포스트휴먼 사회의 물질성과 신체성: 윌리엄 깁슨의 『모나 리자 오버드라이브』와 하니프 쿠레이시의 『바디』

Abstract

This study analyzes how the body and materiality are reconstructed in posthuman society through a comparative reading of Hanif Kureishi’s The Body and William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. Both works present the extreme scenario of bodily detachment and critically expose the illusion of “bodiless freedom” promised by technological disembodiment. In The Body, the protagonist who abandons his aging body for a young transplanted one raises the question of whether human existence can truly be reduced to consciousness alone, thereby underscoring the body as the material foundation of selfhood. Meanwhile, Gibson’s cyberspace universe, with its mechanisms of consciousness uploading and AI deification, highlights the identity fragmentation and ethical void generated by the absence of the body. In this way, the two texts literarily explore the ontological and ethical crises that arise from bodily detachment—disruptions of sensation, the loss of relationality, and the suppression of otherness. This article addresses four central questions: Can a being that has left its body still be called human? How is identity transformed when technology replaces or controls the body? What ethical dangers are implicated in the deification of AI? And can the body remain a meaningful ethical site in posthuman society? To answer these questions, the study draws on new materialist theorists such as Braidotti, Barad, and Hayles, who reconceptualize the body not as a mere biological shell but as a material agent entangled with technology, the environment, and the Other, thereby emphasizing the necessity of a sensory-based ethics. Ultimately, both works call for the return of the body even amidst the crisis of posthuman embodiment. While a bodiless existence may be conceivable, an ethics without sensation cannot be sustained. The future subject must carry out responsibility within networks of affect, pain, and relationality that bind it to the material world. This recognition underscores the importance of a posthuman ethics that moves beyond fantasies of disembodied transcendence and acknowledges the material conditions upon which existence depends.