생명공학기술과 언어 관계에서의 포스트휴먼 비전: 마가렛 앳우드의 『오릭스와 크레이크』

Abstract

This paper aims to propose the posthuman ethics, investigating what results come out when humans intend to increase their own happiness through the excessive applications of biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. This study pursues the affirmative solutions to resurrect language and empathy, because this novel shows the degradations of language and recognition when humans become the indiscrete consumers dominated by the ruthless empowerment of neoliberal corporations. This novel represents that in the post-apocalyptic devastated world driven by the geneticist Crake’s annihilating humans in his totalitarian transgenetic vision, Jimmy (Snowman) struggles to survive and reanimate the language in his self-reconstruction. This novel suggests the eco-posthuman ethical vision because Snowman can understand the bioengineered hominids Crakers’s virtues of accepting otherness, communal cooperations and environmental adaptability. The eco-posthuman reading leads to the positive solutions of vital materialism that we can see the nature not as the uncontaminated pastoral garden but as the postnatural generative space overlapped with human and nonhuman. This perspective offers that we should pursue the postanthropocentrism paradigms. If we read the Crakers as the posthuman subjectivities, the tone of this dystopian novel can be reversed as the hopeful utopian one. The Crakers’s virtues can expand the possibilities for humanity and human consciousness. The Crakers can nourish our compassion and community solidarity for the betterment of futuristic society. As Snowman has struggled to survive at the wasteland and to invent new narration in leading the Crakers, he can become a new posthuman and move toward the other human survivors for their reconciliations in the end of this novel. This novel would suggest the vital posthuman ethics, because Snowman’s narrative future opens the geo-zoe-technology correlation and coevolution.