이종이식, ‘인간’ 신체의 임계와 생명정치 ─ 고바야시 야스미 「인수세공」을 중심으로 ─

초록

In this paper, the critique of Kobayashi Yasumi’s science fiction novel Jinjū Saiku (人獣細工, 1997) challenges us to analyze how the narrative of collapsing species boundaries between human and animal bodies oscillates between a critique of biopolitical violence and a refusal of the posthuman ethical leap. This paper first positions the text within the historical genealogy of Japanese science fiction dealing with artificial organs, then compares the fictional premise of human-to-pig xenotransplantation with current xenotransplantation research to assess both its predictive accuracy and its limitations. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, and Nikolas Rose’s biological citizenship, this paper argues that the experimentation of the father on his daughter’s body exposes how the discourse of “treatment as hope” can function as an alibi concealing the non-consensual instrumentalization of the body. Employing Rosi Braidotti’s concept of Zoe and Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, the cyborg, and the OncoMouse, this paper further shows that although the text possesses the theoretical resources to reimagine the collapse of the human/animal boundary as an emancipatory possibility, it ultimately takes up only the form of this potential while foreclosing its content. This paper concludes that Jinjū Saiku occupies a transitional position between the body-horror imagination of 1990s Japanese science fiction and the posthuman imagination that emerges from the 2000s, lending voice to a fear of the ‘human’ that has neither settled into the optimism of transhumanism nor into the coexistence ethics of posthumanism.

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