ABSTRACT

Having traced Levi’s narratives of embodiment as negotiations of containment both in and beyond the Lager, I now turn to Levi’s futuristic writing and consider his fi ctional depictions of posthuman embodiment. If, as Levi asserts, our capacity to think of the future is a key human characteristic, then the ability to hypothesize about the future is peculiarly human; this includes considerations of the kinds of (human) beings that will populate the future, and the kinds of freedom they might (or might not) enjoy. Levi’s futuristic narrations of robots, cybernetics, and the technological mediation of organic bodies and sentient technologies once more evoke the diffi cult negotiations of containment that human beings often face. His numerous short stories which deal explicitly with these issues might best be termed ‘science fi ction’ writing, although, like all of Levi’s thought, this aspect of his work is marked by ambivalence. While what constitutes and defi nes ‘science fi ction’ remains equivocal, it is undoubtedly the literary genre that most easily enables authors to posit or evoke potential futures and potential future modalities of human embodiment. Before analysing the texts in the next four chapters, I briefl y contextualize Levi’s views on this genre of writing.