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Sublimely Post Human: An analysis of vibrant materialism, the soul, the body, and clones with discussion of Moon, Never Let Me Go, The Boys from Brazil, How We Became Posthuman, Vibrant Matter, and The Sublime.

(that is just the working title)

Within Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go the ethical treatment of the Hailsham clones rests upon the tenuous question of whether or not they possess souls. Ostensibly the art objects produced by the students are imbued with the metaphysical capability of determining the existence of soul essence. Unfortunately, the question poses a double bind as the determination of a soul places the practice of donations in a dubious position. Hence the “sham” of Hailsham and the failure of the project of ethics proposed by Ms. Emily. Nevertheless, the more interesting question seems to be unasked; whether humans possess souls at all. Within the context of the novel, the non-clone humans never question the existence of their own souls. That they are ensouled-beings rather than simply naturally-occurring-donor-bags is taken for granted within the text. This fact of a soul seems the defining characteristic of the human within the novel. However, too close an interrogation into the existence of the unseen essence that separates “human” from “clone,” is problematic from either side of the defining line. In my quest to understand this position I engaged in an analysis of immanence versus transcendence with an examination of the philosophic premise of the sublime as a method of answering the question of who exactly gets to be “human” within a tissue economy.

This would also be important to consider

Merleau-Ponty claims that the introduction of the concept of the Gestalt necessitates a complete revision on the level of both epistemology and ontology in The Structure of Behavior:

That in the final analysis form cannot be defined in terms of reality but in terms of knowledge, not a thing of the physical world but as a perceived whole, is explicitly recognized by Koehler when he writes that the order in a form ‘rests’ …on the fact that each local event, one could almost say ‘dynamically knows’ others. It is not an accident that, in order to express this presence of each moment to the other, Koehler comes up with the term ‘knowledge’. A unity of this type can be found only in an object of knowledge. Taken as a being of nature, existing in space, the form would always be dispersed in several places and distributed in local events, even if these events mutually determine each other; to say that it does not suffer this division amounts to saying that it is not spread out in space, that it does not exist in the same manner as a thing, that it is the idea under which what happens in several places is brought together and resumed. This unity is the unity of perceived objects. A colored circle which I look at is completely modified in its physiognomy by an irregularity which removes something of its circular character and makes it an imperfect circle. (SB, 143)

This is what I'm working on

Yeats’ Voice in the Text

Cormac McCarthy’s use of voice in No Country for Old Men and The Road must be read as an invocation of the Romantic Sublime through ventriloquizing Yeats’ poetics. Additionally, the use of Yeats provides these texts with an underlying sense of a tragic universe in which humans are ultimately responsible for their own fates; there is no divine intervention. Both McCarthy and Yeats privilege a kind of literary redemption that is only made possible through storytelling. In his Byzantium poems Yeats’ utilizes the tropes of Symbolism to imbue his poetry with a redemptive power that is explicitly bereft of divine intervention. While, his use of those tropes is what characterizes Yeats as a Symbolist rather than a Romantic—though his work retains, and makes use of, several Romantic idioms—the Symbolist movement is itself a reinterpretation of Romanticism with the Symbolist poets offering their own peculiar, and possibly even blasphemous, poetic displacement of the Sacred and Sublime.

According to Olivier Sécardin in his article “La Poésie Impie Ou Le Sacre Du Poète: Sur Quelques Modernes,” poets-like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud had the beautifully blasphemous ambition to give birth to a new conception of the sacred—though Rimbaud later renounced this poetic ambition. Previously, the sacred had been confined to the Romantic experience of the Sublime—a Platonic transcendence whose inscrutable profundity language had to strive to reach. However, with the advent of poetic modernity, in a line that can be traced directly through these Symbolist poets, it is the immanence of poetic structure that contains and distills the sacral dimension. The poem is “sacred because it is secret, locked up on itself and from the inside. It is secret in the etymological meaning of the word secretus: it is the mystery” (213-14). For these poets, poetry is the dreaming language, the language of dream, the language of the unconscious “lost tongue,” and therefore a new “sacred text” which deposes the idea of Platonic transcendence within structure. Thus the experience of the Sublime ceases to exist out in Nature but rather exists solely within the realm of language. Within this metaphysical paradigm, redemption is deemed to be no longer possible from Nature and must instead become a human project of linguistic aesthetics. The aesthetic religion that Yeats envisages offers a different and altogether new approach to the problem of the art/metaphysics relationship. Within Yeats’s metaphysical project of literary redemption, the poem itself becomes a kind of redemptive ritual magic.

Yeats’ vision of poetry as word magic is further refined in the “Byzantium” poems. As such, it seems obvious that Cormac McCarthy further extends Yeats’ vision of the poet as vatic visionary with his multiple unambiguous references to Yeats. It is also important to notice that McCarthy most particularly references the early, and most explicitly metaphysical, “Byzantium” poems. Additionally, it is equally important to recognize that McCarthy explicitly engages with the entire metaphysical project that underlies those poems. Most reviewers generally agree that the ubiquitous “fire” referred to in The Road is hope, spiritual belief, or truth, but I think only Barbara Bennett, in her article “Celtic Influences on Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road” has recognized the metonymic use of “fire” as a symbol to refer to the tradition of storytelling. In my own analysis, it is understood that, for McCarthy, this “fire of storytelling” must also include poetics, language, and signification systems generally.

*I also drink cold fucking coffee and grade student essays.