This chapter examines select fiction and memoirs dealing with biocultural precarity. Adapting the work of Samantha Frost, which resonates with Donna Haraway’s “natureculture,” it proposes that the late twentieth century has seen the emergence of texts that foreground somatic and genetic precarity, together constituting a toxic state of human nature itself. The former, visible in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, has an exogenous etiology that emanates from a cultural condition (invisible, residual industrial chemicals) and whose manifestation is in the very nature of Animal’s corporeality. Genetic precarity, seen in memoirs dealing with, say, Huntington’s disease (Mona Gable’s, Therese Crutcher-Marin’s, Sarah Foster’s), has its etiology in the genetic material passed on from generation to generation, again altering irrevocably the nature of the human. In both cases, however, the embedding of the human with her/his toxified nature within specific cultural practices – from family to biomedicine – means that the biological precarity and toxic nature are instantiations of biocultural precarity.

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.