Body Drift: On the Precariousness of Posthuman Life in Never Let Me GoBody Drift: On the Precariousness of Posthuman Life in Never Let Me Go

Carmen-Veronica Borbely
Babes-Bolyai University
carmenborbely@yahoo.com

Body Drift: On the Precariousness of Posthuman Life in Never Let Me Go

Abstract: Using Arthur Kroker’s concept of “body drift” as the image that encrypts the polyvalent directions of posthuman culture, this study explores the inseverable utopian and dystopian moves whereby enselved human bodies are made and unmade in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and its homonymous film adaptation (directed by Mark Romanek, 2010). Never Let Me Go projects a vision which outlines the perils that body drift might pose to the not-quite-human under the impact of the “new eugenics” and emphasizes the necessity to address the precariousness of posthuman life with utmost consideration for those whom Donna Haraway sees as inappropriate/d (biotechnological) others.

Keywords: Body Drift; De-Subjectivation; Posthuman; Kazuo Ishiguro; Precarious Life.

Body drift is our real technological autobiography[1]

According to cyberculture theorist Arthur Kroker, the corporeal imaginary is predicated on simultaneous gestures of deterritorialization and reterritorialization at the turn of the new millennium, as bodies are, on the one hand, subjected to “technologies of abjection, disappearance, inertia, and substitution” and, on the other hand, cast onto “counter-trajectories of resistance, hope and solidarity.”[2] In these “recombinant times,” Kroker shows, the body cannot be envisaged as a “cohesive singularity,” because “we no longer inhabit a body in any meaningful sense but rather occupy a multiplicity of bodies – imaginary, sexualized, disciplined, gendered, laboring, technologically augmented bodies.”[3] Subsumed to the all-encompassing phenomenon of “code drift,” which melds together the overarching narratives of biology and digitality,[4] body drift entails the ever provisional instantiation of corporeality both at the microlevel of “individual bodily inflections” and at the societal macrolevel, as “the multiplicity of bodies that we have become […] is caught up in a larger, more heterogeneous current.”[5] With the aid of the new technologies, the multifarious codes of health, gender, class, age or ethnicity are scrambled up, remixed, respliced and redesigned, making the body vulnerable and hospitable to new alliances (viral, molecular or molar), as bio-technologies – gene therapy, cloning and organ transplantation – are reconstructing the human as a posthuman body.[6]

In Never Let Me Go, novel and film adaptation, this collective, multiplicitous body gains shape through a two-pronged approach to the transhumanist dream of extropy.[7] Thus, in the background story (set in the aftermath of World War II), Ishiguro’s text outlines the accelerated technoscientific revolution that, in the first instance, enabled the creation of an alternative humanity through gene manipulation and that, in the second instance, lapsed into the decreation of this technofabricated population, devitalized through organ harvesting and transplantation. Whereas the first stage would correspond to the utopian design of a lateral human genetic pool (clones, the so-called donors) through the use of “light,” “invisible,” “transparent technologies” (genetics), the second would amount to a dystopian deployment of “heavy,” “visible,” “opaque technologies”[8] that enact the donation of organs from the replicants to the originals (surgery), revitalizing the latter, but that also serve as necro-technologies,[9] bringing about the completion or premature demise of the clones. Anatomical organs and parts literally drift from healthy to diseased bodies, from eucratic to dyscratic individuals, from the normal to the pathological population, supplying the latter with the necessary prostheses for reinstating their normativity. The aim behind the organ donations program[10] was, of course, to deflect the entropic dissolution of the debilitated and traumatized post-war body politic:

After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly […], suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. […] There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease.[11]

By contrast with the novel, which defers until the end the explication of the evental mutations that provide the protagonists with a technogenetic back story, focusing on the state of liminality and ontological undecidability the clones are confined to, the film clarifies the historical context from the start: “The breakthrough in medical science came in 1952. Doctors could now cure the previously incurable. By 1967, life expectancy passed 100 years.”[12] It then delves into a first-person account (consistent with Ishiguro’s intentions) given by Kathy H., the 31-year old female whose humanity – compassion, patience, intelligence – insistently comes to the fore. As the exemplars of perfected strands of human DNA, Kathy H. and her fellow clones have exquisite morpho-anatomical features – their monstrosity, if at all existent, lies in their somatic and genomic overlap with naturally birthed individuals – and yet, in the alternative England of the late 1990s imagined by Ishiguro, the echoes of Frankenstein’s Promethean venture loom large.[13] The post-war scientific breakthroughs aimed at curing humanity of all manner of imaginable disease have successfully engendered, through cloning, a supplementary, abjectionable, disposable posthumanity, whose main function is to serve as a repository of harvestable body parts for the mainstream populace. Ironically, however, by incorporating these body parts – enfleshed fragments of otherness – through surgical means, the majority population, whose (in)humaneness is brought into question, is also inadvertently revealed as posthuman.

However, the posthuman body politic outlined in Ishiguro’s dystopian scenario has little reason to rejoice at these undesired corporeal alliances or misalliances that rhizomatically cut across the epidermal boundaries of humans and clones and are violently enforced on the latter. Rather than being free-floating signifiers of somatic health, drifting along intersecting trajectories of posthuman becoming, these tissues and organs are collected not from cadavers of the kind Victor Frankenstein assembled from charnel houses in his teratogenic reconstruction of the body social, but from living human beings, who, as clones, simultaneously define and encroach the boundaries of normative humanity. As mirror images of the possibles or the persons they were modelled after, these replicas of humanity are both like and unlike the absent progenitors in whose image they were created, and they both reinforce and invalidate notions of individual autonomous selfhood, conceived, within the Western paradigm, as located within the separate, distinct, and impermeable contours of normatively embodied individuals.

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler discusses the normative frameworks within which the demarcation of the “human” produces, via “an exclusionary process, a host of ‘unlivable lives’ whose legal and political status is suspended.”[14] As recent phenomena like prisoner detainment or the refugee crisis have demonstrated, scapegoating based on national, ethnic, gender or religious criteria may lead to practices of de-subjectivation leveled at vulnerable populations. These tend to be “managed” under the regulatory gaze of power not through subjectification, that is, their production as human subjects with rights and obligations under the law, but through their constitution as an extrinsic domain of counternormativity, in which they become “less than human,” lacking “entitlement to rights” and becoming “humanly unrecognizable.”[15] These bodies drift, as Kroker might say, outside the scope of legality or even vitality, being “neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death.”[16]

This dehumanizing treatment of humans that Butler places at the root of the power holders’ own “radically imperiled” and “indefinitely foreclosed” humanity[17] is also applied to the clones in Ishiguro’s pessimistic vision of these technologically fashioned subjects. They are, in fact, the “inappropriate/d others” within whom, as Donna Haraway argues, the barriers between “problematic selves and unexpected others” collapse.[18] They represent the artefactual identities that the new reproductive technologies are forging in speculative fiction on the utopian/dystopian potentialities of the future. They too, like the POWs from World War II, who were corralled in prison camps with electrified fences, are sheltered within heterotopian sites and secluded hinterlands, which both belong to and eschew hegemonic space: segregated schools (Hailsham), communes (the Cottages, the White Mansion, the Poplar FARM), hospitals or barren flats.[19] As revealed by Miss Emily, the protagonists’ former guardian/teacher, at the end of the narrative/film, after the war the prevailing concerns of the authorities were to materialize the extropian project and less to acknowledge the presence of the all-too-human clones whose lives were to be sacrificed on the altar of medical science:

people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. […] So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter […], there would always be a barrier against seeing you as properly human.[20]

To retrieve these biotechnological others from the margins of invisibility and silence to which – through de-subjectivation, in Judith Butler’s terms – they were relegated,[21] various enclaves of normality have been erected to provide these post-Frankensteinian offspring with the semblance of nurture that, by virtue of their own “nature,” most of them had been deprived of. Articulated as a humanitarian movement, the management/docilization of these cloned student populations in panopticist institutions like Hailsham, Glenmorgan, or the Saunders Trust was intended not only as a strategy of disciplining the clones and persuading them to acquiesce to a fate of successive organ excision and life depletion/termination, but also as a means of making visible their humanity and raising public awareness about their reasoning, communicative, affective and creative potential. Hailsham, for instance, is an insulated community of students whose bodies are subjected to constant surveillance and weekly medical checks and whose minds are ingrained with the ideological precepts of the greater good of humanity their sacrifice will serve, but whose teachers also cultivate their social and artistic skills, with a view to perpetuating and disseminating the humane treatment allotted to them in other similar encampments across the country. Rarely is the clockwork mechanism of this insulated utopian community – revolving around classes or collectively programmed activities, like the Exchanges of individually manufactured artworks and artefacts or the Sales of personal collectible objects – jammed by counterideological interventions, which tear holes in the fabric of disciplinarian discourse. When such subjugated knowledge surfaces,[22] it unsettles the youngsters’ minds, but such “told and not told” ideas eventually fail to derail the students from their pre-established paths and are interpreted as fuzzy intimations of their futures, incomprehensible at such an early age. Here is the interpellation that Miss Lucy, the rebel guardian, addresses to the Hailsham children:

None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. So you’re not to talk that way any more. You’ll be leaving Hailsham before long, and it’s not so far off, the day you’ll be preparing for your first donations. You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.[23]

The students have an uncanny apprehension of the otherness inherent within themselves, for they can sense the “difference from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside.”[24] In effect, Kathy H., Tommy D., Ruth and the other parentless children reared within pockets of simulated reality are liminal beings, hovering on the brink of ontological incertitude, as they are deprived of control over their bodies, made to query the humanness of their identities and divested of any chance at self-determination. The clones of Ishiguro’s narrative have been engineered within a grand utilitarian – utopian – narrative of salvaging humanity from corporeal decay and enhancing its viability and they are destined, according to the official ideology of a totalitarian state that passes for a liberal polity, to become carers or donors: this image is reminiscent of Frankenstein’s progeny tending to its own wellbeing, in the absence of its irresponsible parent. It is an image of the repulsive offspring folding unto itself, becoming disemboweled victim and therapeutic companion in one. Indeed, the sensible protection and empathetic palliatives these carers provide donors with renders them as more human than the implacable state governing them.

The capitalist desiring-machine, if I were to resort to a Deleuzian analogy, seeks to appropriate and pierce through the taut skin of the “body with/out organs,”[25] that is, the alternative set of individuals it has engineered into existence – for the community of children at Hailsham is, after all, a static, non-disjunctive enclave of innocent flows and serene intensities – and, in a consumerist frenzy, to plunder its corporeal wealth, gorging up body parts and disgorging them into the bodies of normative humans, all the while literally turning the more-than-human clones into less-than-human organless bodies. While the voracious appetite of the social aggregate appears to be subdued under the appeasing official discourse of necessity and the sanitizing gaze of the medical doctors performing these flesh transfers, as well as by the lengthy process of recovery that the intervals between the successive organ excisions require, this generalized act of cannibalism, seen as the incorporation of fragmented cloned selves into depleted original others, chews away at the distinction and separation between the human and the not-so-human, devours the very legitimacy of monolithic notions of self-contained identity and eliminates the uncomfortable realization that concorporation is becoming the new norm of embodied selfhood, one that resists, as Margrit Shildrick contends, “the binary of sameness and difference.”[26]

The clones are largely excluded from the specular regime in this post-technological world, which plunges them into self-reflexive quandaries, but enables the main population to derealize their atrocious treatment of the clones and to become desensitized to the suffering and sacrifices they are condoning. To give just one example, there is a scene astutely captured in the film in which the protagonists are peering through the glass window of a shop where the possible or model after which Ruth (an avatar of the human) was patterned might be found. This quest for origins is concurrently an analeptic gaze at the past and a proleptic gaze at the future:

Then there were those questions about why we wanted to track down our models at all. One big idea behind finding your model was that when you did, you’d glimpse your future. […] we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down, and maybe too, you’d see something of what your life held in store.[27]

It is also an attempt to turn the gaze within and understand the depth reality underneath the selfsame surface identity with the humans. Still, the gaze of the clones turns into a blank stare, it folds back onto itself, for there is no reciprocated look, and the donors are relegated – as they are, in fact, expelled throughout the narrative – to the domain of invisibility.

In her disquisitions on Precarious Life, from the study mentioned above, Judith Butler articulates two important points that are relevant for the rapport between the ostensibly essential humans and the cloned posthumans in Ishiguro’s text and its film adaptation. The first argument relies on the Levinasian ethical project of acknowledging the vulnerability of the self in assuming responsibility for the other. Butler discusses the twofold impulse attendant on the self’s encounter with the “precariousness of the Other,” whose face simultaneously communicates a “murderous temptation” and a “demand for peace,” the perpetration of violence against the other, so as to prevent the self from experiencing agony at the hands of this other, and the avoidance of harm unto the other, as an acknowledgement of the self residing within the other: “the face makes various utterances at once: it bespeaks an agony, an injurability, at the same time that it bespeaks a divine prohibition against killing.”[28] While Ishiguro’s narrative consistently emphasizes the strategies of effacement and avoidance that the humans resort to in order to silence and obliterate the clones, pushing them into blind corners and invisible recesses, the film makes insistent recourse to the imperative of the other’s face, as a means of sensitizing the self against causing suffering unto these technologized humans. Against the background sound of an intravenous drip, we encounter Kathy H.’s face, but her eyes are averted, staring at the empty central area in an operating room, soon to be occupied by the recumbent, scarred body of Tommy D., whose sutured skin bears tribute to the violence done unto him in the donations program so far. Before long, their gazes interlock and, through the eyes of the carer, who is also an other, the spectators also come visualize the precariousness of life transpiring from the donor’s visage. Reiterated towards the end of the film, the scene of the encounter between a helpless Tommy D. – face front, supine, defenseless and approaching completion – and the audience, whose empathetic response is vicariously elicited, does not find an equivalent in the prose narrative itself. The cinematic rendition of this face-to-face encounter, mediated through the gaze of the carer, addresses and, implicitly, redresses at a phantasmatic level the obliteration of the clones as subjects. Hegemonic normativity, which demands that all cloned students become donors and progress through several surgeries before completing the life permitted to them, operates here through what Judith Butler describes as inhumanization and ahumanization: one form of normative power produces a “symbolic identification of the face with the inhuman, foreclosing our apprehension of the human in the scene; the other works through radical effacement, so that there never was a human, there never was a life, and no murder has, therefore, ever taken place.”[29] For the majority population, effacement of the other occurs through the occlusion of the clones’ shared humanity, which entails a host of consequences: complacency in speciesist supremacy, the impossibility of “public grievability”[30] and the perpetuation of the cycle of violence.

The second possible way through which Judith Butler believes the self can understand the precariousness of the (other’s) life is by complying with the ethical demand of heeding the other’s “vocalization of agony,” that which, like the face that encapsulates the irreducible otherness of the divine, “rouses at once the temptation to murder and the interdiction against it.”[31] The novelist allows Kathy D., the former Hailsham student who is currently engaged in her liminal career as a carer, pending her own set of donations, to voice the bioethical concerns that a deadened, dehumanized society has conveniently put aside. Unlike the hegemonic discourse that obliterates these clones from the ranks of acceptable humans, indoctrinating them with notions of subservience and self-effacement, Kathy’s retrospective account is a testimonial of identity reconstruction that accommodates the individual narratives, memories and self-interrogations of these individuals with stunted destinies who, in an attempt to obtain a deferral from disembowelment and, eventually, disembodiment, strive to persuade the authorities that either through their creative potential or through their capacity for genuine erotic sentiment, they are endowed with souls and are, therefore, human. In The Vital Illusion, Baudrillard posits the question:

Is it possible to speak of the soul, or the conscience, or even of the unconscious from the point of view of the automatons, the chimeras, and the clones that will supersede the human race? Both the individual and the species’ capital are jeopardized by the erosion of the limits of the human, by the slide, not just into the inhuman but into something that is neither human nor inhuman: namely, the genetic simulation of life.[32]

By narrating herself into existence, by compassionately embracing the other and by cultivating memory as the bulwark of identitarian singularity,[33] Kathy D., the sentient clone in Ishiguro’s novel, is insistent on proving that a question like Baudrillard’s begs an affirmative answer. Unlike the novel, which makes little recourse to a graphic rendition of the physical carnage inflicted upon these hospitalized bodies in pain, insisting rather on the psychological convolutions and identitarian disarray they wreak upon these patients, the 2010 film adaptation of the novel resorts to a subdued version of the “body horror” genre, which stages “a spectacle of the human body defamiliarized, rendered other”[34] not by displaying the gory spectacle of organ excision under the surgical scalpel, but by making visible the scars, the emaciation, the debilitation inscribed on the epidermal canvas as traces of the violence done unto them.

Then one afternoon, maybe about a month after I’d started, I came up to his room and found him at his school desk, carefully going over a drawing, his face nearly touching the paper. He’d called for me to come in when I’d knocked, but now he didn’t raise his head or stop what he was doing, and just a glance told me he was working on one of his imaginary creatures. I stopped in the doorway, uncertain whether I should come in, but eventually he looked up and closed his notebook.[35]

By way of illustration, note should be taken of the above-cited encounter between Kathy, the carer, and Tommy, the donor. Glossed over in Ishiguro’s text, which foregrounds Tommy’s painterly efforts at making himself human through proof of his artisticity, the patient’s scarified skin, bearing witness to the processes of laceration, incision, excision, and suturing he has undergone, is simultaneously retrieved from invisibility and subjected to the triple, in-between gaze of Kathy, the director and the viewer alike. Skin, normally taken to delineate the boundaries between embodied selves, to provide defenses against encroachments from outside, is laid bare in the film as a testimonial of monstrification, not so much of the clone as of its progenitor-terminators. Under the director’s compassionate gaze, which serves as a substitute for the absent collective gaze of prototypal humans in the novel, the suffering clone’s scarrified skin is made accessible to viewers and, by extrapolation, to humanity at large. It is a gesture of restitution, consistent with Ishiguro’s intent of using the clone as a specific instantiation of postmodern monstrosity, a figure whose ontological difference from the human can no longer be predicated on dysmorphic corporeality, for clones are, indeed, “visually indistinguishable from the norm,”[36] but whose liminal entity/identity occupies “both terms (or rather, exists in the slash between them) of the opposition human/not-human.”[37] At the same time, because of their self-sameness with the human, clones serve not so much as copies of the original but, in respectable neo-Gothic fashion, as magnifying mirror images of the perils of dehumanization that body drift may generate at the intersection between biology and technology, highlighting the possibility that, in liquid modernity, the spontaneous, anarchic flows of bodies-without-organs may bring the voraciously consumerist systemic order down. Never Let Me Go projects, in the words of Arthur Kroker, “a vision of the hybridity that we are fated to become in this future-land of the present.”[38] It is a vision which outlines the sites of vulnerability that body drift might steer the not-quite-human into under the impact of the “new eugenics”[39] and the necessity to address the precariousness of posthuman life with utmost consideration for the inappropriate/d (biotechnological) others.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004.

Byron, Glennis and Linda Ogston. “Educating Kathy: Clones and Other Creatures in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” In Daniel Olson (ed.), 21-Century Gothic. Great Gothic Novels since 2000. Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2011.

Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane. London: The Athlone Press, 1984.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972—1977. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body. Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

Kroker, Arthur. “Body Drift in the Writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway.” Interview with Peter Marvelis. Ctheory, “Theory beyond the Codes” (2012), http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14936/5831, accessed 25 September 2015.

Kroker, Arthur. Body Drift. Butler, Hayles, Haraway. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Raz, Aviad E. “Eugenic utopias/dystopias, reprogenetics, and community genetics.” Sociology of Health & Illness. 31(4) (2009): 602-616

Shildrick, Margrit, Embodying the Monster. Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London & New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002.

Notes

[1] Arthur Kroker, Body Drift. Butler, Hayles, Haraway (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 4.

[2] See Arthur Kroker, “Body Drift in the Writings of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway,” interview with Peter Marvelis, Ctheory, “Theory beyond the Codes” (2012), http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14936/5831, accessed 25 September 2015. “Always circulating at the edge of codes old and new,” never anchored in or anchoring a so-called “essential identity,” the body drifts both at the level of its “mediated surfaces” and at that of its “deepest biological structures,” in Kroker, Body Drift, 4.

[3] Kroker, Body Drift, 17, 2.

[4] Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 47.

[5] Kroker, Body Drift, 2-3.

[6] See Kroker, Body Drift, 5.

[7] See Stephen Lilley’s discussion of extropy in Transhumanism and Society. The Social Debate over Human Enhancement (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York and London: Springer, 2013), 16.

[8] I am using here the distinction between transparent and opaque technologies suggested by Andy Clark in Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37.

[9] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 9.

[10] Initially a utopian aspiration, which congealed into an ideology. Ricoeur approaches utopia and ideology within the cultural imagination as noncongruent, opposite terms (one transcends, while the other reinforces social reality); in both cases, however, the normative risks gliding into the pathological, once the ideality of the few is enforced as concrete reality for the many, in Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 1-3.

[11] Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 257-258.

[12] Never Let Me Go, directed by Mark Romanek, screenplay by Alex Garland. DNA Films, 2010.

[13] Like the absconding scientists in Ishiguro’s text, the Genevan scientist in the Shelleyan story grounds his technogenetic venture in the Promethean aspiration to “banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!,” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), 31. For an in-depth analysis of the analogies between Ishiguro’s novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and a possible Ur-text of both these narratives of anthropotechnogenesis, see Tifanny Tsao, “Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” Literature and Theology 26 2(2012): 214-232.

[14] Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), xv.

[15] Butler, Precarious Life, 98.

[16] Butler, Precarious Life, 98.

[17] Butler, Precarious Life, 100.

[18] Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 320.

[19] See the analogy in Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 77.

[20] Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 257-258.

[21] “The world didn’t want to be reminded how the donation program really worked. They didn’t want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows” [emphasis mine], Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 259.

[22] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972—1977. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 81.

[23] Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 80.

[24] Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 69.

[25] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 30.

[26] See Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster. Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London & New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), 61.

[27] Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 137-138.

[28] Butler, Precarious Life, 132-135.

[29] Butler, Precarious Life, 147.

[30] Butler, Precarious Life, 148.

[31] Butler, Precarious Life, 139.

[32] Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 23.

[33] The entire novel is constructed of Kathy D.’s memories, not the type a downloadable intelligence might machinically store, but poignant, vivid memories that assist her in constructing her self: “by the end of the year, I won’t be driving around like this any more. So the chances are I won’t ever come across it now, and on reflection, I’m glad that’s the way it’ll be. It’s like with my memories of Tommy and of Ruth. Once I’m able to have a quieter life, in whichever centre they send me to, I’ll have Hailsham with me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away,” Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 281.

[34] Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203.

[35] Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 210-211.

[36] Glennis Byron and Linda Ogston, “Educating Kathy: Clones and Other Creatures in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,” in Daniel Olson (ed.), 21-Century Gothic. Great Gothic Novels since 2000 (Lanham, Toronto and Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2011), 454.

[37] Hurley, The Gothic Body, 203.

[38] Kroker, Body Drift, 17.

[39] See the take on reprogenetics as the “new eugenics” in Aviad E. Raz, “Eugenic utopias/dystopias, reprogenetics, and community genetics,” Sociology of Health & Illness. 31(4) (2009): 602-616.