브라이도티, 이시구로 그리고 윈터슨의 ‘인간 너머’의 세상들: Never Let Me Go와 Frankissstein을 중심으로

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein depict post-human bodies that radically deviate from those of natural-born human as alienated and monstrous in the era of human genetic modification and enhancement. But these novels, at the same time, through the clones' ability to fit into the privileged and normative human world as in Morningdale scandal in Never Let Me Go and Ry Shelly's hybrid and self-made body that Dr. Victor Stein admires in Frankissstein, examine post-human possibilities that can further generate a counter-narrative to the conventional imaginary designed by natural-born human subjects. Nevertheless, while there are some spaces considered as anti-topoi within which these monstrous bodies claim a voice, this paper concludes that these spaces of otherness and human and non-human relationships can be easily remapped into traditional dynamics of competition, or regenerate Cartesian body/mind dualism (and hierarchy) that defines the latter as superior to the former. In other words, this paper criticizes that the ideas such as technological innovations and the myth of human liberation that many of trans-human (or even critical post-huamn) discourses implicate nowadays might function as traditional ideologies. Mostly, through the images of false utopia Never Let Me Go and Frankissstein depict, this paper attempts to warn the possible risks that can be made worse when the first world’s right-wing extremism is enforced by the desires of neoliberal capital market in the current global environment.