Chapter 8 - Surplus Vitality and Posthuman Possibilities

Summary

This chapter argues for the importance of posthumanist thought to remaking subjectivity and agency in ways that can respond to the crisis of the real subsumption of life by capital. It takes up the figure of the immortal vessel in a new way. It considers texts that reorient the ideal of immorality to express a surplus of vitality rather than just the extension of life, rooted in life’s capacity to exceed how capital engineers and constrains life. Drawing on the posthumanist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook, and especially on the materialist political theory of Samantha Frost, it shows how these texts demonstrate posthuman possibilities for renewal. Rather than lamenting the precarity of life in a context in which the dispositif of liberal humanism is no longer sufficient shield against capital, these works offer in its place another imaginary of life and of multispecies personhood. Anne Charnock’s A Calculated Life shows that even engineered, synthetic life has a vitality beyond what is designed. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy reorients how we understand massive ecological change, changing a tale of disastrous ending into one of emergent beginning.