ABSTRACT
If the technologized, posthuman bodies considered thus far seem to be caught in an inevitable progression towards calcifi cation, gradually becoming ever more rigid and alienated from their physical form in an utterly dystopic realization of the machinic body or Enlightenment rationality, a parallel strand of Levi’s fi ction posits a more organic, alternative modality of posthumanism. In striking contrast to the technologized bodies discussed in previous chapters, this is a posthumanism in which technology does not fi gure, which seems to show a future incarnation for the human subject while evoking classical myth, confusing temporal chronology, often opening up or even dissolving the boundaries of the body and between species.1 On one level, it is a postanthropocentrism, which displaces the humanist subject from its assumed position of superiority and difference, and which, in reconfi guring its form and capabilities-and by realigning the human with animal, insect, or natural life forms-implies that ‘the “human” we now know, is not now, and never was, itself’ (Wolfe 2003, 9). Our capacities for assuming other, apparently ‘nonhuman’ forms should not be discounted. As Latour has suggested, it may be that ‘the expression “anthropomorphic” considerably underestimates our humanity’; he advocates removing the restructive prefi x ‘anthropos’ and describing the human being instead as ‘a weaver of morphisms’ (Latour 1993, 137).
