일상성 추구와 포스트휴먼 생명윤리 미학: 돈 드릴로의 『제로 K』

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the process that Jeffrey Lockhart attains the posthuman subjectivity through rejecting the illusion of immortality and finding the wonder in his daily life in Don DeLillo’s Zero K. Jeffrey observes that the Convergence, the cryonics facility in which his father Ross invests is revealed as a compound to put the humans into the ‘life in death’ situation. Jeffrey’s visit to the Convergence is the journey to the underworld for his awakening, because he recognizes the vitality in the life-death continuum and the importance of becoming a vital subject. He realizes that pursuing the ‘radiance in dailiness’ makes him escape from the solipsism, take care of the others and participate in the community. This novel suggests the posthuman bioethical vision, emphasizing on the pursuit of dailiness in everyday life and the embodiment in material world. Zero K portrays the humans on the planet at the risk of extinction in the Anthropocene. DeLillo writes his counternarrative against the transhuman fantasy of the life extension by the cryopreservation. The plot story is developed in Ross and Jeffrey’s binary viewpoints of human existence. Motivated with his wife Artis’s terminal multiple-sclerosis and the intention to extend her life, Ross invests in the Convergence enterprise. Jeffrey shows his concerns with human limitedness and mortality, as he dismisses the Convergence’s illusion of immortality. In conclusion, DeLillo wants to reverse the desires of disembodiment in the technologically accelerated world. DeLillo suggests the affirmative posthuman bioethical vision, through Jeffrey’s understanding the importances of vital subjectivity and communal consciousness in the co-evolutionary relations with zoe-geo-technology continuum.