ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the notion of servility as a crucial trope of capitalist reorganisation in the face of crisis. In the first part, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is read as a meditation on the limits of late twentieth-century discourses of human capital.Ishiguro’s historically mediated projection suggests that neoliberalism’s version of homo economicus as an entrepreneur of the self is not an expansive matrix of subjective possibility, but rather a function of closure as well as enslavement. The novel’s exposure of this ultimately failed ideological construct also rests on a recognition of the social dimension that characterises all forms of post-Fordist labour (particularly, in this case, care work). In the second part of the chapter, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Gois analysed as a more fully developed vision of post-Fordist servility. The contention here is that, if servility primarily appears as a tentative dogma or ideology in The Remains of the Day, the later novel presents it as an accomplished dystopia in which labour becomes literally indistinguishable from life and thus in which the logic of exploitation is rendered as a form of biopolitics.