ABSTRACT
This chapter centres around the protagonists of these visionary worlds: amalgamations of human flesh, machinic internals, and resurrected spirits. In bearing witness to the meeting of technology and cultural artefacts belonging to different epochs and geographies, they are also manifestations of Braidotti’s posthuman subjects, “the subjects of desire we have already become”. For example, the pockets of “deep space” in Bodard’s Citadel, where space and time converge, trigger encounters between bodies in ways that radically invoke Butler’s and Braidotti’s respective theorisations of the interdependence of vulnerable bodies and the instability of dynamic and nomadic subjects. Subsequently, the shifting (non)human entities that occupy its perilous spatiotemporalities become visible as a series of precarious encounters. This chapter also explores how the protagonist of Vallorani’s Il Cuore Finto di DR, a Replicant inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick, injects a narcotic to access human memories and “become other” to herself. By seeking to feel and remember as humans do, DR embraces the unidentifiable “you” theorised by Butler as a transgression and reformulation of the insular and self-serving subject propounded by Enlightenment humanism.
