Posthuman/ist Literature? Don DeLillo’s Point Omega and Zero K

Abstract

Posthumanist literature—question mark. The question mark in the title gestures towards the conundrum that something like posthumanist literature might well be a contradiction in terms. This essay discusses the connection between posthumanism, the posthuman, and posthumanisation, on the one hand, and literature, the literary and post-literary (or the survival of literature), on the other hand. It differentiates between a literature of the posthuman and posthumanist literature. Through a close reading of some contemporary examples it shows that literature can follow a number of paths to engage with posthumanism (as a discourse) and the posthuman (as a figure) and thus respond to the ongoing (social, technological, ecological…) process of posthumanisation. Thematically, posthuman/ist literature is concerned with a variety of topics that are associated with figurations of the posthuman: climate change, artificial intelligence, androids and robots, the Anthropocene, enhancement, postanthropocentrism, the question of the animal, object ontology, cyborgisation and dis/embodiment, non/human futures, to name just the most obvious. Stylistically, however, a posthumanist literature will have to display a level of self-reflexion that problematizes the very idea of the literary as a practice and of literature as an (eminently humanist) institution. Whether examples of posthumanist literature – in this strong, ‘literal’, stylistic sense – can actually exist is explored through a reading of Don Delillo’s Point Omega and Zero K.