ABSTRACT
Since the 21st century, our reliance on technology and its seamless integration in our lives is a natural consequence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in which, according to Schwab in The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Schwab and Davis in Shaping the Four Industrial Revolution, all key emerging technologies—organized around the physical, the digital, and the biological—co-evolve, fuse, and enrich each other. Similarly, critical posthumanists, such as Braidotti, Herbrechter, and Nayar, understand the human and the non-human as a continuum and see the organic body, the machine, and other material forms as relational, co-evolving and interdependent. As the boundary between the human and the machine becomes porous and the dependence on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) increases, humans become especially vulnerable to their loss. Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020) is analyzed through the double lens of posthuman and vulnerability studies by focusing on its aesthetics of melancholia and loss. The characters’ dependence on technology causes posthuman suffering, datafication, and self-amputation as characters adopt the additive language of information to integrate in the infosphere. The sudden loss of ICTs in the novel traps characters in a process of melancholia as they mourn not only the loss of their digital connections but also the unconscious, inaccessible loss of a constitutive part of their (post)human selves.
