ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article reads Michel Faber’s Under the Skin as a literary experiment that aesthetically stages the limits of anthropocentric humanism by reproducing and unsettling its governing logics from within. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of carno-phallogocentrism—the convergence of carnivorism, phallocentrism, and logocentrism constitutive of the sovereign human subject—the study argues that the novel performs a posthuman critique through aesthetic form rather than external moral judgment. Through reflective mimesis, Under the Skin reenacts the rational language by which bodies are classified and rendered killable. This aesthetic strategy operates by destabilizing the perceptual and categorical frameworks through which the human is conventionally defined. Isserley’s liminal positionality as alien, woman, and animal disrupts distinctions between human and nonhuman, subject and object, and reason and sensation. Rather than resolving these disruptions into ethical clarity or moral progression, the novel sustains them as formal tensions that resist closure. By foregrounding moments where meaning-making falters through sensory excess and narrative instability, Under the Skin enacts a posthuman ontology grounded in relationality rather than sovereignty. Ethics thus appears as an immanent effect of disrupted perception, showing that posthuman ethics becomes thinkable through aesthetic practices that unsettle anthropocentric frameworks at the level of form.

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