Becoming-Mystic: The Posthuman in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

The Posthuman in Contemporary Fiction is a full-length study of contemporary fiction from the perspective of critical posthumanism. Moving beyond the limitations of humanism, critical posthumanism is a discourse that builds on poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and feminism, in order to reconceive what it means to be human. The advent of the Anthropocene, the geologic age defined by humanity’s impact on the entire planet, adds new urgency to the need to reimagine the human subject. The thesis refers to the revised conception of the human as the posthuman. The thesis is guided, from a theoretical perspective, by the critical posthumanist Rosi Braidotti’s conception of the posthuman, particularly as it is found in her book The Posthuman (2013). Braidotti is the only critical posthumanist to have extensively theorised the posthuman’s relationship with death. On the basis that death is a central theme in each of the four novels the thesis analyses — the literal and/or metaphorical death of protagonists, death politics, dying species, and dying planets — her conception of the posthuman is especially apposite. At the centre of Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman and death is the concept of becoming-imperceptible, which she argues is the furthest frontier of the process of posthuman transformation or becoming. The thesis comprises a critique of four contemporary novels written contemporaneously with the emergence of critical posthumanism as a discourse. The novels are Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark (2000), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Each of these four novels engages with a nonhuman domain of inquiry within the discourse: art, the nonhuman animal, technology, and Planet Earth, respectively. Additionally, each of the novels contests and undermines one of the key pillars of humanism: representation, reason, individualism, and mastery of nature. The thesis argues that the novels’ protagonists, by virtue of characterising the possibility of an alternative set of values, creativity, belief, caring for the collective, and sustainability, respectively, exemplify the possibility of becoming-imperceptible. In no small part, critical posthumanism’s emergence has been born out of a need to resist the excesses of transhumanism, not least its fundamentalist fantasy of achieving disembodied technological immortality. There already exists a significant body of scholarship dedicated to the relationship between transhumanism and religion. The thesis is recognition of the need, similarly, for the development of a body of scholarship dedicated to understanding the relationship between critical posthumanism and religion/spirituality. Accordingly, the thesis argues that the figure of the posthuman is indicative of the emergence of a new form of mysticism.