Title: “We’re modelled from trash”: Confronting Transhumanism and Critical Posthumanism in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Abstract: In an era when "posthumanism" and "transhumanism" have turned out to be topics of philosophical and scientific enquiry, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) pushes forward the conflict between critical posthumanism and transhumanisms.Transhumanism, as it aims at human enhancement through science and technology, still centers on the idea of anthropocentrism.On the other hand, critical posthumanism, rejecting the idea of human uniqueness, proposes that the human co-evolved with other life forms depending upon each other.Cloning being the prominent aspect of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel in order to constitute a better future society, (unbeknown to them) the cloned 'individuals' are designed to be only the organ donors to the humans who need certain organs to survive.And that has become normal in that speculative world of Ishiguro, until one of the three main characters Ruth, after finding her "possible" (on whom Ruth is cloned), reveals that they are modelled from "trash".This revelation somehow questions the notion of human uniqueness casting away the anthropocentric viewpoint.Thus, through the characters' view, this paper seeks to examine how the text itself somehow rejects the notion of human uniqueness thus propagating critical posthumanism, while transhumanism is inextricably embedded in the text.The dichotomy between these two notions deserves to be designated through this paper.And finally, this paper also focuses on the very dystopian nature as portrayed in the text and its relations to various aspects of posthumanism(s).