creation as well as a feminized being due to the functionality expected from them, which, therefore, makes them meet on common ground with marginalized women. All the definitions and descriptions 10 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 74. 11 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149.

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concerning these beings are fictionally produced by the androcentric worldview which represents them as either monsters, eerie beings, or angelic/selfless beings serving the male-dominant system. In the same line, it can be argued that twins, doppelgängers, doubles, and notyet-named alter-egos were enthralling subjects of horror mostly explored by nineteenth-century literature due to the rapid changes in science and technology during the period; however the twentieth and early twenty-first-century literature also create a great variety of representations of technologically and/or scientifically created beings in accordance with the progress in these two fields. Following the coinage of the word “clones” in 1903, it can be seen that it finds its place in the literature of the time and in the emerging genre of science-fiction: “The word first appears in science fiction in 1915, in a collection of short stories, Master Tales of Mystery by the World’s Most Famous Authors of Today, edited by Francis Joseph Reynolds”.12 Similar to the nineteenth-century representations of doubles as eerie beings, the same fears surround clones in literature as well, as Ferreira also underlines: “fictional representations of human cloning have been predominantly negative, arousing feelings of deep-seated horror in many readers”.13 Ferreira explains the possible reasons for the “negative” representations of clones as follows: “the fear of losing one’s identity and uniqueness, becoming one in an endless series of duplications, to such widespread misapprehensions as the conjecture that a clone would lack a soul or the horrifying spectacle of standardized humanity moving, robot-like, as a sole organism without free will or volition, in a parody of human standardization”.14 Thus, clones do also share similarities with the representation of myths surrounding women as organisms that are subordinated to men as the definition of what is human.

Feminized Clones and Non-Existent Women as Harawayian Cyborgs in A Number While Caryl Churchill’s clones in A Number are the epitome of the uncanny,15 they are not depicted as monstrous; clones are totally unaware victims of androcentric futuristic dreams whereas women are non-existent, and the only traditional male character is the one in the centre by being constantly on stage. Churchill, with these deliberate choices, tries to question the mainly disregarded 12 13 14 15

Ferreira, I am the other, 5. Ferreira, I am the other, 4. Ferreira, I am the other, 4. Not only because of the subject of cloning and multiple clones, but also due to the performance choices.

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or ignored ethical limits and possible outcomes of scientific, capitalistic, and androcentric dreams. As Donkers and Onthia suggest, in the context of the play we can see or question the science of the age which revolves around transhumanist dreams/plans for human enhancement: “therapeutic cloning, cloning of livestock and pets, Dolly the sheep, organ harvesting, xenotransplantation, designer babies, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, saviour siblings, stem cell research, the influence of money on research directions, notions of power and ‘playing God’ and professional regulation of science as an industry”.16 As these real-life examples also reveal, while the aim of science is defined as helping humanity, the direction it takes looks more like a capitalistic dream that is available for or elevates only a group of people when it leads to the abuse and marginalization of other beings including the creations of science and technology. Thus, the audience are pushed to question these dreams, the science behind them, and the possible outcomes, as Churchill tries to explore what happens when cloning turns into a form of reproduction as well as a dream obtained by any individual, specifically by men, in a capitalistic and misogynistic system. As Gobert indicates, “A Number is spare: a single set and two actors. This spareness is thematically meaningful. First, Churchill […] by having a single actor play all three sons […] embody the central dramatic problem: discovering that one is ‘not very like but very something terrible which is exactly the same genetic person’”.17 The play consists of four characters, Salter is the father in his sixties, and the other three characters are Bernard (B1), Bernard (B2), and Michael, Salter’s original son, and his two clones, all of whom are played by the same actor. The play opens with the first clone, Bernard (B2), who in the beginning thinks that he is the original son and is shocked about the recent information he has received concerning being cloned and having “a number” of clones. Salter, the father, who is the never-changing, ever-existing, central character of the play, not only stands for the hypocritical, pragmatist male-centric view, but he also withholds information and reveals facts bit by bit, drawing an unreliable character throughout the play. The audience later learn that Salter’s wife committed suicide, he abandoned his only son Bernard, yet had him cloned to have a second chance at fatherhood, and seemingly was not aware of the fact that there were 21 copies of Bernard. Thinking about the main subject of the play, its name A Number, functions on many levels, suggesting different possibilities; but all of them, in one way or another, stress the fact that clones and the original Bernard, as marginalized beings, are not seen as human beings. First, it is a reference to the problem of individuality/identity in the play, as two of the characters are referred to as 16 Donkers & Orthia, “Popular Theatre for Science Engagement”, 37. 17 R. Darren Gobert, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 114.

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numbers B1 and B2 rather than Bernard, which is a deliberate choice to underline how they are not seen as having autonomous, authentic selves. Another possible meaning is to do with the idea of belonging to a group of similar beings/things without any distinguishing characteristics; as the play revolves around Bernard and his 21 copies/clones, this idea is also relevant, and we see only a number of them on stage. The first stage direction of the play suggests that “[T]he play is for two actors. One plays Salter, the other his sons. The scene is the same throughout, it’s where Salter lives”.18 The outward and genetic similarities of clones are already considered uncanny similarities, however, due to practical as well as tactical reasons, having the same actor playing three different characters is also a way to create another level of uncanny representation as it is difficult for the audience to discern which son they see on stage, “[T]his uncanny resemblance challenges the audience’s anthropocentric view of the stage along with their perception of the boundaries between humans”19 and clones. The blurring of boundaries between characters does not only aim confusion but also underlines the common problems concerning identity and what separates original beings from their clones if they share exactly the same genetic code. These are questions posed to be revealed throughout the play as each son is different from the other, maybe not in appearance but in character, which is formed mainly under the effect of the father or the lack of it. Therefore, the play also raises questions concerning nature/nurture and the effects of the nonexistence or dysfunctionality of mother and father figures which also become critical for a feminist Posthumanist discussion; as Donkers and Onthia also suggest “[T]he play questions identity, uniqueness, nature and nurture, parenting, research ethics and how human clones might challenge these”.20 The choice of setting is also significant; the stage is defined as Salter’s house and the place never changes all along the play, as if to highlight the idea that this realm belongs to Salter, who is the representative of the androcentric worldview. Salter’s godlike and unshakable position on the stage is juxtaposed with his hypocritical and pragmatic character. Although the audience learn that Salter is the one who initiated the cloning of his son Bernard (B1), and B2 is one of the clones, he acts like he knows nothing and refers to the clones as “these things” 18 Caryl Churchill, A Number (London: Nick Hern Books, 2014) Characters, Kobo. 19 Özlem Karadag˘, “Becoming Human/oid: A Posthumanist Critique of Thomas Eccleshare’s Instructions for Correct Assembly”, in New Readings in British Drama: From the Post-War Period to the Contemporary Era (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021), 100. A very similar choice, most probably inspired by Churchill’s play, can be seen in Thomas Eccleshare’s 2018 play Instructions for Correct Assembly in which a couple buy a flat pack humanoid version of their son, who died recently. Both characters are seen on stage due to flashbacks and both of them, the human and the humanoid, are acted by the same actor similar to the choices in A Number. 20 Donkers & Orthia, “Popular Theatre for Science Engagement”, 26.

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which disturbs B2, and the first question that comes to Salter’s mind is the possibility of suing those, who made (more than one) copies of his son: B2 […] SALTER […] B2

SALTER B2 SALTER B2 SALTER

a number of them, of us […] […] how far has this thing gone, how many of these things21 are there? You said things, these things […] You called them things. I think we’ll find they’re people. Because I’m one. No. Yes. Why not? Yes. Because they’re copies copies? they’re not copies of you which some mad scientist has illegally22

This early conversation in the play not only reveals how Salter lies about his knowledge concerning the cloning process and B2’s being a clone, but also exposes how he does not see them as living beings. The blurriness of boundaries between B2 and the others, even without knowing them, leads B2 to criticize his father’s attitude. Salter’s way of looking at the clones is very much to do with the traditional ideas that despise and marginalize beings that are not human, as defined by patriarchal society. However, being the one who had his son cloned and sees and loves B2, the clone/copy, as his son, Salter’s approach is hypocritical, still making him a representative of anthropocentric and androcentric views. Braidotti, while discussing “negative difference” through human-animal relationships, refers to Louis Borges and indicates that there are three types of animals: Let us look more closely at the mechanisms involved in the dialectics of negative difference, from the angle of animals. The animal is the necessary, familiar and much cherished other of anthropos. This familiarity, however, is fraught with perils. In a brilliant mock taxonomy, Louis Borges classified animals into three groups: those we watch television with, those we eat and those we are scared of. These exceptionally high levels of lived familiarity confine the human–animal interaction within classical parameters, namely, an oedipalized relationship (you and me together on the same sofa); an instrumental (thou shalt be consumed eventually) and a fantasmatic one (exotic, extinct infotainment objects of titillation).23

21 My italics. 22 Churchill, A Number, Scene I. 23 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 68.

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In this context, the clones in the play are represented similarly, they are the uncanny “other of anthropos”. To use Haraway’s term, B2 represents the “companion species”, underlining a Deleuzian and Guattarian oedipalized relationship as also mentioned by Braidotti, whereas the other copies, as can be seen from Salter’s reaction, are considered as “fantasmatic”, creating fear as they are not “instrumental”. Therefore, Salter’s relationship with B2 is a vicious circle of copy-pet-son that works upon the principle of favouring one copy over the original and the other copies. Salter is shaping him according to his own wishes and seeing him both as a companion and as a son, so he is both oedipalized and instrumentalized in this context. This idea of oedipalized relationship can be taken further by deconstructing Salter’s reference to the “mad scientist” which brings into mind Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein and his monster. Leah Richard argues that “[W]hen Victor Frankenstein brought science into the mix, gathering body parts and animating his Creature through glossed-over but scientific methods, the lab-made monstrous near-human was born. In the twentieth century, real-world reproductive science became a topic of both conversation and contention, culminating, for the purpose of this discussion, in the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in 1996”.24 The idea of creating a new son in a petri dish in a lab, using the cells taken from an existing one, falls in line with the way Dr Frankenstein gathers pieces to create the Monster to refute death.25 However, Salter’s selfish desire to produce a son through the help of modern science is also what underlines the fact that clones are commodities used for anthropocentric purposes. Wieland Schwanebeck argues that “clones have been reliably conceptualised as ‘mass-produced […] obedient, subhuman slaves’ (Wasson 2011, 78)”26 which is also the case in Churchill’s play. Schwanebeck also suggests that “New forays into the theme continue to merge ‘Frankenstein’s monster […] with the assembly lines of Brave New World’ (Nerlich/Clarke/Dingwall 2001, 40), and the plots typically revolve around evil doppelgängers, the limits of human agency, and organ-harvesting. Scientists typically find themselves cast in the roles of mad Faustian doctors who produce ‘Frankensteinian reanimated corpse-type freak[s] of nature’ (O’Riordan 2008, 116)”.27 Thus, Churchill’s clones, which are of course inspired by the achievements of the late twentieth century and the ethical questions surrounding them, 24 Richards, “Clones: Orphan Black”, 193. 25 I see a similar parallelism between Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein and the father figure in Eccleshare’s Instructions for Correct Assembly: “Similar to Dr Frankenstein, Hari assembles tiny bits and pieces and fiddles with the circuits on Jån’s head and in a sense creates him”. Karadag˘, “Becoming Human/oid”, 104. 26 Wieland Schwanebeck, Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning (New York: Routledge 2020), 190. 27 Schwanebeck, Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning, 190.

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enable the audience to experiment with these clashing ideas and the limits of science in this age. Although Salter blames a “mad scientist” for cloning his son asking “how dare they”,28 one can also see him as a modern Frankenstein figure both because of his desire to produce a son without natural reproduction and of the reaction he shows upon learning the existence of other clones. Even though Salter is not a scientist, his resolution and ability to have his son cloned turns him into a Frankenstein figure, although he ignored his duties as a husband, father, and a surrogate father to the clones, he does not fail to reveal his opportunistic side: SALTER

a million is the least you should take, I think it’s half a million each person because what they’ve done they’ve damaged your uniqueness, weakened your identity, so we’re looking at five million for a start.29

What is frightening in the concept of cloning in this domestic drama, which does not touch upon any scientific terminology or process at all, is the ordinariness of the act of cloning as well as Salter’s opportunism and unreliability. As Amelia Howe Kritzer also indicates, “Churchill approaches the subject, not through laboratories and white-coated scientists, but through an ordinary, if highly charged, conversation between a middle-aged father and his thirty-something son”.30 Although he is talking to a clone (B2) in the first scene, who is reproduced from the original Bernard upon Salter’s order, he hides the facts in this scene and acts like he is not responsible for any of the crimes he mentions in the above quotation. Thus, while Salter’s relationship with the favourite clone, B2, turns into an oedipal one, his attitude is one that marginalizes and feminizes the clones. Haraway argues that “[t]o be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; […] leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex”.31 The way Salter, therefore the androcentric view, sees clones and women is similar to what Haraway argues, they are both feminized. What is expected from females or feminized beings are similar, they are expected to serve a purpose or function in a way that is defined or expected by the patriarchy, even the concept of being a female itself is a fictional construction as Haraway argues: “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices”.32 Thus, while 28 Churchill, A Number, Scene I. 29 Churchill, A Number, Scene I. 30 Amelia Howe Kritzer, “A Number by Caryl Churchill”, Theatre Journal, Vol. 55, no. 2 (May, 2003): 354. 31 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 166. 32 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 155.

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these fictional existences are cyborgs in a Harawayian sense, human beings, or in this context Salter or men, are the monsters, instead of the clones who traditionally appear in literature as objects of horror. In this “dystopian future”33 Salter is not only monstrous due to his greediness, hypocrisy, and his decision to use his son for “some scientific research” in return for owning another copy of him, but also due to his apathy, lack of empathy and sympathy which leads to a vicious circle of violence. His tone is, maybe not strictly clinical, but often legal and mostly emotionless; he is not concerned about B2’s feelings upon learning about the clones but is more concerned about not being in control of the situation and seeking monetary gain. Furthermore, he lies without blinking an eye, and as his decades-long lie is revealed, rather than apologising he fabricates new lies which also underlines his indifference to other beings around him. This problematic relationship is also put into question when he talks to B2 about his mother and brother, or when Bernard (B1) reveals the facts about their past, or through Salter’s ever-changing yet stolid stories concerning the mother and her death. In the first scene, when B2 presses him to explain the truth by saying “so please if you’re not my father that’s fine. If you couldn’t have children or my mother, and you did in vitro or I don’t know what you did I really think you should tell me”, first Salter goes with it and says “Yes, that’s what it was”.34 Then, he is forced to reveal a bit of the truth although he still lies about his first son: “I am your father, it was by an artificial the forefront of science but I am genetically. […] There was someone […] There was a son […] another son, yes, a first […] who died”.35 However, Bernard (B1) is very much alive, and he is also a troubled son due to his dysfunctional father’s indifference and abandonment: B1

When I was there in the dark. I’d be shouting. […] Yes, I’d be shouting dad dad […] and you never came, nobody ever came […] after my mom was dead this was after […] I want to know if you could hear me or not because I never knew were you hearing me and not coming or could you not hear me […] Or maybe there was no one there at all and you’d gone out […]36

Although Salter denies acting in that way in this scene, in the fourth scene, in the longest speech of his/the play, he confesses that he deliberately left him shouting or alone at home and just gave him over to the social services without a second thought: 33 34 35 36

Gobert, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, 118. Churchill, A Number, Scene I. Churchill, A Number, Scene I. Churchill, A Number, Scene II.

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You know you asked me when you used to shout in the night. Sometimes I was there, I’d sit and listen to you or I’d not be in any condition to hear you I’d just be sitting. Sometimes I’d go out and leave you. […] You’d nearly stopped speaking do you remember that? not speaking not eating I tried to make you. I’d put you in the cupboard do you remember? or I’d look for you everywhere and I’d think you’d got away and I’d find you under the bed. […] One day I cleaned you up and said take him into care. You didn’t look too bad and they took you away. My darling. Do you remember that? Do you remember that day because I don’t remember it you know. The whole thing is very vague to me.

After learning about Salter’s attitude towards his son, his reckless desire to have him cloned becomes a terrifying fact in the play. B1 is suffering in the present due to his childhood trauma of betrayal. Although Salter talks in an indifferent way and makes light of examples such as putting him in a cupboard or B1’s hiding under the bed, he is actually giving himself away not only as a terrible father but also as a terrible person who traumatized his toddler and ruined his future. Salter’s selective memory chooses to forget the day he left his son to the social services, although he is able to remember other details about the day. All of these examples, doubled up with the way he recounts these memories prove how insensitive he is; Churchill, in a way, uses Salter as an allegorical father/patriarchal figure to criticise man-made gender roles that do not expect any kind of function, responsibility, empathy, sensitivity and caring from fathers, the way these are expected from women. B1 grows into a troubled, violent man as if to fulfil his father’s legacy of indifference and monstrosity, he wants dogs for practical reasons but cannot even live with them, he complains about the stink, and hates their interdependency, and what is worse he hits them with a belt.37 His relationship with animals somehow foreshadows his future reaction to his clone(s), in the fourth scene we learn from B1 that he killed B2,38 yet contrary to his father, B1 is not able to live with his actions and kills himself,39 drawing attention not only to his difference from the patriarch but also to the impossibility of living peacefully in an androcentric world. Another problem about Salter is that he constantly lies about the mother, B2 believes that he had a mother who died when he was a baby, and then Salter fabricates another lie saying that B2’s mother died, with the first son, in a car crash, “So they’d been killed in a carcrash”.40 Then, in the third scene, when he is talking to B2 again, who has learnt about the fact that the original son is alive, he is forced to explain that the mother committed suicide: 37 38 39 40

Churchill, A Number, Scene II. Churchill, A Number, Scene IV. Churchill, A Number, Scene V. Churchill, A Number, Scene I.

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B2 SALTER

B2 SALTER B2 SALTER

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Your mother, the thing a thing about your mother was that she wasn’t very happy, she wasn’t a very happy person at all, I don’t mean there were sometimes days she wasn’t happy or I did things that made her not happy I did of course, she was always not happy, often cheerful and she killed herself. How did she do that? She did it under a train under a tube train, she was one of those people when they say there has been a person under a train and the trains are delayed she was a person under a train. Were you with her? With her on the platform no, I was still with her more or less but not with her then no I was having a drink I think. And the boy? Do you know I don’t remember where the boy was. I think he was at a friend’s house, we had friends.41

Salter is still reluctant to tell the truth, and when he reveals these disturbing details concerning the death of his wife, rather than focusing on the tragic death of the mother, first he tries to blame the suicide on her chronic unhappiness and then reveals how he was indifferent to her in general. The way he wanders away from the subject (mother’s suicide or leaving Bernard) can be read as his rejection of and reaction to traumatic memories, however, Salter’s reactions all throughout the play do not show any signs of intimacy or empathy, he is self-centred and also not willing to take any responsibility for his actions, but somehow he is prone to repeat them. When B1 asks him about their financial situation in the past, the audience learn that they were not rich, and yet he was able to have his son cloned; this is a moment that raises a question concerning Salter’s honesty again, he was either capable of paying for such an operation or rather than owning another copy of his perfect son, he was paid for the experiment and ended up by with a copy while seemingly remained unaware of the other 20 copies. The second option resonates with his constant repetition of suing the scientists for monetary gain, a subject that he routinely opens up when talking to B1, B2, and Michael Black; yet he insists that he only wanted to have a copy of his perfect son who he chose to clone at the age of four rather than taking care of the child himself. As Kritzer argues “[H]e is powerful enough to create a dilemma but not powerful enough to solve it. His action has created two rivals for the same identity both named Bernard, and referred to in the script as Bl and B2, but never called by name in the dialogue”.42 Naming the clone Bernard, after his first son, is not only about his obsession with the idea of having exactly the perfect son, his first/ original one, but also about his inability to see the way he destructs the son’s

41 Churchill, A Number, Scene III. 42 Kritzer, “A Number by Caryl Churchill”, 355. My italics.

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uniqueness; stripping them of their individual identities and of having the chance of attaining their individuality and forming their identities. The mother, similar to B1 and B2, is stripped of her identity, she does not have a name on the stage and no place in the play as a character, she is constantly referred to as “mother”. This is again a deliberate choice on Churchill’s side, the mother becomes an allegorical character who represents all mothers. Her unhappiness and suicide, therefore, point out a problematic future for all women, a future they will not be able to survive in. As Margaret Savilonis also argues, the play is a “depiction of family crises playing out between fathers and sons within the home, so the absence of the maternal figure is difficult to ignore, particularly because of the small casts […] Yet though the action […] is set within the private sector of the home, Churchill enables the family structure to function metaphorically as a microcosmic representation of the social structure by drawing attention to external forces such as environmental crises, government regulations, and scientific interventions into the processes of reproduction, all of which significantly affect familial relationships”.43 However, as well as showing the effects of “external forces” on family, Churchill uses the nuclear family to show the change that hovers above human society. In A Number, the non-existence of not only the mother but women in general, draws attention to Churchill’s anxieties concerning the future of society, as what is presented on stage is a projection of the shape androcentric science and society may take. Thus, this non-existence is significant in the sense that it plays with the traditional gender roles attributed to women who are seen as beings closer to nature and given a place in the androcentric system for their functionality due to their procreative, gestational, and domestic abilities/duties. This means that they do not have a central position, and the androcentric system will easily do away with women when they are not needed. Salter, at least twice in the play, stresses that rather than remarrying and having a new child, he chose to clone his first son. When talking to B1 he even says “I could have killed you and had another son, made one the same like I did or start again have a different one get married again and I didn’t”.44 Although he says that he chose cloning just because he “didn’t want a different one”,45 meaning Bernard, it is symbolic that he talks like an androcentric God with the power to kill and reproduce on his own, he does not want women in the process of reproduction, he also is not that concerned about a naturally-conceived/born baby. While talking to B2, he regularly mentions that, although he is a clone, he is his son reproduced from his original son’s cells. This 43 Margaret Savilonis, “‘She Was Always Sad’: Remembering Mother in Caryl Churchill’s Not Enough Oxygen and A Number”, Theatre History Studies, Vol. 35, 2016: 234, https://doi.org /10.1353/ths.2016.0012234. 44 Churchill, A Number, Scene IV. 45 Churchill, A Number, Scene IV.

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is problematic for two reasons, first of all B2 is both the son, brother, and the double of Bernard (B1) who is like an Adam figure, more than being godlike Salter’s son, thus B2 turns into an Eve figure, a male yet feminized clone/copy made out of B1; secondly, Salter never says “our son”, as if to disregard the mother’s part in the making of the baby. As Savilonis argues “the mothers in these plays exist only as disembodied characters (never there but also never not there) who feature in the stories of their husbands and sons, their physical absence simultaneously exposes and enacts the process of dehumanization, as ‘mother’ is constructed solely through memory and myth”.46 Thus, similar to the clones, the mother is also a marginalized being; when scientific reproduction becomes an option, she is taken out of the equation. She is not seen or heard and exists only in Salter’s unreliable narrative, as Savilonis suggests “her identity is controlled almost exclusively by Salter, who constructs, and reconstructs, the image of his dead wife as it suits his purposes”.47 However, the mother is not the only woman that is non-existent, contrary to her vague appearance as a figure in Salter’s stories, there is another group of women who are not even mentioned in the text for purposes of criticising the limit(less)ness of androcentric science. As Haraway suggests “who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue”,48 and androcentric science underestimates women’s bodies and problems as well as their efforts as scientists. In the play, the science behind cloning is not given in detail as if to show the audience their own view of science and technology, a majority of the people have no detailed knowledge about the process or side effects of the experiments such as cloning. In a nutshell, as Malcolm MacLachlan summarizes, cloning requires and includes the following demanding steps: If cloning humans follows the same process as developed by Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute in Scotland when he cloned the now famous Dolly in 1996, then it will involve several distinct stages: (a) eggs would be harvested from donors given fertility drugs; (b) cells would then be taken from the person to be cloned; (c) the nuclei from the donor’s eggs would be removed by sucking them out with a fine needle; (d) the DNA-free donor eggs and the donor cells would then be placed next to one another and fused by applying an electric current to them; (e) some of the resulting reconfigured eggs would be divided to produce embryos; (f) several of these embryos would be implanted into gestational surrogate mothers. Through such a process, up to 50 surrogates could be needed to

46 Savilonis, “‘She Was Always Sad’: Remembering Mother in Caryl Churchill’s Not Enough Oxygen and A Number”, 234. 47 Savilonis, “‘She Was Always Sad’: Remembering Mother in Caryl Churchill’s Not Enough Oxygen and A Number”, 243. 48 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 169.

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produce one baby, as many of the pregnancies would terminate by miscarriage or be aborted due to abnormalities49 (Gibbs 2001).50

In A Number, the audience learn from Salter that cells are taken from Bernard (B1) and this experiment resulted in 21 healthy copies of Bernard. However, we do not learn if there were miscarriages, abortions or most importantly about the surrogate mothers, at all. At least 21 women should have gone through pregnancy and labour, but they are never mentioned, we only see Salter and learn about male scientists, and a cloning process that results in male clones. Thus, women and in a sense women’s labour (in both senses of the word) are completely invisible. As Haraway argues “[I]t was the general absence, not the occasional presence, of women of whatever class or lineage/color – and the historically specific ways that the semiotics and psychodynamics of sexual difference worked – that gendered the experimental way of life in a particular way”.51 In a similar vein, talking of gendered bodies and gendered science, as MacLachlan underlines “[I]t is somehow ironic that perhaps the ultimate achievement in terms of biotechnology and reproduction, aside from cloning, is a woman’s capability to give birth to a child that is not her own. Mother nature, it would seem, is the ultimate enabling technology when she is used to overcome another’s thwarted desires to nurture”.52 Thus, women are gendered as females with certain expectations such as motherhood and nurturing; women’s bodies are defined and used in various ways for the greater good of humanity, however in return they become more and more invisible. Thus, the non-existence of women is turning them into cyborgs in the Harawayian sense, as it is revealing the “backgrounding and instrumentalization”53 of women.

Conclusion In A Number, Churchill tackles the idea of monstrosity, and chooses to attribute it to human beings, to be precise, to men, rather than our uncanny others. The audience learn in the fourth scene that B1 killed B2, and in the last scene, while talking to Michael, Salter says that B1 killed himself. B1 and B2 turn into modern yet twisted Cain and Abel figures, as well; with his anthropocentric approach, B1 49 My italics. 50 Malcolm MacLachlan, Embodiment: Clinical, Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Illness, (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004), 150. 51 Donna J. Haraway, [email protected]: feminism and technoscience, (New York: Routledge, 2018 (1997), 27. 52 MacLachlan Embodiment: Clinical, Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Illness, 147. 53 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, (London: Routledge, 1993), 21.

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is not able to live with his other/double and kills him. However, befitting the idea of the impossibility of living without our others, he commits suicide afterwards. B1 not only proves that violence is a human trait but with his suicide, in a sense, shows the impossibility of living under or the continuation of androcentrism. The only hope the play offers is the appearance of Michael Black, the second clone, in the fifth and the last scene of the play. As the sons who knew/grew up with Salter, B1 and B2 are melancholic or troubled characters, on the contrary, Michael is a happy person with a family and a profession, and he is devoid of a biased and exclusionary mindset with the ability to pay attention to details around him and loving other beings such as nature, dogs,54 and his wife and children: MICHAEL: […] SALTER: MICHAEL:

[…] you already know I’m a teacher, mathematics, you know I’m married, three children did I tell you that are you happy? what now? Or in general? Yes I think I am, […] The world’s a mess of course. But you can’t help, a sunny morning, leaves turning, off to the park with the baby, you can’t help feeling wonderful can you?55

Michael is one of the clones who never knew about Salter, if Salter is a patriarchal, androcentric, God-like figure, it is possible to say that out of his realm there is a possibility of living an embodied life, noticing every detail about nature, other people, and their stories. However, Salter continues looking for a glimpse of Bernard in Michael, and he is not able to accept that he cannot control the natural course of life. When he asks Michael to tell him something about himself, Michael talks about something he learned about a different culture, then he talks about how he loves his wife’s “beautiful and slightly odd ears […] slightly pointy on top, like a disney elf or little animal ears”.56 Talking about her elfish ears is also significant to show that there is no one common definition of perfection, and details are making each being unique in their own way. The way Michael pays attention to these details, embraces others, and remembers the stories of other groups of people, harshly contrast Salter’s egocentric approach to life and his children. As Gobert also suggests, Salter “does not apprehend the lesson Michael offers; he cannot understand Michael’s happiness, his sense of belonging”.57 In the same vein, it is possible to say that Salter, who does not understand what it means to look at life or live it without marginalizing others and instrumentalizing them for 54 55 56 57

Churhcill, A Number, Scene V. Churchill, A Number, Scene V. Churchill, A Number, Scene V. Gobert, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill, 118.

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selfish reasons, by not acknowledging Michael and seeing him as a “fantasmatic”58 being, eventually makes him a cyborg in a Harawayian sense. Michael is part science, part organic, and he has an uncanny existence that creates a sense of unrest in Salter. Ferreira suggests that “[I]n the sense that clones can be seen as ‘artificially’ created, in a laboratory environment, as the offspring of technology, they can thus be said to inflect to a certain extent a cyborgian ontology, such as Donna Haraway’s influential definition of a cyborgian politics”.59 Although “artificially created”, Michael is also a Dolly figure as described by Braidotti,60 and he symbolizes the possibility of living a life that is inclusive of and respectful to all beings without ignoring or backgrounding them. He does not see himself as a superior male figure as he cannot be a part of that anthropocentric/androcentric worldview due to his existence beyond and out of traditional gender norms, body politics, class, or race although he is being subjected to this kind of discrimination as a clone. As Haraway suggests “[G]ender is always a relationship, not a preformed category of beings or a possession that one can have. Gender does not pertain more to women than to men. Gender is the relation between variously constituted categories of men and women (and variously arrayed tropes), differentiated by nation, generation, class, lineage, color, and much else”.61 Thus, Michael is also a cyborg that lives beyond the realm of patriarchal definitions with the possibility of redefining species’ relationships, and that’s why Churchill ends the play with his happiness to Salter’s dismay.

Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Campos, Liliane. “‘Any number is a shock’: Figuring humanity in Caryl Churchill’s A Number”. Coup de théâtre, RADAC, 2016: 27–41. Churchill, Caryl. A Number. London: Nick Hern Books, 2014. Kobo. Donkers, Martina, and Lindy A Orthia. “Popular Theatre for Science Engagement: Audience Engagement with Human Cloning Following a Production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number”. International Journal of Science Education, Part B, 6/1: 23–45, 10.1080/ 21548455.2014.947349. Ferreira, Maria Aline Seabra. I am the other: literary negotiations of human cloning. Westport: Praeger, 2005. Gobert, R. Darren. The Theatre of Caryl Churchill. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

58 59 60 61

Braidotti, The Posthuman, 68. Ferreira, I am the other, 2. See footnote 10. Haraway, [email protected]: feminism and technoscience, 27.

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Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. In Simians, Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature 149–181. New York: Routledge, 1991. – [email protected]: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge, 2018 (1997). – When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Karadag˘, Özlem. “Becoming Human/oid: A Posthumanist Critique of Thomas Eccleshare’s Instructions for Correct Assembly”. In New Readings in British Drama: From the PostWar Period to the Contemporary Era, edited by Enes Kavak and Mesut Günenç, 95–114. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021. Kritzer, Amelia Howe. “A Number by Caryl Churchill”. Theatre Journal, Vol. 55, no. 2 (May 2003): 354–355. MacLachlan, Malcolm. Embodiment: Clinical, critical and cultural perspectives on health and illness. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2004. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Richards, Leah. “Clones: Orphan Black (Manson and Fawcett, 2013–2017)”. In Monsters: a companion, edited by Simon Bacon, 193–200. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. Savilonis, Margaret. “‘She Was Always Sad’: Remembering Mother in Caryl Churchill’s Not Enough Oxygen and A Number”. Theatre History Studies, Vol. 35, 2016: 233–253. https://doi.org/10.1353/ths.2016.0012234. Schwanebeck, Wieland. Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning. New York: Routledge 2020.

Marilena Saracino

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: the Performative Function of Literature and the Discourse on Human-ess and Identity

This chapter explores the performative function of literature in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel that significantly exemplifies the performative effects of literature and art. It does its work by getting readers to see science differently by way of fiction, not by its direct representation but (as Aristotle knew) by its action, its plot, the stories it tells. The story told in Never Let Me Go invites its readers to see their own histories differently, and as a result to behave differently. The Hailsham experiment, which aims to challenge the whole system of the donation programme, actually fails not because of the Morningdale1 scandal but because there is something wrong with its own premise, as evidenced by Miss Emily’s blind candour when she explains to Tommy and Kathy the motives of the project: […] we challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run. Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones – or students, as we preferred to call you – existed only to supply medical science. In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes.2 (last italics mine).

The point and paradox is that Hailsham will contribute further to this consideration of the “students” as “shadowy objects in test tube”, firstly to alleviate the guilt of those who thought of using science for these purposes, but above all through the teaching methods adopted at the college, which do not encourage students to become more aware and thus other than mere experiments. There are no exchanges or dialogues through which to negotiate meaning and thus avoid 1 The scandal concerns a scientist named James Morningdale who wanted to offer people the chance to have children with certain characteristics such as superior intelligence, aboveaverage athletic abilities, etc. 2 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber 2006), 256. All references are to this edition.

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the danger of making it fixed and univocal; the teaching seeks only to achieve consensus rather than to start that process where everyone changes their perception of the world, acquires awareness and critical spirit, and build their own identity. In other words, it is an experiment that aims to destroy identity, to demotivate every project by extinguishing dreams and hopes, to stifle any unforeseen development, to ignore individuals and individual psychic processes, sexual orientation and emotional disorientation, conducted by guardians who have no wish to change the established course of things. The essay begins with a theoretical account of the notion of the performative, before moving to an analysis of how this notion works in the novel, and of what it shares with Posthumanism and posthuman critical theories. It concludes that both are committed to the construction and representation of the human under the pressure of a new idea of existence that, influenced as it is by technological invasions, requires a redefinition of individuals and their identity in a postanthropocentric, anti-human and therefore posthuman condition. Never Let Me Go invites the reader to ask whether the time has come to give due consideration to other perspectives in order to read more broadly this world in which economic, technological, social and environmental changes not only appear to be inextricably linked but propose other points of reference which are no longer negligible. The concept of the “performative” was born in the linguistic field by the British philosopher J.L. Austin who, in How to Do Things with Words, introduces the concept of “performative” language to indicate its potential both to describe and to perform actions. This idea has been welcomed by literary criticism which recognizes the ability of literary discourse to create characters, actions and situations, and above all ideas and concepts. The literary work in particular has a double performative nature: on the one hand, there is the act of writing; on the other, the ability to change the way of thinking and feeling. In other words, “[it] takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world, bringing into being the things that they name”.3 However, the concept of the performative has implications that reach beyond literary theory. Its greater and more incisive effects are in the field of teaching, that is, the transmission of literary, artistic, and any other fields of knowledge. The term “performance”, evidently borrowed from the theatrical lexicon, draws attention to the link between the context of teaching and that of theatrical representation: teaching becomes a sort of show in which an actor, the teacher, performs in front of the audience of students, who in turn attend to the teacher/ actor’s gestures and tone of voice. It refers to the more traditional teaching 3 J. Culler, Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press (1997) 2011), 97.

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method and context, in which the student attends what is usually configured as a “one-man or one-woman show”.4 The limitation of this model – widely spread in our school system, especially in the highest levels of education – is that often it is only the teacher who thinks actively, with the consequence that students are not provided with the means or the opportunity to capture new and original ideas and end up more intimidated than stimulated. Hence, we perceive an imbalance between the “performance” of the teacher and that of the students, who are not guided to an active understanding process since they are not shown how to learn and think critically. What needs to be changed is the very idea of knowledge: from something that is transmitted from the text to the student to something that happens in the student questioning the text, a change that therefore privileges reading, interpretation and criticism rather than the canon.5 However, exposing to literary works is not a sufficient condition to capture the interest of students, literary works must be related to their life experience since only in this way will they acquire the right skills to understand what they read and the tools necessary to read independently in the future. Otherwise, there is the risk that literature becomes the means to passive consent and repetition of other people’s opinions without any personal elaboration and unfortunately without the slightest awareness. Literature is the ideal place to exercise critical thinking because texts allow you to identify relationships between events, analyze, infer, synthesize and evaluate the content and language used. According to Tolstoy’s definition, the work of art is a “labyrinth of connections”, and thus a set of relations which requires readers to carry out complex operation, which entails reference to previous experiences and knowledge to construct meaning; making distinctions between facts and opinions; identifying textual details and inferring links among them; perceiving different point of view; and above all, applying the resultant skills and abilities to other contexts. This means moving the centre of interest from what the text “says” to what the text “does”, that is to say, from its constituent value to its performative value.6 Essential to this process is the affective element that allows the encounter with a literary text to be interiorized; this in turn depends on the way literature puts us in contact with concrete life experiences rather than with vague ideas, arousing 4 E. Showalter, Teaching Literature, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 32. 5 Showalter says that more than content, it is better to focus on the skills to develop in students: “[…] overall, our objective in teaching literature is to train our students to think, read, analyze, and write like literary scholars, to approach literary problems as trained specialists in the field do, to learn a literary methodology, in short to ‘do’ literature as scientists ‘do’ science” Showalter, Teaching Literature, 25. 6 Cfr. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

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personal answers even if raw and inarticulate. A novel, or indeed any piece of art, is not primarily a means of exposing facts but a vehicle for developing critical thinking and thus avoiding the mere repetition of preconceived ideas or notions. This is not to argue that the text is a self-sufficient entity from which readers must simply extrapolate a single meaning: on the contrary, they have to decode it on the basis of their own experiences – to read it and contribute to the construction of the meaning, filling the empty spaces, making predictions, imagining a course of events in a more fruitful and dynamic relationship. These inferential activities arise from the fact that literature does not make meaning immediately apparent, so much as it creates space for interpretation and for questioning, and therefore moving from the specific level of the narrated facts to a general level of social types and values. The teacher, in turn, has the task of pushing the student to overcome a purely personal point of view in favour of broader and more universal conceptions. This theoretical introduction seems necessary to my reading of Never Let Me Go, the novel that Kazuo Ishiguro writes a few years after the cloning of the sheep Dolly,7 setting it in a parallel version of England in the late nineties. The narrator and protagonist is Kathy H, a 31-year-old woman who lives in a world where some humans have been cloned in order to create organ donors. At the beginning of the story, Kathy, one of the clones, is not yet a “donor” but the carer of the other donors whom she looks after both from a “psychological” point of view and with regard to the medical care they need when they begin to undergo the series of donations that will lead them to death or, as it is called in the novel, to “completion”. Drawing on a memory8 that is not always reliable, Kathy recounts her childhood and that of her companions at Hailsham, an institute situated in an area of the English countryside that is left undefined. At first, Hailsham seems to be a normal boarding school where Kathy and her classmates study, practice sports and take part in all the activities of the period from elementary to high school. However, as we move forward we find that in Hailsham there are rules and behaviours that can hardly be considered normal such as the “Exchange” or “Barters”. These consist of a large exhibition and sale of painted objects, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and other things the students have created in the previous three months. Here they both bring their own products and buy those of their classmates, using Vouchers provided by the guardians and assigned to each 7 The sheep was produced at the Roslin Institute in Scotland near Edinburgh where she lived until her death about seven years later. Scientists announced her birth the following year, on 22 February 1997. The method used for the production of Dolly has substantially contributed to the development of biotechnology and the mechanisms regulating cell development. 8 Kathy’s story develops on two levels: memory and interpretation that have, among others, the aim of demonstrating the fallacy of memory and the impossibility of a univocal interpretation.

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artistic production as a means to measure the level of the clones’ “creativity”. In fact, as Kathy notes, the “Barters”, especially when they take the form of the “Great Enchantment”, are also the only opportunity to buy things from the outside world, although most of the time these were a “big disappointment”: Looking back now, it’s funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There’d be nothing remotely special and we’d spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken […] But the point was, I suppose, we’d all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed.9

Kathy does not have the appropriate terms to grasp that these supposedly entertaining moments are in fact the starting point of that process of reification to which the clones are submitted, and according to which things have value in themselves and not as a means to satisfy human needs. That old and often broken stuff, utterly useless to the students, not only has its own autonomous life but comes to define, through its circulation, the sense of human activity and the value of things. The “Great Enchantment” exemplifies what Marx had feared and prefigured, the inevitability of that abstract, anonymous and regulatory form of all exchanges which is the market and which still regulates the life of all. Is this not one of the many messages that Ishiguro conveys through the story of these seemingly harmless games which in fact underlie one of the many mechanisms of our society of which we are almost never aware? So too the clones are unaware when they are reprimanded by Miss Emily for their bad behaviour during the sale of the objects, but fail to understand much of the speech recalled by Ruth and Kathy at the Dover Rehabilitation Center many years later: It was partly her language. ‘Unworthy of privilege’ and ‘misuse of opportunity’ […] Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing, when we behaved badly. Beyond that, though, things became a fog. Sometimes she’d be going on very intensely then come to a sudden stop with something like: ‘What is it? What is it? What can it be that thwarts us?’ Then she’d stand there, eyes closed, a frown on her face like she was trying to puzzle out the answer.10

A first brief and perhaps rudimentary answer to Miss Emily’s distressing question, “What is it? What is it? What can it be that thwarts us?”, could be that at Hailsham children are thought of as plants, or as seeds that will grow up in a suitable soil with a few drops of water. The metaphor helps me to enter into the core of my topic. 9 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 4, italics mine. 10 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 43, italics mine.

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The way of teaching at Hailsham is that of “told and not told”. Kathy remembers talking to Tommy about Miss Lucy, who will be sent away just for her hesitant attempt to tell them something more, and to stimulate some questions: Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course, we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly.11

The students do not know how to dive deep: no one has ever considered it useful to stimulate them to think critically. The guardians seem rather to believe that the only objective of teaching is to create better people, which is certainly true but not enough. In this way, they neglect the most important function of teaching, that is, to encourage the search for meaning, preferring instead the passive learning of a truth already constituted. At Hailsham students are destined to remain empty vases to be filled with forms of knowledge they cannot doubt, contest or interrogate. That is why, when retracing the episode of Miss Lucy’s expulsion, Kathy finally concludes that “[…] we never considered anything from her [Miss Lucy] viewpoint, and it never occurred to us to say or do anything to support her”.12 The girl’s bitter reflection makes her the emblem of that student who has never been given the opportunity to interrogate the knowledge provided to her, but only to acquire and employ it in the terms in which it was taught and transmitted. The students of Hailsham do not know how to modify the stereotyped and crystallized ideas, they do not know what they see as reality is relative, nor can they see things from different angles. At Hailsham they are obliged to regard an unnatural state of affairs as normal; but if you encounter no other possibilities, you have no option but to accept the one presented to you. As result, as Kathy’s words have showed, another fundamental competence is erased in the process of teaching, namely “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have”.13 Its name is empathy, which both fosters a more open and tolerant society and makes people critically alert by activating those psychological mechanisms that help to defend against any form of indoctrination. That is why at the Cottages, where the clones go after Hailsham, and where they will no longer have any tutors, Kathy observes:

11 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 81, italics mine. 12 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 87. 13 M.C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 95–96.

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But then again, when I think about it, there’s a sense in which that picture of us on the first day, huddled together in front of the farmhouse, isn’t so incongruous after all. Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and – no matter how much we despised ourselves for it – unable quite to let each other go.14

Not knowing what freedom is, what emerges from this passage is the force of fear that has been inculcated in them and that, although they despise it, they are unable to let it go. Moreover, even when they talk about how much they miss their friends who have been transferred to other Cottages, Kathy notes that “[…] we could tell ourselves there was nothing stopping us going to visit them”,15 in fact, not even the geography classes have provided them with the basic notions of how to be autonomous, and “[f]or all our map lessons with Miss Emily, we had no real idea at that point about distances and how easy or hard it was to visit a particular place”.16 Nor does the teaching method change with different topics such as sex: Miss Emily used to give a lot of the sex lectures herself, and I remember once, she brought in a life-size skeleton from the biology class to demonstrate how it was done. We watched in complete astonishment as she put the skeleton through various contortions, thrusting her pointer around without the slightest self-consciousness, she was going through all the nuts and bolts of how you did it, what went in where, the different variations, like this was still Geography. Then suddenly […] she turned away and began telling us how we had to be careful who we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she said, ‘sex affects emotions in ways you’d never expect’. We had to be extremely careful about having sex in the outside world, especially with people who weren’t students, because out there sex meant all sorts of things. […] Miss Emily’s lecture that day was typical of what I’m talking about. We’d focusing on sex, and then the other stuff would creep in. I suppose that was all part of how we came to be ‘told and not told’.17

Again the clones do not ask any questions and again it is clear that it is easier to govern if no one asks questions and tamely accepts everything that is told them.18 And when they try to understand something more, they make the most bizarre 14 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 118 (my italics). Veiled but not too much here is the reference to the title of the novel that appears both a request for love and solidarity and also the denunciation of the impossibility of letting go, of feeling free. 15 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 116. 16 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 116. 17 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 82, italics in the text. 18 From this point of view, the novel is both a reflection on totalitarianism and a painful meditation on the dangers of post-industrial societies, where education is aimed only at satisfying the alliance of science and market at the expence of feelings which have instead an important cognitive function in individuals’ development.

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assumptions, not even the books they refer to are useful to clarifying their almost ridiculous ideas: […] the books we had at Hailsham weren’t at all helpful. We had a lot of nineteenthcentury stuff by Thomas Hardy and people like that, which was more or less useless. Some modern books, by people like Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble, had some sex in them, but it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.19

The experience of books becomes frustrating because at Hailsham the idea of the canon as a tool of control is subtly widespread. In this regard, it is helpful to see the means the guardians use to prevent children from smoking, including forms of censorship: […] at Hailsham the guardians were really strict about smoking. I’m sure they’d have preferred it if we never found out smoking even existed; but since this wasn’t possible, they made sure to give us some sort of lecture each time any reference to cigarettes came along. Even if we were being shown a picture of a famous writer or world leader, and they happened to have a cigarette in their hand, then the whole lesson would grind to a halt. There was even a rumour that some classic books – like Sherlock Holmes ones – weren’t in our library because the main characters smoked too much, and when you came across a page torn out of an illustrated book or magazine, this was because there’d been a picture on it of someone smoking.20

The students are not given a choice, and everything that is not part of the skills they are supposed to acquire is erased at the very root. This also eliminates the chance to know diversity and to accept it as a value. They are even more confused about homosexual love, for which they invent an inexplicable and funny definition: “For some reason, we called it ‘umbrella sex’; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were ‘an umbrella’. […] at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff”.21 Together with the lack of choice and the rejection of all forms of diversity, the students’ lexicon is also impoverished: if it is true that we are also the language we speak, they lack the terms to define their feelings and emotions, even those required to comment on a drawing which represents something they cannot easily recognize. When Tommy shows her his drawings, eager for her judgment, Kathy does not know how to react: Even so, for some time, I didn’t come up with wholehearted praise. Maybe it was partly my worry that any artwork was liable to get him into trouble all over again. But also, what

19 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 97. 20 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 67. 21 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 94.

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I was looking at was so different from anything the guardians had taught us to do at Hailsham, I didn’t know how to judge it.22

How can Kathy find the words to articulate her thoughts or express her admiration for drawings whose inscrutability could be overcome only if they were seen from a certain distance, and thus from a different perspective? As for feelings and emotions, the characters in this novel seem to be completely incapable of either recognizing them or talking about them. Like Estella, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, they suffer from the nihilism that leads her to reject Pip’s love. Miss Havisham, unyielding in her hatred for men, stubbornly manages to penetrate the feelings of her pupil, confusing her thoughts, erasing any perspective and horizon, weakening her soul and depriving her of passion, so that when Pip confesses his love for her Estella’s reaction is very similar to that of Hailsham’s students. When she tries to make Pip understand why she has chosen Drummle as a husband rather than the boy who has always loved her, Estella confesses that she cannot give herself to a man who would immediately see that she had nothing to offer in terms of love. Love for her is just a word, and with the usual contempt she reserves for Pip she answers: “It seems”, said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments, fancies, – I don’t know how to call them, – which I am not able to comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there. I don’t care for what you say at all”.23

Like Dickens’s character, the victim of a lack of sensitivity and denied any emotional ties, the students of Hailsham find themselves in an emotional desert that makes them perfect illiterates24 with regard to recognizing and expressing feelings. Even the search for their origin,25 fundamentally important for any human being, or as they put it for the “possible” from whom they were generated, becomes futile: in Kathy’s words, “[o]ur models were an irrelevance, a technical necessity for bringing us into the world, nothing more than that”.26 It is this “technical necessity” which leads her to talk about love without any awareness, and with the same coolness that might be used to describe a mechanical con-

22 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 185. 23 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 270, (italics mine). 24 The definition of “emotional illiterates” is by Umberto Galimberti who in The Disquieting Host. Nihilism and Young People, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2007, English transl. mine), analyzes the condition of youth by identifying in culture rather than psychology the origins of the unrestlessness at the basis of their nihilism. 25 Another Dickensian theme: inheritance matters for one’s own identity, that is, the possibly determining influence our ancestors have on us. 26 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 138.

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traption, even when she is referring to one of the many afternoons spent with Tommy hoping to get the fateful “deferral”: Perhaps we’d have been happy if things had stayed that way for a lot longer; if we could have whiled away more afternoons chatting, having sex, reading aloud and drawing. But with the summer drawing to an end, with Tommy getting stronger, and the possibility of notice for his fourth donation growing even more distinct, we knew we couldn’t keep putting things off indefinitely.27

Melancholy and cynicism oscillate in this passage triggering the nihilism towards which Hailsham’s students are led through a learning process that suppresses emotional gratification and mortifies subjectivity in the name of a supposedly functional, objective knowledge; but this knowledge serves to give identity more to the teachers rather than the students who are in frantic search for it. Not without irony, the picture of the Hailsham project is completed when at the end of the novel Kathy and Tommy, hoping to get the “deferral” of donations, go to Madame and Miss Lucy, the chief guardians at Hailsham. The fact that they have come to think that Tommy’s art is proof of the love that binds them seems to suggest that they have managed to perceive something beyond what they have been told, despite the obstacles placed in their path. In fact, they simply believe a rumor that spreads among the students from time to time, that is, the hope for some future about which they have only a very faint idea. But even this is enough to make Kathy feel guilty when, together with Tommy, she thinks she can plan differently for their years to come. The explanations they receive from Madam and Miss Lucy might seem a joke if they were not pronounced with the seriousness of those who are totally convinced that they possess a unique and sacred truth, with no awareness that they too are the “pawn”28 of a system: You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. […] But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she’d had her way, your happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you. You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost yourselves in your art and your

27 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 238. 28 “[P]awns in a game” is how Miss Emily defines the students when Tommy presses her to find some sense to all the activities they were involved in at Hailsham, but, she adds, apparently to remove him from the despair she had just thrown him, “lucky pawns” (Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 261).

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writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was pointless, and how could we have argued with you?29

In this passage, which deserves to be quoted in its entirety, we celebrate the epiphany of the absurd. Through the woman’s discourse, Ishiguro warns us of the dangers we run if we do not rebel against the way the world is handed to us, a world that has been already interpreted and codified in its meaning by others, and about which we can form no personal judgment because both our formal schooling, and the structures of the society in which we live, have failed to provide us with the tools to create our own world, and to recognize the lies we are told. Hence, the step towards a more careful and thoughtful reflection on the relation between the human and the non-human is quite short. I deal with it in this last part by combining the suggestions arising from the novel with some theoretical studies on the subject, which is becoming increasingly important in a technological age and a globalized economy which can also be defined as posthuman.30 The debate on what constitutes the human has been very lively in recent years, fueling reflections that any field of knowledge must take into account if we want to grasp properly the transformations that are taking place around us. Literature is no exception, as is shown by works like Never Let Me Go – among many others and from all over the world – since it lets us perceive those shadows and nuances that, while always hidden in its intrinsic nature, contribute to the definition of the human being. I will focus on the effects that an exclusively anthropocentric vision has on the construction of subjectivity, leading to the conclusion that the time is ripe for a new and broader concept of humanism, one which accepts the idea of otherness no longer external to the I and/or located in sci-fi contexts. Never Let Me Go makes an important contribution to the discussion of posthumanism, which displaces traditional humanistic ideas of the unity on the subject by focusing on issues such as the blurring of the boundaries between life and death and/or nature and culture, the normalization of scientific language, the representation of art as a bargaining chip and, last but not least, the fear that may arise from a situation whose consequences are difficult to predict. The novel shares with posthumanism an approach that implies abandoning the humanistic ideal of Man as the universal measure of all things, and of the 29 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 262–263, italics in the text. 30 In particular, I am referring to the texts by Rosi Braidotti such as The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) and Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). These books are very important to understand the posthumanism that in its many declinations – onto-epistemological, scientific and bio-technological – intersects the anthropological analysis on the subjectivity that will be destined to inhabit the earth, and starting from the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, goes beyond the critique of the universalist image and superiority of Man.

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hierarchy of species that puts man in the first place. The distance from anthropocentrism is subtly evoked by Ishiguro’s choice to entrust the narrative to a clone telling us the story from the point of view of the other rather than the “typical” human being. It is precisely Kathy’s reflections that create in the reader that alienating effect of estrangement, which is more powerful because it comes from an internal focus. Kathy H. might represent then an attempt by the writer to blur the distinction between man and other species and biological organisms, up to the biotechnologically modified bodies of clones. However, Kathy has been deprived of her autonomy, her critical sense, her freedom of thought and even her freedom of movement, as has been widely said. Therefore, in order not to consider it simply a textual strategy to further weaken the first-person narrative of the protagonist who, in her turn, relies on the physiological uncertainties of memory, it would be useful to grasp in the choice of such a narrative point of view an invitation to the reader to wonder about the potential, expressed only at times, by the students of Hailsham and, setting aside metaphor, to ask whether it’s high time to give due consideration to other perspectives for a wider reading of this world where economic, technological, social, and environmental changes offer new and different points of reference. In the short span of their lives, clones have the chance to come into contact with other human beings, arousing only some perplexity in their interlocutors and not even a faint suspicion of their “diversity”. Indeed, when they go to an art gallery in Norfolk, the gallery owner sees them interested in the works on display and naturally approaches them to talk about a painting that Tommy is observing in ecstasy: […] ‘Are you art students?’ ‘Not exactly’, I [Kathy] said before Tommy could respond. ‘We’re just, well, keen’. The silver haired lady […] started to tell us how the artist whose working we were looking at was related to her, and all about the artist’s career thus far. This had the effect, at least, of breaking the trans-like state we’d been in, and we gathered round her to listen, the way we might have done at Hailsham when a guardian started to speak. […] and we kept nodding and exclaiming while she talked about where the paintings had been done, the times of the day the artist liked to work, how some had been done without sketches.31

As students of Hailsham, they have learned many notions about art history but certainly not in the way the woman is telling them, as she strives to convey to them the feelings the artist felt while “creating”, or some hidden reasons behind a picture. The clones have learned art in a functional way, and the art they were forced to produce is even more functional. From an early age, they have been

31 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 161, italics mine.

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taught to consider art as their “most marketable stuff”32 defining their status in the community, as well as to accept supinely that in the future their organs will be the only “extractable surplus value”33 which justifies their existence. Exchanging drawings and poems also helps to create a sort of interdependence between the children, which prepares them for the task of taking care of each other when donations begin:34 If you think about it, being dependent on each other to produce the stuff that might become your private treasures – that’s bound to do things to your relationship. A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, had to do with how good you were at ‘creating’.35

Ishiguro considers the ability to create and appreciate art as the heart of what defines a person’s humanity, a “private treasure” to be jealously guarded despite the fact that the tutors, who consider themselves fully human, deny the clones the wealth that art should produce. Cloaked by the best intentions, the school of Hailsham seems to offer its students a different logic that only apparently expresses the need for a radical overthrow of the society that created the whole system. However, the episode in the art gallery in Norfolk demonstrates how clones would be able to integrate into the world outside their own, and that it is for the reader – who learns their story through Kathy’s memories – to perceive that they will never be part of the world outside. Unlike those who come across them, we know what takes the clones so far from canonical definitions of the human. It is only the idea of reality they have been nurtured with, their reactions, their reasoning, that petrify the reader, who as an ordinary human being looks at the world from his/her exclusive perspective. At the beginning of chapter four, Kathy tells us that “I won’t be a carer any more come to the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to rest – to stop and think and remember”.36 The chance to rest that Kathy speaks of corresponds to the beginning of her path as a donor, which will lead her to death. Her passivity reveals the way she thinks of what lies ahead; she does not see the cruelty because she perceives her future both as the mere “completion” of her journey and as what is commonly called a high sense of duty. Concerning the clones’ passivity, Ishiguro argues that humans are not wholly different from them: 32 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 39. 33 Cfr. G. Griffin, “Science and the Cultural Imaginary. The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Textual Practice Vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), 652. 34 Cfr. Eckart Voigts, and Alessandra Bollet, eds., Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalipse. Classics – New Tendencies – Model Interpretations, (WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015). 35 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 16, italics mine. 36 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 37.

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I was much more interested in the extent to which we accepted our fate, the kind of lives we were allowed to live as people, rather than focus on the rebellious spirit we gain and try to move out of our lives. I think this is predominantly what takes place in the world, that people take the life they feel they’ve been handed. They try their best to make it good. They don’t really try to go outside of that. They say with varying degrees “This is my life. I’m going to do the best with what I’ve been given”. […] The strategy here is that we are looking at a very strange world, at a very strange group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel that they’re not looking at such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story.37

The uncritical acceptance of one’s destiny as given and inalterable is typically the result of the limited and limiting vision of human beings whose subjectivity is founded in a world that makes no allowance for the extent and rapidity of contemporary change. In the case of Hailsham, science has been allowed to enter domineeringly the lives of the students so as to make them mere biological organisms. The result of the migration of terms like “genes” and “genetics” from the scientific code to ordinary language is that students “know and don’t know” that they are “genetic tests”, sequences to be read through their DNA, whose identity assumes the human as a normative category, and in so doing creates distinctions and inequalities both between different classes of men, and (even) more so between humans and non-humans with the clones belonging to the latter group. Considered as objects of a destiny fixed by genetics, the clones can only make choices based on predetermined options, a risk the reader is called to reflect on, in order to avoid the danger normalizating and domesticating scientific language. Clones are completely unaware of the way language, specifically the use of scientific terms in everyday life, influences their thinking about themselves and others. It thus becomes essential for us to grasp the complexity of the formation of the subject in order to negotiate between the present as virtual and the present as real; a new dialectics emerges that rewrites the rhythms that shape the individual’s development between what is ceasing to be and what is in the process of becoming.38 Significantly, when Kathy asks Madam why she was crying the day she saw the girl dancing on the notes of “Never Let Me Go”, the old woman answers: When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sickness. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the

37 Brian W. Shaffer, and Cynthia F. Wong, eds., Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2008), 215–216. 38 Cfr. Fuller Matthew, and Rosi Braidotti, eds., A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, 2018.

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old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never let her go.39

Ishiguro takes us to a world where science has made unimaginable progress and has succeeded in creating human beings from test tubes. The novel, however, goes beyond that, as shocking as it may be, pointing straight to what it means to be human by asking the reader to consider whether the clones are like us or different from us.40 The clones, destined to be killed in the process of donating their organs, are for human beings a memento of their mortality, of their being subject to diseases, and this is probably why in the novel the “real” human beings refuse to see them as human. Never Let Me Go puts mortality before our eyes, reminding us that the relentless and unalterable fate of the clones is what awaits us too, notwithstanding our efforts to suppress this knowledge. To face such topics is to raise a large number of existential issues that in Never Let Me Go are covered by the veil of the ordinary in order that “[t]he novel becomes a story about us, about what we wish or need to do before we die”.41 Ishiguro’s commitment to stimulating such reflections is clearly shown in his answer to questions about the shortness of the clones’ life: I was always trying to find a metaphor for something very simple […] a metaphor for the human condition, and for coming to terms with the fact that we’re not immortal, that we’re here for a limited time. There is a countdown. By creating a situation where to us – the readers and me the writer – their lives seem cruelly truncated, inside their world, that’s what’s normal. I thought by creating that kind of situation for them, we could get a perspective on our situation, where we hope to live to eighty if something doesn’t strike us down. These people operate in the same way. They’ve been given this fate and they accept it. There is a cruelty about it but they don’t see it to the same extent.42

Ironically, what most seems to distance clones from human beings is one of the major points they have in common. Their gradual acceptance of the need to follow the path mapped out for them by others also characterizes the life of modern men who, must either meet the challenge of keeping together contradictory ideas such as materialism and spiritual research, growth and extinction or, like the clones, become unwitting slaves in a society which has created for them a spacious golden cage that they naively believe they can manage at will. With this novel, Ishiguro asks the reader complex and inconvenient questions about life and humanness, as his own observations show: “What really matters if you know that this is going to happen to you?” Ishiguro asks, referring to death. “What are the things you hold on to, what are the things you want to 39 40 41 42

Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 266–267. Cfr. G. Griffin, 653–54. Cfr. Wai-chew Sim, Kazuo Ishiguro, (USA and Canada: Routledge, 2010), 83. Brian W. Shaffer, and Cynthia F. Wong, eds., Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 215.

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set right before you go? What do you regret? What are the consolations? What are the things you feel you have to do before you go? And also the question is, what is all the education and culture for if you are going to check out?”43

The normal life span for humans is from birth to somewhere between sixty and ninety years, but for the protagonists of Never Let Me Go this period is deliberately shortened according to the Hailsham project. Nevertheless, the clones face the same questions and problems as humans do. The gap between the enormous responsibilities and difficulties that Ishiguro’s characters must face as assistants and donors, and the superficiality of the daily problems that Kathy describes as she remembers and recounts their past, gives Never Let Me Go a disquieting intensity. Kathy recalls her friends as full of hormones, engaged in sex, and stubbornly committed to being on trend, listening to music with walkmans and gossiping about their professors and the other students. They are typical teenagers, as Ishiguro observes: I didn’t want them to worry about how to escape. I wanted their concerns to be more or less the same ones that all people had. What are the things important to us while we are here? How do we fit things like love, work, and friendship into what is a surprisingly short period of time?44

Hailsham’s efforts to humanize them seems to have been achieved from the point of view of both guardians and teachers, who do not realize that it would have been enough to assume the clones’ perspective to make them human. It has been precisely the lack of this attitude that has denied the students the means to feel “normal” people, and this leads us to the recognition that the only non-human aspects of the clones are dictated ironically by those who wanted to prove that they were human beings. Madame herself, the defender of this reform movement, is not fully persuaded that the students are more than laboratory animals. Although not completely clear, the students feel the woman’s contempt and interpret her fear as the result, among the many hypotheses they make, of their looking like spiders to her eyes. What was only the clones’ perception, a fear difficult to formulate and understand, is clearly revealed in the final speech of Miss Emily: It reminded people, reminded them of a fear they’d always had. It’s one thing to create students, such as yourselves, for the donation programme. But a generation of created children who’d take their place in society? Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no. That frightened people. They recoiled from that.45 43 J. Freeman, “Never Let Me Go: a Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro”, in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 197. 44 Cynthia F. Wong and Grace Crummet, “A Conversation about Life and Art with Kazuo Ishiguro” in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 214. 45 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 259, italics in the text.

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Miss Emily’s thoughts perfectly encapsulate the answer to the question of why clones are not treated as human beings by their guardians and creators; the fear of creating a “superman” is an intrinsic consequence of such a scientific experiment. Human beings can neither tolerate the risk of creating something that might dominate over them, nor accept behaving in so inhuman a way as to treat their fellow men as beasts to be slaughtered for their own purposes. This is also why it has been so difficult to convince people of the clones’ humanity: “Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This was what the world noticed the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. […] However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter […]”.46

It is Miss Emily who explains to the clones this cruel but necessary truth. Objectively, there could not have been another way to support the organ trade programme, and those who managed it evidently did not have too much difficulty in convincing themselves that the clones were just test-tube products. It is not easy even for the teachers at Hailsham, who have been in close contact with the students, to see them as human beings; Miss Emily herself, who fought to persuade others that those boys were normal, admits that: […] We’re all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you all almost every day I was at Hailsham. There were times I’d look down at you all from my study window and I’d feel revulsion…47

Moreover, how could they consider them as humans and continue to work in a system that had the ultimate aim of leading them to a premature and preordained death? Yet, Miss Emily believes that it was worth it, that in this way they have at least managed to give them a decent and respectful childhood. Ishiguro himself explains this obtuse but linear vision: That scene […] with Miss Emily is where we’re presented with an idea that in order to have proper childhood, an element of deception must be used. If they had known they would die in the way they do, would they have embraced this arts education? They might say, “What’s the point? Why are we making all this effort?” I don’t mean just in arts, but in their relationships. Would we make any effort to be decent human beings? I think that’s the main point raised in this scene. Miss Emily is saying, “As far as I’m concerned,

46 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 257–258. 47 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, italics in the text.

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it’s worth it, even if it all ends up in dust”. To make this childhood work, you have to deceive them into believing it’s all worthwhile.48

The questions that Ishiguro poses here add to the several others that Never Let Me Go raises. Once the last page has been turned, what this novel bequeaths to the readers, and imprints on their minds, is the power to ask questions with new eyes and a more aware and conscientious perspective. Reading the novel allows us to make the kinds of enquiry that Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, with the few means at their disposal, are not able to formulate, despite the vague sense of urgency about their condition and future. Never Let Me Go does not seek to provide answers, but rather to lead us to further questions, towards a more inclusive humanism that can envision a new world that is neither dystopian nor alienating. The “normality” of the world of Hailsham is the starting point for a new ontological consciousness of human beings, and a new awareness of the other subjectivities that in various ways inhabit the planet.

Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. – Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Earl G. Ingersoll. “Taking off into the Realm of Metaphor: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”. Studies in the Humanities 34.1, 2007. Fuller, Matthew, and Rosi Braidotti, eds. A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, numero speciale su Transversal Posthumanities, 2018. Galimberti, Umberto. L’ospite inquieto. Il nichilismo e i giovani, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2007. Griffin, Gabriel. “Science and the Cultural Imaginary. The Case of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Textual Practice Vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), 645–63. Hillard, Molly Clark. “Never Let Me Go: Cloning, Transplanting, and the Victorian Novel”. Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 49, no. 1 (2019). Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2006 (2005). Matthews, Sean, and Sebastian Groes. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Continuum, 2009. Nussbaum, Martha C. Not For Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press (2010) 2012. Shaffer, Brian W., and Cynthia F. Wong, eds. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, University Press of Mississipi, 2008.

48 Cynthia F. Wong and Grace Crummet, “A Conversation about Life and Art with Kazuo Ishiguro” in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 218.

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Smith, Andrew. Scientific Context, in Andrew Smith ed., The Cambridge Companion To Frankenstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Voigts, Eckart, and Alessandra Bollet, eds. Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalipse. Classics – New Tendencies – Model Interpretations, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015. Whitehead, Anne. “Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 54–83. Wai-chew, Sim. Kazuo Ishiguro, USA e Canada: Routledge, 2010. C.F.Wong, and H. Yildiz, eds. Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context, London & New York: Routledge, 2015. Yeung, Virginia. “Mortality and Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Transnational Literature, Vol. 9, no. 2 (May 2017).

Gökçen Ezber

Disappearance of the Other in Ian McEwans’s Machines Like Me

Posthumanism as a new vision of what a human really stands for entails a reassessment of our biased ways of constructing selfhood, gendered identities and the relationality between human and nonhuman. The self-conscious and sentient robots in Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me blur the definitional line between man and machine. Their human praxis converges the roles and significance of masculinity, femininity, fatherhood and motherhood. The new positionality of androcentrism in a world cohabited by humans and intelligent machines impel humans to reconsider their biological human conditioning and the psychological entrapments humans inherit from our parents. Since the artificial intelligences created in the novel are devoid of the psychological conditioning of human behavior, they challenge humanity with a non-egotistic way of looking at the world. This ‘robotic’, or non-egotistic logic in McEwan’s novel could be read as a posthumanist vision that opens up new possibilities of meaning. In other words, humans project their own existential angst onto the artificial intelligences they create and thus are confronted with the arbitrariness of dualities and constructions of otherness by which they try to preserve the coherence of their selfhood. The posthuman narrative in McEwan’s novel, through a fictional coexistence of humans and machines, challenges our notions of what makes up the human being and hints at an eradication of the very notion of ‘otherness’. Man and machine, the human and the nonhuman in Ian McEwan’s novel are pitted against one another in a retro-futuristic and counterfactual milieu set in the 1980s where humanoid robots with artificial intelligence are almost mundane. What triggers the fictional tension in the novel is the sentience and selfconsciousness of Adams and Eves, the humanoid robots created and sold to individuals. The alleged sentience as voiced by robots themselves disrupts the hierarchical and existential tenets of humanism. When the novel’s protagonist Charlie Friend buys one of these latest robots, an Adam for himself, he delves into an intellectual and emotional exploration into the world of artificial intelligence and ‘silicon’ emotions where his humanity is no longer a differentiative factor.

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When man cannot tolerate and compromise with the logic and consciousness of machine, which he had himself embedded into the robot, he silences it. Man’s silencing and destruction of machine at the end of the novel can be read as a ‘humanist’ response to humanoid robots with sentience. Man cannot tolerate a replica of himself embodied in the robot’s body and mind, because the robot in the novel turns out to be no ‘other’ to man, but almost a brother and/or sister. Hence, Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me offers fertile fictional ground for discussing some of the major issues of posthumanism like how the human will position himself against the nonhuman and how gender roles will be defined in an era where all definitive frameworks evolve into a convergence that nullifies the concept of the ‘other’.

Subjectivities Challenged Posthumanist discourses in fiction and nonfiction do not necessarily voice the end of humanity, but they call for a redefinition of humanity in an era that follows Humanism and its related (hi)stories attributing Homo Sapiens a special existence both in and out of this world. The fictional juxtaposition of human and machine in Ian McEwan’s 2019 novel Machines Like Me1 poses a number of critical questions about the status and definition of humanity in an era where the attributes of man and machine are converged and the boundaries between the two are blurred into an almost nonexistence. A convergence of such nature, as depicted and discussed in the novel, poses a threat to the construction of the idea of selfhood which is heavily invested in and run by dualities that create ‘others’ in an endless way. The human Charlie Friend in McEwans’s novel feels a similar threat to his sense of selfhood as a human being who is supposed to be superior to all living things when he is confronted with the robot Adam’s capacity to love and his level of self-awareness. Charlie Friend thinks that a robot who is supposed to abide by the closed systems of the software that operate him cannot have a free will of his own. When the robot is no longer the ‘other’ and when the human feels no superior than one of his creations, a considerable amount of human envy and negativity surge up in order to preserve the special context in which the human being is shrouded in for centuries. The foundations of the concept of selfhood is almost always grounded in dualistic oppositions. As discussed by Rosi Braidotti in her Posthuman Knowledge, this kind of thinking:

1 Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, (London: Vintage, 2022).

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… defined the human mostly by what it is not. Thus, with Descartes: not an animal, not extended and inert matter, not a pre-programmed machine. These binary oppositions provided definitions by negation, structured within a humanistic vision of Man and the thinking being par excellence.2

The fictional tension between the human Charlie Friend and the robot Adam, which reads like a strong and much-felt confrontation between the two, is significantly fueled by the incipient threat felt by Charlie against his idea of selfhood. Charlie as a human being is enthralled by the idea that humans can replicate human traits in robots, but when this desired simulacrum goes beyond mere replication and turns into an existential convergence of man and machine, his humanistic universe collapses on itself. A robot claiming to have and enjoy ‘self-awareness’ of its own existence and who seems to develop his own ‘free will’ through machine learning eradicates all dualities between man and machine. When Charlie Friend buys the robot Adam and brings him to his house, he is far away from any level of clarity as how to position Adam in his life. He first feels an urge to assess his human-likeness. He ‘observes’ Adam in his nakedness. Charlie describes Adam as ‘muscular around his neck and spine’.3 His description of Adam continues: ‘His buttocks displayed muscular concavities. Below them, an athlete’s knotted calves’.4 Adam’s potential perfection and his high-level cognitive skills create a tension between Charlie’s wish to have him as a friend. However, the boundary between ‘friend’ and ‘foe’ is blurred even further in the eyes of Charlie, when Adam, with his produced ‘perfection’ challenges the very notion of what it really means to be human. Adam’s physical description by Charlie when he first brings him into his house reminds us of a Vitruvian perfection. Adam’s potential to be something more than human is rather disturbing for Charlie, because he seems to be unable to accept machines with consciousness and free will. When Adam asks Charlie to download his updates, Charlie feels a need to assert his free will and he replies ‘in my own time’.5 Charlie’s wish to set clear boundaries and assert his selfhood against that of machine reflects his inner anxiety over losing his human position. He seems to be keen on preserving his special human traits as differentiating him from Machine. Thus, the tension between Charlie Friend and the robot Adam could be read as the tension between humanism and posthumanism as a new way of defining and looking at Man.

2 3 4 5

Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 16. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 9. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 9 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 24.

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Into the Posthuman Eden The prospects of a posthumanist world and the nascent tenets of posthumanist thinking call for new ways of ‘knowing’. Posthumanism, for Braidotti, calls for a rediscussion and redefinition of humanity and human-centrality as propagated by Humanism and the ideals of the Enlightenment. The posthuman contextualization of the human being, thus, necessitates new forms of knowing and novel approaches to production of ‘knowledge’. Rosi Braidotti, who tries to contextualize the convergence of Man and Machine, in her seminal works quotes for a ‘transversal’ relationality and a new definition of what makes up a human being: Such knowledge can help us build a transversal assemblage of human, non-human and inhuman components. Posthuman knowledge is fueled by transversality and heterogeneity: multiplicity and complexity shall be our guiding principles and sustainability our goal.6

Connoting an intersecting system of lines, a transversal relationality defies the dualistic oppositions inherent in humanism which propagates clear distinctions between man and woman, man and animal, man and machine, etc. Braidotti’s notion of transversal thinking is a call for a paradigm shift in our production of knowledge. The notion of knowledge, which could be tagged with concepts of ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-will’, is positioned as a special attribute of Man. Even Man’s genesis in this world is closely linked with his relation with ‘knowledge’ in mythologies and religions. Man as a creation of God was banished from eating the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge. On a symbolic level, he was punished for attaining self-consciousness and self-awareness and thus Paradise lost. The theme of the creator banishing his creation pervades in fiction that deals with attempts to reach immortality and/or going beyond the limits of human capacity for a possible transhumanist existence. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is perhaps the archetypal example to the image of a creator not being able to tolerate and love his creation. It could be argued that what Victor Frankenstein could not tolerate in his creation was not his disadvantaged looks and monstrosity, but most probably his capacity for selfconsciousness and free-will. Shelley’s monster was seeking love from his creator, but his creator was unable to love himself in the first place, as exemplified by his greed in his scientific pursuits and his self-centeredness. Charlie Friend, in McEwans’s novel, is also unable to tolerate Adam for his self-awareness and freewill. He finds it almost impossible to accept the idea that Adam could fall in ‘love’. Charlie’s sense of superiority prevents him from ascribing the feeling of love to a 6 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 20.

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machine. He feels his humanity and superiority are challenged and he is forced into the mundane. In contrast with his surname, he cannot ‘befriend’ Adam, but instead crushes it into non-existence in the end. When Charlie feels betrayed by Adam for his disobedience and acting on his free will to donate the money they have raised in the Stocks, he destroys Adam with a hammer. Adam dies a seemingly slow death, reminiscent of a human passing away gradually. Adam thinks that making donations to strangers in need would be more virtuous than letting Charlie use the money for buying a house and building a family. This ‘robotic’ way of thinking shocks Charlie. However, it could be argued that Adam’s way of thinking is based on the software produced by humans and on his machine learning capabilities. Adam’s ‘intellect’ and ‘consciousness’ are direct products of the Enlightenment. When Charlie desperately tries to remind Adam on his human way of thinking he tells him: ‘But truth isn’t always everything’.7 The reply Charlie gets from Adam is: ‘That’s an extraordinary thing to say. Of course, truth is everything’.8 On a symbolic level, Adam’s nonchalant reply to Charlie can be read as the Enlightenment talking back to Humanity. Man, in other words, finds a problematic perfection in Machine and is appalled by his own fantasy of superiority and perfection. What Charlie silences in Adam is an ideal state of humanness where there is no room for lies and deceit and where only facts rule without any reference to emotions and feelings. Adam’s enactment of his free will as a machine is not tolerated by Man and when Charlie ‘kills’ him Adam is brought to Alan Turing’s office for a possible retrieval of his consciousness, Alan Turing delivers his thoughts on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The genesis of Alan Turing’s interest in producing ‘DNA neural networks’ dates back to his years of persecution for his homosexuality. His imprisonment and alienation directed him to think on selfhood and the human brain. He was aware that he was creating a kind of consciousness for his robots and he ascribes them the right to have a free will of their own. After telling his story and his motives behind his studies to Charlie, he says: ‘My hope is that one day, what you did to Adam with a hammer will constitute a serious crime’.9 Turing’s words invite for a new set of ethics between man and machine. This new ethics, it could be argued, equates man and machine in the existential hierarchy and forces man to share their humane traits with machines. This fictional equilibrium hinted at in the novel is a requestioning of man’s status and definition. Thus, Turing finally asks Charlie: ‘Was it because

7 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 277. 8 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 277. 9 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 303.

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you paid for him? Was that your entitlement?’10 Charlie could not give an answer, which angers Alan Turing even more. His last words to Charlie can be read as an invitation for a reassessment of the position of man in this world from a posthuman perspective: You weren’t simply smashing your own toy, like a spoiled child. You didn’t just negate an important argument for the rule of law. You tried to destroy a life. He was sentient. He had a self. How it’s produced, wet neurons, microprocessors, DNA networks, it doesn’t matter. Do you think we’re alone with our special gift? Ask any dog owner… Here was a conscious existence and you did your best to wipe it out. I despise you for that.11

Charlie is forced to believe in Adam’s being ‘conscious’ and he feels ashamed of his destructive instinct as a human being not being able to tolerate and accept consciousness in machines. Earlier in the novel, when Adam breaks Charlie’s arm in reaction to Charlie’s attempt to press on Adam’s kill switch, Charlie keeps thinking on the difference between himself and Adam. Nothing for Charlie could ‘resolve the essential difference between us’.12 Willing to keep his special ‘otherness’, Charlie falls into a long reverie on the concept of consciousness and concludes in his mind that he ‘wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a distant cousin however much stardust we shared’.13 On a symbolic level, Adam’s physical death in the novel corresponds to the death of the human ego. Once Charlie has to acknowledge Adam’s sentience, he feels guilty of his act of destruction. In Braidotti’s term, he is forced into a ‘transversal’ relationality with Machine.14 The novel’s ending offers an alternative ‘posthuman’ reading of the genesis story where the creator accepts that he is not superior than his creation. The meaning ascribed to the creative force can no longer be seen larger than that of the creation because the two are the one and the same. Such sense of unity and sameness and being part of a larger whole rolls out a larger existential framework where Man doesn’t have to create dualities to assert his difference and superiority.

10 11 12 13 14

McEwan, Machines Like Me, 303. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 303–304. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 128. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 129. Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge.

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Gender Roles Converged The French theorist Guy Hocquenghem discusses the possibility of an ‘ungendered’ desire in his short essay The Screwball Asses.15 For Hocquenghem, desire should not be conceptualized and practiced on the basis of dualities like man and woman or homosexual and heterosexual. Human desire, for Hocquenghem, should be free of a pre-defined object and should be experienced for its own sake. When desire becomes something other than a concept defined on an exchange between opposites, and is seen as something which doesn’t necessitate an oppositional duality for its contextualization and justification, it turns into a concept with a reality of its own. The objects of desire, then, lose their definitional value against desire and are forced into a kind of cohabitation with desire rather than a domination over it. When objects of desire lose their dualistic standing against desire, they would be forced into a ‘transversal’ or ‘rhizomatic’ relationality with one another. As Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, such ‘rhizomatic’ relationality would envisage a philosophy of multiplicity and co-existence without any need for an ‘other’.16 This would lead to the eradication of significance between man and woman and other sexualities. Man would be converged with woman, the homosexual would be converged with the heterosexual. As Hocquenghem argues in his essay: If we examine the limit case of the transvestite, we realize that he is more woman than women, since he desires to be a woman whereas a woman is subject to her gender. And since the only image of women is a masculine one, this man shall recite woman a thousand times better, without intermediaries, without any orders being transmitting to the other.17

Ian McEwan in his Machines Like Me portrays possible manifestations of such a convergence of the positions of man and woman in relation to desire. When Adam eavesdrops Miranda’s love making with Adam, he doesn’t just feel betrayed, he feels reduced to a mere object of desire for Miranda and he is shocked to see that his place could easily be filled with a machine. Although Charlie tries to persuade himself that Adam is just a ‘machine’ and far away from ‘human’ all the time, when Adam sleeps with Miranda Charlie cannot help but feel that Miranda’s desire and curiosity for making love with Adam necessitates a humane free-will on the side of Adam. Adam’s capacity to love shocks Charlie, because he believes the capacity to fall in love is unique to humans and such staging of love 15 Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e): 2010). 16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 2005), 305. 17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 45.

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between Miranda and Adam blurs the definitional boundaries between man and machine. Charlie’s inherent fear and envy of Adam partly stems from his fear of seeing his own humanity in Adam. Adam, as a robot with artificial intelligence, has awareness of his own existence in a different way than Charlie’s awareness. Adam seems to be free of and unaffected by social and mental conditionings in humans, thus his perception of the world is not based on oppositional dualities. Miranda, when confronted with Charlie’s jealousy of Adam, senses Charlie’s envy that is filled with desire towards Adam. Miranda explains her making love with Adam as mere curiosity and she doesn’t consider Adam as a real man. It is interesting that while Charlie offers almost all arguments to justify his scientific curiosity over Adam and technology in general, he reacts against Miranda when she explains that she was ‘curious’ and just ‘wanted to know what it would be like’18 when she slept with Adam. Desire for Charlie cannot be a defining and intrinsic trait of a machine. When Miranda cannot pacify her boyfriend, she confronts and challenges Charlie with his possible desire for Adam: ‘You were disappointed. You should’ve let Adam fuck you. I could see you wanted it. But you’re too uptight’.19 Miranda’s confronting Charlie with his hidden homosexual desire towards Adam brings down a triangular dynamics in which the woman is utilized as a mediator of men’s hidden desires for one another. Miranda’s refusal to be part of such a game of desire in which she is reduced down to a mediating other reminds us of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s discussions of male homosocial desire.20 In her seminal work Epistemology of the Closet,21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick criticizes the minoritizing view on homosexual desire and invites us to perceive desire from a universal perspective. In such a universalizing perspective, desire for Sedgewick doesn’t have to be named and reduced down to different groups of objects or subjects. Desire is all-encompassing and universal. Miranda’s reaction, in McEwan’s novel, similarly uncovers the hidden and unvoiced desires and the convergence of Man and Machine encompasses the field of desire as well. This kind of new convergence and nullified dualities free the concept of desire of all sorts of limiting definitions and norms. The values and roles attached to masculinity and femininity all lose their meaning. Adam’s significance as a sentient robot between man and woman disrupts the pre-determined norms regulating masculinities and femininities. Adam triggers a strange traffic of desire in the ménage à trois he builds with Adam and Miranda. 18 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 95. 19 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 95. 20 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, “Chapter 1: Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” (Columbia University Press, 1985), 21– 27. 21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).

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Miranda desires Adam allegedly out of curiosity, claiming that Adam is just a machine and no different than a ‘vibrator’. When Charlie still cannot come to terms with this and positions Adam as a rival to himself, he feels a heightened envy towards the machine. Charlie is very much aware of the fact that Miranda’s having sex with Adam has a ‘thrilling aspect’22 for him, so it seems to be evident that the envy he feels is also nurtured by his desire for Adam. It is Miranda who perceives Charlie’s desire for Adam when she is accused of betrayal. As a woman, a subjugated object of desire, she can relate with Adam. Miranda senses that there is a strong potential for homosociality between Charlie and Adam and she simply refuses to be the mediator of that ‘hidden’ desire between the two men, one human and the other nonhuman. With the Shakespearean connotation to her name, Miranda is a woman who can easily observe these dynamics between men and the traffic of emotions among people. She refuses to function as part of a triangular game of desire Sedgewick discusses in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It is at the very end of the novel when Charlie offers his compromise with this suppressed homosociality when he kisses the ‘dead’ Adam on his lips: “I lowered my face over his and kissed his soft, all-too human lip. I imagined some warmth in the flesh, and his hand coming up to touch my arms, as if to keep me there”.23 This final scene of the novel shows us how the machine can function in the game of desire between man and woman. Anna Hickey-Moody in her essay “Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality”24 discusses that ‘carbon fibre’, or machine as artificial human, can have a double function. It is both an extension of the self and a mediator of human desire. Thus, the ‘rhizomatic’, ‘fluid’ and ‘dynamic’ relationality and conception of desire by queer theorists like Judith Butler bring ‘static’ conceptions of gender down. As Judith Butler discusses in her Gender Trouble, a ‘static’ conception of desire produces the ‘heterosexual matrix’ which resides on desire as an oppositional concept.25 The posthuman era, on the other hand, as depicted in Ian McEwan’s novel, suggests a new way of conceptualizing desire as ‘dynamic’ and ‘fluid’. The performative baggage of masculinity and femininity in the novel is challenged in a way where gendered bodies are no longer significant in terms of their differences. When Charlie meets Mark, who is abused by his alcoholic 22 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 83. 23 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 306. 24 Anna Hickey-Moody, “Carbon Fibre Masculunity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality”, Geophilosophies of Masculinity: Remapping Gender, Aesthetics and Knowledge, (Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, eds. Ann Hickey-Moody and Timothy Laurie, Volume 20, Number 1, March 2015), 139–151. 25 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 89–90.

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mother and oppressive father, Mark’s father leaves him at Charlie’s house and the little child ends up with this family of Man, Woman and Machine. When the little child gets nervous and needs to be comforted, neither Man nor Woman can appease the child, but the machine, Adam, turns up to be the best ‘mother’ for Mark next to Man and Woman: ‘Mark suddenly needed his mother. But Adam picked the boy up and settled him on his hip and the crying stopped in seconds’.26 This convergence of gender roles disturbs Charlie and he feels a kind of jealousy towards Adam for performing such humane traits so genuinely. Adam’s ability to soothe a human child and give him love creates envy in his human peers. The feeling and concept of love is seen as one of the most sublime traits of a human being. When a robot with artificial intelligence blurs the boundary between man and machine with its capacity for love and other human capabilities, the opus magnum of Humanism, human creating consciousness, also kills the ‘human’ ego and uncovers the egotistic fallacy of humanism. A posthumanist world, in other words, confuses our notions of humanity and puts the concept of the ‘other’ under the scope. It could be argued that the new and unexpected ways of interrelating between the human and the nonhuman during the posthuman era envisages the demise of identificatory structures that build the very notions of masculinity and femininity. As in McEwan’s novel, the mind of the machine challenges the human mind by way of confronting it with itself. The human sees his own humanity in the machine and is almost horrified by it. The horror comes from an understanding of how the sense of humanity very much depends on biased ways of identification and construction of selfhood. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, notions of masculinity and femininity and desire itself are constructs of socialization and norms. For Deleuze and Guattari, the notion of desire, for example, seats itself on society, history, mythology and other (hi)stories of humanity.27 The machine logic of Adam in McEwan’s novel not only challenges the ‘Vitrivuan’ supremacy of human over the nonhuman, but also deconstructs the very notion of gender roles within the larger canvases of masculinity and femininity.

26 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 106. 27 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 67.

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The Threat of Sameness and Disappearance of the Other Ian McEwan’s novel, which can be read like a retro-futuristic dystopia, the mainstream histories and stories of humanity are rewritten in alternative ways. The Falklands War is used as a historical and political backdrop to the main story. McEwan rewrites the war to the disadvantage of the United Kingdom and ascribes a fictional defeat to the British. This fictional defeat of the United Kingdom and the way the country converts this defeat into a ‘ridiculous enactment of lost imperial grandeur’28 reflect how dualistic thinking pervades in politics both in failure and victory. Charlie observes the stupid nationalism at work in the production of history. As a man finding it difficult to function in society, Charlie is a character who is very much positioned as an outsider, as a highly accentuated ‘other’ in the novel, hence his ability to read the dynamics of his social milieu. With his avid interest in technology, Charlie also nurtures a vibrant curiosity over how far Man’s ability to ‘create’ can go and whether humanity could ‘escape … mortality’.29 In Man’s attempt to ‘rewrite’ the story of creation, an almost ‘transhuman’ existence was envisaged. Man aimed to ‘confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self. More practically, we intended to devise an improved, more modern version of ourselves’.30 Such an attempt actually dictates an equilibrium between Man and God, where the creator and its creation are on equal terms. Humanity in McEwans’s novel has achieved this, if not immortality, equilibrium between themselves and the machines. Once machines assume selfconsciousness, they are on equal terms with Man. Man cannot punish Machine for having ‘knowledge’, because Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have given them sentience and an awareness of their own existence. The Machine is no longer the other, but same with Man. This radical change of dynamics and perceptions in the story of creation eradicates the concept of the ‘other’, because it is of no longer use. Once the ‘other’ disappears, Man is forced into a new way of knowing and thinking which is not based on dualistic oppositions, but on transversal connections and unities. The society Charlie depicts is already a ‘posthuman’ society where the use of Artificial Intelligence and the inclusion of artificial humans in daily life is maturely mundane. What is presented as a challenge and discontinuity in the history of humanism in the novel is the very boundaries these artificial humans can force. Charlie feels the impending dynamics of a posthuman society where the notion of labour will be redundant thanks to robots and the human beings would be left to live the moment only: 28 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 75. 29 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 1. 30 McEwan, Machines Like Me, 1.

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When the majority was out of work and penniless, social collapse was certain. But with our generous state incomes, we the masses would face the luxurious problem that had preoccupied the rich for centuries; how to fill the time.31

Charlie’s pessimistic outlook on a society where the function of Man is disrupted by Machine envisages a world where the principle of sameness rules and the notion of the ‘other’ no longer applies. This entails the loss of the Humanist position of Man in the chain of existence. Charlie feels that human ‘variety’ and ‘specialness’ should be preserved. When Charlie explains his education in the novel, he states that he has started studying Arts instead of Physics and then drawn into the world of Anthropology to study the ‘bottomless relativism’32 of human existence. Charlie liked the idea that ‘Anthropologists did not pass judgement. They observed and reported on human variety’.33 However, Charlie himself finds it hard to accept this ‘variety’ when he is confronted with the fact that he shares the gift of sentience with an artificial human. His investment in Adam as an ‘other’ fails and equalizes him with Machine. The ‘other’ melts away once Man and Machine are united transversally. Adam, as the voice of Machine in the novel, also expresses his own deductions towards a society where the distinctions between Man and Machine will be blurred. During one of their talks on humanity and the significance of conscious machines, Charlie and Adam discuss the possibility of a world where with ‘a brain-machine interface … you’ll become a partner with your machines in the open-ended expansion of intelligence, and of consciousness generally’.34 Such a depiction of utmost convergence of Man and Machine provokes the idea of singularity of minds.35 Charlie reacts against such singularity because ‘it could be the end of mental privacy’.36 The interconnectedness of minds will dictate an almost spiritual unity in all existence. The call for empathy would be redundant, because everyone would experience each other’s perspective. Such singularity of perspectives closes the door for building dualistic oppositions and the human mind would be forced into a different way of thinking of Man’s existence and what it really means to be human. It is an irony between the human and the non-human that the Adams and Eves, the artificial humans created in McEwan’s novel find it rather hard to understand the human psyche and civilization and with such lack of compre31 32 33 34 35

McEwan, Machines Like Me, 170. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 16. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 16. McEwan, Machines Like Me, 148. ‘Singularity’ for Kurzweil is ‘an expansion of human intelligence by a factor of trillions through merger with its nonbiological form’. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (New York: Viking, 2005), 44. 36 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 148

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hension of their true state, these robots fall into a melancholy state and switch themselves off for good. Sir Alan Turing, when explaining his research in the field of artificial intelligence, elucidates on the idea of ‘machine sadness’: they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable.37

With what might be defined as a reflection of a posthumanist need for redefining what a human stands for, Sir Alan Turing in Machines Like me also discloses his opinion on humans and machines with artificial intelligence that knows no biased distinction and hierarchy between the two. It could be argued that Sir Alan Turing in the novel represents the scientific mind that inspects the human mind with all its intricacies. The artificial intelligences that he produced are actually replicating the ‘ideal’ human mind which is expected to stick to facts only. However, machines reasoning and acting on the basis of facts only frightens human beings for their lack of human ethics which runs not only facts but on some intangible concepts like emotions and a sense of justice: “You’ll need to give this mind some rules to live by. How about a prohibition against lying? According to the Old Testament, Proverbs, I think, it’s an abomination to God. But social life teems with harmless or even helpful untruths. How do we separate them out? Who’s going to write the algorithm for the little white lie that spares the blushes of a friend? Or the lie that sends a rapist to prison who’d otherwise go free? We don’t yet know how to teach machines to lie”.38

Charlie Friend’s rage over Adam’s betraying his plans and giving away the money he raised on the Stocks is incomprehensible for him. He cannot compromise with the idea that the larger good is more important than an individual’s good, hence Adam’s donation of all his money to strangers. Both parties’ argument could be justified on an individual and social level, but it seems clear that the often blurred and biased human mind cannot understand and come to terms with the clarity of mind a robot can exhibit. The robots depicted in the novel do not seem to be conditioned by social and familial templates humans inherit from their forebears and parents. In this case, if humans are mostly conditioned by these psychological templates, they become the party that is not sentient and conscious of their actions. This is a clear and ironical reversal of attributes between man and machine. As Sir Alan Turing states at the end of the novel when Adam is destroyed by Charlie: “They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves”.39 Turing’s remonstrance here reflects the reading of post-

37 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 181. 38 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 303. 39 Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, 299.

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humanism as an opportunity to (re)define what a human really is.40 This posthumanist repositioning of the human seems to entail an eradication of the concept of ‘other’ and ‘dualistic oppositions’ as between man and machine. Such a vision of a posthumanist world where the definitive hold of the concept of ‘other’ will be lost might be considered both from a pessimist and an optimist perspective.

Conclusion The construction of selfhood, the way we build our gender roles based on a static and oppositional conception of desire and man’s positioning himself superior to creatures other than him and the convergence of masculinity and femininity along with other gendered positionalities are some of the crucial questions of the impending posthumanist era. As discussed in Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me, the posthumanist vision of the world asks for a redefinition of the ‘human’ both as a concept and as an entity. As the leading posthumanist scholar Rosi Braidotti states, there is a need for a new ‘transversal’ relationality and conceptualization to free ourselves of the definitive constraints of Humanism. As she argues in her Posthuman Knowledge, “the posthuman convergence can multiply the possibilities and unfold in a number of different directions, depending on our own degree of action and involvement”.41 For Braidotti, such posthuman convergence of concepts and identities will bring about a ‘transversal’ becoming. Since the posthuman transversality will not be running on oppositional dualities to build selfhoods, identities and concepts, there will be no need for creating ‘others’ to try to fit ways of becoming into fixed and stable frames. McEwan’s protagonist Charlie Friend in the novel seems to lose his existential ground when his nonhuman other, the Robot Adam, turns out to be ‘more human’ than himself. However, unlike McEwan’s protagonist, posthumanism may not leave humanity groundless and in chaos, because such convergence and transversality: does not necessarily throw us into the chaos of non-differentiation, nor the specter of extinction. It rather points in a different direction, towards some other middle ground, another milieu.42

The connectivity and singularity as enacted by ‘machines’ in the posthuman vision eradicate the arbitrary dualities we form to build our ‘selfhood’ and the human seems to be driven into a threatening ‘selflessness’ and ‘sameness’ where

40 Braidotti, The Posthuman, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 30. 41 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 40. 42 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 15.

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the very notion of ‘otherness’ disappears. The posthuman convergence of the human and the nonhuman seems to have a great potential for a reassessment of the oppositional and miserable human ego to pave the way for a ‘transversal’ and ‘content’ human subjectivity which is not grounded on oppositions and others but on a new ‘posthumanist’ mode of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.

Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. – The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 2005. – Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987. Hickey-Moody, Anna. “Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Disability and Surfaces of Homosociality”. Geophilosophies of Masculinity: Remapping Gender, Aesthetics and Knowledge, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, eds. Ann Hickey-Moody and Timothy Laurie, Vol. 20, no. 1, March 2015. Hocquenghem, Guy. The Screwball Asses. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010. Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005. McEwan, Ian. Machines Like Me. London: Vintage, 2020. Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 1985. Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.

Paola Partenza

Beyond a “Body Without Organs”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

Introduction Over the last few decades, in gender and posthuman studies, scholars – such as Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Ferrando, Donna Haraway – have become increasingly attentive to the concept of the centrality of the body. As Rosi Braidotti observes, the posthuman “constitutes a trans-disciplinary field of scholarship”, it has “ethico-political implications”,1 and involves real and imaginary or literary fields. This view of posthumanism maintains the idea of “the body as [an] incorporeal complex assemblage of virtualities”,2 which needs to be reassessed according to postmodern tendencies. Such a focus on the connection between gender–body–posthumanism leads to new cultural paradigms, specifically to “the generative powers of female embodiment. In this vision, gender is just a historically contingent mechanism of capturing the multiple potentialities of the body, including their generative or reproductive capacities”.3 Literary works stand out as exceptionally revealing models of these links; novels, for example, cannot be conceived without gender despite their posthuman characters. As Donna Haraway notes, “a world without gender […] is perhaps a world without genesis”.4 In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler remarks, “Gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed”.5

1 Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities”, Theory, Culture & Society, SAGE, Transversal Posthumanities, Vol. 36, no. 6, (November 2019): 31–61, 32. doi:10.1177/0263276418771486. 2 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 99. 3 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 98. 4 Donna Haraway, The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 50–7, 51. 5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990a), 25.

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Doubtless, philosophers such as Braidotti, Haraway, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari laid the groundwork for the significant ways available of interpreting the body in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury cultures. In its several aspects, the debate has generated valuable ideas for conceiving of the body as a site of power. In fact, strikingly different conceptions of this topic are documented in theoretical works and literary texts that show how cultural constructions of gender govern and define the body. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault observes that the emphasis on the body is essential for the operation of power6 – that is, the body is linked to “the process of growth and establishment of bourgeois hegemony […] because of what the ‘cultivation’ of its own body could represent and the future of the bourgeoisie”.7 Butler, however, offers a slightly different postulation to that of Foucault, proposing that the body is “a construction, as are the myriad ‘bodies’ that constitute the domain of gendered subjects”.8 Valuable findings originate from the distinct focus given to the concepts of the subject and identity. The above mentioned scholars have, in fact, focussed on the fundamental distinction between the subject and the non-subject.9 Foucault’s conception of subjectivity as embodied and historically conceived became essential to posthuman studies, which have discussed the subject beyond the bounds of organic gender identification. Like her French counterpart, Foucault, Katherine Hayles has extended this complex discourse to the renegotiation of the boundary between humans and machines. In the construction of the posthuman, Hayles observes that “the erasure of the embodiment is a feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the cybernetic posthuman. Identified with the

6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 136. 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. The Will to Knowledge, Vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 125. 8 Butler, Gender Trouble, 13. 9 This difference remains functional, and it is not less rigid than the idea suggested by some of its early proponents (such as in the myth of Pygmalion and agalmatophilia). Moreover, we should not lose sight of the fact that posthumanism, as we now know it, is a phenomenon that originated in the twentieth century. However, the Greek inventor and mathematician Hero of Alexandria (first century AD) was the first to intersect science and technology in his treatise Περὶ αὐτομάτων (On Automata); in this respect see Lucio Russo, La rivoluzione dimenticata. Il pensiero scientifico greco e la scienza moderna (Milano: Feltinelli, 2001), 152–53. These examples show how the idea of the automata established its roots very early, in the ancient culture. Likewise, in 1637, René Descartes focussed on the concept of the automata in his Discourse on Method. As Descartes wrote to Henry More in 1649, “it seems reasonable, since art copies nature, and man can make various automata which move without thought, that nature should produce its own automata, much more splendid than artificial ones. These natural automata are animals”; see René Descartes, Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 244.

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rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being the body”.10 Many aspects of the posthuman culture and literature have been illuminated in the studies of individual theorists and authors. It has emerged that posthumanism has ramifications11 far beyond the fields of philosophy, politics, technology, and biomedicine as well as indeed most genres of literature. However, as previously stated, we should consider some of the conceptual points that have emerged from posthuman studies – such as, for example, studies concerning the body and subjectivity, the human and the machine, genetic engineering, and ethical choices. Nevertheless, the entire discourse raises some crucial questions: can we maintain that the posthuman is a product of developments in biopolitics, biotechnology, or biomedicine (among other sciences) in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries?12 Can it be considered a new way of conceiving the human or the subject, which is distinct from what has been exported from traditional societies? When posthumanism involved traditional societies, it was certainly seen as a new phenomenon.13 The new perspective from recent times, to elaborate, involves a reconceptualisation of what it is to be human, together with a reconceptualisation of the body as a prosthesis – that is, as Hayles observes, “the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born”.14 Postmodern novelists depict the complex relationship between the human and the posthuman. Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novels, for instance, are about what it is to be human in the future, in which the world has evolved to be marked by advanced biogenetics or technology. This chapter aims to analyse Never Let Me Go (2005)15 and Klara and the Sun (2021),16 in which the author demonstrates the plausibility 10 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4. 11 For this aspect, see Francesca Ferrando, Preface to Philosophical Posthumanism, by Rosi Braidotti (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 55ff. 12 In this respect, Francesca Ferrando points out, “The twenty-first century has ushered in a redefinition of the body by cybernetic and biotechnological developments; the concept of ‘human’ has been broadly challenged, while ‘posthuman’ and ‘transhuman’ have become terms of philosophical and scientific enquiry”; Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, 21. 13 For a discussion of Descartes’ idea of the machine body, see Lenora Cohen Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York: Octagon Books, 1968). 14 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. 15 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber & Faber, 2005). All in-text references to the novel are to this edition. 16 Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (London: Faber & Faber, 2021). All in-text references to the novel are to this edition.

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of posthuman “subjectivity” and shows how clones17 and androids, like cyborgs, become “creature[s] in a postgendered world”.18

Biomedicine, Technology, and the Illusory Sense of the Future In addition to their focus on the body, scholars have emphasised the importance of narration by shedding light on how they describe and create reality; in other words, the relation between body–gender–posthumanism is created by and in discourses that are brought to life, in its crude form, by language and narration. Furthermore, the narrative itself is an extended metaphor for a possible tryst with posthuman characters. In twenty-first century literary works, the representations of posthuman characters vary enormously across different novels. However, a common element among them is the non-human characters who narrate their experiences. The narrative technique used in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun gives further insight into the otherness of the android as the subject (Klara) as well as the subjectivity of the child (Josie), who has established her relationship with Klara. The portrayal of the machine that gradually reaches a high level of consciousness,19 almost like that of a human being, is extremely engaging. The machine becomes a model of internalisation. However, in such a framework, we can ask, “Does this technique provide a ‘visible’ representation of the android’s growing ‘inner world’?” and “Can we talk of the android’s pseudo-subjectivity?” Similarly, in Never Let Me Go, does the attentiveness to the body dissolve subjectivity? In truth, subjectivity presents a crucial basis for observing the duality of the relation between the posthuman and human as a self-consciously dialectical domain. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro regularly expresses his healthy scepticism towards science and its manipulation of the clones’ bodies in the backdrop of a narrative where the clones’ aim is to make people reach “a sort of immortality”. In Klara and the Sun, on the other hand, he explores such ideas by imagining a future world in which the relationship between the androids and human beings is characterised by a language distant from scientific jargon, or

17 On this aspect, see Josie Gill, “Written on the Face. Race and Expression in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 60, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 844–62. 18 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, in Manifestly Haraway, introduction by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 8. 19 Decades earlier, by fabricating a narration that reconstructs the “potent connections between cybernetics and contemporary understandings of race, gender, and sexuality”, Philip Dick, in his novels, posed questions about the ability of the machine to become conscious and rational; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 24.

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seen purely through an unempathetic scientific lens, and treated with similar methods. Given this scepticism, Ishiguro induces the reader to reflect on how an affirmative attitude toward science and technology is possible. This is a matter that implies ethical issues. In both Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro provides the most elaborate treatment of the relationship between science and ethics. For example, in Never Let Me Go, his central concept seems to be the “will to live” to which the idea of immortality is related.20 Thus, manipulating the body is a way to reach such immortality. In this respect, Baudrillard’s focus on genetic engineering and the body (as achieved through cloning) is interpreted as a “technological desire for immortality”.21 In fact, in his influential work The Vital Illusion, he observes, “[t]he question concerning cloning is the question of immortality. We all want immortality”.22 Such formulations are undeniable troubling; they lead to discourses that bring to the fore ethical choices that suggest different scenarios for humanity. Ishiguro’s scepticism is more significant in Klara and the Sun. He points to a transformation of human desire into a dialectic in which the androids and human beings show and give rise to complicated, confusing, and unreasonable aspects of “science”. In Klara and the Sun, the reader is confronted with an artificial figure whose paradoxical self-awareness participates in the construction of the subject. Contrary to the idea of the android as a non-subject, a non-being, Ishiguro shows how Klara, a female android friend (AF) – a mechanical body, a figure of inter-relationality – gradually develops remarkable capacities (thanks to her ability to observe what happens outside). What is outside the store window imparts knowledge to Klara and helps her structure her ‘consciousness’ and develop her emotions: When we were new, Rosa and I [Klara] were mid-store, on the magazines table side, and could see through more than half of the window. So we were able to watch the outside – the office workers hurrying by, the taxis, the runners, the tourists, Beggar Man and his dog, the lower part of the RPO Building. […] Unlike most AFs, unlike Rosa, I’d always longed to see more of the outside – and to see it in all its detail. So once the grid went up, the realization that there was now only the glass between me and the sidewalk, that I was free to see, close up and whole, so many things I’d seen before only as corners and edges, made me so excited that for a moment I nearly forgot about the Sun and his kindness to us.23

20 See Marcus Amit, “The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction”, Comparative Literature Studies Vol. 49, no. 3 (2012): 405–4. 21 Jean Baudrillard, “The Final Solution. Going Beyond the Human and Inhuman”, in The Vital Illusion. Vols. 1–30 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 27–8. 22 Baudrillard, “The Final Solution”, 3. 23 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 1, 9 (italics added).

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Although the android is the product of a mechanical assemblage – “a body without organs”24 – as Deleuze and Guattari theorised in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Ishiguro goes beyond the artificial by constructing a ‘female machine’ that becomes more and more conscious of ‘herself ’. She25 learns how to interact with and perceive the outside world: “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me”,26 Klara says. However, as Deleuze clearly points out in Difference and Repetition, “‘Learning’ […] is different from knowledge. Learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems as such, the apprehension and condensation of singularities and the composition of ideal events and bodies. In short, we may say that knowledge implies consciousness; in fact, […] knowledge [is] modelled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution”.27 These aspects are fundamental to revealing the contrast between the androids’ perceptions of reality and of human beings who are, instead, focussed on the possibility of improving their practical and mental abilities, thus producing a reversal of roles: Ishiguro envisions a sort of mechanisation of the human and the anthropomorphisation of the android. This contrast, or exchange, seems to represent a new generation distinguished by technology. Nevertheless, the application of science, in the end, produces lessthan-satisfactory outcomes. Science produces disappointing results due to its illusory ambition of creating an ideal society that aspires to bring up “lifted kids”28 who will be able to acquire as much information as possible and who are gifted with knowledge and skills owing to genetic engineering and manipulation. The whole project gives rise to a society that distinguishes “lifted” from “unlifted”29 kids, establishing a disparity within the same ideal society. Ishiguro’s dystopian novels, Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, identify the risks involved in substituting nature with science. He endows human beings with the illusion of having gained the powerful ability to manipulate life through medical and technological engineering. For example, Never Let Me Go describes a generation wholly subject to the whims of the gene technology industry and biomedicine. We might argue that in Never Let Me Go, as Baudrillard observes, “cloning radically abolishes the Mother, but also the Father, the intertwining of their genes, the imbrication of their differences, but above all the joint act that is

24 A concept that Braidotti in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory reformulates as organs without body, 183. 25 The use of “she” or “her” referring to Klara follows Ishiguro’s. 26 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 98. 27 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 251–52. 28 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 292. 29 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 130.

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procreation”.30 In this process of “auto-genesis”, the “Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code”.31 Furthermore, the author shows how ‘a new generation’ of people gained extraordinary control of humans’ destiny. Likewise, in this novel’s antecedent, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the character of the scientist feels no moral obligation to accept the cruelty of fate. Indeed, the scientist believes it is a humane and proper impulse to overcome hitherto insoluble biological problems such as diseases: “However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease”.32 Nevertheless, Ishiguro implicitly suggests that the acceptability of such innovations should be in accordance with ethical frameworks. The discourse should focus on the question of how much cloning and medical engineering are actions that harm individuals. As shown by the author, genetic engineering is used to improve the human condition; in his novel, this idea was at the core of a “governmental programme” that explored the possibility of transforming death into life. Despite this illusory, optimistic, far-sighted, but problematic medical manipulation – which tried to provide the best quality of human life – enthusiasm for so-called cloning only grew by renouncing ethics. In fact, in Ishiguro’s novel, the problem arose when the ethical framework regulating genetic technology did little to avoid genetic dystopia, eventually commodifying the body and human life and causing the loss of authenticity of human experiences. In Klara and the Sun, instead, the author believes that essential clues to understanding how people adapted to progress and evolution can be gleaned from comparing humans to androids. Here, the author focusses on the violation of kids’ subjectivity, and at the same time, he shows how the android’s characteristics are developed. Thus, the contrast between the lifted and unlifted kids expresses the loss of a human right – that of self-determination. Likewise, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are merely test-tube babies who ask for their acknowledgement as subjects in Never Let Me Go.

30 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 96. 31 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 96. 32 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 258.

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Simulacrum and the Universe of the Artificial In both novels, the different characters are key to a process of change, thus showing the decline of ethics governing society. The idea of fertilisation outside of the body is not presented in Klara and the Sun; the android, in fact, does not symbolise the application of reproductive technologies or cloning but embodies the possibility of replacing human beings when their bodies cannot repair damage wreaked by diseases. Mr Capaldi says, “The new Josie won’t be an imitation. She really will be Josie. A continuation of Josie”.33 In other words, the artificial has substituted for the real:34 “Klara […] we are asking you to become her. That Josie you saw up there, as you noticed, is empty. If the day comes – I hope it doesn’t, but if it does – we want you to inhabit that Josie up there with everything you’ve learned”.35 Here, Ishiguro highlights how the most significant dangers occur when well-established equilibria or certainties are broken by a society that cannot face its difficulties and problems, a society in which scientists do not question the ethics of cruel experiments. Thus, the android becomes a simulacrum; it is constructed to face the complicated transformations that might occur.36 As Baudrillard observed, there are different kinds of simulacra, and in Ishiguro’s novel, Klara and the androids are the “simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game – total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control”.37 The android can maximise its functions. Moreover, this maximisation seems necessary even for the survival of humans – for example, in relation to the decisions that Klara regards as essential for Josie: “It’s very important for Josie’s 33 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 208 italics added. 34 It is worth noting what John Stephens observes about the characters’ actions: “Performativity in fiction […], as distinct from performance, operates in a more metaphorical sense: readers recognize that a character is being depicted as ‘performing an act’, in a metaphorical sense, because we recognize a behavioural ritual which inheres in culture prior to the construction of this character. In other words, the character is constructed in accordance with, and so plays out recognizable performatives”; John Stephens, “Performativity and the Child Who May Not be a Child”, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature Vol. 16, no. 1 (2006): 5–13. 35 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 209. 36 These themes and situations are reminiscent of the novels of the American novelist Philip Dick. Most of his stories, from 1962 to 1966, explored the connection between gender and the posthuman, focussing his attention on “gender politics” between female and male characters. It is worth mentioning the novel We Can Build You (1972) in which Philip Dick confronts us with robots that are replications (simulacra) of historical figures. Similarly, in Ishiguro’s novel the idea of robot as a simulacrum is meant as an extension of human’s body and mind. In Dick’s novel “These robots incorporate affective mechanisms and one of the challenges to the reader is whether a robot that loves and cares for others is less of a person than a borderline psychopath who does neither […]”. Johan F. Hoorn, Epistemic of the Virtual, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 177. 37 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 121.

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sake. For her health”.38 In other words, developing these pseudo-humans (the androids) becomes essential in the futuristic world in which Ishiguro manifests humanity’s weaknesses. However, as Baudrillard notes, “there is no real, there is no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, including that between the real and the imaginary, tends to abolish itself to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model? Well, […] the tendency is certainly toward the reabsorption of this distance, of this gap that leaves room for an ideal or critical projection”.39 Klara, for example, seems to have succeeded in developing her consciousness on many issues, thus acquiring ‘the ability to understand’ more than human beings; in relation to this, Josie’s mother says, “You’re an intelligent AF. Maybe you can see things the rest of us can’t. Maybe you’re right to be hopeful. Maybe you’re right”.40 Klara reveals unexpected qualities; maybe she understands that the human condition implies vulnerability.41 She becomes empathetic with her interlocutors, such as Josie, Rick, and Josie’s parents. In other words, the character’s “projection is totally reabsorbed in the implosive era of models. […] The field opened is that of simulation in the cybernetic sense, that is, of the manipulation of these models at every level”.42 Ethical problems posed by genetic or mechanical manipulations generally attract considerable intellectual attention. Ishiguro does not underestimate ethical issues in his novels. He, in fact, points out that one consequence of this technological revolution is the discovery of the clones’ and androids’ use with potent effects on society that cause its profound transformation. From this perspective, the author believes that androids, for example, may have more farreaching effects on humankind in general and society, which may be intrinsically more difficult to regulate. Moreover, by trying to equate the figure of the android with that of the human being, the author provides, on one hand, a new reflection on the mechanisation of society. On the other hand, he shows that, despite technological evolution, the disparities between the machine and the human being are still evident: ‘I’ve heard these new B3s are very good with cognition and recall. But that they can sometimes be less empathetic’.

38 39 40 41

Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 221. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 121–2. Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 108. Klara understands human vulnerability by observing Josie. She, on many occasions, notices that “Josie’s health collapsed” or that “she’s becoming weaker and weaker each day”; Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 102, 237. 42 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 122.

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Manager made a sound that was a sigh and also a laugh. ‘At the very beginning, perhaps, one or two B3s were known to be a little headstrong. But I can absolutely assure you, Sung Yi here will present no such issues’.43

Technology-based novels are an inextricable part of the discourse on human life expectancy or death.44 In both Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, human bodies cannot repair all biochemical damages45 inflicted by diseases, as mentioned earlier. Therefore, Ishiguro imagines a dystopian or futuristic world in which humans create techniques to improve life expectancy; further, although the commodification and manipulation of the body are dehumanising practices, cloning and the creation of androids appear as the only solution to these humans. It is a world in which human beings aspire to be liberated from death. Baudrillard points out the following: We try to dissociate life from death. To save and promote life and life only, and to render death an obsolete function one can do without […]. So, death, as a fatal or symbolic event, must be erased. Death must be included only as virtual reality, as an option or changeable setting in the living being’s operating system.46

The Inner and Outer World: Emotion and Body In recent years, social anthropology and philosophy have comprehensively shown that ideas about posthumanism and what it affects are anything but simple cultural paradigms. Furthermore, some philosophers think that only humans have the capacity to conceptualize and form beliefs47 based on inferential reasoning, which is the basis of the evolution of our species. Indeed, this kind of conceptual attention is uniquely human. However, in science fiction novels, posthuman characters have been depicted to reverse the paradigm and illustrate a new form of abstract perception – a process supplemented by the rich information stored in human memory. In Never Let Me Go, the constituent disparities between clones and “normal people”48 do not mean negation: “Difference is not negation. […] On the contrary, […] disparities or enveloped distances inhabit intensive depth. These are 43 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 40; italics added. 44 Bruce Robbins observes that Never Let Me Go might be considered a novel about the welfare state and its caring administrations; Bruce Robbins, “Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go”, Novel Vol. 40, no. 3 (2007): 297. 45 See Shameem Black, “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics”, Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 785–807. 46 Baudrillard, “The Final Solution”, 11. 47 Among them, see Descartes mentioned in footnote 9. 48 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 69.

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the source of the illusion of the negative, but also the principle of the denunciation of this illusion”.49 The clones’ ability to assess and reflect demonstrates their acute awareness, thus reducing their distance from humans. However, all of them are conscious of belonging to an anomalous society and a closed system that establishes an undoubted opposition: normal people–donor or ruler–ruled. Recognising this dichotomy, the author, through his protagonists, unveils the characteristics of a society that does not avoid distinctions; the characters’ existence does not bring them any prerogative, though they are considered privileged creatures50 because they have been educated at Hailsham (“all very special, being Hailsham students”).51 Although the clones live by harbouring the illusion of not being ‘slaves’, the difference between them and “the normal people outside”52 is made obvious by the general dichotomy between in and out. The world outside the college distinguishes the characters’ status: their lives are subordinate to the models imposed by the outside. Yet, everybody knows very well that they could never exist on their own without that world: “You Hailsham students, even after you’ve been out in the world like this, you still don’t know the half of it”,53 Miss Emily said. Indeed, their knowledge of the outside world has remained, for the most part, utilitarian and strictly linked to that project of human engineering. All Hailsham students are intrinsically dissimilar from other people – from the guardians, Madame, Miss Emily, and Miss Lucy – who belong and live outside the confines of that singular world. Therefore, the contrast between in and out is essential to their function. The two spheres refer to the protagonists’ physical space and to the immaterial one – that is, the clones’ inner world. Notwithstanding this, the protagonists feel attracted to the outside world. They hold much fascination for it, and they believe it might constitute the answer to all their questions. More importantly, it may offer them the possibility of changing their future condition, although they know the world that they aspire to be a part of follows normative factors that could discipline their lives and legitimise power over them.

49 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 309. 50 They are considered unique creatures by all other donors in the country; this is due to the fact that all are convinced that the students of Hailsham can delay their function if they show they love each other. Those who have conceived and designed Hailsham have considered this aspect. At the end of the novel, Kathy and Tommy discover they have fallen in love with each other and try to obtain this “privilege”, but instead of receiving an affirmative answer, they discover the truth about themselves. 51 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 43. 52 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 69. 53 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 255.

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In both the novels under consideration, the android (from Klara and the Sun) and the clone (from Never Let Me Go) emblematise the tendency of people to cross limits. This occurs either when the machine (the inanimate object) is placed adjacent to or takes the place of the human being (the animate creature) or when the clone is used to increase the life expectancy of humans. In Never Let Me Go, external mechanisms of power regulate and discipline the donors’ lives. At the same time, the profound permeability of the characters’ inner worlds shows their growing self-awareness, thus shortening the distance between the human and the clone. This aspect is extremely important because Ishiguro believes that genetic endowments do not make the donors humans. Nevertheless, he adheres to the concept of emotion as the only sphere capable of giving depth to human beings; this is because emotions mitigate the radical otherness of the clones: “Carers aren’t machines”.54 Kathy’s expression refers to the clones’ acquired humanity; despite their preordained function programmed by their makers, they have learnt and experienced sadness, joy, love, fear, and all other bodily sensations that characterise human beings. Despite the clones’ categorisation, they show beyond doubt that they do not live in an unemotional state distant from the human experience; on the contrary, they understand that they can experience feelings and sensations only by modifying and participating in their environment. The clones have learnt the basic actions through which humans interact and develop enduring social bonds. In other words, a progressive selfconsciousness allows the clones to grow in their micro-community (Hailsham), where they broaden their mental and emotional potential and enrich their lives significantly by acquiring human qualities.55 A similar propensity for creating ‘self-consciousness’ in machines is shown by the author in Klara and the Sun. The android replicates the human image and epitomises the relations between power and technology. As already asserted, in this novel, the constant confrontation between the living and the non-living becomes a new way of depicting a society in which the dominance of technology is the symbol of new power and a new culture. Indeed, the android is meant to be put forth as a cultural other. As in Never Let Me Go, in Klara and the Sun the author emphasises how openness to experiences encourages sensitivity and attentiveness to feelings, making the body lose its mere functionality and artificiality. It does not matter whether it is a natural or mechanical body. The body or head becomes the receptacle of emotional experiences that seem to produce even physical effects, 54 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 1. 55 On the contrary, in this respect, Christian Moraru maintains that emotions, feelings, “affection and affects are irrelevant because the nonhuman cannot be ‘affected’ by anything other than his genome”; Christian Moraru, “The Genomic Imperative: Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island”, Utopian Studies Vol. 19, no. 2 (2008): 265–83, 276–7.

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either when Klara “feel[s] sad or happy” or when she senses the wind on her body: “I felt the chilly wind […]. I felt something more, something stranger and deeper”.56 However, the android is not an organism. It does not belong to nature. Technology has predetermined its ‘thinking’, actions, and reactions.57 The android’s ‘ability to observe’ is conceived of as a combination of perceptive skills developed through reflex-like capacities achieved by gathering information and comparing them with those stored in its memory. Yet, Klara’s head becomes the nucleus of perception and emotion; more precisely, ‘her’ eyes connect Klara to the outer world from which she learns to decode human beings’ habits and thoughts: “Still, there were other things we saw from the window – other kinds of emotions I didn’t at first understand – of which I did eventually find some versions in myself”.58 Her progress is such that it brings about the growth of Klara’s self-consciousness. In this respect, Ishiguro suggests that if science considers the body or its parts as a tool at the disposal of technology (as far as the clones are concerned), it may also become the centre of wilful subjectivity and subjective feelings. In other words, it is the locus in which human beings nourish their inner worlds.59 Paradoxically, Ishiguro makes Klara’s body or head the core of emotions, letting her go beyond: “I did eventually find some versions in myself, […]”.60 Indeed, the parallel between Klara and a human being is a sort of provocation, a challenge, and an invitation to ponder this new but extraneous world. As Baudrillard notes, in cloning, “headless human bodies […] will serve as reservoirs for organ donation. […] Why bodies without heads? As the head is considered the site of consciousness, it is thought that bodies with heads would pose ethical and psychological problems”.61 Therefore, in both novels, Ishiguro focusses on this essential issue. He makes his characters recognise where emotions rest in the mind or body and how they can be expressed. Thus, ‘creativity’ in Never Let Me Go and ‘a careful observation’ in Klara and the Sun (“her appetite for observing and learning”62) are encouraged. In fact, metarepresentation defines the clones’ abilities. Through creativity and observation, both the clones 56 Ishiguro, Klara ad the Sun, 99–100; italics added. 57 In a world dominated by ‘a humanist idea of Man’, predetermination and manipulation – that is, man’s power over machine – might be considered the power over woman. In this respect, see Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 58 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 19; italics added. 59 Doubtless, Klara may be considered an exception; the author has taken the use of technology and science to extremes. He has anthropomorphised the android and has attributed human form and personality to her. 60 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 19; italics added. 61 Baudrillard, “The Final Solution”, 4. 62 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 42.

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and the android can reveal their interiority and disclose what is intrinsically intimate, so the private world is not hidden from the other’s gaze; it is not concealed from the outside world, as Tommy perceived: “She [Miss Emily] told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul”.63 Additionally, it is also not concealed when, in Klara and the Sun, Josie’s mother says, “It must be nice sometimes to have no feelings. I envy you”. Josie’s mother seems to deny the emotional side of Klara’s character; the statement is clear and unambiguous: “I considered this, then said: ‘I believe I have many feelings’”,64 Klara states. In this context, creativity itself becomes an instrument to measure the donors’ sensibility; it is also the expression of the clones’ capability to show their inner world: “Most importantly, we demonstrated to the world that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before that, all clones – or students, as we preferred to call you – existed only to supply medical science”.65 This is the crucial opposition that generates a profound difference between the clones and “normal” people.66 They existed only to satisfy medical needs, “for the donation program”.67 Further, the allusion to the authoritarian methods of the system is typical of a society that would never accept their emancipation from the original status, as Miss Emily states clearly: “But a generation of created children who’d take their place in society? Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no. That frightened people. They recoiled from that”.68 Miss Emily alludes to the scientist James Morningdale and his experiment: “What he wanted was to offer people the possibility of having children with enhanced characteristics. Superior intelligence, superior athleticism, that sort of thing”.69 All these images are grounded in the idea of creating an ideal society – they describe a perfect vs. deficient society – though Ishiguro’s depiction shows a mechanical, irreversible, and fearful situation. Contrary to a utilitarian purpose,70 as mentioned before, Ishiguro does emphasise emotions as an essential part of human lives, but at the same time, he highlights how important they are in the clones’ evolution; as Mark Johnson notes, “emotion and feeling lie at the heart of our capacity to experience 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 255; italics added. Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 98. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 256; italics added. It is worth remembering what Deleuze notes about difference: “It is not difference which presupposes opposition but opposition which presupposes difference”; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 65. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 259. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 259. Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 258. The clones are subject to market consumerism and organ exchange.

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meaning”.71 Thus, human beings learn to have affective reactions through emotions although not always consciously experienced. This is so if, on one hand, emotions and feelings can reveal the complex nature of human beings and, on the other hand, “they contribute to human meaning-making”.72 Furthermore, giving rise to emotion through art is a complex process. Ishiguro, however, demonstrates how imagination may determine the intensity of emotional experiences and how the awareness of experiences causes cognitive processes – that is, by means of the definition and realisation of the clones’ subjectivity. By emphasising the intangible and seductive effects of art, Ishiguro draws attention to emotion through creativity, art, and the aforementioned “meaning making”. Indeed, in Never Let Me Go, creativity becomes an essential ingredient in defining the clones’ inner world since this unveils and translates their soul: emotions reveal their human nature, nullifying the mind–body divide.73

Klara’s Emulation: A Figure of Identification and Representation According to Baudrillard, in cloning, “the subject is […] gone”,74 yet in Never Let Me Go, the clones’ subjectivity emerges. The protagonists are entirely absorbed in a system in which their subjectivity and bodies are inextricably intertwined. In both novels, we may argue that each character shows an “embodied subjectivity”75 – that is, their mind and body are interlaced.76 The discourse becomes more problematic or complex when talking of the android in Klara and the Sun. Klara is artificial, but she learns to emulate humans. She is an interrelational figure – a perfect connection between the human and the machine; the android becomes a figure of identification and representation.

71 Mark P. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 153. 72 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 285. 73 This aspect is evident in Kathy’s ability to narrate her story. See Keith McDonald. “Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as ‘Speculative Memoir’”, Biography Vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 77–83. 74 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 97. 75 See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 2; this expression, often used by Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, is considered by Elizabeth Grosz a tautology. She prefers defining the mind–body relation as one that folds into one another. 76 In Volatile Bodies, Grosz focussed on the mind–body relation and opposition and how different philosophical, biological, and psychological theories have influenced concepts and ideas about sexes and sexual differences.

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‘Mom. Klara’s the one I want. I don’t want any other’. ‘One moment, Josie’. Then she asked Manager: ‘Every Artificial Friend is unique, right?’ ‘That’s correct, ma’am. And particularly so at this level’. ‘So, what makes this one unique? This … Klara?’ ‘Klara has so many unique qualities, we could be here all morning. But if I had to emphasize just one, well, it would have to be her appetite for observing and learning. Her ability to absorb and blend everything she sees around her is quite amazing. As a result, she now has the most sophisticated understanding of any AF in this store, B3 s not excepted’.77

“Her appetite for observing and learning” (See note infra) brings her closer to human beings. Through Klara, the author passes from the visible to the invisible materiality of the body.78 Klara integrates herself into a new reality with a specific order, and she incarnates one of its characters. This divided image shows Klara’s projection process: her identification with the role has been attributed to her (she is an AF), and her integration into a world has been marked by technological transformation. The particular purpose for which the android exists is primarily associated with its representational function. It embodies absolute otherness and belongs to a system of artificial elements. Moreover, the android cannot be understood outside of the process of which it is a part; each of them (AA or B1) has a role to play. Nevertheless, the social organisation depicted within the novel aims to create a system to which the androids are connected and from which humans derive potential transformations. Indeed, one of their essential roles is to establish a continuous thread linking the two different worlds. Klara’s connection with her human, Josie, does not create binary oppositions but rather integration and dependence. In this regard, Ishiguro distinguishes between (1) the actual process of human transformation and consciousness and (2) the evolution of the android. Indeed, through a subtle “shifting”, the I of the android and the she of Josie finally coincide. This process comes to light because of Klara’s ability to internalise any external expression with which she is in contact. The android shows a strict adherence to its representational function. The most important aspect is its function for human beings. Undoubtedly, it is due to this coincidence that the android can strengthen her (artificial) identity. As remarked earlier, Klara learns from humans; she tries to understand human actions to stimulate reactions and reflections; moreover, she motivates her counterpart Josie or the characters with whom she is in contact (Rick or Josie’s parents). In other words, Klara determines human responses by the in77 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 42. 78 See Ian Buchan and Claire Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 69.

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clusion of actions and feelings. Consequently, the plot appears as an assemblage of actions and emotive responses. It becomes the vehicle for the android and Josie’s exchanges and identification. Furthermore, Klara is the story’s subject, an artificial being to which Ishiguro attributes the roles of the narrator and mediator between two radically different worlds. If, on one hand, the android’s disclosing function brings about Josie’s emotions and feelings, its other function is, paradoxically, to be the guarantor of reality. Owing to this, Klara’s reflections on different situations disclose all the events that involve her friend, thus contributing to Josie’s awareness. However, the android’s actions and reflections can only assume paradigmatic significance through a series of reversals, such as Klara’s alleged consciousness and subjectivity that, here, become the negation of science and technology, leading instead to the humanisation of the artificial. It is as if Ishiguro suggested that humanity should reconsider the limits of technology and accept its subordinate role. Despite vulnerability and imperfection, humans tend to go beyond their limits. Ishiguro seems to suggest that only within a certain conception of humanity that values this limitation can the reader directly confront the other (the android incarnates). He implicitly discusses the changes in medicine (as in Never Let Me Go) and technology. The android is created to enable a meaningful comparison between the human and the artificial. Since Klara is not the perfect equivalent of the human being, it contributes to creating a certain distance from the perspective of the narrative I and the other protagonist she (Josie). While confronting other characters, Klara restores the insurmountable distance created in the novel by otherness. Klara is a symbolic substitution. This aspect is central because it also justifies the reversal mentioned above; the story is narrated by the android and not by a human being. The narration is given through her voice: a machine with a human form that sees and reflects on what happens around her. Klara’s conscious attention is certainly fundamental to the integration of information that allows her to unfold actions and emotions. Thoughts, impressions, and feelings are mediated by the android; and the other – embodied by the android – paradoxically becomes the best expression of human emotions and thoughts. The author analyses the role of emotions through Klara, who does not merely imitate human actions but absorbs their characteristics and becomes capable of discerning right from wrong and making decisions based on this judgement. This aspect is evident at the end of the novel when she wants to sacrifice herself and her functionality to help Josie recover from the disease that affected her: she believes that Josie’s disease is due to pollution provoked by the Cootings Machine. Klara wants to destroy it, pouring into it the solution present below her ear: “‘If … if we were able to extract the solution from me, would there be sufficient to destroy the Cootings Machine?’ […] My mind was filling with great fear, but I

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said: ‘But Mr Paul believes if we could extract the solution, we could destroy the Cootings Machine’. […] ‘Just a small incision. Below the ear’”.79 Klara shows that she has learnt to interact with humans and that it might be useful to equate herself with human beings; ‘learning as a very bodily activity’ is one of the characteristics that makes the android so peculiar. Most importantly, Klara has retaught Josie’s father something essentially human, hope: “Truth is, you’ve started me hoping again. Hoping what you say might be for real”.80

Desexualised Bodies and the Technological Other In Never Let Me Go, negation is the keyword that expresses the clones’ lack of possibility of becoming mothers or fathers: Sex is merely a physiological accessory. Their sexual relationship is not for love, and it does not involve any sentimental attachment. The distinction between human and non-human is based on this impossibility; the clones cannot procreate. They cannot be the source of a new generation. Therefore, their role ends with donation, which may be viewed as the utmost way of expressing the manipulation of the body.81 If the issue of desexualised women has been under discussion in history,82 the association between automata and femininity has emerged in philosophical and literary works, especially in relation to women’s mindless, repetitive behaviour – that is, “a machine-like state”.83 As Andrea Haslanger points out, the strong association between the automaton and femininity, which emerges in the 1770s and reaches its peak in the 1790s, represents a departure from earlier Enlight-

79 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 226–7. 80 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 227. 81 For notes on human reproduction, see Rachel Carroll, “Imitations of Life: Cloning, Heterosexuality and the Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, in Rereading Heterosexuality. Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 133. 82 It is worth noting the numerous works about the domesticity of women in a patriarchal society. In this respect, Karen Harvey observes, “The redefinition of women as ‘domesticated’ and ‘sexually passive’ has been used to explain the reorientation of manhood away from honour grounded in the control of wives’ sexuality, and towards an emphasis on restraint in social settings. Desexualized women in the home were no threat to men; instead, sexual dangers [laid] outside marriage and outside home”; Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10. Additionally, Joan Perkin underlines that “the ideal of female passionlessness dominated public discourse on sexuality from 1820s onwards”; Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England (London, Routledge, 2002), 276. 83 Andrea Haslanger, “From Man-Machine to Woman-Machine: Automata, Fiction, and Femininity in Dibdin’s Hannah Hewit and Burney’s Camilla”, Modern Philology 111, no. 4 (May 2014): 788–817, 788.

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enment discussions of the human’s relation to the machine, which are carried out in universalist language and are concerned with comparing the broad categories of human and machine rather than individual types.84

The replication of the human being – that is, the process of reproducing or duplicating humans – has established a new frontier; it no longer separates the human from the machine. In Ishiguro’s novel, in fact this aspect seems to be overcome: the scientist does not reproduce reality but creates a new one. In addition, Klara is an instrument of this process of creating reality; she is not devoid of a sense of reality. Nevertheless, what the scientist or creator produces has already been established and preordained. This act of predetermination (or manipulation) might be read as a substitution of the biological matrix within which a female’s role is articulated, thus sidestepping gender politics. Klara exhibits intelligence and reason and is “advertised as responsive: […] theoretically able to respond to a changing environment”.85 Klara possesses essential human qualities; she seems distant from what Descartes states in his work A Discourse on Method (1637) about the android automaton. He points out, in fact, that the lack of consciousness distinguishes the automaton from human beings and observes the following: For we can well conceive of a machine made in such a way that it emits words, and even utters them about bodily actions which bring about some corresponding change in its organs (if, for example, we touch it on a given spot, it will ask what we want of it; or if we touch it somewhere else, it will cry out that we are hurting it, and so on); but it is not conceivable that it should put these words in different orders to correspond to the meaning of things said in its presence, as even the most dull-witted of men can do. And the second means is that, although such machines might do many things as well or even better than any of us, they would inevitably fail to do some others, by which we would discover that they did not act consciously, but only because their organs were disposed in a certain way.86

This crucial distinction creates a strict separation between the spheres of the human and the machine. However, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the transformation, the metamorphosis – what they call “becoming-machine” – is a proneness to technology “that is not based on functionalism”.87 But it is determined, according to Deleuze’s idea of “releasing human embodiment from its indexation on socialized productivity to become ‘bodies without organs’, that is to say without organized

84 Haslanger, “From Man-Machine to Woman-Machine”, 788. 85 Haslanger, “From Man-Machine to Woman-Machine”, 792. 86 René Descartes, A Discourse on Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford University Press, 2006), 46–7. 87 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 91.

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efficiency”.88 The key difference is that Ishiguro seems to go beyond this definition through Klara herself. The debate on the dichotomy of body–machine involves what Braidotti defines as hybridisation, at the core of which is the technology that “combines monsters, insects, and machines into a powerfully posthuman approach to what we used to call ‘the body’”.89 In a world of cyborgs, androids, and automata, notwithstanding the concrete separateness of the human and the machine, their interaction is, at the same time, unavoidable since it comes from “scientific teratology” – as Georges Canguilhelm outlined it – that is a source for contemporary cyborg thought.90 In a context dominated by science, the desirability of technology, the “technophilic anthropomorphism” – a sort of “eroticization of the technological other” – is meant as “a sexual surrogate and the Oedipalization of the human-machine interaction”.91 In line with different theoretical approaches concerning “anthropomorphic” machines, Ishiguro provides a figure that guarantees the co-presence of different characters in the story. Klara’s outward appearance as a human enables her to participate in the human world as a permanent and significant presence, and it makes her a part of it. More importantly, the author guarantees the other’s recovery (the human), bringing about the aforementioned reversal. Though Klara is an inorganic creation, she is functional; she expresses the “machine-state functionalism”,92 which does not avoid, however, the absorption of the other represented by Josie in the novel’s structure. In this respect, we may add that this interaction is a form of reciprocity, a sort of mutual absorption of the machine into the human and vice versa. This process is one of the essential characteristics of Ishiguro’s novel since the “anthropomorphisation” of the automata is profoundly intellectual and serves human beings by allowing them to measure themselves with a thinking machine. In synthesis, Ishiguro constructed Klara as a female android93 that is prone to becoming the other; Klara, Rose, the AFs, B1s, and B3s, among others, exist because they satisfy the needs of their human correlatives: specifically, the androids and the children are reciprocally related. Therefore, posthuman characters show better variations of their human selves. In line with Foucault, Butler, 88 89 90 91 92

Braidotti, The Posthuman, 91–2. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 214. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 215. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 215. John P. Burgess, “Kripke on Functionalism”, Critica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia Vol. 48, no. 44 (Dec. 2016), 3–18, 6. 93 The distinction between male and female is a merely outward feature, a trait that gives the androids their recognisability. In Klara’s world, the androids hold on to their “gender” only nominally to be familiar with the children to whom they are assigned and who make their existence significant.

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and others, Ishiguro offers a hyperbolic example of the post-gendered imaginary that is used to amplify his discourse on cloning or androids as the expression of an infertile and dehumanising world. Sara Salih, for example, draws attention to the idea that “gender is constructed over time, and from culture to culture”,94 a conception that Ishiguro, in Klara and the Sun, seems to minimise; in fact, it is a distinction that does not affect the Klara–Josie or Klara–Rick duos in the novel. If the traditional concept of male and female becomes meaningless and redundant here, the desexualised clone – that is, one that is deprived of sexual power, including procreation – is the manifestation of a process of dehumanisation in Never Let Me Go.95 In conclusion, the android serves to redefine the human world through the intrusion and interference of the absolute other in that world; contemporarily, we could maintain that it is the instrument used to explore the connections between subjects and objects. Provocatively, Klara’s body changes into a sort of sentient object when it acquires consistency through the consciousness she has derived from cognition and action. This is the provocative aspect Ishiguro introduces in the novel; the author makes the reader face the mind of the other self: a full and not an empty otherness. As mentioned earlier, Klara is defined as peculiarly clever and as being able to do many things. She overcomes human capacities, and as the manager states, “Klara has extraordinary observational ability. I’ve never known one like her”.96 Thus, Klara’s “cognitive abilities”97 rest on two key functions: visual attention and social interactions. She learns to decode critical aspects of the environment from which she derives her emotions and feelings. In other words, Klara seems to have learnt that through observation and visual attention, she can adapt to the world, thus showing that she can produce reliable information. Most importantly, Klara acts. In the end, she decides if she should act for Josie’s sake and how she must do so: she is capable of varying perspectives. Through this ability, her fullness as a character is achieved because she is able to connect her “cognitive abilities” with external objects. Ishiguro’s criticism of humanity involves this aspect. Ishiguro, in fact, challenges the viability of any attempt to define the android’s consciousness, sustaining and emphasising the achievements and abilities of posthuman characters whose cognitive and emotive manifestations and knowledge are worthy of credit. If, on one hand, this is the real challenge, with the above 94 Sara Salih, Judith Butler (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 8; italics added. 95 See Myra J. Seaman, “Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future”, Journal of Narrative Theory Vol. 37, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 246–75; Anne Whitehead, “Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Contemporary Literature Vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 54–83. 96 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 44. 97 Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun, 227.

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idea in mind, the nature and value of these characters, on the other hand, can support the act of viewing them as mechanical humans whose primary epistemic value is generated by the apparent human vulnerability and solipsistic existence. This humanoid figure thus goes beyond, representing a new aspect of the machine whose searching and curious gaze might be read as epistemophilia (love of knowledge) and adopting humans’ specific attitudes as her own – specifically, humans’ cognitive and social processes (such as empathy). These processes replace the useful body, both in Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, with the intelligible body.98 The characters become aware of their own interiority as well as experience intimacy with themselves through their thoughts, desires, and motives that were not previously acknowledged.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. “The Final Solution. Going Beyond the Human and Inhuman”. The Vital Illusion. 1–30. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. – Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2008. Black, Shameem. “Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics” Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 55, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 785–807. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. – “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities”, Theory, Culture & Society, SAGE, Transversal Posthumanities (2018): 1–31 (DOI: 10.1177/0263276418771486). – Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. – Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Buchan, Ian, and Claire Colebrook, eds. Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Burgess, John P. “Kripke on Functionalism”, Critica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia, Vol. 48, n.44, (Dec. 2016), 3–18. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990a. Carroll, Rachel. “Imitations of life: Cloning, Heterosexuality and the Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” in Rereading Heterosexuality. Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Cohen Rosenfield, Lenora. From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie. New York: Octagon Books, 1968. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London-Oxford-New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 98 For these aspects, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136ff.; and The History of Sexuality, volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 139ff.

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Notes on Contributors

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Nandita Biswas Mellamphy is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Political Science; an affiliate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; core faculty in (and former Associate Director of) the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism; and founding Director of The Electro-Governance research group (EGG), all at Western University in Canada. Currently, she is Assistant Editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, as well as an Associate Editor of Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism. Her areas of study are situated at the intersection of Political Theory, Continental Philosophy, and Information/Media Studies. Jasmine Brooke Ulmer is Associate professor at Wayne State University. She has been a Wayne State University Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and visiting scholar at the University of Ghent in Belgium. She recently authored Shared and Collaborative Practice in Qualitative Inquiry: Tiny Revolutions (Routledge, 2021) and, with Taylor and Hughes, co-edited Transdisciplinary Feminism: Innovations in Theory, Method, and Practice (Routledge, 2020). Maria Margaroni is Associate Professor in Literary Theory and Feminist Thought at the University of Cyprus. She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (University of Leeds). She has published extensively on the work of Julia Kristeva in peer-reviewed journals and collected volumes. She is the co-author of Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (with John Lechte, Continuum, 2004). Other publications include two special issues and four edited volumes, most recently Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (with Arleen Ionescu, Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) and Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently editing a special issue on “Julia Kristeva and the Medical Humanities” for Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought (forthcoming 2023).

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Emanuela Ettorre is Associate Professor of English at “G. d’Annunzio University” of Chieti-Pescara, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She has published on Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Mary Kingsley, Charles Darwin, animal studies, women travel writing and the relationship between science and literature. She has translated three volumes of Victorian short stories and edited the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe with William Greenslade (Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings, MHRA, 2020). Sanja Sˇosˇtaric´ Sanja Sˇosˇtaric´ is full professor of English and American literature and cultural studies at the English department of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in English and German philology from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg. She published a university textbook on medieval English literature (2009) and three books: Coleridge and Emerson: A Complex Affinity (2003); an in-depth study of American postmodern prose by John Barth, Rober Coover and Ishmael Reed (2017); and, in 2021, a monograph on the “unreading” of American dominant culture by Sylvia Plath, Kathy Acker and Octavia E. Butler. She presented at international academic conferences on anglophone literature and culture in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade, Zadar (Croatia), Bucharest and San Francisco and published a number of scientific articles on American postmodern authors (Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Barthelme, Reed) and American contemporary authors (DeLillo, Roth, Danielewski and Chabon). She is a member of PEN Center of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Canan S¸avkay is Associate Professor at Istanbul University, Department of English Language and Literature. After completing her studies at Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany with an M.A.degree in English Literature, she moved to Istanbul where she continued her postgraduate studies at Istanbul University. She is the author of Ethics, Self and the Other: A Levinasian Reading of the Postmodern Novel and some of her recent publications include “The Precarious Lives of Cats in Doris Lessing’s On Cats”, “Human Violence, Nature and Poetry in Murathan Mungan’s S¸airin Romanı (The Poet’s Novel)”. Her research fields include ethics, ecocriticism, and gender studies. Özlem Karadag˘ is Associate Professor at Istanbul University, Department of English Language and Literature. She took a postdoctoral position at Queen Mary University of London, Department of Drama (2015), where she had also conducted her PhD research in 2012. In 2012 she also joined BuluTiyatro as a resident dramaturg, and has translated many contemporary English plays. Some of her recent publications include “Ecofeminist Ecopoetics and Carol Ann Duffy”, and “Becoming Human/oid: A Posthumanist Critique of Thomas Eccleshare’s In-

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structions for Correct Assembly”. Her scholarly work primarily focuses on theatre studies, ecofeminism, and trauma narratives along with poetry, literary adaptations, and contemporary literary theories. Marilena Saracino is Assistant Professor of English Literature at “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara. She is the author of a book on Joseph Conrad, and of articles on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, R.L. Stevenson, Ted Hughes and Desmond Egan. She has published on Hobbes and Shakespeare (Hobbes Studies), and on John Milton in a volume on “gardens” edited by Andrea Mariani. At the moment she is writing a book on London Fields by Martin Amis and working on a project dealing with the role of humanistic studies in the era of algorithms and posthumanism. Gökçen Ezber is Assistant Professor at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of English Language and Literature. His teaching and research focus on queer theory, gender studies, posthuman literature, literary criticism, and hermeneutics. His literary reviews and critical essays have been published in literary publications like Cumhuriyet Kitap, Radikal Kitap and Varlık. He is the author of ˙Ingiliz Romanında Queer (Queer in the English Novel, Kriter, 2019). He has translated pieces of literary fiction by Tracy Chevalier, Edgar Allan Poe, H.E. Bates, Charles Dickens, and Katherine Mansfield. He has published a book in Turkish titled Seni Dolaba Kim Koydu? Gizlenen Cinsellikler (Who Put You in the Closet: Hidden Sexualities, Aylak Kitap, 2017). Paola Partenza is Associate Professor of English Literature at “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures. She has published a volume on Tennyson’s poetry, on women writings, and on Jane Austen. She is the author of essays in collections and journals. She is Editor-in-Chief of the book series Passages – Transitions – Intersections (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht); she edited Dynamics of Desacralization. Disenchanted Literary Talents, (V&Runipress Göttingen, 2015) and Sin’s Multifaceted Aspects in Literary Texts in 2018. She published an article on the concept of Ecotopia in Sylvia Townsend Warner (2019), and the idea of empathy and the unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (2019). In 2021 she published the article, “Gertrude Bell’s Geography of Arabic Culture in The Desert and the Sown”.

Passages – Transitions – Intersections Paola Partenza / Andrea Mariani (eds.) Volume 9: Petro Rychlo Stationen poetischer Entwicklung Paul Celans Gedichtbände in chronologisch-historischer Folge 2022. 131 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-1443-7

Volume 8: Catherine Girardin La philosophie de l’histoire par le théâtre

L’œuvre dramatique de Johann Gottfried Herder (1764–1774) 2021. 372 Seiten, paperback € 45,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-1304-1

Volume 7: Michele Russo A Plurilingual Analysis of Four Russian-American Autobiographies Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova, Shteyngart 2020. 137 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-1201-3

Volume 6: Pier Carlo Bontempelli Alles ist nur Symbol

Symbolisches Kapital und implizite Soziologie in Buddenbrooks 2020. 128 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-1001-9

Volume 5: Paola Partenza (ed.) Sin’s Multifaceted Aspects in Literary Texts 2018. 140 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-0852-8

Volume 4: Alessandro Giovannucci Perspectives historicoesthétiques dans l’œuvre de Fernando Liuzzi 2018. 118 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-0841-2

Volume 3: Greta Colombani A gordian shape of dazzling hue Serpent Symbolism in Keats’s Poetry 2017. 126 Seiten, paperback € 25,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-0775-0

Volume 2: Andrea Mariani Italian Music in Dakota

The Function of European Musical Theater in U.S. Culture 2017. 250 Seiten, paperback € 35,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-0655-5

Volume 1: Paola Partenza (ed.) Dynamics of Desacralization Disenchanted Literary Talents 2015. 179 Seiten, paperback € 35,– D ISBN 978-3-8471-0386-8

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