Posthuman Pathogenesis Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media by Basak Agın, Şafak Horzum - Bibis - Ir

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Posthuman Pathogenesis
This multi- vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to

contagions provides insights into the companionship of posthumanities,
environmental humanities, and medical humanities to shed light on how
we deal with complex issues like communicable diseases in contemporary
times. Examining imaginary and real contagions, ranging from Jeep and
SHEVA to plague, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, Posthuman Pathogenesis
discusses the inextricable links between nature and culture, matter and
meaning-making practices, and the human and the nonhuman. Dissecting
pathogenic nonhuman bodies in their interactions with their human
counterparts and the environment, the authors of this volume raise their
diverse voices with two primary aims: to analyse how contagions trigger
a drive to survival, and chaotic, liberating, and captivating impulses, and
to focus on the viral interpolations in socio-political and environmental
systems as a meeting point of science, technology, and fiction, blending
social reality and myth. Following the premises of the post-qualitative turn
and presenting a differentiated experience of contagion, this ‘rhizomatic’
compilation thus offers a non-hierarchised array of essays, composed of a
multiplicity of genders, geographies, and generations.
Başak Ağın, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English Literature at

TED University, Ankara, Turkey. She is the founder of “PENTACLE:
Posthuman Entanglements of Culture, Literature, and Environment,”
the first Turkish website on posthumanities (https://thepentacle.org).
Her monograph, Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu ([“Posthu
manism: Concept, Theory, Science-Fiction”] 2020, Siyasal), is the first
Turkish work to explore science fiction literary/filmic narratives in light
of posthumanist-new materialist theories.
Şafak Horzum, M.A., is Ph.D. candidate at Hacettepe University and

an independent scholar based in Ankara, Turkey. A former Fulbright
Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Department of English, he focuses
on the human-nonhuman relations in fantasy fiction, specifically in the
works of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll in his doctoral dissertation.
ii
Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities
Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare

Grace McCarthy
Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

A Phenomenology of Pregnancy in English Early Modern Drama
Katarzyna Burzyńska
Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media
Edited by Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum
To learn more about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Literature-and-Health-Humanities/book-series/
RSHH
iii
Contagion in Literature, Arts,
and Media
Edited by Başak Ağın and

Şafak Horzum
iv
First published 2023

by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-26426-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26428-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28824-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
to all posthuman bodies of the world

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vi
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables x
List of Contributors xi
Foreword: Posthumanism in the Year of COVID-19 xiv
P R A M O D K . N AYAR
An Implosive Introduction: Haunted Experiences,

Affective Assemblages, and Collective Imaginings 1
B A Ş A K A Ğ I N AN D ŞA FA K H O RZUM
PART I
Discontents of the Human and Its Others 21
1 Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times:

On Camus’ Tragic Humanism 23
S TE FA N H E RB RE CH TE R
2 Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural Creatures: Parasites,

Biopolitics, and Contemporary Literary Reflections 42
K E R I M C A N YA ZGÜN O ĞL U
PART II
Pathogenic Temporalities 61
3 Viral Temporalities: Literatures of Disease and

Posthuman Conceptions of Time 63
R U TH C L E M E N S AN D MA X CASE Y
4 Pathogenic Hugs and Ambiguous Times: The Joy

Epidemic in Gumball 82
A N D R É VA S QUE S VITA L
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viii Contents
PART III
Pestilentia Loquens: Narrative Agency of Disease 101
5 Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman Feminist

Environs: Viral Becomings in Nicola Griffith’s
Ammonite 103
Ş A FA K H O R Z UM
6 Power or Despair: Contagious Diseases in Turkish

History and Miniature Paintings 122
Z . G I Z E M Y I L MAZ KARAH A N
PART IV
Contagious Networks of Communication 143
7 Hyperobjects, Network Ontologies, and the Pandemic

Response in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio 145
J AY D E M A RTIN AN D B E N H O RN
8 Entangled Humans, Entangled Languages:

A Posthumanist Applied Linguistic Analysis of
COVID-19 on Reddit 167
TA N A R D A GE DIK A N D ZE YN E P A RPAÖ ZÜ
PART V
From Medical Humanities to Medical Posthumanities 187
9 HIV, Dependency, and Prophylactic Narrative

in Bryan Washington’s “Waugh” 189
S TI A N K R I S TE N SE N
10 The Vampire as Posthumanist Pharmakon:

Towards a Critical Medical Humanities 207
R O N J A TR I P P-B O DO L A
CODA: Affirming the Pathogenesis 227

BAŞAK AĞIN
Afterword: Posthuman Healing and Revealing 247

F R A N C E S C A FE RRA N DO
Index 251
xi
Figures
6.1 Example (1) of cauterisation for the treatment of leprosy 132

6.2 Example (2) of cauterisation for the treatment of leprosy 133
6.3 Sabuncuoğlu’s experimentation with the antidote which he
prepared on himself 135
8.1 Weijia Jiang’s tweet 173
8.2 Love everyone meme 174
8.3 Facebook post 175
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Tables
8.1 Commentaries sampled under Figure 8.1 173

8.4 Semantic valence of commentaries 176
xi
Contributors
Başak Ağın is Associate Professor of English Literature at TED University,

Ankara, Turkey. Founder of the first Turkish website dedicated to
posthumanities, PENTACLE (https://thepentacle.org), she is the
author of Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu (2020), the
first Turkish monograph on science fiction and posthumanist- new
materialist theories.
Zeynep Arpaözü teaches English as a second language and is a graphic
artist based in Ankara, Turkey. Deeply interested in the intersections
of languages and posthuman subjectivity, she is currently developing
her portfolio as an illustrator and finalising a graphic novel.
Max Casey is pursuing a research master degree in Comparative Literary
Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current research
explores multimedia approaches to the AIDS epidemic, focusing espe-
cially on how disease creates new experiences of space and temporality.
He is also the editor-in-chief at FRAME: Journal of Literary Studies.
Ruth Clemens is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Utrecht University, the
Netherlands. Once a visiting research fellow at the UU Institute for
Cultural Inquiry under the supervision of Rosi Braidotti, she is also
currently a lecturer and tutor at the annual Posthuman Summer School
in Utrecht.
Francesca Ferrando is Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University,
USA, teaching Philosophy in NYU-Program of Liberal Studies. She is
the founder of the Global Posthuman Network and the author of sev-
eral publications, including Philosophical Posthumanism (2019).
Tan Arda Gedik is pursuing his master degree in Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics, at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Germany. As a usage-based construction grammarian, he works on
the proliferation of posthumanist applied linguistics in his studies.
Stefan Herbrechter is Privatdozent at Heidelberg University, Germany. He
is the director of Critical Posthumanism Network (http://criticalposth
umanism.net/) and the general editor of its online-project “Genealogy
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xii List of Contributors

of the Posthuman.” His single-authored and collaborative publications
about posthumanism and its critique include Autoimmunities (2018),
European Posthumanism (2016), and Posthumanism: A Critical
Analysis (2013).
Ben Horn is pursuing his Ph.D. in English Literature at the University
of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Also a fellow of the English PEN
Society, he continues to co-organise events at the University of
Birmingham.
Şafak Horzum is an independent scholar based in Ankara, Turkey.
Focusing on the intersections of posthumanities and fantasy fiction,
he conducted his academic research at the University of Lisbon,
Portugal, and Harvard University, the United States. Also an editor
at PENTACLE founded by Ağın, he will join University of Münster,
Germany, for a month in 2022.
Stian Kristensen is Ph.D. candidate in English and American Studies at
the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. As the co-founder of
the HIV Humanities Research Group at Manchester, Kristensen is
interested in understanding how and why anxieties about HIV/AIDS
linger in contemporary fiction.
Jayde Martin is pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at the University
of Birmingham, United Kingdom. In her role as the co-director of
the Critical Posthumanist Research Network, she has organised four
seminars on posthumanism and Afrofuturism.
Pramod K. Nayar is Professor at the Department of English, University of
Hyderabad, India. With his seminal work Posthumanism (2013), he is
one of the founders of critical posthumanism scholarship.
Ronja Tripp-Bodola is currently developing a medical humanities curric-
ulum for the Department of Psychiatry at LSU Health Sciences Center,
New Orleans, United States, where she is managing three graduate
medical education programs. She published widely on visual culture,
ethics, and biopolitics, as well as on life sciences in the humanities.
André Vasques Vital is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Postgraduate
Program in Society, Technology and Environment of the University
Center of Anápolis, Goiás, Brazil. His research has a transdisciplinary
approach including the water and other nonhumans as active agents
in History.
Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu is Assistant Professor of English Language and
Literature at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, Turkey, specialising
in contemporary British novel, ecocriticism, ecocultural studies, and
gender studies. He is also an editor at PENTACLE founded by Ağın.
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newgenprepdf
List of Contributors xiii

Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan is Associate Professor of English Language
and Literature at Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey. She has
extensively published on ecophobia, elemental ecocriticism, ancient
philosophy, early modern English drama, monster studies, and Turkish
theatre. She is also an editor at PENTACLE founded by Ağın.
vxi
Foreword
Posthumanism in the Year of COVID-19
Pramod K. Nayar
The school of thought called posthumanism has established itself, within

the past two decades or so, in curricula, conferences, and publications—
in short, in academia. With several notable (net-)works ranging from
companions and glossaries to journals, hubs, and web-based enterprises,
the school has now become an ever-flourishing field in itself. An irrev-
ocably postdisciplinary endeavour, posthumanism, has enabled the
creation and elaboration of novel concepts such as ‘entanglements’ or
‘transcorporeality,’ thanks to the works of established scholars such
as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo. It
has also become an umbrella field that encompasses feminist studies
(including epistemology), postcolonialism, disability studies, science
and technology studies, environmental studies, cultural studies, animal
studies, and queer studies. Newer developments such as critical plant
studies (with Randy Laist and Janet Janzen being the forerunners) have
also blossomed around posthumanism and are sure to render the field
even more vibrant.
In view of such developments, a volume such as this, coming in
the ‘wake’ of COVID-19 and its vicissitudes, is timely, terrifying, and
troublesome, for it engages materially, methodologically, and philosoph-
ically through its essays, with contagious diseases, one of which has come
to haunt humanity and the planet since early 2020. Speaking the same
language of the infected year(s), the volume comprises and employs our
expanding medico- environmental vocabulary: Pathogenesis, vectors,
contagions, and infection have become part of our everyday discourse due
to the global-scale threat that has affected and shaped our lives. Through
the posthumanist discussions of how contagions are interlinked with
the human presence on this planet, the essays of this volume display the
pathogenic interactions between human and nonhuman bodies, which we
have understood to be an indisputable part of life as we know it.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, it has become increasingly clear that
the human is no longer the only autonomous entity, contrary to what we
long believed: The demolition of the myth of human sovereignty has been
near-total in the past year. Despite the vaccine, which also poses its own
problems as attested by the discourses around the novel Coronavirus,
v
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Foreword xv
never before has human vulnerability been exposed on such a scale, and
this is precisely why posthumanism as an approach, school of thought,
methodology, and stance makes even more sense today. So, what does
posthumanism mean in the COVID-19 year(s)?
That humans are not sovereign but assemblages whose identity, coher-
ence, and functioning are all contingent upon structures and presences
as diverse as an immune system propped up by the infusion of an alien
life form and pharmacological interventions of antibiotics, enzymes, and
other chemicals has been brought home to us in sudden and intractable
ways. The support systems—medical, welfare, communitarian—became
even more significant (even when they collapsed) during especially the
first year of the pandemic and underscored the embedding of human life
within networks. In places like India, where small eruptions of epidemics
like dengue and gastroenteritis (in the summer months) are frequent,
these assemblages once again came under tremendous strain. Community
action and activism, one could even argue, saved the day with practices
such as the voluntary delivery of oxygen cylinders and make- shift
innovations in medical treatment sites. One virus has demonstrated how
much interconnectedness constitutes the life-sustaining environment the
human life form occupies.
As such, the pandemic experience has brought into play several aspects
of posthuman thought. First, it has laid bare how temporality has shifted
from anthropocentric to post-anthropocentric: As one of the sections
of this volume captures, human time began to be measured within and
against another kind of time. The time of the virus traverses the time
of humanity, intersecting through the virus’s sequence and cycle, from
symptoms to remission, self-isolation to post-recovery trauma, and thus
has altered ‘our’ sense of time to a viral, posthuman temporality. A time
period of 14-day quarantines as well as the duration and dosage of the
drugs to battle the infection became our temporal markers.
Second, the experience has modified our sense of space. Our cor-
poreal, community, and species borders have been breached. Our isolated
existence (locked- up, locked-down) and the enforced distancing have
reconfigured our spatialities as well. The posthuman spatiality thus has
crystallised in the face of eroding geographical boundaries, shifting the
idea of space from a human-measured one to a concept that is only calcul-
able in nonhuman forms. Indicating that the human body itself formulates
a space of its own kind, this new understanding of spatiality leads us to
dissect our bodily and digitised landscapes. The ‘posthuman’—a human
inhabited by multiple nonhuman forms including bacteria and viruses—
continuously emerges through time and space and, therefore, this new
ontology has irreversibly altered the presumed human sovereign control
over temporal and spatial boundaries.
Third, an arithemacy entered our posthuman lives. Oxygen concen-
tration levels, platelet counts, and viral loads became the numbers that
determined the health, well-being, and even the life of the human. The
xvi
xvi Foreword
fear of numbers—oxygen levels below and viral loads beyond a certain
number—haunted humans. It was in the shadow of such an arithemacy
that we determined our social interactions, isolation (or otherwise),
hospitalisation (or stay- at-
home), and general comportment of the
human form.
Fourth, the very networks that made human mobility, from airports
to public transportation systems, became conduits for the virus. As tech-
nology, bodies, and nonhuman forms all meshed in a crisis of border-
crossings, empowering systems became threats and revealed the extent to
which our assemblages are also causes of danger.
Fifth, all lives were rendered precarious in a state of mutually
assured infection. The socius became a patho- socius, as the basis of
human community became the basis for the spread of the infection.
Drawing us deeper into the state of ecoprecarity, the pandemic experi-
ence demonstrated how we share precarity across continents, regions,
languages, and all those cultural barriers that divide us. In one sense, our
shared precarity has rendered the world truly ‘transnationalised’ through
the contagion’s work.
With these five conceptual frames—temporality, spatiality, arithemacy,
(im)mobility, and precarity— in mind, the essays of Posthuman
Pathogenesis enable us to travel from one space-time to another. The
volume is full of pathogens and viruses, in keeping with the climate under
which the essays were written and in which we have led our lives during the
pandemic. This collection, therefore, navigates the reader through those
diverse temporalities and spatialities experienced in real or imaginary
contagions, as reflected in both literary and cultural productions.
In its content and range, Posthuman Pathogenesis does what it sets out
to do. It voices the discontents of the human with inspirational approaches
such as ‘tragic humanism’ and the alignment of the nonhuman life forms
with biopolitics. The book calls into question urgent and pressing matters
of epidemics and pandemics, discussing what we mean by solidarity in
times of crisis and by which criteria we determine the fate of the non/
vaccinated, the senior citizen population, and the ethics of care. It further
explores the grounds on which the physiological and affective dimensions
of diseases engage with our sense of narrativity and temporality. In line
with the new materialist directions of the posthumanities, the essays
underscore why we humans cannot be the sole or sovereign actor in the
world’s web of entangled relationalities, directing our perceptions towards
the nonhuman agencies especially during the ‘sick’ times. As such, the
volume calls for the reader to reflect upon the communicative networks
of non/human interactions, upending the representations of pathogens.
Highlighting the inter-and multi-disciplinary naturecultures of academia
and life itself, Posthuman Pathogenesis concludes with a turn to the med-
ical (post)humanities, once again demonstrating the necessity of reading
life/non-living, human/nonhuman through transdisciplinary lenses.
xvi
Foreword xvii
The insistence on ‘pathogenesis’ is a crucial one. Not only does the
pathogen—an intruder, an alien, an outsider—haunt the human imagin-
ation, the body, and the body politic, it also determines the extent, form,
and content of human interactions. The pathogen may arrive from the out-
side or may be nurtured within our (human) laboratories and receptacles,
fostered within human-created life-sustaining environments, and ultim-
ately, in a neat inversion of the purpose of symbiosis, flourishes as a form
that induces threat in humans. In posthuman explorations of entangled
lives and processes, everything, from climate change to COVID- 19,
reflects the degrees and nature of entanglements. This volume is an excel-
lent instantiation of this posthuman stance. Reading back and forth in
time—from Greek and Roman classics and medieval Turkish miniatures
to modern and contemporary British and American literary works as well
as multinational screen productions—and in the present (COVID-19),
the collection as a whole captures this posthuman entanglement in deeply
unsettling and disquieting ways.
xvii
1
An Implosive Introduction

Haunted Experiences, Affective
Assemblages, and Collective Imaginings
Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum
Conceived first through voice calls and virtual meetings between Ankara
and Boston during the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, the ideas
that spurred this collection of essays emerged from a union of local and
global actors, all posthuman, and all cutting across emergent conditions
of time, scale, and agency. Those ideas were galvanised by not only our
scholarly work in the posthumanities but also our humanly anxieties,
fears of uncertainty, and care. Both of us having been trained as literary
and cultural studies scholars (of British literature and culture specific-
ally), we had studied and read immensely about narratives of disease and
epidemics, as well as the possibilities and vulnerabilities that accompany
them, long before this outbreak. We were familiar with a wide variety of
literature focusing on disease, for instance. Ranging from canonical to
popular, some of our personal favourites included Daniel Defoe’s A Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), José
Saramago’s Blindness (1995), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
(2014). Likewise, we were also aware of many filmic representations of
contagions, which often portrayed formulaic “outbreak narratives,”1
or followed a post-apocalyptic scenario during or in the aftermath of
epidemics, such as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), Danny Boyle’s 28
Days Later (2002) and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel, 28 Weeks Later
(2007), Francis Lawrence’s 2007 adaptation of Robert Matheson’s I Am
Legend (1954), and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011). Both of us
being fond of bio-art and video games, we enjoyed Laura Splan’s Viral
Artifacts, which “examines our comfort and discomfort with the micro-
bial world in a series of sculptures, prints and drawings,”2 and we had
even experienced ‘becoming’ (or ‘becoming with’)3 different pathogens,
varying from viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites to nano-viruses and
bioweapons, with the games Plague Inc. (2012) and Plague Inc.: Evolved
(2014) by Ndemic Creations. None of these experiences ‘counted,’ how-
ever. One of us born in the same year as Kinji Fukasaku’s Fukkatsu no hi,
also known in its English title as Virus (1980), and the other as Norman
Spinrad’s Journal of the Plague Years (1988), neither of us had witnessed
a real-life pandemic.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-1
2
2 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

Our experiences were only second-hand, fed through those literary,
cinematic, artistic, and mediatic channels. What we grasped from our
textual analyses of any type of disease narrative, no matter how in-depth
they were, fell short in understanding and explaining the impact of an
actual contagion of zoonotic origins, like that of SARS-CoV-2. In the
face of a global threat so massive in scale, the questions that revolved
around the issue were not simple matters that could be reduced to indi-
vidual survival tales. They concerned the entire world with their medical,
social, financial, educational, and environmental repercussions, which no
factual data could account for, nor could any fictional narrative reflect
in full accuracy. We knew that the social stigma of associating illness
with gender, race, and/or ‘unhygienic’ cultural practices, or the denial of
being the disease-carrier to avoid such stigmatisation could accompany
the spread of the novel Coronavirus, as we had long internalised this
from the case of ‘Typhoid Mary’4 or from the critiques of the conservative
responses to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, which entwined sex and death, as
illustrated by Spinrad’s short novel. On similar grounds, conspiracy the-
ories were not unexpected. Just like the MM88 virus in Fukkatsu no hi,
the accidental by-product of a scientific experiment, this new member of
the SARS family was (and still is) the topic of some intriguing plots circu-
lating around us, inserting a sense of ‘heaviness’ into our hearts, already
broken by the loss experienced on the planetary scale, and adding fuzzi-
ness to our brains, already fogged by our vastly increased screen time. We
have passed, and are still passing, through turbulent times. On an affirma-
tive note, however, our panic-stricken voice calls and digital meetings,
recalling the famous Marilyn Manson lyrics “You are posthuman and
hardwired,”5 sparked passionate conversations over pulling together a
volume integrating the concept of the posthuman into the literary and
cultural analyses of contagions. This is how Posthuman Pathogenesis
came to life, as a point of convergence between technology and affection,
despair and hope, and knowledge and oblivion.
Seeking to rethink our current methods of envisaging and understanding
the “volatile bodies”6 that contagious diseases constitute in literary
and cultural studies, Posthuman Pathogenesis primarily problematises
the ways in which we deal with the unpredictable challenges that such
diseases pose, be they viral or otherwise. Pandemics in our known med-
ical literature, the most notorious of which include Black Death, Cholera
Attack, and Spanish Flu, often created havocs: They led to medical, social,
and psychological discussions during and after their charge, yielding
both negative and positive results, such as stigmatisation, ostracisation,
delirium as well as fraternities and social bonding over the concerns of
disease. One cannot help remembering, for instance, the violating impact
of HIV/AIDS on the gay communities in the 1980s and how this later
gave birth to support groups. In other words, disease has always been a
meddler of systems, triggering a drive to survival, and chaotic, liberating,
and captivating impulses. Fictional diseases, such as the Dragon Pox in
3
An Implosive Introduction 3
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) or the Great Plague in
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) among many others,
are no exception to this, in terms of their individual or collective medico-
social consequences. But the question is, what do all these contagions—
real or imaginary—tell us?
From a contemporary posthumanist perspective, germs, bacterial
and viral infections, and subsequent pandemics, during which our digit-
isation further crystallises, signal how we relate to each of the infec-
tious actors that live in and are enlivened by temporalities, spaces, and
agencies different than ours. Those actors are, to adapt and evolve Donna
Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, a blend of myth and social reality.7
Bending the boundaries between life and death, they are the powerholders
in Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics,”8 determining who is to live and who
is to die, and calling to mind Jacques Derrida’s words in his exploration
of the animal question: “The dead-alive viruses, undecidably between life
and death, between animal and vegetal, that come back from everywhere
to haunt and obsess my writing.”9
It is those haunted experiences, affective assemblages, and collective
imaginings10 that Posthuman Pathogenesis derives its energy from.
Bringing together various posthumanities scholars across thousands of
miles and continents and composing a collection of diverse voices from a
multiplicity of genders, geographies, and generations, this volume presents
a differentiated experience of contagion because, first, it is written from
within, as we are literally ‘in the days of cholera,’11 and second, it comes
from the multiple, heterogeneous, posthuman actors of the dynamic web
of life of which we are part. Bearing in mind that “life,” as Rosi Braidotti
notes, “is not exclusively human,” but “it encompasses both bios and zoe
forces, as well as geo-and techno-relations that defy our collective and
singular powers of perception and understanding,” what invigorates this
volume is the idea that “the posthuman subject relates at the same time to
the Earth—land, water, plants, animals, bacteria—and to technological
agents—plastic, wires, cells, codes, algorithms.”12
We find such heterogeneities important for two reasons. To begin with,
the intersections of the posthumanist discourse and pathogenesis—the
study of the development of a disease—lend themselves for an affirma-
tive and empowering reading of the posthuman, rather than one with
cautionary undertones. As the chapters in this book also showcase, what
started in the late 1990s and the early 2000s with the earlier posthumanist
discussions of neo- cybernetics, autopoiesis, and symbiosis has now
grown into an entire Venn diagram of the social and the scientific, the
discursive and the material, and the philosophical and the environ-
mental under what has become the posthumanities—a non-hierarchical,
non-gendered, and non-racialised assemblage of matter and meaning,
attesting to the very idea of the posthuman subject. Our understanding
of posthuman subjectivity is, in line with Braidotti’s apt summary, one
that relates to “becoming other-than-the Homo Universalis of Humanism
4

or other-than-the Anthropos of anthropocentrism,”13 hence the chapters
distributed through a set of notions that open to discussion our ‘viral’
becomings or interconnections.
The second reason why heterogeneities matter is the ongoing
conversations between the academia and the arts, and theory and
practice, about the multi- scalar relationality and transversality of
posthuman subjectivities, heterogeneous multiplicities of human and
nonhuman actors at work, the entanglement of matter and meaning-
making practices, and life itself, as “a complex inter-relation of mul-
tiple zoe/geo/techno-systems.”14 Of vital importance is how we respond
to what is within and around us, recalling the dual meanings of the
Baradian notion of “response-ability”15: (1) the ability to respond (in
relation) to the human and nonhuman agentic forces and (2) the ethics
of accountability and care. With Jane Bennett’s example of the “bac-
teria colonies in the human elbow,”16 for instance, we have now come
to understand how microorganic agents overthrow ‘Man’ and ‘his’
taken- for-
granted capacity of changing the course of events. Those
posthuman bodies reveal our co-existent states of enmeshment with
social and political actors, decision-making processes, our DNAs, and
the affective environments within and around us, indicating that “health
itself is a situated knowledge”17 to borrow Stacy Alaimo’s words, ref-
erencing Haraway’s concept.18 Such situatedness allows us to explore
seemingly fixed entities, following “an infinite process of untangling,
where new relations continue to emerge,”19 within the spatial, tem-
poral, and agentic intersections of literary, filmic, or artistic narratives.
In other words, incorporating the posthumanist interpretations of lit-
erary and cultural texts into the study of contagious diseases without
falling into transhumanist pits enables us to bring into the equation
more than what appears on the surface. In exploring and untangling the
dynamic relations between fact and fiction, returning to our response-
ability matters. That is, how we respond to narratives (just as how we
respond to anything else) matters in our ‘becoming with’ posthuman
pathogeneses, which is why the overall aims of this volume, as each of
the chapters demonstrates, follow a thread that enmeshes both local and
global actors all at once, through what we could call the Harawayan
methodologies of implosion.
In her interview with Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen,
Haraway employs a backward referencing to her Modest_Witness,20
explaining the “family of entities,” which lead one another like threads
and evolve into heterogeneous eruptions of meanings, both layered and
entangled at once. Illustrating her intricate relationship of “pulling the
threads” in “balls of yarn,” “gravity wells,” “points of intense implo-
sion,” or “knots,” which “lead out into worlds,” Haraway presents us
with a list of items that seem unrelated at first sight: “chip, gene, cyborg,
fetus, brain, bomb, ecosystem, race.”21 Those objects can implode sets
and layers of meaning:
5
Out of the chip you can in fact untangle the entire planet on which
subjects and objects are sedimented. Similarly, you do not have to
stay below the diaphragm of the woman’s body when dealing with
the fetus. It leads you into the midst of corporate investment strat-
egies, into the midst of migration patterns in northeastern Brazil,
into the midst of little girls doing cesarian sections on their dolls,
into the midst of compulsory reproductivity and the question ‘What
is it that makes everybody want a child these days? Who is this
“everybody”?’22
What we discover from this gravity well immediately affects the intricate
dynamics of contagious diseases that accompany medical and financial
issues as well as socio-political affairs, on both individual and societal
levels, and on both local and global scales, with which this volume is very
much concerned. Like other objects of analysis selected by the authors
of this book, New York- based Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Neves
Marques and their project A Mordida (The Bite) is one such case that
pinpoints correspondences between not only art and science but also the
medico- socio-
political implications of contagion. Specifically focusing
on the enmeshed relations between disease, gender, and biopower, Neves
Marques drew, with A Mordida, “parallels between the terror induced
by the Zika epidemic in Brazil and a sense of fear within the LGBTQ
community as right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro rose to power.”23 With
their alternately looping videos, Neves Marques started their analysis
from the case of the genetically modified male mosquito, which was then
released back into its habitat to encounter and sterilise the virus-carrier
female mosquito. Then moving onto the extrapolation on gender roles
and power within the Brazilian political context, the filmmaker almost
echoed Haraway’s words that “figures are never innocent”24 because
their “installation evoked an eerie feeling of collapse between biological
epidemics and political crisis, specifically seeking to reflect the current
alarming spread of intolerant conservative politics in Brazil.”25 The
intensity of the imagery employed by the filmmaker thus referred to an
ongoing conversation among communicable disease, sex with or without
reproduction, and “transcorporeality”26:
The control and militarization of gender portrayed in the mosquito

laboratory was paralleled through the films’ three main characters—
a man, a woman, and a transgender woman—as they navigated an
intimate relationship. Veering between the sterile environment of the
lab and scenes that depicted nature and contact between bodies, Neves
Marques poetically suggested intimacy, affection, and acceptance as
sensitivities to be preserved in times of hostility.27
Those poetic suggestions by Neves Marques resonate with Haraway’s

words not only out of their deconstructive steps taken towards fixed
6

categories but because they indicate a family of entities as well. That
family includes especially the fetus, race, and ecosystem, reminding us
how the Zika virus leads to microcephaly affecting the unborn foetuses
of Brazilian women and indicating “the intersections of ecophobia,
homophobia, speciesism, racism, and sexism.”28 With Neves Marques’
choice of pronouns as ‘they/ them/their,’ we understand the dynamic
involvement of the filmmaker in the project. Identifying themselves as
nonbinary, and the Brazilian habitat being one of their fields of research,
Neves Marques and their entanglement with A Mordida implodes with
several layers of meaning, deconstructing the fixed categories of human-
ness and heteronormativity. As this elaborate example also highlights,
understanding the entanglements between the human and the nonhuman
(in this case, the insect or the virus), the heteronormative and the queer,
and the natural and the lab-produced, then, is a matter of entanglement
between the observer (the knowing-subject) and the observed (the object
of analysis).
This is because implosion is not simply a matter of “picking an entity”
or any random item to analyse. It requires “the analyst,” or the human
component— the literary readers that we are, to be “always already
bound in a cathectic relationship to the object of analysis,” so we must
“excavate the implication of this cathexis of [our] being in the world
in this way rather than some other. Articulating the analytical object-
figuring … is about location and historical specificity, and it is about a
kind of assemblage, a kind of connectedness of the figure and the sub-
ject.”29 This assemblage gives us as much freedom as it binds us with the
environment that exists within and surrounds us. Since our excavation,
as Haraway notes, entails our cathexis with the object-figure, we could
perhaps respond to the object-figurings of our analyses in this volume,
which are the disease-carrying agents in this case, on either a literal or a
metaphorical level. This means that any text on contagion—literary, art-
istic, or historical—would implode with the connectedness between the
posthuman actors involved in the analysis.
Take, for instance, a contemporary post-apocalyptic narrative like Bina
Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018). This feminist dystopia, which reiterates,
in a different setting, many of the themes in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985) such as the state-forced reproduction of women,
can present diverse implosions depending on the connectedness between
several posthuman actors, including but not limited to the text itself, the
imagery in the novel, the author’s lexical choice and identity, and our own
repertoire. The setting in Before She Sleeps is a dystopian desert, located
somewhere in what is now referred to as the Global South. This futur-
istic nowhere, having survived a nuclear war, is artificially oxygenated
and forested. Perhaps in Shah’s imaginary, the location may refer to a
future, post-apocalyptic Pakistan, the author’s country of origin, but for
the text to implode, as analysts, we also need to bring our own spatio-
temporal account into the play. Doing so is not an overly complicated
7
task because, despite the questionability of the proximity of where we
are to what Shah probably imagined, the potentials of our geograph-
ical location becoming a desert are also high, given its current levels of
deforestation, waste import, and many other detrimental practices that
contribute to its climate change. And, as strongly demonstrated by the
COVID-19 scenarios that we have experienced so far, any place on the
planet is vulnerable to an apocalypse—some places more so than others.
The dictatorship of Green City in the novel might as well work for any
country in the current historical context, with the rise of increased gov-
ernmental control all around the world, but then again, some places dis-
play further ‘intersectional’ disadvantages. If this volume is a matter of
haunted experiences, affective assemblages, and collective imaginings,
then we must remember what Braidotti formulates in this sharp maxim:
“We-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same.”30 For
this reason, we need to involve our differences in our readings of the
posthuman pathogenesis, as actors of implosion.
Standing where we are, then, we already have this cathectic relation-
ship with Bina Shah’s repertoire of images and figures. We could, there-
fore, engage with “the Virus” in Before She Sleeps, “which morphed
from a rare strain of HPV into a fast- spreading cervical cancer epi-
demic,”31 on multiple layers. If we bend the meaning from literary to
theoretical, for instance, we could read the novel as the critique of the
medico-enviro-political assemblages of crisis, which is a set of figurative
pandemics burning in the entire world. If we bend it from metaphor-
ical to a more contextualised political one, then we can argue that the
virus stands for the epidemic of violence (specifically the domestic vio-
lence targeting women), which increased during the forced lockdowns,
pushing women to stay with their perpetrators. Our location and histor-
ical specificity at this moment in time, as local or global actors of minor
importance, as scholars of posthumanities, or as Turkish citizens, thus
implodes with several alternatives, paralleling our aims of multi-scalar
relationality and transversality. Returning to how we respond to texts
and everything else, our understanding of the posthuman subject would
inevitably play a pivotal role in what meaning we produce out of the
interaction between ourselves and our object of analysis. Since we, as the
editors of this volume, often tend to associate ourselves with the material-
feminist and/or material-ecocritical aspects of the posthumanities, it is
no wonder what we bring into the equation is an implosive strategy that
implicates nonhuman narrative agency. As we have stated elsewhere,
we often tend to argue that the nonhuman actors of this planet such as
“communicable diseases confound our primary visions of ourselves as
self-contained entities by making the porosity of our bodies palpable,
exhibiting the agency of matter and the inextricability of the human from
the nonhuman.”32 This means that “the disease-carrying agent demotes
the human from its position of the only determiner of causality and the
only narrator,”33 so yet another implosion would perhaps come from
8

reading Shah’s novel as the assembled agencies of the virus, the inflicted
women, the survivors, their secret city of Panah, and their combined
efforts to find a way out of oppression, or perhaps viewing the disease
itself as the ultimate story-telling agent. But a focus on “narrative cap-
abilities of non/human beings as nonlinear assemblages of effect”34 is not
the only alternative towards imploding the text.
Our material- ecocritical tendencies would perhaps also reveal
our background knowledge of and intensive research in the environ-
mental humanities, which, to us, belongs to the entire family of the
posthumanities in its current and ever-growing status. In this case, our
reading of Neves Marques’ poem, “Epidemic,” from the collection Sex as
Care and Other Viral Poems (2020) would implode in meaning-making
practices that not only enmesh the social and the medical but also high-
light the concept of naturecultures. In the first stanza, Neves Marques
juxtaposes the imagery of military, invasion, and street demonstrations
with that of the virus and “sweeping through the land.”35 The poem
was written as part of the filmmaker/poet’s project on the Zika virus,
like their A Mordida, “drawing an analogy between the spread of the
Zika epidemic in Brazil, the genetic modification of its carrier mosquito,
and the rise of fascism to mount a critique of both gender biases in
science and anti-queer populisms.”36 But from our perspective, and as
the collection was published in 2020, this might well be appropriated
to the context of COVID- 19, and the rise of anti- queer populisms
might well be placed elsewhere in the world, too, so why not Turkey,
where LGBTIQA+are continuously suppressed and even the rainbow
flag is considered ‘a weapon of crime,’ almost matching Jasbir K. Puar’s
observation on the “unfathomable, unknowable, and hysterical mon-
strosity” in associating the queer with “terror” and constructing them
as “terrorist bodies.”37 The poet’s lexical choice of “hatred”38 is a clear
reference to the rising conservatist policies in Brazil (or Turkey for that
matter) that systematically oppress and suppress the queer, while their
use of the word “tears” indicates both their sorrow and their bodily fluid,
which may allude to a source of contamination because the eyes are also
vulnerable to the contraction of SARS-CoV-2. The second stanza dir-
ectly refers to how disease alienates people further, with the line “others
become more other,”39 indicating the intersections of (dis)advantage,
such as race, class, and gender, which may boost or limit one’s access to
basic hygiene and healthcare services. But most importantly, the phrases
“—the virus of culture” and “—the virus of nature,”40 both preceded
by an em dash and italicised to mark the end of each stanza, indicate
“the transformation from the distinction between culture and nature to
naturecultures.”41 Regardless of Neves Marques’ intentions in penning
this poem, the meaning that we produce out of those lines, that is, our
‘interference’ in the patterns of ‘diffraction’ exemplifies what we mean
by the employment of implosive strategies in understanding posthuman
pathogeneses in this volume.
9
Employing implosion as a strategy is not limited to literary pieces
or fictional texts on disease, of course. Different texts, and their
conversations with different authors and readers, would also reveal
a differentiated experience of relationality and transversality. Those
conversations could intersect and cut across genres, disciplines, and
methodologies. A narrative that appears to fall canonically into the cat-
egory of travel writing, for instance, may unfold as a record of medical
history, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
(1763), which had a significant impact on the study and application of
“engrafting” technique against smallpox.42 Travelling from Istanbul to
London with Lady Montagu, the (arguably) Ottoman method of engraft-
ment prompted a radical step in the medical history of Europe, turning
the page from despair to hope. This variolation revolutionised the ways
in which immunity was understood, if it was at all, making Montagu’s
baby daughter the first person to be immunised against anything in the
history of England and Europe.43 It also enabled an eight-year-old boy
to survive the epidemic—Edward Jenner—who would later become the
father of cowpox inoculations with his 1789 breakthrough and would be
acknowledged as the inventor of the first modern vaccination.44
With this set of medico-historical data in mind, we must underline two
points. First, the story-telling agent (in Turkish Embassy Letters and the
ample research in historical, literary, cultural, anthropological, or med-
ical fields carried out on this work) shifts from Montagu herself as the
author-narrator to the disease, smallpox, its variolas, the engraftment
method, and all the scientific practices that merge the past with the pre-
sent, along with the human actors playing their own part in the socio-
political background to the course of events. Second, let us remember
that Montagu herself, being a survivor of smallpox, had lost her brother
to the disease and often complained about having lost her beauty because
of the scars left by the variolas. During her stay in Istanbul, she had
the chance to observe Turkish women’s self-care routines, and she often
mentioned in her accounts, with a hint of jealousy, that those women’s
skins glowed with health. This means that Montagu’s cathectic relation-
ship with smallpox and skin beauty played an agentic role in Europe’s
journey from variolation to vaccination. While our being familiar with
this story due to our educational backgrounds formed some part of our
repertoires, our national identities drew our attention more to Montagu’s
letters, with Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire being involved in this
account. And inevitably, the world’s current struggle with COVID-19,
along with the disputes over patent waivers and ‘big pharma,’ has also
acted as an agent in leading us to delve into the history of contagious
diseases and vaccines, which ‘gently’ pushed us further towards Edward
Jenner. All these entanglements put us into a cathexis with Montagu,
Istanbul, England, disease, and vaccination, hence our imploded reading
of those transversalities across knowledge, bodies, and phenomena. As
this two- fold implosion also demonstrates, the crossovers of history,
01

literature, and science, once blurred, become embedded and embodied
posthuman subjects themselves, telling us that “the agency commonly
reserved for subjects is not the exclusive prerogative of Anthropos.”45 In
this case, the transversal and relational cuts across time, agency, body,
geography, space, matter, fact and fiction, and the arts and media implode
even further.
As these cuts showcase, and in line with the overall multiplicities of
Posthuman Pathogenesis, the chapters comprise a wide range of local
and global perspectives. With authors’ implosive strategies built through
their theoretical, literary, and cultural analyses of materials varying
from early modern medical texts to twenty- first-century animated
films, posthumanist approaches to disease and contagion in this volume
abound in transversalities. Part I, “Discontents of the Human and Its
Others,” presents critical discussions of the human, inhuman, and
posthuman. Stefan Herbrechter’s opening chapter, “Yearning for the
Human in Posthuman Times: On Camus’ Tragic Humanism,” focuses
on Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), one of the major literary works
to which avid readers have turned in times of crisis like the COVID-19
outbreak. Herbrechter argues that pandemics evoke the double ‘nature’
of the human and questions the ‘nature’ of ‘true humanity’ as well as the
correlations between the experience of tragedy and the feeling of cath-
arsis. The author notes that Camus’ tragic humanism resonates with some
of the core aspects of the contemporary posthumanist thought, in the
sense that both schools of thought require a ‘horizontally achieved’ soli-
darity towards social justice. By drawing examples from Camus’ work,
he contends that the struggle with the disease-carrying agent, the deadly
microorganism, is at the same time a global struggle of political resistance
and a moral duty, united under the concept of solidarity. Underlining that
such human solidarity is in fact a “self-righteous, self-indulgent, and nos-
talgic misconception,” he points out that the centralisation of Anthropos
in this misconception poses a threat to all planetary inhabitants, including
the human, which thus requires a turn to the critical methodologies of
posthumanism as the critique and deconstruction of humanism. Linking
his discussions of the battle between the human and the microbe to what
he calls “the radical ‘openness’ and ambivalence of the human-animal,”
Herbrechter concludes that Camus’ tragic humanism is “complementary
to the search for new ecological forms of multi-species justice” and that
a new post-anthropocentric form of catharsis needs to evolve out of this
multi-scalar, relational search.
Entitled “Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural Creatures: Parasites,
Biopolitics, and Contemporary Literary Reflections,” Kerim Can
Yazgünoğlu’s chapter also foregrounds the discussions of the nonhuman,
inhuman, and posthuman. Yazgünoğlu opens his chapter with the prob-
lematisation of the definitions of and the interactions between human
and nonhuman bodies, pointing out the questionability of the human as
a self-contained entity, discussing viruses as in-between figures of non/
1
life, and indicating how these ‘invisible’ bodies permeate the borders of
the living and the nonliving. These deadly agents, for Yazgünoğlu, offer
a dark ontology of life, one that could redefine social and corporeal
boundaries. Thus, he poses a critical question: “What if,” Yazgünoğlu
asks, “viruses, which appear essential to the foundations of life, have
always already been posthuman?” In his answer to this question, the
author turns to Katherine Hayles’ entry in Critical Inquiry’s “Post from
the Pandemics” blog and draws two significant conclusions showing
(1) “the unpreparedness and the limits of the human,” and (2) “how
humans are interdependent with viruses.” These conclusions lead
Yazgünoğlu to his discussion of the host-pathogen interactions in the
context of viral and parasitic bodies, taking as his basis Karin Moelling’s
virological redefinitions of the ancestorial relations between the viral
and human agents. Using Michel Serres’ The Parasite (1982) as an
example, Yazgünoğlu argues that the deadly agencies of viruses are in/
corporeal forces sustained by the mutability and interconnectedness.
This view, he notes, posits life as germinal, dynamic, processual, and
intensive, thus showing how the virus as a dark force exposes the other-
ness of the inhuman and the very eradication of all forms of distinct-
iveness including human uniqueness. Building upon critical life studies
and necropolitics, this chapter concludes that assessing how the virus-as-
dark-life may reconnect the human to the inhuman world.
Part II, “Pathogenic Temporalities,” raises the issue of time in the
context of contagious diseases. Ruth Clemens and Max Casey’s chapter,
“Viral Temporalities: Literatures of Disease and Posthuman Conceptions
of Time,” questions multi-scalar effects of disease, discussing the temporal
transformations experienced by the body in times of illness. The authors
develop a theory of ‘viral temporality’ that accounts for the multifaceted
ways in which disease, in its multispecies entanglements, creates different
structures of time that are not simply quantifiable, discrete, or striving
for linearity. This theory, as Clemens and Casey note, works to explore
the multiplicity of temporalities and subjectivities of human-pathogen
entanglements. Through their analyses of the multi-scalar, spatio-temporal
effects of illness in Anglo-American women’s writing, the authors exem-
plify their theory. Their analysis first focuses on Tory Dent’s 1999 poem
“Fourteen Days in Quarantine,” from the collection HIV, Mon Amour,
which narrates Dent’s experience of HIV/AIDS while she was hospitalised
under respiratory isolation. Then, the authors turn to Virginia Woolf’s
1925 essay “On Being Ill” and demonstrate how disease and illness act as
agentic bodies that help the author produce literary texts and transform
her bodily and temporal experiences. Clemens and Casey thus under-
line the situatedness of viral temporalities, which implode in intersections
with “material circumstances” and “the structures of futurity that exist in
different cultural environments.” Noting that both Dent and Woolf were
relatively privileged in the sense that they were middle-or upper-middle
class women with access to healthcare, they conclude that the “situated
21

nature of viral temporalities makes their theory adaptable to a variety of
different contexts.”
This part closes with André Vasques Vital’s chapter, “Pathogenic Hugs
and Ambiguous Times: The Joy Epidemic in Gumball.” In the animated
series The Amazing World of Gumball (2011–2019), the episode “The
Joy” narrates the story of a mysterious epidemic of joy that originates
in a hug given by Richard Watterson to his sons Gumball and Darwin.
The disease apparently affects the nervous system of the victims and later
spreads rapidly among Elmore Junior High School students through
physical contact of affection, such as hugs. As Vital illustrates in his
chapter through his discussions on this specific episode, a posthumanist-
new materialist conceptualisation of agency and time well accompanies
the emergence of epidemics of infectious diseases. Based on their ability
to transform power relations in society, those epidemics display their cap-
acity to reconfigure notions of time and history. Vital analyses how the
invisible pathogen and the epidemic of joy act like phenomena, respect-
ively resembling what Jane Bennett calls a ‘force’ and an ‘agentic swarm,’
dancing through the choreographies of assemblages as posthuman
agents that alter the power relations between characters. This alteration,
according to Vital, calls into question “the composition of time itself.”
“The pathogen,” as Vital contends, “facilitates the horizontalisation of
necropolitical power by allowing the sick to choose who should live and
who should die, simply by embracing the chosen target to transmit the
contagion.” The chapter concludes that “thoughts, consciousnesses, and
human institutions emerge ‘with’ non-human phenomena,” thus eroding
the dichotomies of “linear and non-linear time” and “historical continuity
and discontinuity,” exposing an interplay between “life and death” and
“permanence and flux.”
Part III, “Pestilentia Loquens: Narrative Agency of Disease,”
involves material ecocritical aspects of posthumanist discussions in lit-
erary, historical, and visual contexts. Both chapters in this part focus
on the concept of narrative agency, as theorised by Serenella Iovino
and Serpil Oppermann, which highlights the agentic powers of matter
and combines it with its always-already-embedded discursivity. Şafak
Horzum’s chapter, “Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman Feminist
Environs: Viral Becomings in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite,” opens this
part. In his chapter, Horzum reads Griffith’s novel from both material-
feminist and material-ecocritical perspectives, highlighting how this text
from the 1990s is conducive to a contemporary posthumanist worldview.
The author argues that Ammonite demonstrates the intertwined nature
of human and viral bodies through its critique of androcentrism, which
is often equated with anthropocentrism in line with the Enlightenment
ideals of ‘Man.’ Horzum’s analysis of the novel illustrates how
naturecultures, bodymind, and mattertext are always already enmeshed
within one another, with examples drawn from the text itself and with
supports taken from the recent theoretical work on the intersections of
31
environmental humanities and the posthumanities. Reading Marghe, the
protagonist of the novel, as a posthuman subject who undergoes symbi-
otic experiences with the nonhuman and the planet, Horzum contends
that the entangled bodies of the woman, the Jeep virus, and the planet
GP unfold as an assemblage that presents an emergent relationality
within the narrative. Noting that these actors are involved in a series of
multiple becomings, the author pinpoints the flat ontology that each of
these actors dwells on, both as individual figures and as a collective body
that is in an ongoing, dynamic process of narrating and becoming with
each of its components. This process, according to Horzum, is one that
creates and navigates the entire narrativity and horizontal relationality
in the novel. This chapter concludes with the author’s assertion that “our
ceaseless potential of ‘becoming with’ materialises the communication
and intra-action between non/human bodies and the planet,” thereby
indicating a never-ending dynamism where every living and non-living
entity is a vibrant, lively agent.
This third part closes with Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan’s chapter, “Power
or Despair: Contagious Diseases in Turkish History and Miniature
Paintings,” which takes on a material ecocritical approach to disease and
draws on the concept of nonhuman narrative agency. Contending that
viral and bacterial agents point to vibrant ecologies in their co-evolution
with other living matter, forming hybrid configurations, Yılmaz Karahan
invites us to rethink disease- carrying micro-agents as storied matter
in cooperation with human stories. In their narrative assemblage, she
argues, the agentic powers of the microorganisms transform urban life
from centres of power and consumption into centres for fear and deso-
lation. The author’s case analysis starts from Justinian Plague and inter-
mittent contagious diseases in such urban centres as Istanbul, Trabzon,
and Diyarbakır and brings us to the current outbreak of COVID-19,
tracing Turkish medico-historical records in an environmental context.
This chapter links the stories of contagious diseases to traditional Turkish
miniature painting, as exemplified in the earliest paediatric surgical atlas,
Cerrahiye-i İlhaniye (1465), by the surgeon Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu.
Arguing that Sabuncuoğlu’s miniatures brought together “the agential
interplay of paper, pen, paint, knowledge, imagination, and imitation,”
the author draws our attention to how the atlas “becomes an embodied
narrative” and combines a three- dimensional posthuman medium of
analysis by enmeshing theoretical, literary, and visual engagement. The
chapter concludes by drawing our attention to “the concurrence and co-
emergence of material and discursive formations telling multispecies
stories.”
Part IV, entitled “Contagious Networks of Communication,” involves
two distinct approaches that signal new directions in the future of the
posthumanities. This part first draws from a combination of posthumanist
theory and literary analysis of a pandemic narrative, then moving onto
the emerging field of posthumanist applied linguistics with a case study
41

that entails data collected from social media threads. Opening this
part, Jayde Martin and Ben Horn’s chapter is entitled “Hyperobjects,
Network Ontologies, and Pandemic Response in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s
Radio.” In their chapter, Martin and Horn’s primary aim is to illus-
trate how Bear’s novel portrays our “cybernetic interconnectedness with
microbiological, evolutionary, and geological hyperobjects,” producing
what the authors call “network ontologies.” Advancing this view, the
authors read the SHEVA virus in the novel with a focus on synergistic
interactions between human and nonhuman agents, being host environ-
ments and pathogens, respectively. Drawing analogies between Timothy
Morton’s hyperobjects and autopoietic systems as theorised by Niklas
Luhmann, Lynn Margulis, and Bruce Clarke, they argue that Darwin’s
Radio presents hyperobjects as multi-layered sets of relations between
signifiers. Martin and Horn thus contend that those relations pave the
way for emerging possibilities that lead to new configurations of meaning.
For the authors, the SHEVA virus forces us to reconsider notions of
distributed nonhuman agency, which undermines anthropocentricism.
The virus, as they argue, disturbs the idea of human essence by inducing
mutations. The chapter concludes that the novel helps us rethink the
socially constructed boundaries between the human and the nonhuman,
while giving us insights through a discussion of ‘the world without us.’
The multi-layered sets of relations on which Martin and Horn focus are
akin to the posthumanist linguistic case study in the following chapter,
which re-considers the various multi-species, multi-being nature of lan-
guage evaluated in greater detail.
The closing chapter of this part, “Entangled Humans, Entangled
Languages: A Posthumanist Applied Linguistic Analysis of COVID-19 on
Reddit,” is co-authored by Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü. In their
chapter, Gedik and Arpaözü examine the intricate relationship between
the current pandemic and the necessary posthumanist shift in linguistics,
suggesting a posthumanistically augmented citizen sociolinguistics as a
useful way to analyse semiotic assemblages in online platforms. Enthused
by the observed dehumanisation and stigmatisation of certain ethnic
backgrounds upon the emergence of the COVID-19, attended by the
spread of the discriminatory and racist language use, the study is based
on data collected from social media threads on Reddit, which were then
identified and sampled through the trending hashtags “chinesevirus,”
“kungflu,” and “Chineseflu.” Finding the semantic valences of selected
commentaries through the qualitative meaning- based content ana-
lysis method, Gedik and Arpaözü then locate Anthropocentric thought
patterns embedded in the linguistic reflections of the humanist traditions,
which fail to acknowledge the inherent consequences of - isms. The
authors indicate that racism displayed a rapid increase during the early
days of the COVID-19 outbreak. Discussing how human language holds
a mirror up to anthropocentric problems, Gedik and Arpaözü conclude
their chapter by stating that embracing posthumanist applied linguistics
51
may contribute further to the study of human languages, which parallel
the embedded and embodied experiences of the naturecultures from
which they emerge.
Entangling the medical humanities approaches with that of the
emergent field of medical posthumanities, Part V brings an end to the
chapters of this volume. Entitled “From Medical Humanities to Medical
Posthumanities,” this part involves the analysis of disease narratives from
the long twentieth to the twenty-first century, which show an oscillation
between sticking to the old patterns of narratives and shifting attitudes
in contemporary readings. Stian Kristensen’s chapter, “HIV, Dependency,
and Prophylactic Narrative in Bryan Washington’s ‘Waugh’,” revolves
around the discussion of how HIV preventive medication, which is
known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, has spurred debates on access to
healthcare services and treatment. Kristensen argues that, adding to the
already stigmatised contests around the classed, racialised, gendered,
and sexualised ‘nature’ of HIV/AIDS, the (non-)access to such preventive
medication has also triggered questions on the temporality of disease. For
Kristensen, many of the theatrical, cinematic, or literary representations
of the HIV/AIDS debates tend to portray the disease as a thing of the
past. However, as the author points out via Bryan Washington’s short
story “Waugh” (2019), the sense of temporality evoked by HIV/AIDS
narratives may not always fall into such categorisation. This means that
not every narrative functions as a process of memorialisation, but, as
is the case with “Waugh,” they may induce new dialogues between a
medical-humanities and a posthumanities perspective. The author’s dis-
cussion of the short story, by especially focusing on the characters of Rod
and Poke and highlighting the uncertainties about when the disease will
develop, pinpoints how group dynamics may change in line with prophy-
lactic thinking and how being tested positive or negative affects not only
the conceptualisation of the disease but also the group member’s percep-
tion of one another. Underlining the gendering, racialising, and othering
processes that accompany the contraction of the virus, Kristensen’s ana-
lysis of “Waugh” reveals intriguing posthuman predicaments, where
“moralistic assumptions,” in the author’s words, “undergird a psy-
chosocial repression of the epidemic.” Kristensen concludes that such
assumptions present themselves as a “prophylactic narrative separating
the self from the other.”
Following this medical humanities approach, Ronja Tripp-Bodola’s
chapter, “The Vampire as Posthumanist Pharmakon –Towards a Critical
Medical Humanities,” investigates how narratives of vampirism and
vampiric lore shifted in attitude both towards the vampire as agent and
towards concepts of contagion. Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
and Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling (2005) as endpoints of a trajectory, she
uses Derrida’s and Girard’s pharmakon to delineate that shift. Sketching
the narratives throughout the long twentieth century, she draws our
61

attention to how “every generation has its own vampire that mirrors their
biopolitical threat at the time,” echoing Nina Auerbach, thus reminding
us of the emergence of new vampiric accounts, paralleling the spread
of HIV in the 1980s and the rising appeal of the cyborg in the 1990s.
According to Tripp-Bodola, the shift from stigmatisation to pathology
as “embedded and embodied, relational situatedness” brought about
a posthumanist difference in understanding the vampire. This chapter
concludes by suggesting a shift towards the posthumanities in medical
practice and medical humanities and presenting an edifying purpose for
the vampire narratives of contagion, noting that they could serve as a
framework “for a postdisciplinary posthumanism debate in medical
education.”
The CODA section, penned by Başak Ağın, explores further
meanings of contagion in posthumanist contexts. Considering the mul-
tiple formulations of the posthuman, or “many posthumans” as she
calls them, Ağın derives meanings out of other literary and visual texts
on contagion, which have remained out of the scope of this volume.
Likening the division of chapters in the volume to heroic couplets, she
asks what implosive methodologies other literary or visual examples of
contagious diseases have employed, in a spatio-temporal scale that ranges
from Ancient Greek literature to contemporary American dramas. This
section consists of two parts. In the first part, “Pathogenic Implosions:
Heroic Couplets, Tragic Times,” Ağın presents a concise investigation
of how contagions are understood in texts from Antiquity like The Iliad
and Oedipus Rex and in Medieval or Augustan texts like Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales and Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, as well as in contem-
porary literary or visual fictions like Ling Ma’s Severance, The Walking
Dead, or the Netflix drama Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Noting that
“contagions have never been matters of medical sciences alone,” Ağın
then directs two sets of questions to the other contributors of this volume,
and interviews them in the second part, entitled “Further Conversations
over Posthuman Pathogeneses.” Commenting on the responses to her
questions, Ağın concludes that a merger of medical, environmental, and
posthumanities would be an appropriate way to shape our understanding
of the naturalcultural embodiments of posthuman pathogeneses in the
twenty-first century.
With the hope of developing better symbiotic adaptations with the
environments within and around us, we wish our readers a ‘healthy’
posthuman experience.
Notes
1 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
2 Laura Splan, “Viral Artifacts,” laurasplan.com, www.laurasplan.com/viral-
artifacts (accessed May 10, 2021).
71
3 The term “becoming- with” has become a part of the language of the
posthumanities as a result of the attempt to bridge the onto-epistemological
gap between the human and the environment. “Becoming-with,” as Kate
Wright notes, “is a form of worlding which opens up the frames of what
registers to us and so what matters to us (in part by recognising what matters
to others)”; Kate Wright, “Becoming-with,” Environmental Humanities 5,
no. 1 (2014): 279.
4 Mary Mallon, known as Typhoid Mary, was a healthy carrier of Salmonella
typhi, and due to her denial of being sick during the fatal strike of 1907, she
became the source of contact for many people who contracted the disease. For
further details, please see Fillo Marinelli et al., “Mary Mallon (1869-1938) and
the History of Typhoid Fever,” Annals of Gastroenterology 26 (2013): 132–4.
5 Marilyn Manson, “Posthuman,” in Track 7 on Mechanical Animals (Universal
Victor, Inc., 1998), compact disc.
6 This phrase alludes to Elizabeth Grosz’s book Volatile Bodies: Toward a
Corporeal Feminism (1994), which connotes the underlying support of
material feminisms in the development of the current trends in posthumanist
thought. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
7 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 149.
8 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019).
9 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans.
David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 406.
10 We borrow this phrase from Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
11 Here, we prefer to refer to the current COVID-19 pandemic as ‘cholera,’
alluding to Gabriel García Márquez.
12 Braidotti, 48.
13 Braidotti, 57.
14 Braidotti, 54.
15 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 393–4.
16 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 120.
17 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Sciences, Environment, and the Material Self
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 31.
18 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575.
19 Nina Lykke, “Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience: Portrait of
an Implosion,” in Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media,
Bioscience, and Technology, eds. Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke (Seattle,
WA: University of Washington Press, 2008), 6.
20 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_ Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan_
Meets_OncoMouseTM (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997).
21 Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen, “ ‘There Are Always
More Things Going on Than You Thought!’: Methodologies as Thinking
Technologies: Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Bits of Life: Feminism
81

At the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (Seattle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2008), 38.
22 Lykke, Markussen, and Olesen, 38.
23 Sammy Mack, “Mosquitoes, Zika, Sexuality: Art Meets Science in a New
Film Installation at PAMM,” WUSF Public Media, April 17, 2019, https://
wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/2 019-0 4-1 7/m
osquito
es-zika-sexuality-art-meets-scie
nce-in-a-new-film-installation-at-pamm.
24 Lykke, Markussen, and Olesen, 38.
25 “Pedro Neves Marques: A Mordida,” PAMM: Pérez Art Museum Miami,
accessed May 15, 2021, www.pamm.org/exhibitions/pedro-neves-marques-
mordida.
26 Alaimo.
27 “Pedro Neves Marques: A Mordida.”
28 Simon C. Estok, The Ecophobia Hypothesis (London: Routledge, 2018),
10–11.
29 Lykke, Markussen, and Olesen, 38–9.
30 Braidotti, 57.
31 Bina Shah, Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018), 68, Google
Play Books.
32 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum, “Diseased Bodies Entangled: Literary and
Cultural Crossroads of Posthuman Narrative Agents,” SFRA Review 51,
no. 2 (2021): 150–1.
33 Ağın and Horzum, 151.
34 Ağın and Horzum, 150.
35 Pedro Neves Marques, Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems (Pântano Books,
2020), 55.
36 “Pântano Books,” Pantano.Press, accessed May 16, 2021, http://pantano.
press/.
37 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), xxiii–xxiv.
38 Neves Marques, 55.
39 Neves Marques, 55.
40 Neves Marques, 55; italics in the original.
41 Başak Ağın Dönmez, “Posthuman Ecologies in Twenty-First Century Short
Animations” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Ankara, Hacettepe University, 2015), 50.
42 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (London: William
Pickering, 1993), 81.
43 Isobel Grundy, “Montagu’s Variolation,” Endeavour 24, no. 1 (2000): 4–7.
44 Gulten Dinc and Yesim Isil Ulman, “The Introduction of Variolation ‘A La
Turca’ to the West by Lady Mary Montagu and Turkey’s Contribution to
This,” Vaccine 25, no. 21 (2007): 4265.
45 Braidotti, 48.
References
Ağın, Başak, and Şafak Horzum. “Diseased Bodies Entangled: Literary and
Cultural Crossroads of Posthuman Narrative Agents.” SFRA Review 51, no.
2 (2021): 150–7.
Ağın Dönmez, Başak. “Posthuman Ecologies in Twenty- First Century Short
Animations.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Hacettepe University, 2015.
91
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Sciences, Environment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated
by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418.
Dinc, Gulten, and Yesim I. Ulman. “The Introduction of Variolation ‘A La
Turca’ to the West by Lady Mary Montagu and Turkey’s Contribution to
This.” Vaccine 25, no. 21 (2007): 4261– 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vacc
ine.2007.02.076.
Estok, Simon C. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. London: Routledge, 2018.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Grundy, Isobel. “Montagu’s Variolation.” Endeavour 24, no. 1 (2000): 4–7.
https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-9327(99)01244-2.
Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_
OncoMouseTM. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–
99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Lykke, Nina. “Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience: Portrait of an
Implosion.” In Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience,
and Technology, edited by Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, 3–15. Seattle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2008.
Lykke, Nina, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen. “‘There Are Always
More Things Going on Than You Thought!’: Methodologies as Thinking
Technologies: Interview with Donna Haraway.” In Bits of Life: Feminism at
the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, 32–41. Seattle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2008.
Mack, Sammy. “Mosquitoes, Zika, Sexuality: Art Meets Science in a New Film
Installation at PAMM.” WUSF Public Media, April 17, 2019. https://wusfn
ews.wusf.usf.edu/2019-04-17/mosquitoes-zika-sexuality-art-meets-science-in-
a-new-film-installation-at-pamm.
Manson, Marilyn. “Posthuman.” In Track 7 on Mechanical Animals. Hollywood,
CA: Universal Victor, Inc., 1998, compact disc.
Marinelli, Fillo, Gregory Tsoucalas, Marianna Karamanou, and George
Androutsos. “Mary Mallon (1869–1938) and the History of Typhoid Fever.”
Annals of Gastroenterology 26 (2013): 132–4.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics, translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke
Montagu, Lady Mary W. Turkish Embassy Letters. London: William
Pickering, 1993.
Neves Marques, Pedro. Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems. Pântano Books, 2020.
Pantano.Press. Pântano Books. Pantano.Press. Accessed May 16, 2021. http://
pantano.press/.
02 12

“Pedro Neves Marques: A Mordida.” PAMM: Pérez Art Museum Miami. Accessed
May 15, 2021. www.pamm.org/exhibitions/pedro-neves-marques-mordida.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Shah, Bina. Before She Sleeps. Delphinium Books, 2018. Google Play Books.
Splan, Laura. “Viral Artifacts.” laurasplan.com. Accessed May 10, 2021. www.
laurasplan.com/viral-artifacts.
Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.
Wright, Kate. “Becoming-with.” Environmental Humanities 5, no. 1 (2014):
277–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615514.
12
Part I
Discontents of the Human

and Its Others
2
32
1
Yearning for the Human in
Posthuman Times
On Camus’ Tragic Humanism
Stefan Herbrechter
Pandemonics
What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity
(if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must
never falter.1
In the middle of the global pandemic, in the course of 2020, while

the calls for an ‘exit strategy’ from the global restrictions of (human)
movement and social distancing introduced to avoid the spreading of
the new Coronavirus pandemic were getting louder, many politicians
and virologists were advocating even tighter measures of confinement
to slow down the number of new infections, to protect the vulnerable,
and to avoid the collapsing of overstretched and underfunded healthcare
systems, overwhelmed by the prospect of further successive waves of the
pandemic. It became increasingly clear that economic interests were on
a collision course with a humanitarian ethics of care, and a weighing-
up process began, pitching the loss of human life to the virus against
the loss of human life due to poverty as a result of the social lockdown
and the global economic downturn to follow. Environmentalists (and
advocates of ‘degrowth’) quickly saw the fall in economic activity and
the decrease in carbon emissions, or the temporary recovery of cities from
air pollution in times of emptied streets, as a sort of vindication of the
Fridays-for-future marches: You see! It ‘can’ be done; if a pandemic can
reverse climate change by forcing us to downscale our economic activ-
ities, we have to accept that, that is, just what it takes!
Just as easily, other ways of inflecting the pandemic rose to the surface:
We have all got used to the idea that global finance capitalism will not
be able to continue to generate wealth for ever more people and places,
but had it not been so successful, politicians would not currently be able
to throw vast amounts of money at the Corona crisis fallout and at the
development of a vaccine. So, it is not difficult to see how economists –
after a due check on some global strategies that have proven exaggerated
and unhelpful (e.g. just-in-time no-stock transnational production lines) –
will want to return to wealth generation with a vengeance to make up
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-3
42
24 Stefan Herbrechter
for the huge losses and deficits that have built up since the beginning
of global lockdown. Science will probably also do very well out of this
crisis. Scientists have been making a comeback as public intellectuals and
as the main ‘authorities’ to provide prop-ups for stringent and often anti-
constitutional, extremely unpopular, illiberal, and increasingly contested
policing measures. After decades of a steady global rise of populism, sci-
entific experts are all of a sudden back in the national and global media
and are ‘listened to.’
The pandemic will also be seen as an opportune moment to look again
at the role of social media and the importance of a (national, contin-
ental, international, global) public sphere, once it becomes clear to what
extent ‘fake news’ will have been shared as virally as the virus itself. Last
but not least, another community will have capitalised from the pan-
demic climate of ‘bio(in)security,’ namely all those people who have been
pointing at (human) biology as the weakest link in humanity’s chance
for survival and further evolutionary development. It is fairly easy to
see how ‘transhumanists,’ for whom pandemics (apart from asteroids,
catastrophic climate change but also future wars) form global risks of
extinction that need to be countered with the right political and techno-
logical consensus to overcome ‘our’ frustratingly disappointing ‘human
condition,’ this less than perfect mortal frame of ours. In their eyes, it has
almost become a moral obligation to technologically and thus ethically
enhance ourselves and transcend our current limits by extracting our-
selves from nature and its viruses.2
Given this explosive mix of antagonistic and opportunistic discourses,
it seems unlikely that the world after Corona will be in any way a better
place. There will be calls to rebuild, to remember the essentials, or to
be better prepared next time, to learn the lessons, to overcome, to cele-
brate life, and so on. Calls for human solidarity will encourage a return
to universal humanist values, a return to essential and timeless truths
and celebrations of the tragic but heroic beauty of human (self-)sacrifice;
calls for a new Enlightenment and optimism, onwards and upwards, will
resound; a global ‘rolling-up of sleeves.’ What there will probably not be
much time for, however, is critical reflection of an existential, ontological
kind. Who will still have time for questions like: What does it mean to be
human, once humanity has been (re)united in confronting an ‘evil’ and
invisible enemy, a deadly virus?
In short, this pandemic has brought pandemonium to the globalised
neoliberal capitalist world and, at the same time, has sharpened our
awareness that posthumanism and the time ‘after’ the human can be nei-
ther a simple return to old humanist or even humanitarian reflexes, nor a
simple ‘moving-on-regardless’ process. In other words, humans can nei-
ther self-abdicate nor continue to reign supreme: This is the true dilemma
of ‘post-anthropocentrism,’ a post-COVID-19 dilemma one might call
‘pandemonics’. Pandemonium refers to the “abode of all demons; hell,
the infernal regions.”3 It also means “a centre of vice and wickedness; a
52
Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 25

haunt of evil”, and more recently, “a place or state of utter confusion and
uproar; a noisy disorderly place; … a tumult; chaos.” Etymologically,
there is of course no convergence between pandemic and pandemonium.
Pandemic goes back to demos, (the) people, while pandemonium derives
from daimon/daemonium, the devil, which raises the question whether it
would not be a great evil to mix up these two etyma –people and devil,
society and chaos, even though some will argue that it is the demos, pre-
cisely, who have become the daimon, in the form of global overpopula-
tion but also as far as the steady rise of populism is concerned.
The phrase ‘pandemic pandemonium’ obviously appeals because of its
alliteration. There is, for example, an archived post by James C. O’Brien
(Principal of the Albright Group LLC) from 2007 on the website of the
online journal Industry Today that begins with what, today, has to be
called a truly prophetic statement: “According to experts, including the
World Health Organization (WHO), an influenza pandemic is inevitable.
The pandemic will spread along supply chains, making businesses espe-
cially vulnerable to the disease and to measures taken to protect public
health.”4 And I also found a short article by Josh N. Ruxin (then an
assistant clinical professor of public health) in The National Interest in
2008, equally prophetic with hindsight, which emphasises that “[t]‌oday’s
pandemics have evolved to prey on our greatest weakness: our inability
to wage sustained fights against pressing health issues.”5 Ruxin’s (not
entirely disinterested) call for a proactive approach to public health
clearly combines the social, economic, and humanitarian costs of a pan-
demic threat:
[I]‌t may be worthwhile to consider how a pandemic could push

people living on the edge into poverty and starvation. With food pro-
duction suffering greatly, the urban centers that are dependent on
daily imports of food could rapidly fall victim…. [T]he economic and
potential political destabilization that would result would cross these
borders and be felt in everyone’s bank accounts.6
While these two visions, contracting pandemic and pandemonium, are

thoroughly materialist and secular, one might say, I am here equally
interested in the metaphysical, religious connotations of pandemonium
because they are connected to what I find most striking about the
current co-implication of a sanitary and a civilisational crisis, and in
the way, many commentators seem to have instrumentalised COVID-
19. Collapsologists, consequently, see the sanitary crisis with its political
and socioeconomic fallout and the possibility of ‘the end of civilisation’
as an ecological chance, or at least as a welcome and overdue wake-up
call, for humanity to rethink its relationship to other species and to the
planet. Even someone as poised as Philippe Descola, in an interview with
Le Monde, joined the widespread apocalypticism by saying “Nous [i.e.,
Western capitalist ‘man’] sommes devenus des virus pour la planète.”7
62
That humans might be the real virus or disease on and for this planet has
become somewhat of a posthumanist topos at least since Agent Smith in
The Matrix (1999) called ‘us’ that. ‘Viral’ thinking or information going
‘viral’ has of course also become central metaphors for digitalisation.
And, like every major crisis, a global pandemic is the bearer of both hope
(for change) and dejection (extinction angst). It produces both nihilist (we
are all going to die anyway) and idealist (we can build a better world)
reactions. While most of the current high-visibility thinkers use COVID-
19 to justify their own conceptualisations of and agendas for social
critique –from a more affirmative biopolitics to post-anthropocentric
solidarity to compositionism, entanglement, degrowth, or anarchism, to
transhumanist calls for technological ‘optimisation’ –it might be worth
(re)gaining some detachment and thus some critical distance to escape
the frenzied preoccupation with the question whether the human, or the
planet, or both have a future, and to remember how ‘we’ got into this
pandem(on)ic mess and what brought ‘us’ here.
Pandemics, like all natural and unnatural disasters, bring out the best
and worst in humans and thus touch the core of their self-understanding,
that is their humanism, whether it be of a secular, atheist, or religious
inflection. And this also inevitably includes any posthumanist attempt
to escape this humanist ‘gut reaction’ –the desire to become (more or
more-than) human. This double human nature, the best and the worst,
this psychomachia (the fight between good and evil forcing the individual
to take the ‘right’ choice) is at the heart of any humanist morality. It is
based on the idea that the experience of tragedy will produce an improve-
ment (catharsis –a cleansing and an at least temporary release, from
suffering, or dilemma). In the face of the absurdity (of the cruelty, evil,
death, suffering, and injustice) in this world, becoming (truly) human is
the main ‘task’ for each and every human. This moral imperative is fun-
damental to a tragic humanism, and it can be seen everywhere at work,
again or still, during the COVID-19 global crisis. It is a well-rehearsed
human reflex with regard to the absurdity and inscrutability of evil (the
problem of theodicy) and the ‘outrage’ they cause.
Many like-minded people with a self-critical (theoretical, philosoph-
ical) disposition, after the onset of the pandemic, will have reached
back on their analogue or digital bookshelves to pull out their Foucault
volumes. Others will have remembered their literary (humanist) education
and reached for their Camus. This is not to say that these reactions are
mutually exclusive, but they translate into different foci. The Foucauldian
route leads to a critique or a genealogy of the disciplinary apparatuses,
the politics of power and administration, and the scopic regimes put in
place to create human ‘subjects’ and ‘docile bodes’. The Camusian route
is likely to emphasise the metaphysical revolt of the human subject in the
face of absurd suffering and his (mostly his) attempt to overcome it in
solidarity and love.8 What follows below is not meant as a contribution
to literary criticism. It is not a valorisation of the greatness of Camus’s
72

work, which is in fact difficult to classify, situated as it is between phil-
osophy, literature, drama, and journalism. It is also not another comment
on whether Camus should or should not be taken seriously as a philoso-
pher. On the other hand, it is also not a contribution on the sociological,
political, or ecological impact of COVID-19. It is also not about ‘the
virus’ per se. It is an attempt to show that posthumanism –at least the
form of it that I would like to designate as ‘critical’ –is not all about tech-
nology, the new alliance between science and the humanities, biopolitical
entanglement, new challenges like climate change and extinction threats.
It is all of that of course, but it feeds, necessarily, from something else;
something that is often forgotten in the breathless race towards who is
most serious about their ‘post-anthropocentrism’. Something that is the
motivation of why one should engage with a thinking that is so arcane
and complicated as a lot of posthumanist theory undoubtedly is in the
first place, namely its ongoing critique of humanism, the desire to under-
stand what went wrong, and what continues to be wrong with our most
cherished values and self- understandings and the question whether
this really is just a Western ‘problem’ of troubled and melancholic self-
searching in a ‘decolonial’ world. Questions not only concerning what it
‘is’ but what it ‘means’ to be human, or what a ‘good’ life is and which
way ‘evil’ lies. This posthumanism of a more critical and genealogical
kind is not nostalgic, or maybe only a little, in tone but not in spirit; it
is not technophobic, but it refuses to answer the question of technology
in a deterministic or essentialist way. It is not religious in any way even
though it does read the postsecular not as a straightforward turn away
from the modern and enlightened, political notion of secularism. It is in
this deconstructive vein that I think Camus and the controversy to what
extent he was or was not an ‘existentialist’ and whatever happened to this
existentialism (i.e. to what extent it should still inform us today) are rele-
vant for the discussion about where COVID-19 has taken us and might
still take us. So, this is an intervention on how aspects of humanism –
which might well prove to be unsurpassable –are still governing our
thinking despite our best intentions or our most insistent repressions.
From absurdity to revolt

… one cannot help but be struck by the ethical force of Camus’s
works….9
Camus’ ‘tragic humanism’ still seems to remain a tempting point of refer-

ence whenever one is faced with apocalypse, extinction, and crises like a
global pandemic. It is precisely because Camus is such a strong defender
of liberal values like individual freedom, social justice, pluralism and dia-
logue, democratic republicanism, and the rule of law in the very face
of catastrophe that his tragic humanism may again appear attractive to
many, especially those who are always willing to return to and affirm
82
liberal humanist values and even hoping to extend them when faced with
adversity. And it is precisely this desire to reconnect with these values (or
indeed, without ever really having disconnected from them) that needs
to be investigated by a critical posthumanism, now, again. Why do these
values retain their strong attraction when we know that the hope and uni-
versal appeal they offer have such a bad track record as far as our learning
from their flaws, their exclusions, their nostalgia, or their ressentiments
are concerned?
Albert Camus’ The Plague remains the most obvious modern literary
reference for a humanist scenario playing itself out in the context of an
epidemic. It emplots the task to become or remain fully human in the face
of annihilation, to search for the human in inhuman, or one might say,
posthuman times. It is through witnessing and accepting the fact of death
and through experiencing the humiliation of endless defeat while facing
the merciless epidemic that Doctor Rieux and his comrades impersonate
the idea of human revolt. Out of the experience of absurdity arises the
need to act and thus to embark on a quest for a better, more human(e),
world. Most of us know this story; many of us have internalised it in
some form; it is almost impossible not to believe in it somehow; it seems
without alternative. It is the age-old yearning for transcendence that
drives it. And this is regardless of the fact that this yearning is linked to
the idea of technological development, social progress, or to the mor-
ality of human perfectibility, from Christian notions of resurrection to
Nietzsche’s Overman to transhumanist prophesies of enhancement and
the evolutionary replacement of humans by a superior AI.
The return to Camus in the time of the plague might be very predict-
able, as predictable as the reaction of future-oriented transhumanists who
have been arguing for a technical fix to human suffering for a long time.
Transhumanists would probably distance themselves from such a seem-
ingly reactionary and moralistic move, stuck in a ‘can’t do’ attitude as far
as the ‘human condition’ is concerned. There have certainly been con-
servative motivations in rereading The Plague, framed as an example of
how to retain one’s humanity in the face of suffering, or as an answer to a
yearning for ordinary humanity and good sense,10 a call for decency and
fidelity and the need to hold on to our humanity in the face of the plague
and evil by way of vigilance.11 But there were also much more nuanced
reminders. Jacqueline Rose, for example,12 reminds us of the complexity
of Camus’ novel and its reception –a text that Camus intended to have at
least three levels: An almost anthropological level of how people behave
when faced with an epidemic and suffering; a symbolic level dealing
with Nazi ideology, totalitarian practice, bureaucracy, and camp men-
tality (preceding Foucault, Agamben, and the entire discussion on ‘bare
life’ and biopolitics); and a metaphysical-theological level that explores
the problem of evil and the question of theodicy from a (post)secular
angle (i.e. after Nietzsche’s ‘death of god’). Rose also puts her finger on
what may be the two most significant absences in The Plague, namely
92

the literal absence of Oran’s Arab population and Camus’ complicated
position as a pied-noir, a French-Algerian, regarding colonial politics and
postcolonial resistance, as well as the low visibility and the subservient,
accessory role of women in Camus’ work and existentialism more widely.
However, the chord that The Plague cannot help but strike even today lies
in the narrator’s (i.e. the medical doctor Rieux’s) final carefully crafted,
both tragic and hopeful message that the epidemic leaves behind, namely
that “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”13 Rieux’s
is a statement that encapsulates the entire post/humanist problematic in
that it may be precisely this arch-humanist consensus that may no longer
be tenable or even desirable and suspicious. And one way, precisely, in
which it has become suspicious, as feminists and critical posthumanists
would agree, lies in the use of the word “men.” Men, deep down, will
still think that there is something desirable about them in the hope that
at least some women (and men, or other genders) will agree. All is thus
still to decide or to play for, as Rose says, and so much that remains to
be done.14
Camus’ work is often described –based on his own classification
into different ‘cycles’ –by a development “from absurdity to revolt.”15
Absurdity arises out the fact that after the ‘death of God,’ the human
finds him-, her-, or itself alone in this world. This causes a deep moral
crisis, the loss of transcendent and religious values, and the experience
of meaninglessness and nihilism. Instead of a liberation, the absence of
God leads to a lack of a sense of direction, and ultimately to a reduction
of freedom and the loss of dignity. An absurd life is a life where every-
thing is permitted, but nothing makes sense. The only unshakable know-
ledge is that there is death at the end of life. There are only two options:
revelling or rebelling, to put it starkly. Either one lamentingly accepts
the absurdity of life and becomes a nihilist, or one takes absurdity as
a starting point of one’s personal revolt against this very absurdity and
stands up to nihilism. The challenge is thus to accept life’s absurdity and
derive positive and constructive values and a limited notion of freedom
out of what otherwise might become collective nihilistic depression.
However, this affirmative new humanism must refrain from seeking new
transcendental values outside of the human. It is purely immanent in its
radical anthropocentrism, but not in a materialist, consumerist, or capit-
alist sense, which would seek the significance of life in the accumulation
of wealth and consumption. Instead, it must be in close connection with
‘nature.’ This is not to be confused with a romanticised ecological notion
in Camus’ case, however. For Camus, nature is utterly ambivalent in its
‘inhumanity.’ The consciousness of absurdity, nature’s inhuman beauty,
and the acceptance of death as the ultimate limit can be the only ground
for developing a set of values on which to build a community of humans
and reach solidarity. The individual experience of absurdity leads to con-
sciousness and to metaphysical revolt, out of which arises the experience
of community in suffering. This, in turn, stirs the collective fight against
03
evil in this world. It is basically a cathartic or tragic vision, which derives
intrinsic collective human grandeur out of the individual (but shared)
experience of suffering, of death but also scorn, persistence, and strength
in adversity, authenticity, integrity, and dignity. In one word, it is heroic
in its ‘meekness’ –a “lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very
midst of the desert.”16 The experience of absurdity should therefore lead
to lucidity and to an affirmation of life despite everything. In this sense,
“living is keeping the absurd alive.”17 The “divorce between the mind
that desires and the world that disappoints” should spark to a “nos-
talgia for unity” and coherence.18 Suicide, self-annihilation, withdrawal,
acceptance… all these, by contrast, amount to a betrayal of the injunction
to pursue happiness in the face of evil. This is the main message of The
Plague –namely to be resolutely on the side of the victims while put-
ting up a fight against evil without delusion, accepting absurdity without
either becoming complicit with or adding to it.
From an existentialist point of view, in the absence of God, all the
meaning is for humans to produce. Against the destructive movement of
history, the only option is this desperate (tragic, heroic, Sisyphean) hope
combined with a utopian desire without illusion –on which all remaining
human dignity relies –and which alone constitutes human freedom. This
yearning manifests itself in the individual’s endeavour to overcome ‘his’
alienation and thus to show ‘fraternity’ and solidarity with the victims
(of persecution, of cruelty, absurdity…).19 The sanitary fight against the
deadly microbe is therefore, at the same time, a form of political resist-
ance and a moral duty. It is a fight against indifference and for freedom
for which self- delusion and ideological division is itself a pernicious
form of death. This revolt against the human condition is based on this
existential(ist) recognition of the human (double) nature. Nevertheless,
more and more humans are becoming aware that all of this is not only a
rather self-righteous, self-indulgent, and nostalgic misconception of what
solidarity might mean, but also that it is a worldview that is also increas-
ingly becoming a threat to the planet and to nonhuman as well as human
survival. Hence, the urgency of a shift towards a (critical) posthumanism
understood as the ongoing critique and deconstruction of humanism.
Camus and tragic humanism

créer les conditions d’une pensée juste et d’un accord provisoire entre
les hommes qui ne veulent être ni des victimes ni des bourreaux.20
In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis,21 I investigated ‘our’ ongoing love-

hate relationship with humanism which continues to manifest itself in an
absurdist belief based on nostalgia, revolt, and the yearning for something
entirely other –another planet, another life, another freedom –and which
seems to ‘get us’ every time, especially in moments like the current COVID-
19 pandemic crisis. But why, indeed, should this be a surprise? Humanism
13

is humanity’s greatest (and most dangerous) achievement. However, it is
an ideology, a set of values, a worldview that is now increasingly turning
against its subjects, in the face of ever more threatening global crises,
extinction angst, human-induced climate change, new genocides, global
refugee movements; in short, unending human and nonhuman suffering.
And the central question remains: What to do about ‘it’? And what to do
about ‘us’? How may reading Camus (still) help in such a seemingly irre-
solvable situation? How can we ‘unlearn’ the very humanist gestures that
keep returning precisely in those very moments when we start believing
(hoping?) to have left them behind?
The least thing one could say about Camus’ relationship to humanism –
and this is what he shares with today’s critical posthumanists –is that he
was disappointed by it. He was disappointed by the Christian humanism
of Kierkegaard or Mauriac, which, in the face of the ‘human condition,’
through a kind of ‘leap of faith,’ emphasises the ‘humanity’ of God in
Christ and elevates human suffering into a form of divine selection and
salvation. He was disappointed by the atheist humanism of existentialists
like Sartre as well as that of Marxism even though he shared their prem-
ises, namely that the human (especially in inhuman, totalitarian, nihilistic
times) is the greatest value in need of protection. However, he distanced
himself from any human divinisation, including the idea of a Nietzschean
Overman or any kind of political absolutism in the name of which humans
may commit violence against other humans. The best way to describe
Camus’ very particular humanism is that it emphasises the importance of
human solidarity in the face of evil and suffering without however com-
promising the notion of human freedom and dignity.
Camus’ generation witnessed first-hand what the threat of nihilism
means and how quickly political ideals can turn into nightmares. Camus’
humanism is tragic, precisely, because it has gone through the experience
of despair. As he said about his generation in his acceptance speech of the
Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm in 1957: “They have had to forge
for themselves an art of living through times of catastrophe, in order to
be reborn, and then to fight openly against the death-instinct which is at
work in our time.”22 It is the experience of the absurd, evil, suffering, and
death in this world that provokes the temptation of nihilism and that needs
to be resisted by a humanist renewal expressed in revolt and solidarity.
Camus looks to the life-affirming tradition in classical Greek philosophy
and morality –a tradition he sees perpetuated in Mediterranean thought
and nature –to accept the ambivalence of human existence. Humans are
capable of as well as subject to the ‘best’ and the ‘worst,’ and they are thus
condemned to make choices in the absence of absolute knowledge. They
are subject to both love and despair. In a world where innocent children
are suffering and dying, the problem of theodicy (i.e. if God is good and
just, why does he let evil happen to the innocent?) highlights the existen-
tial absurdity of the human condition. Camus, however, sees in this no
justification for some kind of desperate faith (as exemplified in The Plague
23
by the character of Father Paneloux) nor for a complicity with violence or
a nihilist ‘anything goes’ attitude. The revolt Camus increasingly comes
to advocate in his writings after his first cycle of works is born from the
experience of the absurd and the resistance to it, the scorn that Sisyphus
shows of his tragic fate imposed by the gods –and which is why, des-
pite his suffering, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”23 Therefore, the
experience of the absurd presents some valuable notions for us to learn
from. In other words, “from the apparently purely negative experience
of the absurd itself,” as John Cruickshank aptly summarises, there are
“three values ultimately derived”:
First, there is the individual’s discovery of the part of himself which he

holds to be important, which he identifies as his essence as a human
being, in the name of which he confronts the absurdity of human
existence –the value, we might say, of the individual human worth.
Second, the individual shares with other men this worth which he
discovers in himself and this fact leads him to a second value –a
common human nature. Third, this value takes him directly to the
idea of the bond which links all men in face of the absurd –the value
of human solidarity.24
The answer to this individual and collective revolt, however, cannot lie in
some kind of religious or political community seeking ‘transcendence’ of
the human condition. It needs to be achieved not ‘vertically’ but ‘horizon-
tally,’ so to speak, in the pursuit of happiness in this life and in the pursuit
of (social) justice based on (human) solidarity.
Other critical questions arise at this stage regarding the legacy of
Camus’ tragic humanism: In what sense, exactly, might Camus’ very spe-
cific take on humanism have survived the anti-humanist wave of post-
structuralist theory that was to emerge shortly after Camus’ death in
1960? And, how to explain its continued attractiveness in ‘posthuman’
times? One of the most comprehensive contemporary reassessments
of Camus’ life and work is the already mentioned Camus, Philosophe:
To Return to Our Beginnings by Matthew Sharpe (2015). As its sub-
title indicates, Sharpe believes that Camus’ continued relevance lies in
the way he reconnects modernity and humanism with its Greek origins.
The ‘modern’ Camus is the one who, together with his entire generation,
investigated the nihilistic ‘abyss’; the ‘pre-and postmodern’ Camus looks
both ahead and back as an incorrigible humanist and moralist. It was his
moralism in the face of absurdity, evil, and revolt which made him look
completely dépassé shortly after his death, “in the heroic eras of struc-
turalism and post-structuralism after 1960 in France, and the generations
of the ‘theoretical turn’ influenced by these movements in the UK, US,
Australia and globally,” as Sharpe explains.25 However, it is precisely
this moral affirmation (of the human, the world, nature etc.) in reac-
tion to the absurd, suffering, injustice, and death –the core of his tragic
3

humanism –which again seems to chime with certain aspects of contem-
porary posthumanist thinking. Sharpe provides a very colourful portrait
of Camus’ Janus-faced reception which is worth quoting in full:
Camus’ divided reception bespeaks the singularity of Camus’ thought

and writing as an author both Algerian pied noir and proudly repub-
lican; both Mediterranean and European; philosophically trained yet
famed as a litterateur; deeply “of his times” yet drawn to ancient
paradigms; a man of sentiment yet legatee to “a certain kind of dry,
plain, contemplative rationalism, which is typically French” [Sartre’s
words]; a résistant moved by solidarity with the political struggles of
his contemporaries, while longing for the solitary leisure characteristic
of what less interesting times called the vita contemplativa; hedonist
and humanist; a thinker inveterately sceptical of all totalising philo-
sophical systems, yet an unfailing defender of the life of the mind;
one of the first, most powerful critics of French barbarities in Algeria,
yet unable to endorse complete French withdrawal from its colonial
possession; a man of the Left, yet increasingly anti-Stalinist; a figure
acutely moved by what one early essay names “the love of life”, but
a love whose envers in all his writings is a nearly-tactile sense of the
transience of things, the reality of senseless suffering, and the prox-
imity of death.26
Camus’ surviving appeal most probably lies in his struggle for ‘authen-
ticity’ and the consciousness of his own ambivalence, as described by
Sharpe above: The desire to be ‘himself’ all the while deeply ‘caring’ about
others and humanity’s fate in general. This is what makes Camus the “last
thinker of authenticity”, as Jacob Golomb claims; Camus understands
his desire for unity and his need for clarity and coherence as an act of
lucidity.27 In a time when the human in the humanist sense is threatened
with disappearance –literally and conceptually –Camus’ tragic or des-
perate attempt to seek assurance for the human dignity guarantees a
continued or a renewed desire to be (or to become) human, after all:
But I know that something in the world has a meaning and that is
man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. The
world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its jus-
tification against itself.28
Camus’ cry of revolt remains a “fundamental expression of the uni-

versal, transcultural human desire for unity,” Sharpe claims.29 In a world
facing “ecological collapse, resource shortages, species extinctions, the
superexploitation of the South, the liberal-plutocratic eclipse of demo-
cratic will-
formation, the rise and rise of forms of state- based and
extremist terrorism, and the growing of states’ security and surveillance
apparati,” Camus’ is a “kind of measured, neoclassical naturalism and
43
humane thinking that the world today cannot very much longer do
without.”30 Impossible, it seems, to argue with this, and yet…
Today’s plague
Je tiens au monde par tous mes gestes, aux hommes par toute ma
pitié et ma reconnaissance. Entre cet endroit et cet envers du monde,
je ne veux pas choisir, je n’aime pas qu’on choisisse.31
The Plague belongs to Camus’ second cycle of works which he named

“The World of Tragedy and the Spirit of Revolt” and which followed on
from the cycle of “The Absurd”, as Margaret Gray aptly summarises it32:
In keeping with this cycle’s exploration of tragedy and revolt, La

Peste chronicles the imprisonment, exile, oppression and suffering
experienced by the citizens of Oran when plague strikes. Yet the
novel also dramatizes the victory of human spirit and solidarity over
that which would threaten and dismember it: a plague, an enemy
occupation, existence itself.33
However, The Plague is also a great drama of separation and solitude (the
narrator, Doctor Rieux, is separated from his wife, Rambert is separated
from the woman he loves, and virtually all inhabitants of Oran are bru-
tally separated from their dead loved ones, not to speak of Camus’ own
experience of exile during the war while writing the novel).34 And yet, it
is Rambert’s choice in favour of solidarity over his own happiness that
emblematises the victory of human spirit of revolt against the segrega-
tion and repression of the pandemic regime (i.e. the plague itself and the
administrative reaction to it –both also meant as an allegory of France’s
occupation by the Nazis and the existence of concentration camps).
As Camus’ narrator claims, when it comes to plagues, “everybody is a
humanist,”35 in the face of its utter meaninglessness. It is the anonymity
of death during a plague, the sheer arbitrariness in which it claims the
lives of random individuals (including the most innocent ones), the de-
individualisation of bodies buried in mass graves that makes an epidemic
so absurd and which calls for solidarity and revolt (both in a metaphys-
ical and political sense). It is the ‘banality of evil’ (of the plague, but
also of the other epidemic that Camus allegorises in the novel, namely
Nazi fascism, fanatical nihilism, and political or religious absolutism
of any sort) that is most terrifying and dehumanising. It is that which
calls for resistance in the knowledge that illness and death (just like the
‘rats’ carrying the pestilence bacillus) cannot ultimately be defeated (or,
indeed, Camus’ life-long struggle with tuberculosis). Since there is no sal-
vation outside of this world, it is this one life that counts and that needs
affirmation. It is an affirmation, however, that is ultimately without hope
because it will inevitably end in death and defeat. And it is a struggle that
53

must be based on the recognition that an individual pursuit of happiness
can only function through solidarity with others. “For human truth lies
in accepting death without hope. Real courage means never to cheat.
That double lesson is at the core of Camus’s major novel, The Plague.”36
Even though it may be endless, the fight against suffering and the pursuit
of immanent happiness is all the more important, since the ‘microbe’ (the
bacillus of the plague) is constantly present in and with ‘us.’ But so is
the beauty of this world. Revolt is thus a question of “common decency
[honnêteté]”, as Tarrou explains.37
Arguably, the central scene of The Plague is the dialogue between
Tarrou and Rieux, two friends united in their revolt against suffering,
which contains all the central elements, values, moves, and maybe
‘reflexes’ of a tragic and liberal humanism as the only credible answer
to the absurdity of the human condition and the inhuman beauty of life.
One could argue that Tarrou serves as a living example of conscious
human sacrifice (as opposed to the unconscious, ‘gratuitous’ death of
the innocent child, judge Othon’s son, which leads to a confrontation
between Father Paneloux and the atheist, Doctor Rieux). Rieux is the
helpless witness to Tarrou’s losing battle against the microbe, but as
the narrator, he is also its prime moral ‘beneficiary,’ the survivor to
tell the tale. Tarrou is motivated –like every homme révolté –by a
hatred of violence even if committed in the name of apparently good
causes.38 It is the ‘inner plague,’ the “plague within [humans],” which
is the reason that “[w]‌e must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a
careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection
on him.”39 “[T]he good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the
man who has the fewest lapses of attention,” in this scheme. Tarrou’s
‘lesson’ on the sacrificial logic of the (good, or at least less evil) human
culminates in what is probably the best-known statement of the novel:
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences [fléaux] and
there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join force
with the pestilences.”40
What Tarrou aspires to is being a “saint without God”41 and being
even “less ambitious” (in terms of heroic humanism) than Rieux, who
still aspires to being human: “What interests me is –being human [être
un homme].”42 This may, indeed, be the hardest lesson to be administered
to humans, as their ultimate ‘sin of pride’ is to aspire to ‘humanity,’ when
all they need to do is to perform their “métier d’homme.”43 In this sense,
Tarrou’s death, the ultimate defeat for the medical doctor unable to help
the friend he loves and admires, is tragically cathartic. Tarrou’s legacy
is for Rieux, the witness, to tell –a tale (or chronicle) that is not heroic
in the sense of a song of praise of human grandeur, but maybe heroic in
a more stoic sense, of an unwinnable fight against “the spear-thrusts of
the plague” striking his friend’s “human form … consumed by searing
superhuman fires.”44 And what, then, one may ask, is the lesson of such
a tragic humanism? That “all a man could win in the conflict between
63
plague and life was knowledge and memories.” However, this is not a
quietism; “Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.”45
Rieux legitimates his role as the narrator (he only reveals himself
as such once the events of the plague in Oran have been resolved, so
to speak) in order to create and maintain the idea of a ‘chronicle’ –an
objective, self-less account of an almost ‘cosmic’ battle (between good
and evil), expressed in the mystifying sentence:
Summoned to give evidence regarding what was a sort of crime, he

has exercised the restraint that behoves a conscientious witness. All
the same, following the dictates of his heart, he has deliberately taken
the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow-citizens the only
certitudes they had in common –love, exile, and suffering. Thus he
can truly say there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not
share, no predicament of theirs that was not his.46
In the (legal) case against the human brought on by the cosmic force of
nature in the form of the microbe,
Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not

be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in
favour of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of
the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite
simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more
things to admire in men than to despise.47
This cathartic and affirmative lesson –the degree zero of any humanism,
namely that humans are and remain redeemable –remains a temporary
achievement, however. It constitutes the radical ‘openness’ and ambiva-
lence of the human-animal, and it is, ultimately, what guarantees that the
cosmic drama will continue. This is the knowledge and humility that the
plague has administered to Camus’ lone humanist survivor:
He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have
learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears
for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and
linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and
bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the
bane and the enlightenment of men, it roused up its rats again and
sent them forth to die in a happy city.48
In other words, it gives rise to tragic ‘nostalgia’ and the insight that
“through suffering comes knowledge.”49
Yearning for the human in inhuman or posthuman times is a desire
that drives any humanism. Posthumanist suffering today involves a recog-
nition that the tragic anthropocentrism of Camus cannot be ignored but
73

also that the principle of solidarity that humanism proposes has proven
to be insufficient. Camus was certainly deeply aware of the beauty and
inhumanity of nature in his keenly felt, exilic attachment to the Algerian
landscape of his youth. However, the realm of the nonhuman (nature,
‘the animal,’ the alien and absent god) remains ‘other’ in its indifference.
And in its indifference or ambivalence, it also remains a challenge or
task. What separates a posthumanist understanding from existentialism,
ultimately, is the awareness of an inextricable entanglement between
humans and nonhumans (between nature and culture, between human
and nonhuman animals, life and death, bodies, and technics…). It is
this new non/human (or more-than-human) condition, which does not
so much invalidate the tragic humanist desire for meaning but extends
it, that calls for affirmation and solidarity today. It is an extension of
Camus’ life- affirmation ‘beyond’ the human, accommodating, living-
with the nonhuman, including the ‘microbe’ (bacillus, virus…) and
an extension of solidarity to nonhumans.50 The posthuman communi-
ties of ecological entanglement should see Camus’ ethical and political
struggle for happiness and social justice in the face of ‘absurdity’ despite
all its shortcomings and weaknesses not as irrelevant or opposed but as
complementary to the search for new ecological forms of multispecies
justice. After all, to transform nihilism from passive despair into a way of
revolting against the death drive at work in the Anthropocene is still very
much at the heart of contemporary climate concern. However, there will
not be much time left to regret the downfall of the tragic human and ‘his’
condition. ‘He’ will need to be told to get a grip. While there is no harm
in believing that there is (still) more things to admire than to despise in
humans (or nature for that matter), the human can no longer remain a
semi-detached ‘stranger’ to this world. Tragedy’s catharsis and the culti-
vation of ‘moral excellence,’ today, lie outside anthropocentrism.
Notes
1 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
[1947] 1960), 207.
2 fairly representative view on the “dangers for the world after (COVID-19)” can
be found in any number of magazines and manifestos explaining new world
scenarios. There is for example Le Spectacle du Monde 2 (Autumn 2020) that
identifies the pandemic, transhumanism, and demography (i.e. overpopula-
tion) as the “new” main global challenges. The collective authors of the Second
Manifeste Convivialste (Paris: Actes Sud, 2020) argue for a “post-neoliberal”
world that is ecologically responsible, degrowth (décroissance) and post-
market oriented (démarchandisation), post-globalised (déglobalisation), and
against technoscientific ‘hubris.’
3 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “pandemonium,” accessed October 1,
2020.
4 James O’Brien, “Pandemic Pandemonium,” Industry Today 11, no. 1 (2007).
Available online: https://industrytoday.com/pandemic-pandemonium/.
83
5 Josh N. Ruxin, “Pandemic Pandemonium,” The National Interest 96
(2008): 26.
6 Ruxin, 27–8.
7 Philippe Descola, “Nous Sommes Devenus des Virus pour la Planète –
Entretien,” Le Monde, May 21–22, 2020, 27. The quote reads in English:
“We have become viruses for the planet.” (Editors’ translation.)
8 In fact, the two routes can be found in Camus’ work as well. Camus’ play État
de Siège/The State of Siege (1948), one might argue, is much more focused
on the administrative power shift, the aspect of ‘governmentality,’ while his
novel, La Peste/The Plague, foregrounds the drama of ‘separation’ from a
more strictly humanist and tragic angle in the form of a metaphysical revolt.
See also Matthew Sharpe’s Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings
(Leiden: Brill, 2015), especially chapter 1 (“Plague Power: Camus with and
against the Critiques of Instrumental reason”, pp. 61–97). Camus’ État de
Siège appeared almost at the same time as La Peste, in Camus, Oeuvres
Complètes, vol. II (1944–1948) (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 91–373.
9 David Sherman, Camus (Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2009), 7.
10 Cf. Robert Zaretsky, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky: Camus’s The Plague and
Coronavirus”, TLS, April 10, 2020. Also available online: www.the-tls.
co.uk/articles/albert-camus-the-plague-coronavirus-essay-robert-zaretsky/.
11 Stephen Metcalf, “Albert Camus’ The Plague and Our Own Great Reset,”
Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2020. Also available online: www.latimes.
com/ e ntertainment- a rts/ b ooks/ s tory/ 2 020- 0 3- 2 3/ r eading- c amu- t he-
plague-amd-coronavirus.
12 Jacqueline Rose, “Pointing the Finger: Jacqueline Rose on The Plague,”
London Review of Books 42, no. 9 (May 9, 2020). Also available online:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger.
13 Camus, The Plague, 251.
14 The ‘masculinist’ bias in Camus’ “particular version of humanism, in which
virility and fraternity are often key values” is also pointed out by Martin
Crowley, “Camus and Social Justice,” The Cambridge Companion to Camus,
ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 93.
15 Cf. for example John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt
(London: Routledge, 2014) on this point. Tad Sessler sees in this development
a move from solipsistic nihilism to immanent humanism, and links his to the
‘ethical turn’ in Camus and Levinas; see Tad Sessler, Levinas and Camus:
Humanism for the Twenty-First Century (London: Continuum, 2008).
16 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, [1942] 1975), 7.
17 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 53.
19 It is worth pointing out the tacit ‘masculinist’ (or at least paternalistic and
heteronormative) consensus again that much of existentialism, humanism,
and (French) republicanism presuppose.
20 Camus, “Ni Victimes ni Bourreaux,” Actuelles –Écrits Politiques (Paris:
Gallimard, 1950), 123. “… to create the conditions for a thinking this is just
and a provisional agreement between humans who wish to be neither victims
nor perpetrators” (my translation).
21 Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013; the original German version was published under the title
93

Posthumanismus –Eine kritische Einführung [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 2009]).
22 Cited in John Cruickshank, Albert Camus –And the Literature of Revolt
(New York, NY: Galaxy, 1960), x.
24 Cruickshank, xvii.
25 Sharpe, Camus, Philosophe, 4.
26 Sharpe, 5.
27 Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus
(London: Routledge, 1995), 168–9; quoting Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, 45.
28 Camus, “Letters to a German Friend,” Resistance, Rebellion, Death, ed. and
trans. Justin O’Brien (New York, NY: The Modern Library, 1974), 28.
29 Sharpe, Camus, Philosophe, 49.
30 Sharpe, 53.
31 Camus, “L’Envers et l’Endroit [The Wrong Side and the Right Side],” Oeuvres
Complètes d’Albert Camus (Paris: Éd. Du Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1983),
155. “I care about the world in everything I do, I care about humans with all
my compassion and gratitude. Between these two sides of the world I do not
want to choose, I do not like that one chooses” (my translation).
32 Cf. Margaret E. Gray, “Layers of Meaning in La Peste,” The Cambridge
Companion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 165–77, for an excellent first overview.
33 Gray, 165.
34 The ‘tragic’ dynamic in Camus’ work and his humanism are generally
attributed or at least linked to Camus’ experience of exile as French-Algerian
during Algeria’s occupation and subsequent movement towards independ-
ence. Cf. for example Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Camus’s Curious Humanism
or the Intellectual in Exile,” Modern Language Notes 112, no. 4 (1997): 550–
75; Tony Judt, “The Reluctant Moralist: Albert Camus and the Discomfort
of Ambivalence,” The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and
the French Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 87–135; and Ronald D. Srigley, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).
36 Victor Brombert, “Albert Camus, the Endless Defeat,” Raritan 31, no. 1
(2011): 30.
38 Camus, The Plague, 206–7.
39 Camus, The Plague, 206–7.
40 Camus, The Plague, 206–7. Tarrou’s statement inspired a number of post-
Holocaust, post- totalitarian intellectuals and novelists, among them Elio
Vittorini and his Uomini e no (1945) [translated as Men and not Men] whose
main message and sacrificial humanist logic states that the victim is always
more human the perpetrator. Cf. Elio Vittorini, Men and not Men, trans.
Sarah Henry (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1985).
42 Camus, The Plague, 209; translation modified.
43 Camus, “Le Vent à Djemila,” Noces, Oeuvres Complètes d’Albert Camus
(Paris: Éd. du Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1983), 170.
04
49 Cf. Robert Zaretsky, “The Tragic Nostalgia of Albert Camus,” Historical
Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 39, no. 3 (2013): 67.
50 Cf. Stefan Herbrechter, “Microbes,” The Edinburgh Companion to Animal
Studies, eds. Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 354–66.
References
Brombert, Victor. “Albert Camus, the Endless Defeat.” Raritan 31, no. 1
(2011): 24–39.
Camus, Albert. “État de Siège.” In Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 2 (1944–1948),
91–373. Paris: Gallimard, [1948] 2006.
Camus, Albert. “Le Vent à Djemila,” Noces. In Oeuvres Complètes d’Albert
Camus, 173–80. Paris: Éd. du Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1983.
Camus, Albert. “L’Envers et l’Endroit.” In Oeuvres Complètes d’Albert Camus,
103–56. Paris: Éd. Du Club de l’Honnête Homme, 1983.
Camus, Albert. “Letters to a German Friend.” In Resistance, Rebellion, Death,
edited and translated by Justin O’Brien, 2– 32. New York, NY: Modern
Library, 1974.
Camus, Albert. “Ni Victimes ni Bourreaux.” In Actuelles –Écrits Politiques,
115–46. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, translated by Justin O’Brien.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1942] 1975.
Camus, Albert. The Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, [1947] 1960.
Collective. Second Manifeste Convivialste. Paris: Actes Sud, 2020.
Crowley, Martin. “Camus and Social Justice.” In The Cambridge Companion
to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes, 93– 105. Cambridge: Cambridge
Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus –And the Literature of Revolt. New York, NY:
Galaxy, 1960.
Descola, Philippe. “Nous Sommes Devenus des Virus pour la Planète –Entretien.”
Le Monde, May 21–22, 2020.
Foley, John. Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt. London: Routledge, 2014.
Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Gray, Margaret E. “Layers of Meaning in La Peste.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes, 165–77. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Herbrechter, Stefan. “Microbes.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Animal
Studies, edited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, 354–66.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury,
2013.
Herbrechter, Stefan. Posthumanismus –Eine kritische Einführung. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009.
14

Judt, Tony. The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron and the French
Twentieth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Kritzman, Lawrence D. “Camus’s Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in
Exile.” Modern Language Notes 112, no. 4 (1997): 550–75. https://doi.org/
10.1353/mln.1997.0058.
Metcalf, Stephen. “Albert Camus’ The Plague and Our Own Great Reset.” Los
Angeles Times, March 23, 2020. www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/
story/2020-03-23/reading-camu-the-plague-amid-coronavirus.
O’Brien, James. “Pandemic Pandemonium.” Industry Today 11, no. 1 (2007).
https://industrytoday.com/pandemic-pandemonium/.
Rose, Jacqueline. “Pointing the Finger: Jacqueline Rose on The Plague.” London
Review of Books 42, no. 9 (2020). www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/
jacqueline-rose/pointing-the-finger.
Ruxin, Josh N. “Pandemic Pandemonium.” The National Interest 96 (2008):
26–32.
Sessler, Tad. Levinas and Camus: Humanism for the Twenty- First Century.
London: Continuum, 2008.
Sharpe, Matthew. Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our Beginnings. Leiden:
Brill, 2015.
Sherman, David. Camus. Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Srigley, Ronald D. Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2011.
Vittorini, Elio. Men and Not Men, translated by Sarah Henry. Marlboro, VT: The
Marlboro Press, 1985.
Zaretsky, Robert. “Out of a Clear Blue Sky: Camus’s The Plague and
Coronavirus.” TLS, April 10, 2020. www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/albert-camus-
the-plague-coronavirus-essay-robert-zaretsky/.
Zaretsky, Robert. “The Tragic Nostalgia of Albert Camus.” Historical
Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 39, no. 3 (2013): 55–69. https://doi.org/
10.3167/hrrh.2013.390305.
24
2
Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural
Creatures
Parasites, Biopolitics, and
Contemporary Literary Reflections
Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu
When J. G. Ballard was asked to write some glossary headings for

the twentieth century, he wrote the following entry on retroviruses:
“Pathogens that might have been invented by science fiction. The greater
the advances of modern medicine, the more urgent our need for diseases
we cannot understand.”1 This entry not only indicated the blurry lines
between the fictional and the factual but also suggested that viruses
are not just biological entities that medical science tries to understand,
work on, and categorise. It emphasised how they involve characteristics
that make them both textual and material. Our present understanding
of viruses as such also provides an insight into how medicine illustrates
new forms of viruses and, following them, diseases, or how they would
emerge in the ongoing evolution of the relations between the human and
the nonhuman. In view of such intermingled relations, “human bodies
are integrating newly evolved and evolving viruses,” as Dorion Sagan
argues. Sagan notes that “joining together genetic fragments in jamais-
vu combinations,” such viruses and bacteria “circulate around the bio-
sphere and technosphere harmlessly and unnoticed.”2 No matter how
hard we try to consider ourselves separate from inhuman pathogens, it
has been pretty clear at present for humans that the body is no longer
understood as a self-contained entity. If, as Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan
(this volume) contends, our DNA is our ancient story- telling agent,
which is both material and inscriptional, and if our bodies are made up
of myriad nonhuman agentic forces, which range “from ecto-parasites
in the hair follicles to the microbiota in the gut flora,”3 we can reiterate
the posthuman view that the human is always already enmeshed with
the nonhuman. From this perspective, along with what I have outlined
above with Ballard and Sagan quotes, the body and inhuman actors are
implicated upon each other in such negative and affirmative ways that
it is impossible to think of the self as bounded and autonomous, inde-
pendent from other-than-human entities.
Given this implication, this chapter explores what viruses might do
with the human and what their roles as ‘in/post/human’ actants would
be, in reconfiguring questions of life and death and in redefining social
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-4
34
Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural Creatures 43

and corporeal boundaries. Rather than identifying life as being always
subservient to its negation, death, I take these deadly and beneficial
agents as a starting point, demonstrating how viruses, as ‘non/life’ actors,
illustrate the imbrication of life and death, the corporeal and the incor-
poreal, and the human and the inhuman in affirmative and negative ways.
These ‘biocultural’ agents offer a vital ontology of life, one that could
redefine the permeable boundaries between the human and the non-
human, inside and outside, self and other, and immunity and commu-
nity. In what follows, I argue, viruses as posthuman biocultural creatures
might forge an intricate but unpredictable in-betweenness stranded in the
present, where the human and the inhuman, life and death, essence and
appearance, and visible and invisible are equally and vitally implicated.
Such mutual implication reflects a posthumanist desire for a new subject-
ivity, neither anthropomorphic nor zoocentric. Yet, a crucial question
arises here: What if viruses, which appear essential to the foundations of
life, have always already been posthuman?
The answer to this question depends quite a lot on how viruses are
categorised and conceptualised. In Critical Inquiry’s “Posts from the
Pandemic” blog section, for example, N. Katherine Hayles proclaims that
the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, might be conceived as “posthuman”
in two senses: First, SARS-CoV-2 is “oblivious to human intentions,
desires, and motives,” while the virus itself does not “distinguish between
Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Christians and
Jews, Evangelicals and Muslims.”4 For Hayles, irrespective of race,
gender, nation, and religion, this situation provides novel spaces for
building up new dialogues to reconsider the place of the human in the
universe. It shows that the extent to which humans have pushed the limits
of the world could pave the way for much more complicated diseases and
pandemics that could reach beyond the unthinkable. In the second sense,
for Hayles, there have been different evolutionary strategies for humans
and viruses even though their approaches are intricately complex:
In evolutionary terms, humans and viruses have adopted diametric-

ally opposed strategies. Humans have achieved dominance within
their evolutionary niche by evolving toward increased cognitive com-
plexity, developing language with associated changes in brain and
body, evolving elaborate social structures, and in very recent human
history, augmenting their capacities with advanced technical devices,
including artificial intelligence. Viruses, by contrast, have evolved
toward increased simplicity. Viruses replicate by hijacking a cell’s
machinery and using it to proliferate, which allows them to have a
much smaller genome than the cell itself, a characteristic favoring
rapid replication.5
Although this reveals different, opposed strategies of humans and viruses

towards survival, the new coronavirus, according to Hayles, points out,
4
44 Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu

on one hand, the unpreparedness and the limits of the human, and, on
the other, illustrates how humans are interdependent with viruses. In this
sense, Hayles writes, the coronavirus “reminds us with horrific force that
although humans are dominant within our ecological niche,” and “many
other niches exist that may overlap with ours and that operate by entirely
different rules. It screams at jet-engine volume that we are interdependent
not only with each other but also with the entire ecology of the earth.”6
Regarding intimate interdependencies, Hayles goes on to argue that at
some critical stage of life in the evolutionary history, viruses played a
very significant role in human reproduction. She notes that “posing a
deadly threat to contemporary humans,” the “viral contamination” is
also, “in another guise, critical for human reproduction.”7 Indeed, Hayles
seems to suggest that the basis of all the living entities depends on viruses,
be it deadly or beneficial. The claim that “[i]‌f the novel coronavirus is
posthuman, other viruses, such as those in stem cells, are human at their/
our core”8 is helpful in illuminating the relations between humans and
inhuman actors. Hayles’s argumentation, therefore, gives way to an
understanding of how bodily, ecological, and viral materialities inter-
twine and interpenetrate with other in/human bodies.
In consonance with Hayles’s argumentation, one of the concerns of
this chapter is to raise questions about what/who the post/human is with
regard to viruses and to question those things about immunity, commu-
nity, and parasitic subjectivity that will be explored later. Thus, another
way of approaching viruses would be to ask how deadly and dangerous
viruses have become all around the world. In such an unprecedented
time of COVID- 19, when commonly repeated phrases such as ‘herd
immunity,’ ‘social distancing,’ and ‘flattening the curve’ have become
new parts of our lives, along with the debates over vaccinations, patents,
and side effects, viruses are broadly seen as foes rather than friends by
humans. This commonsensical opinion, which rises out of the fatality
rates associated with recent epidemics, is actually the driving force behind
the recognition of viruses, such as Lassa, Ebola, Hantavirus, SARS, and
West Nile, as harbingers of diseases since these beings are, this way or
another, in touch with human experiences. In order to reverse such an
approach, nonetheless, the virologist Karin Moelling alerts us to another
way of redefining viruses and the human, giving a particular insight
into how the human has been intimately and intricately interconnected
with viruses in Viruses: More Friends Than Foes (2016). First, Moelling
propounds that, because viruses have stood “at the origin of life” since
“the very beginning,”9 viruses are “our ancestors!”10 For Moelling, ‘life’
does not exist independently of viruses: “At the origin of life RNA viruses
were around as the largest biomolecules, and from then on they have
always been present.”11 Moelling’s location of viruses at the roots of life
is important to place viruses alongside other nonhuman actors affecting
the life/death course because this might transform our definition of ‘life’
itself. This is why she suggests that the human is deeply bound up with
54

viruses: “It came as a shock to the scientific community worldwide,” she
writes, “when it was discovered that our human genome is composed
of almost 50% of retroviruses or virus-like elements.”12 On this view,
considerably, it is impossible to think the human body apart from some
forms of viruses. That is, viruses, indeed, have been an integral part of the
human. Moelling explicates it more in detail:
Most genetic information in our genome is not uniquely “human”

but has arisen by horizontal gene transfer (HGT), from all the many
other living organisms around us. About 10–20% of our genome
is identical with that of bacteria, and almost 50% with that of
retroviruses or retrovirus-like elements; 5% results from fungi; the
contribution of archaea, plants or other viruses cannot be quanti-
fied yet.13
What Moelling would like to do here is to draw attention to how the

human is as much a product of viruses as of other inhuman elements, as
is the insight that every living entity from bacteria to mammals somehow
consists of viruses. While deconstructing the deep-rooted preconceptions
about what it does mean to be human, Moelling invites us to re-present
the human body not as one bounded and autonomous body, but a multi-
plicity of assemblages built from a mass of interacting other in/human
bodies such as viruses. In doing so, she shows that the body, be it human
or nonhuman, is open to radical revision. So conceived, bodies become
the site of mutual engagements and multiple entanglements of different
forms of life.14
Of great significance to multiple becomings with viruses is, moreover,
Moelling’s highlighting of the bizarre relationship between virus as a
parasite and its host. Although she figures out that today “we detect only
cell-dependent parasitic viruses,”15 she contends that each virus as para-
site enters into and develops a unique relationship with its host, thereby
converting its own existence into a kind of coexistence whether it is bene-
ficial or deadly for the hosting body. She asks and answers the following
question:
Will viruses destroy their hosts, and lead to the end of mankind by
killing us all? No, that is a fairy tale and will not happen. It would
be nonsense from the point of view of evolution, because then viruses
would eliminate the basis for their own existence or ‘survival’ and die
out themselves.16
What Moelling calls “co-evolution” of the parasite and its host would
take on a different level of significance as an evolutionary tool in the
survival of non/humans even though dangerous “zoonoses” –viral
diseases transmitted from nonhuman animals to humans –like SARS,
MERS, and COVID-19 began to spread increasingly due to the changing
64

environmental conditions. These zoonoses show us that humans have
material and mortal bodies that have been impacted by the mutual
interactions with other in/human bodies. They remind us, to borrow
Tess Charnley’s words from her visual essay, that we have leaking
bodies, as opposed to what we often think of ourselves as. The porosity
of our bodies, therefore, as Charnley notes, is both a signifier of our
evolution and a herald of our mortality, especially in an era marked by
viral spreads:
Bodies leak. They cannot be contained. Our skin, inherently

porous, expels and receives; society, a mingling of cells. This, as
has become all too clear throughout the Covid-19 [sic] pandemic,
is how viruses spread. They spread through our leaking, through
our fundamental inability to shore ourselves up. Two metres (or
one metre plus), apparently, is the sweet spot. An invisible line we
draw around ourselves to prevent our fusion with others and to
‘stop the spread’. This cordon may be new, but our permeability is
not. We have been leaking throughout time and not just in terms of
our fluidity as a species. In the age of the Anthropocene, and with
the advent of the Virocene, we see the detrimental effect of our
leaking on(in)to the planet, as we spill into the oceans and spread
across forests, in ways that bring our own extinction closer than a
pandemic ever could.17
Following Charnley’s views, the zoonotic diseases that we experi-

ence at present also illustrate that it is no longer possible to distin-
guish between zōē, bare life force, and bios, normative/political life
of humans.18 True, some part of our bodies has always already been
implicated with the nonhuman, but perhaps this has never been as clear
as it is. As Charnley notes, we are in times that lead us to question
whether “we will ever be able to forget our leaking again.”19 We do not
know for sure whether
it will be possible to stand next to a stranger, shoulders brushing per-

haps, and not think about the transferal of those spiky viral particles
from one body to the other. To touch a public surface and forget
about what might be living on your hands. To kiss a stranger without
the weighted responsibility of extending [our] ‘bubble.’20
The nonhuman actants in our bodies will constantly remind us of the

eroded boundaries between our lives ‘worth living’ as bios and the life of
the ‘disposable others’ that once made up zōē. This kind of impossibility
in determining where the formerly taken-for-granted borders between the
human and its others begin and end, in fact, recalls Jane Bennett’s refer-
ence to the confederacy of the “many macro-and microactants.”21 As
Bennett notes, although in a different context, the zoonotic diseases and
74

their interdependency with the humans indicate “an interfolding network
of humanity and nonhumanity.”22
Along similar lines, Timothy Morton also underlines this kind of a
radical coexistence. He compellingly argues that
the human as such is already nonhuman, insofar as our bodies are

colonies of symbionts down to the DNA level (DNA as such is a
symbiotic community of code insertions, pieces of viral code, and so
on). The oxygen we breathe, the iron we smelt, the oil we burn, the
hills we walk on are byproducts of the metabolism of life forms. We
need a term like ‘coexistentialism’ to describe what it feels like to be
a swarming colony: we contain multitudes.23
This attempt to transpose the parasitic relationship into a radical coex-

istence is at its most striking in reconfiguring the interactions between
viruses and humans. In order to reflect on the bizarre and intricate rela-
tionship between the parasitic virus and its host, for instance, Moelling
presents an account of the polydnavirus (PDV) that has properties of
endo-and exogenous viruses:
The viral DNA is integrated into the genome of the host, the mother
wasp, and guarantees the production of new virus particles in its
ovaries. Mother wasp secretes the eggs and, with them, the virus, and
she injects all into the body cavity of caterpillars. Now the viruses
release the 30 DNA plasmids with genetic information for toxins,
which are produced and kill the caterpillar. This results in predigested
food for the young wasps. This is a perfect reversal of roles: viruses
with host genes and hosts with virus genes.24
Obviously, the parasitic event is transmuted into a mutual, dynamic pro-

cess of symbiosis in which the parasite and host are tightly linked with
each other. Yet a third party, a caterpillar, participates in this mutual
alliance; however, the caterpillar behaves differently in this relation: “It is
in mortal danger from the virus and the young wasps, but it still defends
them against foreign invaders trying to attack their cocoons. Thus it helps
its future murderers.”25 In this sense, the parasite-host symbiotic inter-
action produces a kind of mutually ‘beneficial’ life system in which life
forms are multiple, plural, dynamic, and active. As such, this reflection
could fuel an argument, germane to Hayles’s, that viruses are always
already posthuman, only to reveal the radical coexistence as are humans.
Indeed, basing her argument on coevolution, coexistence, and symbiosis,
Moelling poses such a question: “Finally, if we are an ecosystem and
if all the foreign genes contribute to our own genes, we may become
philosophical for a moment and ask ‘who is a human being?’ –‘Who
am I?’.”26 The answer to this question is that we have already seen how
viruses give grounds for re-construing the human not as “an index of a
84

historically specific fantasy of mastery over the self, the earth, and all
its many creatures”27 but as multiple, chimerical, and posthuman, only
to question what one could take to be the ‘essentially human’ in this
framework. Yet in ontologising the human, it is significant not to erase its
historical, social, and material determinations. Therefore, the human is
characterised not by hierarchy and normative dualism but the multiplicity
of bodily life forms and in/human powers, agencies, and desires as well
as the ensemble of social and biopolitical relations that the human enters
into. This addresses what Samantha Frost calls “biocultural creatures,”
the ones who are “embedded in various ecologies and networks of
relations and who can integrate their acknowledgment of their embodi-
ment, animality, physicality, dependence, and vulnerability into their
self-conception and their orientation toward and modes of being in the
world.”28
While such an approach seems to get us very far with viruses, the
aforementioned reflection on the parasite-host interaction also hinges on
the way that relations between life and death, human and nonhuman,
zōē and bios, immunity and community, and inside and outside might
be parasitic, interruptive, and transformative. In addition to viewing
biocultural creatures as determinants in reconfiguring normative and
material relations, one can view them as products of the way that para-
sitic relations make, remake, regulate, and organise themselves. Of abso-
lute relevance here is Michel Serres’ figuration of ‘the parasite’ in his book
The Parasite (1982). For Serres, the figure of the parasite is a way for
the struggle to survive through incorporating or expelling the parasite in
normative and material relations. Serres is concerned to highlight the dis-
tinctive ways in which bio/social realm is configured and ordered through
parasitic relations, and from these relations emerges the third entity, ‘the
parasite,’ that might be considered other, foreign, or invader. In order
to understand the logic behind ordering through parasitism, first, it is
noteworthy to elaborate on the figure of the parasite. Serres illustrates
the parasite by providing its three different definitions in French: noise
or static, the biological parasite, and the social parasite.29 Serres iden-
tifies its first sense, noise, as a kind of interruption and interference. In
order to exemplify it, he writes about La Fontaine’s fable “The City Rat
and The Country Rat.” The city rat invites the country rat, his cousin,
to visit so that he dines with him in a tax farmer’s house. The rats begin
to eat leftovers on the carpet in the dining room while the farmer sleeps
upstairs. All of a sudden, their feast is disturbed by the noise outside the
door. The rats flee and await till the noise abates. The country rat does
not want to return to the feast; rather, he flees to his country house. Serres
re-reads this fable in such a way that the mechanism of parasitism, inte-
gral to the functioning of systems, shows that the parasite takes from the
host without giving anything in return. What is so interesting in the fable
is that the rats’ feast takes place in the house of the tax farmer, who is
himself a parasite that parasitises the producer through levy. Then, the
94

city rat parasitises the tax farmer. That the city rat invites the country
rat for free dinner is a third form of parasitism. So, we have the logic
that the parasitical relation depends on “the parasited one parasites the
parasites.”30 The parasite as such might be characterised by the interfer-
ence, one that is both disruptive and generative according to Serres.
As for the second definition, the parasite as a biological entity feeds on
its host. And this mechanism also takes and gives nothing back. However,
this survival strategy is valid for every living system on earth, and humans
adopt this kind of parasitism:
We adore eating veal, lamb, beef, antelope, pheasant, or grouse, but

we don’t throw away their “leftovers.” We dress in leather and adorn
ourselves with feathers. Like the Chinese, we devour duck without
wasting a bit; we eat the whole pig, from head to tail; but we get
under these animals’ skins as well, in their plumage or in their hide.
Men in clothing live within the animals they devoured. And the same
thing for plants. We eat rice, wheat, apples, the divine eggplant, the
tender dandelion; but we also weave silk, linen, cotton; we live within
the flora as much as we live within the fauna. We are parasites; thus
we clothe ourselves.31
Humans become parasites, Serres claims, in domesticating nonhuman

animals or turning raw materials of plants and animals into clothing.
In regarding humans as constitutive of disruption as such, this analysis
can go along with a parable. In this instance, Serres tells of the parasitic
relations between a paralysed man and a blind man. While the blind man
carries the paralysed man, the paralysed man shows the directions for
the blind man. So, it is not the one-way relation of men that determines
their being, but, instead, their interdependence determines their existence.
What is striking here is that the parasite cannot exist without the host.
When we look at the third meaning, the social parasite or the uninvited
guest, Serres narrates the event between a poor man, a kitchen hand, and
an uninvited guest. Here is a row between the poor man and the kitchen
hand because of the poor man smelling the food. In the meantime, a third
man emerges and offers a solution to them. He takes a coin, puts it on
the sidewalk, and rings it a little. The sound of the coin pays for the smell
of the food. In doing so, the third man, a parasite, solves the problem.
Accordingly, he becomes a relational link between two different social
orders and constructs a fluid space where social and material exchanges
are possible:
The parasite invents something new. Since he does not eat like
everyone else, he builds a new logic. He crosses the exchange, makes
it into a diagonal. He does not barter; he exchanges money. He wants
to give his voice for matter, (hot) air for solid, superstructure for
infrastructure.32
05

A characteristic feature of parasitism is the way that parasites, be it human
or nonhuman, interrupt, parasitise, or create new relations that they
parasitise. So, it is not surprising that parasites either are incorporated
into relations or are expelled, and in this way, all relations and transform-
ations are contingent on parasites.
What is more, while describing parasites’ disruptive relations, Serres
has also examined more complex rivalry between parasites with a view
to eliciting recurrent patterns of expulsion or incorporation. In doing so,
drawing on René Girard’s account of “mimetic desire,” he asks who the
scapegoat is because the scapegoat as an unwelcome parasite must be
excluded from the community. In the scheme, one views the other as a
rivalry, an obstacle to her/his desire, and she/he finds an ‘innocent’ scape-
goat who becomes a total object of the hatred of the community, and thus
the parasite should be expelled from the community. Serres blends this
scapegoating with parasitism as such:
History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that every-
thing and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and
animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest.
Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of
giving in his favour when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When
he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be
the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence
rivalry.33
In regarding humans as parasites to each other and the nonhuman, rival-

ries might occur, and later, this contradiction is solved by excluding the
parasite. Accordingly, the community constitutes itself through this
expulsion of the parasite. Such an act indicates that the community turns
to order and safety, and new norms and relations may emerge after
the expulsion even though the parasite always comes back. Saliently,
by parasitising naturecultures, humans might be disruptive to other
relations. For example, today’s COVID- 19 zoonosis is the obvious
indicator of humans’ parasitic relations such as intensive farming and
destruction of nonhuman animal habitats although placing the human at
the relational nexus of viruses and other parasites.
Moelling’s articulation of coexistence and Serres’s parasitism go
beyond the interpretation of who the post/human is. Their respective
arguments might open out onto a wider discourse about life, immunity,
and community. In Giorgio Agamben’s assertion, the sovereign power for
humans and politics mainly relies on the bifurcation of zōē (bare life) and
bios (political life). So, without questioning what kind of life the human
and the nonhuman should live, biopolitics tries to configure and regu-
late the community and protect political existence, while dominating and
destroying biological existence. However, this emphasis on bios at the
expense of zōē makes the sovereign power a necropolitical sovereignty
15

most favoured and fostered by Western politics. As Achille Mbembe
contends, this necropolitics decides
those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis
of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself
in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests
itself in.34
In this way, the power of death, according to Mbembe, pervades the

structures of political life. Nonetheless, biocultural creatures and para-
sitic events interrupt these relations, thereby illustrating the interdepend-
ence of zōē and bios somewhat differently. In particular, contagious
diseases and epidemics may be used as the indicator of such problem-
atisation. At stake at a time when contagious disease seeps into the
daily fabric of life is the immunity of the individual and of the commu-
nity. The biopolitical practices immediately try to provide protection
and exemption from the virus in order to stabilise bios. Interestingly
enough, some political lives are immunised in various ways, but those
who are viewed as bare life are excluded from this immunisation. In this
view, “immunization refers to a particular situation that saves someone
from the risks to which the entire community is exposed.”35 In this
account, the opposition between the immunity and community is set
up. Reconsidering biopolitics, however, Roberto Esposito articulates a
different form of biopolitics by claiming that immunity is always coter-
minous with community. He suggests that modernity uses the process
of immunisation, and, then, problematises communitas (community):
“Everywhere we look, new walls, new blockades, and new dividing lines
are erected against something that threatens, or at least seems to, our
biological, social, and environmental identity.”36 He posits that in the
Western traditional models of the community, the community protects
the individual from the inside, while from the outside, it becomes a kind
of hostile fortress against the other, be it viruses, immigrants, or foes.
As he claims, while
communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing

them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to them-
selves, encloses them once again in their own skin. Immunitas brings
the outside inside, eliminating whatever part of the individual that
lies outside.37
The necropolitical sovereignty in this way tries to dominate bios by

destroying zōē, as the community is thus exclusionary. What Esposito
is criticising in this model is that the ideal of a proper and immunised
community is by all means untenable, in particular with regard to viral
diseases, climate-induced calamities, and wars. Therefore, he emphatic-
ally underlines the crisis of the community, suggesting that the aim is
25

not only “to overturn in some way –indeed in every way –the balance
of power between ‘common’ and ‘immune’ ”38 but also “to conceptu-
alize the function of immune systems in a different way, making them
into relational filters between inside and outside instead of exclusionary
barriers.”39 What Esposito articulates is best exemplified in the virus, as
one does say that the virus and a vaccine are as inseparable as the com-
munity and the immunity. The virus leads to a non-hierarchical view of
the parasitic relations between life and death, the inside and the out-
side. The essential feature of the vaccine depends on the “homeopathic
principle”40 of the pharmakon; that is, one injects into her/his body a
portion of poison to protect herself/himself from diseases. Through this
introjection of immunity comes the interdependence and coexistence of
zōē/bios, self/other, inside/outside, and community/immunity, since the
pharmakon, Esposito argues, is “a gentle power that draws death into
contact with life and exposes life to the test of death.”41 The life is seen as
already marked by what it tries to exclude as a result.
Within this context, it is essential to ask how contemporary literary
texts address the intricate and disruptive entanglements of what Stacy
Alaimo suggests “often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human
bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and
other actors.”42 A good way to imagine such intertwinements is to
look at what biopolitical, necropolitical mechanisms and their destruc-
tive parasitism bring about. As discussed earlier, humans as biocultural
creatures, despite their coexistence with the wider world, continue to
parasitise all the relations to a certain extent that they ostensibly disrupt
and dissolve these relations no matter how all life forms are parasitic
to one another. Accordingly, it seems that such an anthropocentric atti-
tude would end up in an ‘end of the world’ scenario in contemporary
literature. This is what contemporary British novels, especially environ-
mental dystopian ones, are mainly concerned with. Highlighting millen-
nial anxieties related to a sense of ‘endism’ like the end of the world, for
example, Malcolm Bradbury summarises the disruptions of the human’s
parasitic relations:
The world’s problems –industrial pollution, environmental crisis,

global warming –had not gone away. Apocalyptic signs abounded:
plagues (AIDS and drugs) and earthquakes seemed to spread, weather
patterns shifted, cities decayed. Human pleasures were human pains:
food and drinks, sex and smoking, all came with health warnings.
New visions arose of the technological wilderness, the age of dreck,
crime-ridden, drug-crazed cities, wasted landscapes, ethnic cleansing,
modern genocide, tribal slaughters, rising seas, shrinking ice-caps,
urban surveillance, genetic interference, human cloning, cyberspace.
Sensations of transition, anxiety and uncontrollable energies and
disorders had always haunted the ends of centuries.43
35

These bleakest evocations of a catastrophic world articulated in con-
temporary British novels make them raise questions on social, political,
religious, and ecological collapses caused by industrialisation, global-
isation, technologisation, biopolitical mechanisms, and epidemics. For
instance, Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) and Clare Morrall’s
When the Floods Came (2015) both epitomise the challenges of climate
change, environmental crises, social upheaval, biopolitical breakdown,
and epidemics, respectively.
Limning an eco-dystopian vision, first of all, Sarah Hall reflects the
ecological, social, and economic wasteland in the novel, underlining the
crises of biopolitical systems and anthropocentric forms of exploitation.
The protagonist, Sister, narrates what happened to her father’s generation:
My father’s generation seemed to die out quickly, though their

lives had been lived in prosperity. The health system cracked apart.
Epidemics swept through the quarters in every town and city. There
were new viruses too aggressive to treat. Those who did not fall ill
seemed just to fade away.44
Hall’s reference to epidemics and the rise of new viruses and diseases
present the human’s desire and predilection to dominate, manage, and
conquer all life forms, and, as a result, the human’s parasitism leads
to the collapse of the human and nonhuman realms at the same time.
Although the social, ecological, and economic systems burst asunder in
the novel, the necropolitical sovereignty of the aggressive government,
the Authority, continues to dominate and destroy life. Human and non-
human biocultural creatures try to survive in this eco-catastrophic vision.
So, Hall points to the status of the human, the nature of the human’s
relationships to each other, and highlights how nature and society undergo
a crisis. She concedes that the ignorance of the human’s coexistence with
the nonhuman could generate such an eco-dystopian world.
Clare Morrall, likewise, extrapolates the current ecological, social,
and viral concerns into the future, questioning how the Hoffman virus
has played a key role in transforming Britain into an infertile waste-
land, and problematising the relations between immunity and commu-
nity in When the Floods Came. Morrall’s futuristic world shows how
the Polanski family –Popi, Moth, Roza, Boris, Delphine, and Lucia –
survives in an abandoned tower block periodically surrounded by flood
water in the decaying wasteland that was once the city of Birmingham.
However, outside awaits a danger: the Hoffman virus that wiped out
most of the population and rendered many survivors infertile 20 years
ago. Thus, Britain is largely cut off from the world due to the impact of
the deadly virus. Nonetheless, the Polanski family is immune to the virus
as stated by Roza: “Our family has been lucky. My parents have the gene
of immunity, the unexpected privilege of undamaged reproduction.”45
45

The Polanski family has already genetically incorporated the virus them-
selves before the Hoffmann’s, and they coexist with the virus. Their
multiple subjectivities in this sense can be viewed as posthuman as their
bodies are in constant interchange with other biocultural life forms. This
is also valid for other biocultural creatures, for almost all human beings
“caught the virus in the milder form that eventually spread to the con-
tinent and the rest of the world.”46 Nevertheless, the Polanski family tries
to protect the immune insiders from the outside in the tower block, and
the immunisation mechanism seems to work properly. Yet a foreigner,
Aashay, appears in their lives one day, and then, everything is changed
for the family. Seemingly, the introduction of Aashay as a mysterious
and exotic creature brings about the illusion of an immunisation process
before wreaking destruction on the family. In the immunisation process,
as Esposito puts it, the system reacts to the foreign element, negating it.
However, the Polanski family, especially Roza, albeit being suspicious
about Aashay, welcomes the community through the incorporation of
him. After Aashay’s invitation to the Fair, the family gets exposed to the
outside, and their relations to other survivors at the Fair become parasitic
as the people of the community at the Fair want to parasitise the Polanski
family’s child, Lucia. In the context of a view that the pharmakon might
act in its double as both pathogenic and curative, the immunisation pro-
cess does not work for the family, not because their parasitic relations
are not beneficial but because the outsider is so much an enemy as an
ally. As a result, these environmental disaster novels crystallise around
the ramifications of drastic ecological alterations and their impacts upon
human and nonhuman life. They also deploy viral narratives not just as
the very repercussion of ecological breakdown, but as cautionary tales of
the Anthropocene so as to highlight both the way that late capitalism and
biopolitical mechanisms have manipulated and exploited the wider world
and the way that humans have based their cultures on an anthropocentric
understanding of life.
The relationship between the human and viruses is, furthermore, a
central issue in Geoff Ryman’s winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award,
The Child Garden (1989). Unlike The Carhullan Army and When the
Floods Came, The Child Garden appears to address the pressing con-
temporary question of biogenetic intervention into all life forms. Ryman
is interested in exploring the way viruses as a biopolitical tool transform
the human and the nonhuman into posttechnological and postbiological
creatures. In doing so, he illustrates the “posthuman predicament,”47 to
quote Rosi Braidotti, in which human and nonhuman bodies have been
entrapped by biocultural viruses and can be read by a transhumanist
biopolitical sovereignty called the Consensus in the text. Genetically
engineered viruses in the novel are presented as the carriers of embodied
knowledge in a posttechnological future of tropic London, the Pit:
Viruses not only “knew all the words, knew all the notes,”48 but also
“transferred information between species.”49 It is clear that viruses play
5

a key role in the relations through which “Postpeople” make sense of the
world around them and determine their existence by seeping into every
part of their lives. It is by means of viruses that human and nonhuman
denizens of London are exploited, traced, manipulated, and cured by
the transhumanist mechanism, since post-natural viruses are biocultural
actants transferring knowledge to Postpeople whose bodies are biologic-
ally and technologically readable. As is narrated,
[b]‌ecause of advances of in medicine, acceptable patterns of behav-

iour could be caught or administered. Viruses made people cheerful
and helpful and honest. Their manners were impeccable, their con-
versation well-informed, their work speedy and accurate. They
believed the same things.50
The functioning of this transhumanist biopolitics enables us to under-

stand the ways in which material and social relations are reproduced
through the Consensus’ transhumanist ideology. This is what Rosi
Braidotti identifies as “a perverse form of the posthuman”51 engendered
by advanced capitalism and biogenetic technologies. The real paradox
here is between the plasticity of Postpeople’s corporealities, which,
through biogenetics, makes bodily boundaries more porous and viscous
and the Consensus, which generates the ideal, perfect, impeccable
transhuman subjectivity of sameness. Indeed, just because biocultural
subjects are always in a material relation to other biocultural creatures,
including viruses, dissolving the boundary between self and other, inside
and outside, they can be conceived as ‘posthuman.’ More importantly,
the protagonist Milena Shibush cannot be “Read” and is immune to
viruses. Especially, she is resistant to heterosexual love. Throughout the
course of the novel, she falls in love with Rolfa, called GE, a genetically
engineered person. Rolfa is a female Polar Bear, a perfect singer, immune
to the viruses before she was Read, and is thereby viewed as the ultimate
other. Although the Consensus appears to control and manipulate every
bodily creature, parasitic relations such as those between Milena and
Rolfa can generate new relations. This echoes Serres’ indication of how
parasites might be a nexus at which new particular positions emerge.
The way Rymann sees the intricate interaction between the post/human
and the wider world, and the emphasis he places on it, even if one is
inoculated with viruses, pinpoints the human’s radical coexistence with
other biocultural creatures.
What began as a discussion of viruses as posthuman biocultural
creatures has led to much larger questions about the social, economic,
political, ecological, and material relations. There is always already a sig-
nificant interplay between the human and the posthuman in reconsidering
how the human does not have in common a position outside material
agencies and outside other life forms. It is increasingly apparent to the
human that social and material structures and relations are not, as she/
65

he would wish, regulated and governed by the biopolitical sovereignty
but they become intricately interdependent on other biocultural actors.
Despite the emphasis Serres places on the multiple relations that link the
parasite to the human, such an approach might be applied to the non-
human, which then opens up new contingent spaces for prioritising the
dynamic but unpredictable interrelations between human bodies, non-
human bodies, ecologies, and technologies. It is this contention that
assures how human/nonhuman, inside/outside, nature/culture, zōē/bios,
and immunity/community are implicated through viruses, indicating “a
kind of enfolding in which everything presumed to be outside the prop-
erly human is always already within.”52 In such a schema, humans are
always already as posthuman as viruses are, since “we are the aliens, the
multitude of ‘foreign’ creatures that inhabit and constitute our only seem-
ingly distinct ‘selves’.”53
Notes
1 J. G. Ballard, “Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century,” in
Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York, NY:
Zone, 1992), 275.
2 Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity,” in Incorporations,
eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York, NY: Zone, 1992), 380.
no. 2 (2021): 150.
4 N. Katherine Hayles, “Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus,” Critical Inquiry
47, no. S2 (2021): S68. All the posts in this section of Critical Inquiry are
published in this special issue of the journal.
5 Hayles, S68–9.
6 Hayles, S70.
7 Hayles, S71. In a similar manner to Hayles’s argument, Katherine S. Pollard
points out that some retroviruses are crucial for survival, while some are dan-
gerous. She gives the example of the relic virus, PtERV1. According to Pollard,
the protein, TRIM5α, evolved to prevent PtERV1 and similar retroviruses in
humans, but this evolution also makes it more difficult for humans to fight
against HIV (49). Katherine S. Pollard, “What Makes Us Human?,” Scientific
American 300, no. 5 (2009): 44–9.
8 Hayles, S71.
9 Karin Moelling, Viruses: More Friends than Foes (Hackensack, NJ: World
Scientific, 2016), 1.
10 Moelling, 22.
11 Moelling, 23.
12 Moelling, 159.
13 Moelling, 170.
14 In this chapter, a vital “life” is considered the basis of all foundations of
systems. Drawing on new materialist theories, this study shows that a “life”
designates “an interstitial field of nonpersonal, ahuman forces, flows, ten-
dencies, and trajectories” Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
75

of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 61; regarding everything,
including viruses, as being “in a sense, alive,” life might be conceived not just
a vibrant force, but also an ontological foundation interconnected with other
vital agents. Therefore, Bennett notes that “in a knotted world of vibrant
matter, to harm one section of the web may well be to harm oneself” in
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 117, 13.
15 Moelling, 25.
16 Moelling, 25–6.
17 Tess Charnley, “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-
19,” Anthropocenes –Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no. 1 (2021): 1.
18 In this chapter, zōē is privileged over bios.
19 Charnley, 3.
20 Charnley, 3.
21 Bennett, 23.
22 Bennett, 31.
23 Timothy Morton, “Deconstruction and/ as Ecology,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 301.
24 Moelling, 131.
25 Moelling, 132.
26 Moelling, 125–6.
27 Samantha Frost, Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.
28 Frost, 3.
29 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 203.
30 Serres, 13.
31 Serres, 10.
32 Serres, 35.
33 Serres, 24. In the original text, Serres refers to the human as ‘man’: “L’homme
est le parasite universel”; Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980), 38.
34 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 17.
35 Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,
trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York, NY: Fordham University Press,
2013), 58.
36 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 59.
37 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 49.
38 Roberto Esposito, “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,” trans. Zakiya
Hanafi, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18, no. 3 (2013): 87.
39 Esposito, “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,” 88.
40 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans.
Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 125.
41 Esposito, Immunitas, 127.
42 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
43 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Penguin, 2001), 510.
44 Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 37.
45 Clare Morrall, When the Floods Came (Edinburgh: Sceptre, 2015), 46.
46 Morrall, 9–10.
85

47 Rosi Braidotti points out that the posthuman predicament might be under-
stood as the “bio-political management of living matter.” The Posthuman
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 111.
48 Geoff Rymann, The Child Garden, or, a Low Comedy (London: Unwin,
1990), 13.
49 Rymann, 240.
50 Rymann, 1.
51 Braidotti, 7.
52 Alaimo, 155.
53 Alaimo, 155.
References
Cultural Crossroads of Posthuman Narrative Agents.” SFRA Review 51, no. 2
(2021): 150–7.
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Ballard, J. G. “Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century.” In Incorporations,
edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 269–79. New York, NY:
Zone, 1992.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin, 2001.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Charnley, Tess. “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-19.”
Anthropocenes –Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no. 1 (2021): 1–4. https://
doi.org/10.16997/ahip.933.
Esposito, Roberto. “Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.” Translated by Zakiya
Hanafi. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18, no. 3 (2013):
83–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2013.834666.
Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, translated
by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
Esposito, Roberto. Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics,
translated by Rhiannon N. Welch. New York, NY: Fordham University
Press, 2013.
Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human.
Hall, Sarah. The Carhullan Army. London: Faber and Faber, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus.” Critical Inquiry 47,
no. S2 (2021): S68–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/711439.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture
15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
Moelling, Karin. Viruses: More Friends than Foes. Hackensack, NJ: World
Scientific, 2016.
Morrall, Clare. When the Floods Came. Edinburgh: Sceptre, 2015.
Morton, Timothy. “Deconstruction and/as Ecology.” In The Oxford Handbook
of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 291–319. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014.
95

Pollard, Katherine. “What Makes Us Human.” Scientific American 300, no. 5
(2009): 44–9.
Rymann, Geoff. The Child Garden, or, a Low Comedy. London: Unwin, 1990.
Sagan, Dorion. “Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity.” In Incorporations,
edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 362–85. New York, NY:
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Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
06
16
Part II
Pathogenic Temporalities
26
36
3
Viral Temporalities
Literatures of Disease and
Posthuman Conceptions of Time
Ruth Clemens and Max Casey
In “Remembering the Historical Present,” Harry Harootunian argues

that, before the end of the Cold War in the United States, a certain
framing of time had developed. This new conception of temporality was
tied to modernity and saw the creation of the sense of a unitary time
moving linearly and progressively towards an “increasing perfection or,
with capitalism, even development everywhere.”1 Harootunian describes
an imagined societal progress narrative which, he argues, works to con-
ceal the temporal reality of “non- contemporaneous contemporary”:
“a present filled with traces of different moments and temporalities,
weighted with sediments.”2 This non-contemporaneous contemporary
is characterised by phenomenological differences in speeds, scales,
directions, and mass, which nonetheless coexist. Harootunian argues
that this non-contemporaneous contemporary became obvious in light of
Hurricane Katrina, when
the media immediately discovered the existence of a Third World

within the midst of the United States… . In no time at all, an act of
nature was able to easily rip off the veneer of the present to reveal
an enduring and deep-seated historic unevenness … instead of the
homogenous time associated with both capital and the nation form.3
Here, Harootunian highlights the way that progress narratives work to

displace historical unevenness and elide other temporal structures. In this,
Harootunian borrows from generations of Marxist theorisations of the
temporality of modern capitalism, dating to at least Walter Benjamin,
where progress narratives are an ideological mechanism used to displace
the existence of separate temporalities existing alongside each other.
While Harootunian and other critics, such as David Harvey (1990) and
Lauren Berlant (2011), provide excellent analyses of the temporalities of
modern capitalism that allow us to understand its logics and structures,
they often fall short of situating nonhuman agency in such structures. The
coexisting temporal differences of non-contemporaneous contemporan-
eity extend, and are located, beyond the level of the species or society. It
is significant that Harootunian’s own example of what belied capitalist
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-6
46
64 Ruth Clemens and Max Casey

time structures was a so-called “act of nature”4: the geological event of
Hurricane Katrina. Already, the significance of scales, forces, and matter
beyond the human become foregrounded, whether Harootunian means to
do this or not. Via a similar process, the “act of nature” of Katrina forces
a reconfiguration of time, revealing the posthuman realities underlying
capitalist temporal systems at the same time as notions of human(ist)
agency and sovereignty are shattered. In such acts of nature, the reality
of forces and entanglements within and beyond the human is revealed.
In her article, “Anti-Catastrophic Time,” Claire Colebrook provides a
framework for understanding how humanist capitalism reacts to the tem-
poralities of catastrophic change present in the modern world. She argues
that in humanist conceptions of catastrophic time there is an “exclusive
disjunction” where “the future is merely our already existing catastrophic
present or a nostalgically orientalist conception of a timeless indigenous
other.”5 We can think beyond this exclusive disjunction “by way of a
time that is multilinear,” which Colebrook positions as the “inclusive
disjunction.”6 This multilinearity consists of multiple coexisting yet
incompossible temporalities operating at different speeds, directions,
vectors, and scales.7 Following Colebrook, in this chapter we are interested
in how “it is possible to recognise both the thoroughly ‘human’ nature
of the sense ‘we’ make of the world, while also striving to think beyond
what has (up until now) counted as human temporality.”8 As such, we
propose the concept of viral temporality to describe what happens when
there is a colliding or unfolding of these temporal disjunctions: In illness,
to name one of the phenomena caused by the human–pathogen inter-
action, humanist linear time collides with nonhuman, cellular, pathogenic,
and epidemiological temporal framings. Like Harootunian’s example of
Hurricane Katrina as revealing the non-contemporaneous contemporary,
illness too is an “act of nature,” albeit on a different scale. Illness fits
into current conceptualisations of the catastrophic and temporally dis-
junctive. The time of illness seems incompatible with humanist temporal
linearity, and thus experience of it must be rendered into a strict tem-
poral line through narrative structuring, in order for the temporal dis-
junction to be resolved. However, this conceptualisation of time ignores
the complexities and multiplicities behind the inclusive disjunction—the
existence of multiple nonhuman temporalities existing within, alongside,
and beyond the human revealed in the human–pathogen interaction. We
situate ourselves within the lineage of critiques of humanist temporality
in the modern age from Nietzsche to Bergson to Benjamin. At the same
time, we understand that these critiques must be expanded to account for
the multi-scalar, multi-agential, and multispecies temporal encounters,
relations, and entanglements that have come to the fore in recent years.
The posthuman implications of this temporal disjunction are explored in
this chapter, where we consider how the human–pathogen relation brings
forth viral temporality. We present this temporal framing through an
analysis of the 1925 essay “On Being Ill” by Virginia Woolf and the 1999
56
Viral Temporalities 65
poem “Fourteen Days in Quarantine” by Tory Dent. Via this analysis of
Anglophone illness writing, we argue that humanist temporalities and
viral temporalities exist concurrently but disjunctively.
An intervention in the study of illness writing through an analysis of
human–pathogen interaction is an important and, indeed, timely one, for
a number of reasons. Criticism in the medical humanities has up until
now tended to centre the humanist subject and linear time, which are
presented as co-constitutive of one another. Theorists from the med-
ical humanities have often argued for a correlation between autono-
mous identity as a coherent representation of subjectivity and a sense
of linear temporality through which this representation can be mediated
or situated. This linear humanist time, which forms half of Colebrook’s
inclusive disjunction, is often presupposed as a positive: This is the time-
line of recovery, while at the same time being the recoverable object
of recovery. This is in many ways an outcome of the popularity of the
narrative turn in the medical humanities, most exemplified by the work of
Arthur Frank. Frank argues that “[s]‌tories do not simply describe the self;
they are the self’s medium of being.”9 He further states that such stories
require a sense of coherent temporality, meaning they must contain “a
past that leads into a present that sets in place a foreseeable future.”10
Serious illness though can endanger this sense of a foreseeable future, as
the body is threatened by forces outside of its control. In Frank’s frame-
work, illness leaves the person suffering a “narrative wreck,” in which the
temporality of their life’s progression has been disrupted and so, there-
fore, has their very ability to narrativise it coherently: “The illness story is
wrecked because its present is not what the past was supposed to lead up
to, and the future is scarcely thinkable.”11 Frank’s framework, like many
in the medical humanities, is deeply indebted to humanist philosophy.
As Angela Woods argues, this generic framework “promotes a specific
model of the self –as an agentic, authentic, autonomous storyteller …
whose stories reflect and (re)affirm a sense of enduring, individual iden-
tity.”12 The subject imagined is autonomous and is either in agential con-
trol of their futures, or is a “narrative wreck” and must reconceptualise
the self in order to reaffirm this humanist subject. This linear/wreck
narratological binary has concurrences with Colebrook’s conceptualisa-
tion of the exclusive disjunction of catastrophic time. On the one hand,
different temporalities that fall out of the linear/wreck binary are not
accounted for; and on the other, this framing ignores the reality of disease
as a co-species phenomenon of multiple enmeshed agencies on multiple
spatio-temporal scales. In our analysis, we ask which temporal frames can
emerge when the humanist sense of self-sovereignty, in which the concep-
tion of the self is aligned with linear narrativisation, is imagined alongside
disjunctive pathogenic timeframes. Following this, we are interested in
how to engage with the loss of humanist sovereignty and concurrent dis-
ruption of capitalist temporality seen in interspecies entanglement in an
affirmative and multiply situated (albeit not always optimistic) manner.
6

The disruptive relationship between capitalist-humanist framings of
time and illness, sickness, and disease has already been well theorised.13
Situating ourselves among this pre- existing scholarship, we identify
viral temporality as a disruption to capitalist-humanist chronology or,
as Elizabeth Freeman terms it, “chrononormativity.”14 This disruption is
caused by an affective and material surge of an interspecies entanglement
between human and pathogen. This viral temporality has had widely
recognised repercussions in the recent past and, indeed, the present day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated viral temporalities across the
globe, with disruptions to the chrononormative calendar of the working
day and week, the time of holidays, festive time, and social time. Indeed,
perhaps the most multi- scalar effect of the ongoing COVID- 19 pan-
demic is how the virus engenders an upheaval of human(ist) structures
of time. This viral temporality has reconfigured the experience of time
with disorientating repercussions: Time has slowed down for many while
simultaneously speeding up for others, or we may experience both accel-
eration and deceleration of different temporal scales at the same time.
Of course, the temporal shifts of viral temporality are entangled with
chrononormative social organisations: Many carers, parents, disabled
people, shift workers, and key workers have experienced qualitatively
different kinds of temporal lurch than those with the possibility to work
without disruption from a safe, healthy, and secure home office. In add-
ition to this, the viral temporality of the COVID-19 pandemic has given
us a proliferation of new public metrics of time. Previous units of time
have been replaced by temporal units of incubation, isolation, quar-
antine, lockdown, immunity, and recovery—in fact, the ‘long’ of ‘long
COVID,’ the colloquial name for post-COVID syndrome, is a temporal
lengthiness first and foremost. In a similar way to Harootunian’s example
of Katrina, this historical- social-
natural event illustrates how illness
reveals the human–pathogen relations that are always already present in
our embodiment in the world. The human–pathogen relation itself can be
conceptualised in pre-existing posthumanist frameworks as a co-species
entanglement, an intra-action, or a site of becoming.15 In any case, the
messy everyday realities of co-species habitation within and among the
human body at different organic scales are revealed in illness while they
are usually ignored by capitalist temporal frameworks that engender
the autonomous sovereign human subject. However, while this norma-
tive state of being autonomous and pathogen-free is pervasive, it is not
an adequate description of our being in the world. Instead, we turn to
critical posthumanist theory to describe the realities of how agency is
distributed across and among matter and species which are caught in
different degrees of relation.
Our understanding of how the human– pathogen interaction shifts
humanist narrative frameworks versus viral temporal frameworks in
many ways maps onto the distinction established by Donna J. Haraway
in Staying with the Trouble between systems that are autopoietic (that
76
is, self-
organising) and systems that are sympoietic (that is, collab-
oratively organising). Quoting M. Beth Dempster, Haraway portrays
autopoietic systems as “ ‘self-producing’ autonomous units ‘with self-
defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally con-
trolled, homeostatic, and predictable,’ ” whereas sympoietic systems
are “collectively-producing … [and] do not have self-defined spatial or
temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among
components.”16 As we established earlier, the presentation of linear
humanist time requires the construction of an agential subject that can
then influence that time’s progression. When human self-sovereignty is
questioned, as in a sympoietic system, this framing of subjectivity and
temporality is undermined. In the frameworks of critics like Frank, it is
the ability of subjects to narrativise themselves that allows them to con-
struct what appear as “self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries” and
the affect of self-sovereignty and control. On the other hand, we want to
think of illness as a sympoietic process that is collectively produced by
the entanglement of various different matters, species, and forms of life,
and where temporality is engendered outside of delimited and ostensibly
agential processes.
Before we begin, it is important to clarify that a viral temporality is not
something conceived or positioned in opposition to humanist capitalist
time. Colebrook has highlighted how attempts to conceive of a nonlinear,
nonhumanist, or non-capitalist temporality can often fall into a dialect-
ical opposition. Alternatives to linear humanist time fall into a binary
where the future is “either a more perfect fulfilment of our own line of
time, or a quasi-orientalist imagining of a cyclic, mythic, eternal natural
rhythm.”17 Both of these, however, are structured around the dialectics
of capitalism, and cannot conceive of different times not bound within
its frames. Rather than this oppositional framework, then, we want to
posit that viral temporalities create an inclusive disjunction where “time
is nonlinear and brutally linear.”18 This means the experience of viral
temporalities is not a different temporality, but instead one where sim-
ultaneous temporalities exist alongside each other. Often, humanistic
temporality is still present but deconstructed, or held onto as a form ver-
ging on cruel optimism, where what is desired has become an obstacle to
one’s own flourishing.19 Indeed, what is important in this framing is the
ways that the time of viral temporalities is not simply an anti-humanist
time, because the genres and phantasies that structure humanist time are
still most often active and constitutive of how those who are ill experi-
ence time. As we previously noted, the subjective experiences and effects
of the viral temporalities of COVID-19 differ along human(ist) lines of
difference such as age, citizenship, race, gender, and class. However, by
deprivileging autonomous subjectivity and linear time as the a priori ‘nat-
ural’ way to experience temporality, and instead seeing it as one tempor-
ality active within a multiplicity of different simultaneous times, we can
trace how different temporal frames are active within the same space.
86

In this chapter, we thus develop a theory of ‘viral temporality’ that
accounts for the multifaceted ways that disease, in its multispecies
entanglements, creates different structures of time that are not simply
quantifiable, discrete, or striving for linearity. In order to substantiate this
theory of viral temporalities, we will analyse two illness texts from different
parts of the twentieth century. First, we consider autobiographical litera-
ture from the AIDS epidemic in the USA to analyse the experience of the
human–virus entanglement, as illness and pandemic force those affected
to reconceptualise temporality as well as their agency and subjectivity.
We will analyse Tory Dent’s 1999 poem “Fourteen Days in Quarantine,”
taken from the collection HIV, Mon Amour, which narrates her experi-
ence of HIV/AIDS while she spends a fortnight in respiratory isolation
at New York Hospital. After this, we will turn to Virginia Woolf’s 1925
essay “On Being Ill.” Here Woolf discusses the role of disease and illness
in literary production and the bodily and temporal transformations that
such experiences create. Despite the temporal separation of 74 years, the
texts share a lot of similarities. Firstly, the authors share the position of
being white Anglo-American women in their early 40s accounting for
their illness. Secondly, both of these accounts foreground the experience
of illness as one that disrupts the progressive temporal frames that we are
accustomed to in capitalist realism. Situating these accounts in this way
allows us also to acknowledge the context, parameters, and limitations of
these accounts within their concurrences. It is important to note here that
both Dent and Woolf were white middle-or upper-middle-class women
in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, and they both
had access to the better parts of their contemporary healthcare systems
and, to a more limited extent, education systems. As such, the portrayal
of viral temporality in these texts gives an account of some, but not all,
of the multiple non-contemporaneous contemporaries which characterise
times of illness for different people, groups, and societies. We believe that
viral temporalities can have methodological usefulness in a transnational
perspective, but any account of viral temporalities must also be highly
situated, both in terms of the material circumstances it analyses and in
terms of the structures of futurity that exist in different cultural envir-
onments. Given this, our analysis is situated within our respective areas
of study, though we invite other scholars to think how viral temporal-
ities can exist and promulgate in contexts outside of those seen in Anglo-
American women’s writing.
Quarantine
Dent tested positive for HIV in 1988 at the age of 30, having contracted
it from an ex-boyfriend who had haemophilia and who subsequently
received HIV from a blood transfusion.20 “Fourteen Days in Quarantine”
is a narrative poem that recounts the 14 days Dent spent in respiratory
isolation following an allergic reaction to her tuberculosis medication.
96
She suffers from hives for the first few days, and after the allergic reac-
tion subsides, she is given pentamidine, a drug for treating tuberculosis as
well as pneumocystis that often causes extreme nausea and drowsiness.
Disability studies scholar Ally Day argues that Dent uses “her female-
bodied experience [of HIV/AIDS] in order to queer conceptualizations of
self and other … [in a way that] enables a different kind of life beyond
the stainless steel interventions of hospitals.”21 In Day’s reading, Dent’s
writing on illness does not simply attempt to resolve her identity with a
linear and normative framing of time, but instead undermines any attempt
to create a coherent and autonomous sense of self. Day uses formalist
analysis to argue that the form of Dent’s poetry—its density, its intertext-
uality, its “leakiness”—mediates her embodied experience as a woman
living with HIV/AIDS. We aim to develop this reading further and look
to how Dent presents a dense present where the heteronormative and
humanist time frames are still present, but in which the speaker struggles
to find an alternative. This, we argue, makes it an interesting case for an
analysis of viral temporalities. We see the speaker’s attachment to linear
time in Dent’s work as an opportunity to chart the ambivalences and
complexities of these posthuman temporalities, and how they simultan-
eously proliferate and refuse incorporation.
We see this attachment to conventional autonomous identity and
linear time very clearly in one section near the end of the poem, where
the speaker asserts that
What’s most terrifying about sickness is its fascist self-containment,

the seizing of the body by itself, the warring efforts toward redemp-
tion of selfhood and its defilement, the defeat produced by somatic
betrayal.
The ally of my anatomy could no longer be trusted. I thought
I was more than a display of carnage though I’m still sentimentally
attached to it as if to a person rather than a decoy.22
Here, illness is rendered as an experience not of engagement with exter-

iority, but with intense self-containment. The body is seized “by itself,”
not by something external to it. Not only does the speaker describe illness
as a form of self-containment, but the experience is described using reli-
gious imagery. “Redemption” recalls the ways in which illness literature
during this period was often concerned with religious ideas of redemp-
tion.23 “Defilement” also has religious connotations, indicating some-
thing that has been rendered “morally foul or polluted.”24 This sort of
narrative of deliverance, where the self can be redeemed, presumes a sort
of autonomous subject who is individually responsible and therefore
agential. Connoted by this defilement are the ways that the normative
moral structures of the humanist body— as well as the body itself—
have been contaminated by the virus. At the same time, this distinctly
humanist “I” persists as a detached poetic voice passing moral judgement
07

as it narrates a disembodied yet concurrently embodied phenomenology
of illness, creating a paradox which undermines the Cartesian split.
Religious narratives are common in illness writing, given they provide
narrative frameworks where actions can take on an inherent purpose
and meaning.25 Anne Hunsaker Hawkins further notes in Reconstructing
Illness that the framing of illness as “a battle between two opposed forces”
is indebted to religious framings of morality and is extremely common in
Western illness writing.26 Further, tying the defeat to the body, to the
“somatic,” would work to preserve the idea of some aspect of the self
as existing separately from the body that could be redeemed. Religious
redemption narratives are thus a common way that the breaking of fanta-
sies of autonomous identity caused by illness is mediated and understood.
From a critical posthumanist perspective, though, these forces are less
opposing than they are constitutive of an inclusive disjunction created by
the human–pathogen relation.
This religious framing, though, is undermined in the second half of
this excerpt. We read how the speaker “thought [she] was more than a
display of carnage.” This indicates how illness has not so much changed
who she is than it has revealed what she always was: this display of car-
nage. It has revealed what humanist framings of subjectivity attempt to
suppress, that is, the body’s inherent fallibility, its anonymity, and its
messy open entanglements with other bodies and organisms. “Carnage”
suggests the messy aftermath of a violent scene, with the coherent units of
individual bodies reduced to an abject status of unidentifiable collective
matter; carcasses in disarray. Gained in the recognition of this messy
carnal entanglement is the speaker’s sense of loss of bodily autonomy that
accompanies illness. This is presented as a loss of individualistic exist-
ence, and as a form of death accompanying this. We read that “the ally of
my anatomy could no longer be trusted.” Who or what is this ally? Is it
the speaker’s sense of her identity? In which case, she has reversed what,
according to Frank, one would expect from illness writing, where illness
is often seen as a state where the body can no longer be relied on.27 We
propose that the ally of her anatomy is humanist normative discourses
more broadly, the scripts and genres highlighted by Harootunian that
work to give bodies meaning and orientation in the present, and that for
Freeman establish chrononormative linear temporal frameworks. This
critique is further seen in how the speaker claims to have been attached
to a “decoy” instead of a “person.” We see this person/decoy dichotomy
as articulating how humanist and capitalist structures engender and
rely upon a coherent sense of individual identity in relation to a fore-
seeable futurity that guarantees the maintenance of such structures by
masking their inherent fallibility through systems of deferral (as argued
for in Colebrook; Freeman; Edelman). What Dent’s poetry foregrounds
then is the ways that illness forces a confrontation with the phantasmatic
imagining of the autonomous sovereign subject.
17
Importantly, the speaker is “still sentimentally attached to it.” That
“it” we interpret to be her identity as an autonomous subject, and it is in
this precise ambivalence that we see the influence of viral temporalities.
The speaker in many ways acts as the Americans Harootunian described
hearing about Hurricane Katrina: suddenly shocked and perturbed to find
another temporality that belies their previous understanding and experi-
ence of time. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, cultural representations
of the experience of the virus foreground the sense of being tempor-
ally transformed or existing along with multiple temporal scales. In Paul
Monette’s famous AIDS memoir, Borrowed Time (1988), he famously
referred to the day he learnt his partner was HIV positive in March 1985
as “the day we began to live on the moon.”28 Here we see the sense of
occupying a space radically alien and separate from others, that is, out-
side of normative socio-temporal functioning. As Ronja Tripp-Bodola
notes in her chapter (this volume), coincident with the HIV/AIDS epi-
demic in the United States was a growth in cultural representations of
the figure of the vampire, a creature renowned for its temporal undecid-
ability and inability to exist among human(ist) chronologies. On the sur-
face, there is very little here that is “affirmative.” At the same time, we
want to substantiate viral temporalities by showing how the speaker in
this poem records the ambivalences of interpenetration with nonhuman
forces.
Further than this, there is still an irony in this idea of self-containment
caused by illness. HIV/AIDS is ‘viral’ in a way which describes its activity
at the same time as its materiality—if people were always self-contained
it, and no other virus, could spread. It is further significant to look for a
posthuman analysis in a poetic rendering of a quarantine room, a space
deliberately built to prevent viral entanglement on a cellular level and
nonetheless constituted by agential forces of the virus. The quarantine
room is a consequence of viral entanglement, and its use adapts to the
temporality of disease. As we will see, this temporal frame in Dent’s
poetry is isolating because viral entanglements create spaces that are out-
side of the linear humanist time through which we understand conven-
tional genres of reciprocity and intimacy. We shall explore this more by
analysing another section of the poem in which she discusses the experi-
ence of quarantine. Dent describes the experience of her first few days of
allergic reaction as:
The days succeeded then in a condensed formula of alternate Darkness

and light that make up twenty-four hours as I waited for my medi-
cation, A dose every three hours: Benadryl, prednisone, shots of epi-
nephrine, Atarax While the room reverberated a cryptic quiet, my
bygone and would-be world held in abeyance beyond the gridded
glass, where I in an incubated state of sorts watched with voyeuristic
intensity the heads that only in profile would pass.29
27

In this excerpt, time becomes structured around a “condensed for-
mula of alternate/darkness and light” while she waits for medication.
The present here has a succession, but there is no progression; the days
are “condensed” both in the sense that the pain caused by the allergies
gives the feeling of a dense present, and in the sense that time has been
reduced to a simplistic “formula” of day and night, with no sense of it
leading towards a future that is different from this. Here the clock and
its hours of daytime and night-time have no agency; instead, it is the
rhythmic shifting caused by the sensory and bodily input of light and
darkness. The lack of control the speaker describes, rendered in the inten-
sity of the atmosphere, leads to this sense of an unending present. As
in the work of Brian Massumi, affective intensity in the present leads
to these “static-temporal” states “of suspense,” where the conventional
linear form of time becomes interrupted.30 One experience of temporality
mediated here, then, is suspension and pause: a sense that temporality is
cyclical ‘and’ unmoving. This indicates the point of movement or inver-
sion between the exclusive and the inclusive disjunction of catastrophic
time posited by Colebrook.
However, we can see how the speaker presents other temporalities
in how she describes herself as being in an “incubated state of sorts.”31
Incubation recalls the imagery of new life being cared for by another
body before birth; but at the same time its implications in this con-
text are different, given that HIV/AIDS is often described in terms of
its long incubation period. Randy Shilts’ early history of the AIDS epi-
demic in the United States, And the Band Played On (1987), persistently
dramatises doctors and scientists attempting to grasp the length of the
incubation period for HIV/AIDS. Here in Dent’s poetry, birthing imagery
is coupled with imagery associated with the growth and cultivation of
HIV/AIDS, a disease seen in medical, social, and cultural environments at
the time as a terminal condition. At various points in HIV, Mon Amour,
the speaker calls HIV “dead, enemy children,” “the dead child inside
me,” and describes how “Enemy children, you yanked my baby away
from me.”32 While there is much to be said about this imagery, for now
we want to use it to understand how she relates the inclusive disjunc-
tion to viral temporality. The imagery of birthing allows the speaker
to perform the desire for restoration or rebirth following her quaran-
tine. The speaker is temporally isolated, her world is “held in abeyance”
and “bygone,” but the use of birth imagery articulates the possibility
for a new version of the self. As queer theorists have argued, the image
of the child has long been associated with heteronormative, humanist
and capitalist conceptions of temporality and progressive teleology.33
But while she writes of a rebirth, this imagery is implicated with HIV/
AIDS—with the disease’s own incubation in her body, with its personi-
fication as “dead enemy children”—so fundamentally that the speaker’s
own articulation of the self, her own attempt to imagine her life’s progres-
sion, cannot be made separately from her disease’s progression. Here, the
37
experience of entanglement with disease challenges the speaker’s ability
to articulate herself as a humanist subject. In this instance, the articula-
tion of the subject is co-constitutive with her disease, with its progression
through her body, creating a temporality of ‘incubation’ concurrent with
chrononormative time. This temporality of incubation fits uncomfort-
ably with Massumi’s sense of “static-temporal” suspense. As Colebrook
describes, it constitutes an inclusive disjunction, where stasis exists along-
side several virtual progressions and temporal experiences.
Earlier we discussed how disease is presented in Dent’s poetry as an
isolating force which engenders a sense of self-containment. We see this
here too. This world is “bygone”—indicating something that existed in a
past time, or something deceased or departed. She is temporally exterior
to this world now, to the extent that looking at it she becomes a voyeur
in a one-sided relationship. At the same time that this world is “bygone,”
it is also “would-be,” speaking to other possibilities for the speaker’s life.
This is precisely the incompossibility of anti-catastrophic time of which
Colebrook writes. There is an irony in the sense that the speaker’s sense
of autonomy and sovereignty is undermined, as seen with the incubation
imagery, at the same time as she is presented as isolated and separate from
everything else. This highlights the multivalent ways that our concurrent
experiences of reciprocity, entanglement, and intimacy are facilitated
around the phantasmatic structures of humanist linear time. As queer
theorists have shown, not being able to live consistently within the tem-
poral conventions of capitalist time facilitates new modes of engaging
with others, and different forms of bonding and kinship.34 Here, the quar-
antine room’s specific temporal requirements have (literally and meta-
phorically) isolated Dent’s speaker from the world around her. At the
same time, she is intensely present and situated within multiple human–
pathogen entanglements (human–HIV–allergen—the very entanglement
which precipitated her isolation in the first place). Viral temporalities, by
undermining the imagining of the sovereign humanist subject, undermine
the ability of people to engage in the genres of intimacy that humanist
time sustains, leading to this seemingly contradictory sense of entangled
solipsism. In this way, the human–pathogen relation is revealed pre-
cisely through the inclusive yet disjunctive temporalities which pierce the
experience of illness.
On Being Ill
Dent’s poem, then, performs a series of ambivalences where a linear
time is represented as interpenetrated by other times, times that
appear static or that progress in directions that do not facilitate lib-
eral human subjectivity. Moving on to Virginia Woolf’s work, we see
similar processes occur. These processes similarly offer an insight into
the framing of illness, which accounts for viral temporalities. “On Being
Ill” was published in the January 1926 issue of The New Criterion, a
47

London- based modernist little magazine of literature and criticism
edited by T. S. Eliot. Woolf opens her short essay with a description of
how there are few to no “[n]‌ovels … devoted to influenza; epic poems
to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache.”35 She observes how
the English language “can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tra-
gedy of Lear, [but] has no words for the shiver and the headache.”36 We
identify a link here to what we described earlier via Dent’s poetry. If
humanist subjectivity must be engendered through narrative forms that
construct linear temporality, the fact that illness undermines this subject
means it escapes conventional or normative narrative framing. As Woolf
writes, literature’s concern has traditionally been “with the mind,” “the
body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and
clear.”37 Illness undermines this humanist fantasy precisely because it
disrupts the perspective of the mind’s self-sovereignty: Illness reveals that
the body is not simply a transparent surface through which the soul
may engage with the world. Rather, through illness we see that the body
is actively constitutive of the world. Illness is presented as an experi-
ence that belies this sense of the mind’s sovereignty, that foregrounds
matter and entanglement, and therefore explains its perceived absence
in narrative form. Indeed, Woolf’s claim that illness has not been suffi-
ciently narrated but ‘ought to be’ disruptively echoes what Frank called
the “narrative wreck” of illness writing, where the inability to construct
a linear temporal life narrative leaves one outside of the conventional
subject formation. Woolf fields a criticism of writing about illness: “[T]
he public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot”38 des-
pite the actual tensions and significance of the experience of a bout of
flu. Central to Woolf’s quandary, then, is how to present and understand
the temporality of illness when it seems to confound traditional narrative
forms which require the autonomous agential subject presented as a
mind transparently viewing the world.
We see several different methods for describing the viral temporality of
illness. Woolf describes illness as a “beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery.”39
Disease is thus described as a script, but an ancient one separate from the
western literary tradition. This further connects with Woolf’s description
of illness as something which disrupts notions of civilisation and pro-
gress. She describes the slowness of illness, its different temporal frame,
and how
civilisation points to a different goal; if the cities of the Middle West

are to blaze with electric light, Mr. Insull ‘must keep twenty or thirty
engagements every day of his working months’—and then, what
place is there for the tortoise and the theorbo?40
Illness is something out of place in the world of the “electric light,” of the
tightly regimented timetables of modern capitalism. But by being rendered
as hieroglyphics, Woolf portrays illness as not only old or ancient, but in
57
some sense ‘obsolete,’ or at least obsolete within the temporal framing of
time within humanist capitalist modernity. This gives us a sense of the
different temporal frameworks that illness engenders: Viral temporalities
evoke other times, ones which exist concurrently despite their different
timescales. This is the inclusive disjunction.
Woolf considers those who bear the responsibility of caring for the ill:
“Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures,
women for the most part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by
side with anarchy and newness).”41 If we accept Alison Kafer’s claim that
our conventional notions of able-bodiedness are defined by the ability to
work,42 then laggards and failures would describe those who do not adhere
to the regimented workday of modern capitalism. Women are also seen
as representing simultaneously the obsolete, anarchy, and newness. The
cultural links between women, the figure of the mother, and the necessary
production of new human subjects within capitalist systems here also
cross back to the child/virus figuration mapped in Dent’s poem. Women
in this mode—associated with illness—enact a threefold representation of
the old, the destruction of the present, and the new. They represent tem-
poralities that stretch back and ahead of the present moment. Woolf also
claims that there is “a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said,
truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.”43
Illness is connected to childishness, it is given a voice here as well as a
script: The human–pathogen interaction is agential in the power it has to
transform the subject’s speech. As Woolf claims, if all had sympathy for
the ill, “buildings would cease to rise, roads would peter out into grassy
tracks; there would be an end of music and of painting.”44 In many ways,
these descriptions show that illness represents everything the autonomous
capitalist subject defines itself against: femininity, childishness, obsoles-
cence, anarchy, failure, and slowness. These are all factors that restrict
the autonomous human subject’s progressive trajectory, that undermine
the phantasmatic structures through which individuals constitute them-
selves as such in the biopolitical social field.45 These descriptions con-
stitute the incompossible temporalities that Colebrook identifies, where
several different temporal frames are existing simultaneously even though
they are in contradiction with one another.
Woolf provides an extended metaphor for illness in the middle of her
essay. She writes that in times of sickness,
we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.

They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-
skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinter-
ested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to
look up—to look, for example, at the sky.46
Illness removes us from the “army of the upright” and disrupts its
humanist and capitalist temporal march of the clock. Instead, the ill
67

become “deserters,” not only out of capitalist time, but actively deserting
its cause. The information that follows gives multiple and disjunctive
conceptualisations of the time of illness. On the one hand, “we float with
the sticks on the stream,” indicating a benign experience of illness as a
slowness or a deceleration. This, though, is in tension with the following
description, where sickness leaves us “helter-skelter with the dead leaves
on the lawn.” As opposed to the image of slowness, “helter-skelter”
captures a disordered haste, a speed, and a chaos. These images create
another temporal incompossibility, where two conflicting experiences
of temporality exist alongside each other. Critically, both images pre-
sent an entanglement of agential forces: Whether floating with sticks, or
helter-skelter with leaves, one is not existing alone as an autonomous
subject but rather as a messy entanglement of matter and forces. This
is not portrayed as a loss or lack of agency tout court, and it is cer-
tainly not an ontological shift for which a future cannot be imagined or
narrativised. Woolf, however, does not portray this simply as a product
of illness; she described later how “with the heroism of the ant or the bee
… the army of the upright marches to battle.”47 This sense of collectivity
which humanist structures elide is present both in the sick and the well.
We saw this already with Dent, where illness renders her a “display of
carnage” which she thought she was “more than”: Posthuman entangle-
ments trouble conventional subject formation, the ability to render an
‘I’ as autonomous and separate from the surrounding environment. This
experience reveals the terrifying truth of illness: Autonomous subjectivity
is always already illusory, but its illusory nature becomes foregrounded
in illness. Woolf, however, offers a more affirmative conceptualisation of
this truth in her exploration of how to narrativise the human–pathogen
relation. This could be attributed to the qualitatively different matter of
Woolf’s relation with illness at this time compared to Dent’s. In her time of
isolation, as well as her HIV-positive status in a world full of stigma and
without a cure, Dent’s proximity to the human–pathogen relation exists
on a different scale of intimacy and temporality than Woolf’s. The experi-
ence of illness, then, both subverts humanist framings of subjectivity and
time, and reveals an inclusive disjunction of different times existing simul-
taneously alongside each other, by which the ill person is interpenetrated,
and which undermine conventional humanist autonomy. This experi-
ence, though, is portrayed as not exclusive to illness, but foregrounded in
the experience of illness.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have shown how human–pathogen entanglements
have the potential to create new posthuman temporalities. Our readings
of “Fourteen Days in Quarantine” and “On Being Ill” reveal the dual
ways in which these entanglements are posthuman. Firstly, the displace-
ment of the self by the cell is grounded in radically nonhuman—that
7
is, non- anthropocentric— interactions. Secondly, the new speeds and
scales of the human–pathogen entanglement disrupts linear humanist
metrics of time, thus becoming posthumanist. In this way, this frame-
work may offer a way of understanding the current temporal shifts
relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. The human–pathogen interaction
causes the expansion of multiple concurrent and entangled time frames
and agencies. This is viral temporality. Our analysis of two literary-
biographical texts illustrates the ways that co- species pathogenesis
creates new posthuman temporalities, and engenders different forms of
spatio-temporal entanglement with an environment. It is true that lin-
earity is maintained in humanist framings of time through the estab-
lishment of an autonomous subject with agency in the world for whom
the body exists as a transparent surface with little impact on individual
sovereignty. This is the temporality that sustains fantasies of not only
individual autonomy but capitalist social relations and progressive
narratives of futurity as well. Capitalist linear time suppresses entangle-
ment and the multitude of ways that experience is constituted outside of
our individual control. Illness undermines this experience of the world
because suddenly the body has lost its transparency and the affect of
self-sovereignty. The medical humanities provide models that perpetuate
the myth of the autonomous subject, presenting the individual as either
in autonomous control of their life or as a “narrative wreck.”48 Rather
than seeing those caught up in viral temporality either as autonomous
subjects or “narrative wrecks,” this chapter instead has worked to
explore the multiplicity of temporalities and subjectivities of human–
pathogen entanglements. This cartography of viral temporalities shows
that the human–pathogen interaction in causing the experience of illness
does not so much undermine human sovereignty as it reveals the societal
mechanisms through which the fantasies and affects of autonomous sub-
jectivity find their grounding. A focus on viral temporalities thus reveals
an inclusive disjunction where several, often-contradictory temporalities
exist alongside each other simultaneously. Critically though, viral tem-
poralities do not exist in opposition to capitalist linear time. Such a lin-
earity is simply one line of time existing among many.
We see the presence of linear humanist time with the poetry of
Dent, where the speaker undermines and deconstructs the sort of fan-
tasy structures through which humanist subjectivity is sustained, at the
same time that she remains “sentimentally attached to [them].”49 The
experience of viral temporalities, here, is presented as highly ambivalent:
Humanist linearity, static temporal states, the scheduled regimes of quar-
antine, the time of ‘incubation,’ implying both the possibility of rebirth
and the possibility of death, exist alongside each other. All of these times
pull the speaker in different directions, different lines of time and different
virtualities, but few of which seem desirable. The disjunction of times is
painful, as one becomes detached from the fantasy structures through
which futurity is conventionally sustained, and the logic of exclusion is
87

at risk of being reasserted in this way. These temporalities are positive
in the sense that they are not reduceable simply to capitalist time or its
dialectic opposition, but they are also messy, uncomfortable, unwanted,
and rarely optimistic. They also create a contradictory sense of contain-
ment, a sense that one is isolated from the world, which exists along-
side descriptions of anonymity and entanglement. In Woolf’s writing,
we see the inclusive disjunction engaged with on more affirmative terms,
where human–pathogen entanglement provides the opportunity for the
introduction of the new. As opposed to the accelerated progress of cap-
italist modernism, illness reflects femininity, childishness, obsolescence,
natural detritus, anarchy, failure, and slowness. These latter terms are
not contiguous, and do not provide an alternative temporality but sev-
eral virtual trajectories. For Woolf, illness must be explored as a topic
in cultural production because it has previously not sufficiently been
accounted for and yet has a great power, as we can see via multiple scales
and temporalities.
For further research, it is important to chart the reflexive ways that
capitalist time itself can incorporate and reterritorialise alternate tem-
poralities engendered by the human–pathogen interaction. This much
has become clear for most of us throughout 2020 and 2021. Indeed,
Woolf’s claim that there is not sufficient literature about illness became
outdated several decades later during the ‘memoir boom’ of the 1980s
and 1990s where a plentitude of personal narratives of illness were
published and consumed by the publics. What this demonstrates is that
illness should not be privileged in and of itself as a way of opening
up onto the inclusive disjunctions of time, given its experience can be
reterritorialised and made to adhere again to linear temporal frames.
Further, while we have framed a lot of our discussion around pro-
gressive narratives of capitalist futurity that were present throughout
the twentieth century, Colebrook aptly ponders in her article, “[d]‌oes
it make any sense to argue for nonlinear temporalities? Who, today,
would make a claim for the contrary –for teleology, destiny, fate,
proper progress towards ‘Man’s’ destined end?”50 The framing of pro-
gressive futurism in the Francis Fukuyama mode is in many ways obso-
lete in the present, so analyses of contemporary viral temporalities
must be attentive to the breakdown of collective Western futurity in
the present, and how that alters our experience of the inclusive dis-
junction of time. Further, our analysis has, as noted in the introduc-
tion, privileged the experience of white Anglo-American middle-class
women with access to healthcare. The situated nature of viral tempor-
alities makes the theory adaptable to a variety of different contexts,
and it is important to see how it emerges in different contexts. In out-
lining this cartography of viral temporality, we anticipate emergent
literatures of the transnational viral pandemic beginning in 2019 and,
we hope, offer a way of revealing the multi-scalar realities of viral tem-
poralities yet-to-come.
97
Notes
1 Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry
33, no. 2 (2007), 481.
2 Harootunian, 476.
3 Harootunian, 475.
4 Harootunian, 475.
5 Claire Colebrook, “Anti-Catastrophic Time,” New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 92 (2017), 107.
6 Colebrook, 107.
7 Colebrook, 116.
8 Colebrook, 102.
9 Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 53.
10 Frank, 54.
11 Frank, 54–5.
12 Angela Woods, “The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical
Humanities,” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (2011): 75.
13 Cf. Taraneh Fazeli, “Notes for ‘Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against
Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying’ in Conversation with the Canaries,”
Temporary Arts Review, May 26, 2016.
14 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
15 See Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota
University Press, 2007); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007); and Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2013), respectively.
16 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
17 Colebrook, 102.
18 Colebrook, 116.
19 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
20 Tory Dent, “The Poet and the Poem: Tory Dent,” interview by Grace Cavalieri,
The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress, January 16, 2002.
21 Ally Day, “Chronic Poetics, Chronic Illness: Reading Tory Dent’s HIV Poetry
through Disability Poetics and Feminist Bioethics,” Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 88.
22 Tory Dent, HIV, Mon Amour (New York, NY: Sheep Meadow Press,
1999), 10.
23 Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1998), 24.
24 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “defilement,” accessed June 28, 2020.
25 Hawkins, 48.
26 Hawkins, 19.
27 Frank, 55.
28 Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (New York, NY: Avon
Books, 1990), 2.
29 Dent, HIV, Mon Amour, 3.
30 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 86.
08

32 Dent, HIV, Mon Amour, 65, 59, 66.
33 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke
34 Cf. Judith [Jack] Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005);
Edelman; and Freeman.
35 Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” The New Criterion 4, no. 1 (1926), 32.
36 Woolf, 33.
37 Woolf, 32.
38 Woolf, 33.
39 Woolf, 35.
40 Woolf, 36. Tortoises and theorbos here mean objects meant to comfort the ill.
41 Woolf, 35.
42 Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2013).
43 Woolf, 36.
44 Woolf, 35.
45 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London:
Picador, 2010).
46 Woolf, 37.
47 Woolf, 38.
48 Frank, 54.
50 Colebrook, 108.
References
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press,
2007.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Colebrook, Claire. “Anti-Catastrophic Time.” New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 92 (2017): 102–19.
Day, Ally. “Chronic Poetics, Chronic Illness: Reading Tory Dent’s HIV Poetry
through Disability Poetics and Feminist Bioethics.” Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 83–98.
Dent, Tory. HIV, Mon Amour. New York, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1999.
Dent, Tory. “The Poet and the Poem: Tory Dent.” By Grace Cavalieri. The Poet
and the Poem from the Library of Congress, January 16, 2002.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke
Fazeli, Taraneh. “Notes for ‘Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against
Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying’ in Conversation with the Canaries.”
Temporary Arts Review, 2016. Accessed December 7, 2020. https://temporary
artreview.com/notes-for-sick-time-sleepy-time-crip-time-against-capitalisms-
temporal-bullying-in-conversation-with-the-canaries/
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Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell.
London: Picador, 2010.
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Halberstam, Judith [Jack]. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University
Press, 2007.
Harootunian, Harry. “Remembering the Historical Present.” Critical Inquiry 33,
no. 2 (2007): 471–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/513523.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography. West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1998.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2013.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–
109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354446.
Monette, Paul. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. New York, NY: Avon
Books, 1990.
Woods, Angela. “The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical
Humanities.” Medical Humanities 37, no. 2 (2011): 73–8. https://doi.org/
10.1136/medhum-2011-010045.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” The New Criterion 4, no. 1 (1926): 32–45.
28
4
Pathogenic Hugs and
Ambiguous Times
The Joy Epidemic in Gumball
André Vasques Vital
Introduction
Animated and fantasy narratives, following their own paths, are pre-
sent in debates on different contemporary themes through the subver-
sion of reality. That subversion is enabled by radically imagined scenarios
that challenge and impact viewers’ visions of the world. Consequently,
although those narratives are situated in the broad political, social,
cultural, and environmental circumstances of the time in which they
were created, they also depict anxieties and fears materialised in the
speculations, questionings, and different ways of seeing and thinking
about the world that permeate the stories.1
Some historians are attuned to the potential of animated and fantasy
television series, as well as pop culture in general, as a source for ana-
lysing and understanding the aspirations, anxieties, and perceptions of an
era.2 Moreover, there are studies that analyse how events of the past are
narrated and communicated, as well as the historical meanings that are
constructed or suggested by science fiction and fantasy series. In the latter
case, it is also possible to see television series as a space of contention
and dispute over the role of human and nonhuman agency in historical
processes.3
This is the case, for example, for the fantasy and science fiction
animated series Steven Universe (2013– 2020), where the problem of
the nonhuman agency is clearly visible in the narrative surrounding the
character Lapis Lazuli. A series produced and broadcast by the Cartoon
Network television channel, Steven Universe was notable for breaking
gender norms through themes related to identity, sexuality, and queer
representations. Lapis Lazuli, however, is a character with broader
implications. With her hydrokinetic abilities, Lapis Lazuli is a water
witch, an alien possessing a science ability regarded as occult; through
her fluid and disruptive presence, she produces dramatic transformations,
disrupting norms, altering politics, and heightening anxieties wherever
she goes.4 The relationship between Lapis Lazuli and Peridot (a scientist)
shows a history between modern science and water, suggesting a pro-
found disparity between the expectations of permanence, control, and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-7
38
Pathogenic Hugs and Ambiguous Times 83

management emerging from the binary ontology of Cartesian realism and
the non-linear, transitory, and dissolutive nature of water.5 In that case,
human agency is presented in a decentralised way, in a universe formed
by pluralities of forms of existence that have fundamental ambivalences:
As a water elemental, Lapis Lazuli is creative death in an infinite suicidal
spiral, enabling the gestation of life and impermanences in time and space.
Following a path similar to the above example, this chapter ana-
lyses the emergence of infectious disease epidemics through their ability
to transform power relations in society, as well as reconfigure notions
of time and history, based on a case presented in the animated series
The Amazing World of Gumball (from now on, mentioned as Gumball)
(2011–2019). Gumball is an award-winning6 British and American co-
production in the fantasy genre, created by the French-British director
Benjamin “Ben” Bocquelet, and produced and broadcast by the Cartoon
Network television channel. The episode “The Joy,” which aired on 19
June 2014,7 tells the story of a mysterious joy epidemic which originated
in a hug given by Richard Watterson to his sons Gumball and Darwin.
The disease, which seems to affect the nervous system of the victims,
later spreads rapidly among the students at Elmore Junior High School,
through physical contact that expresses affection such as hugs.
The invisible (and completely undeterminable) pathogen of the joy
epidemic in “The Joy” is a phenomenon that resembles, respectively,
what Jane Bennett describes as a force8 that dramatically alters the
power relations between the characters, calling into question the very
composition of time. On the one hand, the pathogen facilitates the
horizontalisation of necropolitical power by allowing the sick to choose
who should live and who should die, simply by embracing the chosen
target to transmit the contagion. On the other, the joy epidemic draws
attention to the role played by nonhumans in reconfiguring the notions
of past, present, and future, as well as the very definition of history
from a posthumanist perspective. It suggests that history is a perpetual
change in relations among different phenomena, where time and space
are constituted by ambivalences: Permanence and flow, linearity and non-
linearity, continuity and discontinuity, and life and death integrate and
constitute one another, coexisting in disruptive processes.
Gumball: Diversity in an Enchanted Universe

The story of Gumball revolves around the adventures and misadventures
of Gumball (Gumball Tristopher Watterson) and his adopted brother
Darwin (Darwin Raglan Caspian Ahab Poseidon Nicodemius Watterson
III), set in a suburb of the fictional town of Elmore, California. They
live with their parents Richard and Nicole Watterson, as well as their
younger sister Anais. As noted by Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska (2016),
Gumball is an animated series that is primarily focused on feelings,
exploring dilemmas, and emotions that emerge from complex and
48
84 André Vasques Vital

conflicting circumstances, which can easily be associated with the turmoil
of modern life.9
This complexity is already visible in the protagonist’s family environ-
ment, where Nicole is the head of the Watterson family, making all the
family decisions and facing a double burden: working at a factory as well
as performing domestic labour. Richard, in turn, is a loving father but has
an aversion to work; he is lazy and spends most of his time watching tele-
vision. In the sixth season, Gumball and Darwin discover that Richard
leads a double life, dressing up as a woman and taking walks with a group
of ladies during the day. Anais is the prodigal daughter, exhibiting great
sensitivity and intelligence, and is close to her mother. Within the family
unit, there are exaggerations that underline the dilemmas of female eman-
cipation associated with women being overburdened by simultaneously
being providers and caretakers of the home. That aspect, which is con-
sistent with current social changes concerning gender roles in the family
environment, coexists with older social remnants, such as the repressive
environment of Elmore Junior High School, where Gumball and Darwin
have most of their adventures.10
In addition to the complexities and conflicts at the social level, the
universe of Gumball is inhabited by a rich diversity of animal species
with anthropomorphic characteristics, beginning with the family unit
itself. Gumball is a 12-year-old blue cat. Darwin is a 10-year-old gold-
fish who has evolved, growing arms and legs. Richard is a pink rabbit,
Nicole is a blue cat, and Anais is a pink rabbit. At school, that diversity is
more extreme, encompassing creatures with very distinct circumstances,
materialities, and temporalities. Some of their classmates exemplify this
diversity, such as Tina Rex (a dinosaur), Anton (a piece of toast), Bobert
(a robot), Alan Keane (a balloon), Carrie Krueger (a ghost), Masami
Yoshida (a cloud), Joe Banana (a banana), and Carmen (a cactus). The
combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional image techniques
reinforces the diverse nature of reality in the animated series. What are
shared by all the characters are self-awareness, intentionality, and lan-
guage –all supposedly anthropomorphic characteristics11 that dissolve
the ontological hierarchies and distinctions between them.
That diversity transforms Gumball into a permanently enchanted
universe, which also suggests that the real modern world has its own
powers of enchantment. According to Jane Bennett, enchantment is a
state resulting from encounters that surprise, immobilise, and moment-
arily suspend time through new, wondrous, mysterious, and disruptive
feelings.12 The universe of Gumball, however, is far from idyllic, with each
episode presenting the personal conflicts, turmoil, violence, and inequal-
ities that permeate the context experienced by two children who are 12
and 10 years old.13 Those conflicts, which authentically depict everyday
aspects of modern life, are entangled with moments of enchantment that
emerge from gatherings, interminglings, metamorphoses, and intimacies
among beings with simultaneously human and nonhuman characteristics.
58

Although those moments of enchantment are characteristics of the fantasy
genre, their inextricability from the conflicts that permeate the modern
world suggests alternative ways of understanding everyday reality, par-
ticularly in terms of human exceptionality.
In Gumball and Darwin’s adventures and misadventures, the effects
of intentional actions rarely occur as expected. No matter how good
their intentions are, things go wrong, and often when their intentions
have a mischievous character, the effects can be unexpectedly beneficial.
Intentionality, one of the fundamental anthropomorphic aspects unifying
the diversity of beings inhabiting the series, seldom functions in terms of
predicting, controlling, and dictating the effects although it directs the
actions of all the characters. Consequently, agency is less the traditional
humanist notion of intentionality and self-awareness inherent in human
beings and more the ability to affect the world. This is a notion of agency
that bears a resemblance to what is proposed by Jane Bennett, i.e., a
phenomenon dissolved in the vitality that permeates the processes of dif-
ferentiation.14 And in this case, the characters that exist in the plot are
themselves examples of vitality who permeate the universe of things.
The Joy Epidemic as an Emerging Phenomenon

In The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics
(2001), Jane Bennett analyses how narratives of crossings between species
and examples of real crossings (such as animal organs transplanted into
humans) demonstrate forms of enchantment that call into question
the fixed categories related to nature and identity. Bennett, however,
recognises the most dangerous aspects of real crossings, involving, for
example, the breaking of species barriers by viruses that may become
deadly.15 It is the most dangerous aspect of intimacy between species that
emerges in “The Joy,” making it possible to analyse not only the nature
of an epidemic as an event but also the delusion of considering the world
to be divided between a dynamic society and a static/inert nature, based
on the mind/matter ontological distinction.
“The Joy” begins with Gumball and Darwin leaving their bedroom
to eat breakfast. Anais realises that they are both in a bad mood and
suggests to their father that his sons need a hug. Richard attempts to
find out why the boys are in a bad mood, and their response is that it
is Monday, the most boring day of the week. That is when their father
offers them a “wonder hug” to improve their mood.
Richard’s wonder hug is indeed wondrous, very close to the notion
of wonder that is part of the enchantment of modern life analysed by
Bennett. It is an act of affection that becomes a disruptive phenomenon
with completely unpredictable consequences. The moment of the hug is
represented by a colourful explosion that can be seen from outside the
Watterson family home, which, in practice, is an encounter between a
rabbit, a cat, and a fish. There is an additional creature among those three
68

representatives of animal species forming a family (a virus, perhaps?),
and the colourful explosion is likely the moment when that undetermined
creature crossed the species barriers, infecting Gumball and Darwin.
In the following scene, the two protagonists are walking through their
school and exhibiting the first symptoms of the infection, which seems
to be affecting the nervous system: Darwin is unable to stop smiling, and
although Gumball still has an angry expression, he is taking small leaps
of joy as he walks. They are both surprised by each other’s behaviour, but
they cannot control themselves.
The circumstances surrounding the wonder hug are marked by some
complete darkness that instils a permanent climate of mystery and uncer-
tainty. It is possible that Richard Watterson, even if he was asymptomatic,
was the index case of the joy epidemic, or perhaps not. Before he hugged
Gumball and Darwin, Richard hugged Anais, who is also a rabbit, and
she showed no symptoms of infection. It is possible that the infectious
agent is not pathogenic in rabbits. The first signs of the disease’s spread
are presented as effects that “resonate with and against their causes,”16
which makes it difficult to understand what triggered the epidemic. Based
on the hug scene, however, it would be a mistake to speculate on a cause
or set of causes for the joy epidemic, as the only thing present in the
hug scene is indeterminacy. The scene suggests a moment of origin of
an epidemic emerging from entanglements, multiple explicit and implicit
relationships. In that origin, there is an entanglement of diverse phe-
nomena with different dynamics and scales, which nonetheless coin-
cide: Gumball and Darwin’s bad moods, feelings tied to Monday as the
first workday of the week, Anais’ suggestion of the hug, the hug as an
important form of affection in social relations, and a potential pathogen
that somehow took advantage of Richard’s physical closeness to his sons
at the time of the hug. The pathogen and the disease as such thus do
not exist prior to the hug, i.e., the object-phenomenon does not precede
the interactions and “intra-actions”17 (mutual constitution of entities and
their agencies) present in that scene.
The joy epidemic is therefore an emergent phenomenon, which simul-
taneously constitutes and differentiates itself in a procedural interdepend-
ence with other phenomena, be they ideas, feelings, matter, or memories.18
The scenes that precede the moment when the illness begins to be depicted
at Elmore Junior High School suggest mutual constitution and differen-
tiation with other processes. From her office, the teacher Lucy Simian (a
baboon) is watching footage from the school’s security cameras, observing
that the students and staff are dejected about beginning another week of
study and work. Miss Simian sadistically celebrates that pervasive feeling
of sadness but is surprised to see Gumball and Darwin walking happily
into the classroom. The same bad feeling that emerges from the relations
that characterise a Monday as the first workday of the week and that is
at the origins of the disease’s spread to Gumball and Darwin is one of
the aspects bringing to the fore the specific characteristics of the boys’
78

behaviours on that day. The memory of the way Gumball and Darwin
acted on other Mondays and the comparison with their classmates make
their joy suspicious.
The disease as such begins to be depicted when Miss Simian confronts
the boys in the class and they both start singing clumsily and laughing
uncontrollably. Even with a surprise test scheduled at that moment, nei-
ther of them is able to stop singing and laughing. Between songs and
laughter, the boys confess that they feel weird and out of control, until
Gumball begins to cough uncontrollably as he is laughing, expelling
droplets of colourful neon secretions. At that moment, Miss Simian
realises that those attitudes evade ‘normality’ and that she may be
confronting symptoms of a disease. In that scene, the depiction of joy as
an infectious/contagious disease begins to take on its first dimensions and
properties, in inextricable interactions and “specific intra-actions” where
“contingent meanings” come to the surface.19
The symptoms of the disease once again shed light on the question
of intentionality, which, as noted above, is one of the hallmarks of the
anthropomorphism present in the characters of Gumball. The disease that
seems to affect Gumball and Darwin’s nervous system, leaving them with
a completely uncontrollable joy (and cough), draws attention to an inten-
tionality that is not innate but emerges from the complex relationships
that compose the human organism (although they are animals with
human characteristics and the human body itself can be considered ‘an
animal’ on the one hand and a digitised being on the other20). It is thus
once again possible to detect an agency that is dissolved between human
and nonhuman phenomena, in this case, between an anthropomorphic
fish and an anthropomorphic cat entangled with an indeterminate infec-
tious agent. Completely incomprehensible to the boys themselves and to
other individuals, these strange intentions and attitudes emerge from that
entanglement.
In the posthumanist understanding of the world, such strange
emergences may appear and disappear, depending on the circumstances
that surround them. In fact, this kind of view is also visible in the concepts
and formulations that precede posthumanism as a set of theories, such
as those foregrounded by Alfred North Whitehead. A phenomenon that
can shine with immediate clarity, as Whitehead suggests, can also recede
into the shadows or even into total darkness, in the constant flux of
circumstances.21 What is initially established is a fundamental ambiguity
where joy as a disease remains on the plane of “non/being” or “bursting
with innumerable imaginings of what could be.”22 In addition, the plane
of consciousness or intentionality proves secondary to the primal phys-
ical sensations emerging in the clash between Miss Simian, and Gumball
and Darwin, where new contrasts and rhythms –utterly strange –are
depicted as coming from the two students. For Miss Simian, the situation
at hand is extremely strange, leading her to speculate about the possi-
bility of it being a contagious disease. She tells the school principal, Nigel
8

Brown (a hairy slug), about the disease and the risks of spreading a joy
epidemic. From that scene on, joy as a disease begins to take on greater
clarity, resonating with a Baradian notion of agential cuts, through “its
configuration and reconfiguration of space and time.”23
In that spatial and temporal reconfiguration, joy takes on the dimen-
sion of a “thing-power,”24 dramatically altering not only the school rou-
tine but also the hierarchies inherent to the dynamic of the characters in
the plot. Power imbalances are part of the emergence of a phenomenon
through the dynamics of constitution and differentiation, a process that
also defines the abilities to affect and be affected.25 In the case of the epi-
demic as an event in Gumball, there is a constitution that involves a dis-
ruptive redistribution of power within the school environment, involving
the potential or lack of potential to transmit the disease.
The Democratisation of the Power to Produce Knowledge

and Death
Lucy Simian’s first observations can be likened to Karen Barad’s
understanding of measurements, although with few specific instruments
for that end. These measurements, which can be understood as material-
discursive practices, are aimed at resolving the indeterminacies of a
phenomenon, although the desired success out of the measurements
is always partial (as indeterminacy is characteristic of the dynamics
of phenomena).26 Since Miss Simian is not a doctor, what happens is
similar to a process of “research in the wild,” when observations made
by those considered to be laypeople become part of scientific research
in some form.27 That condition exacerbates the dispute between the
teacher, Principal Brown, and Joan Markham (an anthropomorphic
bandage), a nurse who works in the infirmary at Elmore Junior High
School. In the infirmary, Miss Simian conducts a series of observations
and experiments on Gumball and Darwin. Although different evidence
emerges from the observations (such as permanently dilated pupils, the
boys’ inability to stop smiling, and a frustrated attempt to hug and kiss
the teacher), Ms. Markham remains sceptical. For her, the teacher has
no scientific authority to conduct the experiments, and the boys are
simply happy, which she does not consider a problem. Principal Brown
agrees with Nurse Markham. Miss Simian, however, insists that the
boys’ happiness is a symptom of a disease and that the evidence prove
her point of view.
Miss Simian’s knowledge of Gumball and Darwin’s behaviour is the
result of daily proximity to the students. Even if her knowledge could not
be considered scientific (and this is a central point in Nurse Markham’s
rejection of her suspicions of disease), she manages, as in the circumstances
of the research in the wild, to not only steer the initial investigations into
the event but also to provoke and sustain an intense dispute. Although
Nurse Markham does not agree with the disease hypothesis based on the
98

signs of the boys’ joy, Miss Simian succeeds in forcing the investigation to
continue and even imposing quarantine. There is a consensus that some-
thing different is happening with Gumball and Darwin, but the interpret-
ations of the effects and the different circumstances from which each of
those interpretations emerges keep the dispute alive. Joy, as an event, a
thing-power, since it constitutes a process of differentiation, has subtle
effects on the power relations at the school, to the point that Lucy Simian
becomes stronger in a dispute with a health professional in the infirmary
due to her daily proximity to the students.
The transformations in the hierarchies, however, follow a disjointed
pattern. At some point, the effects of the disease on the power relations
at the school become more dramatic, leading to ruptures as the boys’
symptoms evolve. Lying in the infirmary’s beds with their vital signs being
monitored, Gumball and Darwin begin to laugh and shake their arms
and legs intensely until they stop moving, seemingly exhausted or uncon-
scious. The device indicates cardiac arrest followed by a colourful neon
wave. Miss Simian celebrates those signs, for it would be ‘proof’ that
she was right about their joy being a disease. However, the phenomenon
takes on new dimensions, increasing the uncertainties inherent to the
dynamic of the entanglements that compose the epidemic. In the midst
of Miss Simian’s happiness, the children stand up once again, with an
attitude similar to that of zombies, run out of the infirmary, and begin
to hug the people they encounter, infecting Principal Brown and Nurse
Markham, spreading the disease throughout the school and forcing the
teacher to lock herself in her office.
The disease spreads and is established as an epidemic, and the sick are
empowered in a necropolitical logic. Necropolitics, according to Achille
Mbembe, is the relationship between politics and death or the ability to
manage death in a direct or indirect relation to gestation and the mainten-
ance of life. That management of death can be accomplished by nation-
states, institutions, economic systems, and other forms of power through
states of exception and urgency as well as the (fictional) creation of
enemies. It is a thingification/animalisation/dehumanisation of the other,
subjecting them to an instrumental rationality in order to promote spe-
cific forms of life and existence. The aim is to eradicate the other, which
is the fundamental condition of plurality. Death is not only understood
as the loss of life in a biological sense but also as the loss of humanity
through social death, whether due to a lack of rights over one’s own
body or a lack of political rights or rights of place.28 However, Mbembe
argues that the total democratisation of the ability to kill is one of the
main effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Any individual with the dis-
ease can partially decide the fate of others by infecting them with simple
gestures such as a handshake, a kiss, or a hug although the risks remain
unequal among classes, sexes, and individuals in society. The social iso-
lation imposed by governments and by people themselves would be an
attempt to regulate that power.29
09

Mbembe’s argument about necropolitical and the social effects of
COVID-19 strengthens the idea that epidemics are events or assemblages
that resonate with what Jane Bennett suggests. Bennett views this as
an “agentic swarm” or phenomena that strengthen, weaken, obstruct,
and produce multiple and unequal political effects in the public space.30
Those effects are clear in “The Joy,” with Gumball and Darwin laughing,
drooling colourful neon secretions, and hugging their classmates, con-
taminating them while Lucy Simian takes refuge in her office. Both
students, as the ‘other’ thingified in a necropolitical logic, at that moment
manifest “their presence and power” as things in an “occasion of contin-
gency.”31 Elmore Junior High School is a space of extremely restricted
freedom due to the imposition of strict rules by Principal Brown and
Miss Simian. There is supervision that involves control over the students’
bodies, which can be seen in one of the first scenes in “The Joy,” when
Miss Simian orders Bobert, the robot, to quickly enter the classroom.
Bobert rushes, and Miss Simian contradicts herself, screaming once again,
but this time for him not to run down the hallway, which produces a
collapse in his electronic system. With the emergence of the joy epidemic,
the once sadistic and feared teacher at Elmore Junior High School loses
her former power over the institution, and the students achieve redemp-
tion: A blackout, destroyed and overturned chairs, tables, notebooks, and
neon vomit everywhere –a redemption that is freedom and power in the
form of horror and death.
Time of Ambivalences and Non-linearity

Lucy Simian does not accept the new configuration of power resulting
from the epidemic; this is visible in the scene where she despairs and
breaks the furniture in her office. She unexpectedly discovers what may
be the cure for the disease: a sad song. Nonetheless, she will also be
infected in an attempt to cure the sick. Her final words are recorded on
video, where she concludes by saying (while coughing and expelling col-
ourful secretions) that the story has a happy ending. Happiness here is
related to death as rupture and transitoriness: The grumpy Miss Simian
would become a different being, decaying, and rotting amidst laughter.
“The Joy” depicts multiple ambiguities that permeate the emergence
of the joy epidemic. Hugs are simultaneously wondrous and pathogenic,
affectionate, and contemptible, exhibiting empathy and horror that
emerge out of life and death, contradictory states that prove to be per-
fectly integrated. Miss Simian declares that the story has a happy ending,
but the happy ending is unwanted death. At the height of the joy epi-
demic, the colourful neon vomit spreads through the corridors of the
school, flowing from the mouths of the characters onto dark, greyish
bodies, and backgrounds. That integration of high contrasts and ambi-
guities shows an aesthetic of ambivalence that dominates the episode and
impacts the very structure of time.
19

Moreover, the ambiguities in “The Joy” demonstrate how epidemics
and pandemics cause the world to confront what Whitehead understands
as a universal primal paradox, namely, the yearning for novelty, in a
present time that has changed very little in comparison with the past
(prompting a rejection of the past, inciting rebellious attitudes), which
also coexists with the terror of potentially losing referents, customs,
and everything to which one has an attachment in the present and
past. What is desired for the future are stable facts, recognised in the
past: Friendships, love, and old relationships (sadness, power, and the
oppression of the other in the case of Miss Simian), and time is rejected
as a perpetual perishing.32 Lucy Simian is the ‘anti-hero’ heroine of the
episode, personifying the desperate attempt to escape the ‘flux of things’
in a perishing time: She is the tireless warrior guarding the permanences
and is herself the final bastion “of these permanences amid the inescap-
able flux.”33 Miss Simian is thus every creature who struggles for stability
in their relationships and for their own permanence in a time and space
that ever flows.
The joy epidemic in Gumball suggests that those types of events are
useful for rethinking traditional notions of history based on a continuous
human time. Epidemics shed light on other ways of thinking about his-
tory, bringing together multiple time scales and discontinuities that sim-
ultaneously encompass human and nonhuman phenomena. Mbembe, for
example, argues that one consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic (an
extreme event, even compared to other pandemics of the past) will be
a change in the consciousness of time, more precisely in how the future
is conceived. For him, the immersion in uncertainties about continuities
(including the continuity of human life on the planet) may set the tone for
debates in this century.34
Unlike Mbembe’s assessment, however, the medical historian Charles
Rosenberg suggests, in a classical study, that epidemics are events the
narratives of which have sequential and predictable patterns, beginning
with discrete events, followed by a progressive revelation, culminating
in individual and collective crises that later move towards stabilisation
and completion.35 This conclusion conflicts with more current analyses
of the temporal nature of an event. Maria Tamboukou, for example, calls
attention to how events are disruptions composed of forces with different
intensities that dilute any logical and temporal sequence, disturbing orders
and certainties, i.e., opening up the future to unthinkable possibilities,
marking narrative, and historical discontinuities.36 Although they both
seem to agree that an event (whether an epidemic or not) is a moment
that disturbs a continuous time, they disagree over the very nature of the
time of an event, which for Rosenberg is linear and for Tamboukou has a
fundamental non-linearity.
What joy as an event suggests, however, is that the time of the epidemic
is both continuous and discontinuous. Continuity and discontinuity are
mutually constituted, integrated, and intermingled in a complex relational
29

process where one cannot exist without the existence of the other. Just
as death is a condition of life and life is constituted in the processes of
death,37 the same can be said about the linearity and non-linearity of
time. Continuity and discontinuity and linearity and non-linearity can
be understood in the same way as the categories of permanence and flux
in the philosophy of the process. “In the inescapable flux,” Whitehead
states,
there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence,

there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched
only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate inten-
sity only by its submission to permanence.38
An epidemic as an event thus has multiple temporalities, fundamentally

linear and non-linear, and continuous and discontinuous.
The conjunction between linear and non- linear temporality, con-
tinuous and discontinuous time as a characteristic of the epidemic is very
clear throughout nearly the entire episode of “The Joy.” The hours are
displayed digitally in the middle of the screen, in red, as if made of blood,
accompanied by a song that evokes a horror film during many times of
the episode. Richard Watterson’s wonder hug was given at 07:52, and
the episode ends at around 18:20. The chronological time is not only
visible but is part of the materiality of the events, to the extent that Miss
Simian is struck by the time stamp at 16:06 and pulls herself up using the
numbers only to push them down and off the screen. That time, however,
constitutes a time that is simultaneously against and with the events that
compose the emergence of the epidemic, as it emphasises the disparity
and urgency of the events.
There are thus at least two intertwined temporalities in the narrative.
The first is the chronological time of the epidemic itself, which is the time
of the episode (i.e., from the moment Gumball and Darwin come down
the stairs to eat breakfast to the hug they both give Miss Simian, infecting
her). There is here a principle of linearity, from the wonder hug to the
clarity of the symptoms and the disease as a phenomenon ending with
a mass contagion at the school. The second temporality is multiple and
non-linear and is constituted in the linearity of the different events and
effects that mark the emergence of the joy epidemic. In other words, lin-
earity and non-linearity are constituted by and permeate one another in
the emergence of the epidemic as an event.
The question of the fundamental ambivalence or contradiction
surrounding linear and non- linear time becomes more evident when
considering the multiplicity of effects that an event like an epidemic
involves and provokes. In a posthumanist approach, pathogens emerge
with policies, powers, economic interests, social aspects, health systems,
technologies, and a multitude of other phenomena.39 The notion of
emergence makes it urgent for us to rethink meanings with defined and
39

pre-existing limits that disregard the mixtures inherent to the complexity
of space and time. A posthumanist, non-continuous history therefore
posits multiple times that perpetually perish in intra-actions, where con-
tinuity and discontinuity remain intertwined in processes of materialisa-
tion involving permanence and flux.
In a posthumanist-new materialist sense, the fundamental ambiguity
permeating the constitution of the time of an epidemic can be understood
through the very immanence of the event. Usually, time in an event is
understood within the conceptual assumptions about the event, defined
based on the notions of relationship or decision. In the first case, the
emphasis is on the relationship between two moments in time, one before
and one after, involving two distinct configurations, something that is part
of the relationships that make up the world and the material processes
in themselves in everyday life. In the second case, the decision implies a
break, a certain persistence towards a future that makes the event some-
thing unique, especially due to a resulting collapse, an event that is in some
way external to the situation that prevailed before.40 The notion of the epi-
demic in Rosenberg is based on the definition of an event as a relationship,
while in Tamboukou, an event is a decision, which emphasises a persistent
look at the future (and uncertainties). However, the “The Joy” episode
suggests that these perspectives can be integrated, especially if epidemics
are conceived of as events in a more radical way, within the scope of
indecision –that is, if they are considered both as ruptures involving a
revolution and the primary desire for an identity amid the inconsistency of
their manifestations.41 The joy epidemic is a radical rupture that involves
a revolution in power relations and multiple material aspects of Elmore
Junior High School, while it constitutes itself as a primary impulse, a mani-
festation that induces the production of new meanings, representations,
and strategies that emerge throughout the episode.
This condition reinforces what Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum high-
light in their introduction to this volume: From a posthumanist perspec-
tive, epidemics, including the joy epidemic on which this chapter focuses,
demonstrate the immersion of actors in multiple temporalities. Those
temporalities, although mutually constituted, retain some form of indif-
ference towards each other, and yet they still form systems marked by
ambiguity. The actors’ experiences are subject to both materially different
bodies, with their specificities and particular configurations, and the
different systems that emerge from their relationships.42 The same occur
in the formation of time, where multiple emergent temporalities form
the time of the epidemic, which is markedly linear and non-linear, con-
tinuous and discontinuous, being in a state of both permanence and flux.
Therefore, the randomness and contingency movements formed by the
encounters and the temporal ambiguities resulting from these movements
are the most concrete elements of the epidemic.
The linear and non- linear, continuous and discontinuous time of
an epidemic is constituted by the multiple encounters and affects that
49

make it an event. Thus, the epidemic as such leaves a trail of dissociated
knowledge that emerges in the constant disruptive flux of temporalities
formed by these encounters and affects. The epidemic breaks with the
human meanings, representations, and intentions, intensifying horrors in
the face of unthinkable realities. These breaks can be understood in its
broadest sense, close to a notion of “history as a disrupted singular,”
which consists “of several disruptive moments and transformations” as a
flux of “perpetual transformation of unknowable corning histories” with
multiple temporalities, pasts, and dissociated knowledge.43 This notion of
time is also close to the new materialist perspective exposed by Z. Gizem
Yılmaz Karahan in her chapter (this volume). As Yılmaz Karahan notes,
both COVID-19 and the Plague of Justinian in the 16th century radic-
ally changed power relations and the existence of things considered to be
human (such as cities), and therefore, those epidemics presented a true
“historical creativity” that changed identity and human life in a broad
sense. Put differently, then, epidemics are not inserted in time, but make
up time itself, producing their ambivalences.
Thus, the history of an epidemic can be understood as “the permanent
revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to
be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or
how the event that revokes it will come about.”44 The very dynamics of
the COVID-19 pandemic since its beginnings, forcing the suspension of
plans, goals, and movements of people worldwide and producing multiple
uncertainties in the treatment and production of vaccines, as well as the
constant emergence of several variants of the virus in several countries,
demonstrate this dimension. Even the mystery surrounding the origin of
the pandemic and the way it started through zoonosis to affect humans
and spread across the planet reinforce the horrors of the indecipherability
that marks time, and more notably, the moments that form the present
and the future.
In a time marked by multiplicity and conceived as simultaneously
linear and non-linear, the future emerges in the present as a speculation
marked by the notion of uncertainty, a future that appears to be dystopian
but has traces of utopia. Fears, anxieties, oppressions, degradations,
diseases, and death mark the possibilities of the future in a time that
flows or perpetually perishes in a spiral of the dissolution of the present
and the past. However, in the time that flows, there is an expectation
of disruption moving towards more stable realities: The permanence of
what is felt and envisioned as good and just remains alive in dystopian
speculations about the future. Returning to the discussion of Gumball’s
case, then, there is a clear example that attests to such disruption. In the
battle against the joy epidemic, Miss Simian finds herself confronted by
a dystopic future, marked by a pathogen that causes an alienated, suf-
focating, and oppressive happiness. In her battle, she has a vision of an
ordered, disciplined, and permanent world. Lucy Simian’s utopia made
59

Elmore Junior High School a dystopian space, where dismay and unhap-
piness prevailed. Nonetheless, the pathogen of joy, amidst the laughter
and colourful secretions expelled from its hosts, made a purported uto-
pian speculation of universal happiness into a dystopia.
Final Considerations
Gumball’s episode “The Joy” inspires different ways of thinking about
epidemics as events. The narrative about the emergence of the bizarre
joy epidemic poses powerful questions about some of the most cherished
assumptions of humanism, such as the centrality of consciousness or
intentionality as the engine of history and the notion of a linear evo-
lution in the historical process. The historical agency is decentralised
in a universe formed by pluralities of processes and forms of existence
that constitute one another; i.e., thoughts, consciousnesses, and human
institutions emerge with nonhuman phenomena. Similarly, an epidemic as
an event relates and constitutes itself as an agent through entanglements
with a number of other processes. It emerges as a thing-power, the effects
of which are dynamic and strengthen, weaken, and supply the structure
of new realities and forms of power around the world. Epidemics must
therefore be understood in a radical intimacy with the circumstances in
which they emerge, in order to understand the transformations that they
provoke.
Nonetheless, while an epidemic reveals the inevitable entanglement of
social space and institutions with nonhuman phenomena, it also points
to different ways of thinking about the notion of time. The joy epidemic
in Gumball ruptures binary oppositions by suggesting a complex integra-
tion between linear and non-linear time and between historical continuity
and discontinuity, which are related to the processes of life and death as
well as permanence and flux. That integration is constituted in the plur-
ality of disruptive processes that emerge with and in the phenomenon of
the epidemic. “The Joy” thus inspires a posthumanist approach to the
history of disease, reinforcing the fundamental ambivalences that make
the epidemic an event. Moreover, it points towards the integration of
contradictory elements in history by reinforcing the ambiguous nature of
time, the very fabric of the universe and life itself.
Notes
1 Lincoln Geraghty, “Introduction: Future Visions,” in Channeling the Future:
Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, ed. Lincoln Geraghty
(Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009), vii–xviii; David Whitley,
The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008);
Gary Westfhal, Science Fiction, Children’s Literature, and Popular Culture:
Coming of Age in Fantasyland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Paul
Wells, Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998).
69

2 Ramzi Fawaz, “Where No X-Man Has Gone Before! Mutant Superheroes
and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America,” American
Literature 83, no. 2 (2011): 355–88, doi: 10.1215/00029831-1266090; David
C. Wright Jr. and Allan W. Austin, eds., Space and Time: Essays on Visions of
History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010).
3 David C. Wright Jr., “Constructing a Grand Historical Narrative: Struggles
through Time on Highlander: The Series,” in Space and Time: Essays on
Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, eds. David
C. Wright Jr. and Allan W. Austin (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 116–30;
Judith Lancioni, “The Future as Past Perfect: Appropriation of History in the
Star Trek Series,” in Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science
Fiction and Fantasy Television, eds. David C. Wright Jr. and Allan W. Austin
(Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 131–55.
4 André Vasques Vital, “Lapis Lazuli. Politics and Aqueous Contingency in
the Animation Steven Universe,” Series: International Journal of TV Serial
Narratives 4, no. 1 (2018): 51–62, doi: 10.6092/issn.2421-454X/8401.
5 André Vasques Vital, “Water, Gender, and Modern Science in the Steven
Universe Animation,” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 8 (2020): 1144–58,
doi: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1662466.
6 Major awards include the International Emmy Kids Award for Animation and
the Annie Award for Best Production, both in 2012, and the award for Best
TV Production at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2011.
7 The Amazing World of Gumball, 3, 4, “The Joy,” directed by Ben Bocquelet,
June 19, 2014, Cartoon Network.
University Press, 2010), 4–5.
9 Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, “Od Fantazji do Gumballa –Estetyka Filmu
Animowanego,” Polonistyka. Innowacje 3 (2016): 135–50, doi: 10.14746/
pi.2016.1.3.13.
10 Mąka-Malatyńska, 147–8.
11 It is important to note that in the last decades, ethologists and neurobiologists
are researching about the animal consciousness and some results suggest that
many species have some level of cognition. Monkeys, dolphins, and crows are
important examples.
12 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and
Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
13 Mąka-Malatyńska, 147–8.
14 Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, 155.
16 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 42.
17 Karen Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality and
Justice (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 7.
18 Laura Stark, “Emergence,” Isis 110, no. 2 (2019): 332–6, doi: 10.1086/
703336.
19 Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness?, 7.
20 In the final episode of Gumball, Superintendent Evil (Rob in disguise) tries to
transform all of the characters into digitalised humans to save them from the
end of the animated series.
21 Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York,
NY: The Free Press, 1978), 15.
79

2007), 179–80.
24 About the notion of thing-power, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 6.
25 Stark, 334–5.
27 Research in the wild is when a scientific investigation begins by placing the
knowledge of lay people in dialogue with scientific knowledge (beginning of
the process); involving non-specialists in scientific disputes (during the pro-
cess); and provoking disputes by exposing mistakes that have led to drastic
changes in people’s everyday lives (end of the process). Michel Callon, Pierre
Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on
Technical Democracy, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2009), 79–106.
28 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke
29 Achille Mbembe, “Pandemia Democratizou Poder de Matar, Diz Autor da
Teoria da ‘Necropolítica’,” Folha de São Paulo, March 30, 2020, www1.
folha.uol.com.br/mundo/2020/03/pandemia-democratizou-poder-de-matar-
diz-autor-da-teoria-da-necropolitica.shtml.
30 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 32.
31 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
32 Whitehead, 340.
33 Whitehead, 209.
34 Mbembe, “Pandemia.”
35 Charles E. Rosemberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the
History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279.
36 Maria Tamboukou, “Broken Narratives, Visual Forces: Letters, Paintings
and the Event,” in Beyond Narrative Coherence, eds. Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-
Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou (Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, 2010), 70.
38 Whitehead, 338.
39 Chris Wilbert, “Profit, Plague and Poultry: The Intra-Active Worlds of Highly
Pathogenic Avian Flu,” Radical Philosophy 139 (September–October 2006):
2–8, www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp139_commentary_
profitplaguepoultry_wilbert.pdf.
40 Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
41 François Laruelle, “Identity and Event,” Pli 9 (2000): 174–89, https://plijour
nal.com/papers/francois-laruelle-identity-and-event/.
42 Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and
Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 9, no. 2 (2012): 225– 33, doi:
10.1353/nlh.2021.0020.
43 Zoltán B. Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for
the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 56.
44 Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the
Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, eds.
Olivier Corpet and François Matheron (London: Verso, 2006), 174.
89

References
Althusser, Louis. “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter.”
In Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, edited by Olivier
Corpet and François Matheron, 163–207. London: Verso, 2006.
Barad, Karen. What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality and
Justice. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012.
Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and
Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and
Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 9, no. 2 (2012): 225–33. https://doi.
org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0020.
Bocquelet, Ben, dir. The Amazing World of Gumball. 3, 4, “The Joy.” June 19,
2014, Cartoon Network.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. Acting in an Uncertain
World: An Essay on Technical Democracy, translated by Graham Burchell.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009.
Fawaz, Ramzi. “Where No X-Man Has Gone Before! Mutant Superheroes and
the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America.” American
Literature 83, no. 2 (2011): 355– 88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-
1266090.
Galloway, Alexander R. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Geraghty, Lincoln. “Introduction: Future Visions.” In Channeling the Future:
Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, edited by Lincoln Geraghty,
vii–xviii. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009.
Lancioni, Judith. “The Future as Past Perfect: Appropriation of History in the
Star Trek Series.” In Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science
Fiction and Fantasy Television, edited by David Wright Jr. and Allan W.
Austin, 131–55. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.
Laruelle, François. “Identity and Event.” Pli 9 (2000): 174–89. https://plijournal.
com/papers/francois-laruelle-identity-and-event/.
Mąka- Malatyńska, Katarzyna. “Od Fantazji do Gumballa –Estetyka Filmu
Animowanego.” Polonistyka. Innowacje 3 (2016): 135–50. https://doi.org/
10.14746/pi.2016.1.3.13.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics, translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke
Mbembe, Achille. “Pandemia Democratizou Poder de Matar, diz Autor da Teoria
da ‘Necropolítica’.” Folha de São Paulo, March 30, 2020. www1.folha.uol.
com.br/mundo/2020/03/pandemia-democratizou-poder-de-matar-diz-autor-
da-teoria-da-necropolitica.shtml.
Rosemberg, Charles E. Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of
Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Simon, Zoltán B. History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the
21st Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
9

Stark, Laura. “Emergence.” Isis 110, no. 2 (2019): 332– 6. https://doi.org/
10.1086/703336.
Tamboukou, Maria. “Broken Narratives, Visual Forces: Letters, Paintings and
the Event.” In Beyond Narrative Coherence, edited by Matti Hyvärinen,
Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo and Maria Tamboukou, 67– 86.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2010.
Vital, André Vasques. “Lapis Lazuli. Politics and Aqueous Contingency in
the Animation Steven Universe.” Series: International Journal of TV Serial
Narratives 4, no. 1 (2018): 51– 62. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-
454X/8401.
Vital, André Vasques. “Water, Gender, and Modern Science in the Steven Universe
Animation.” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 8 (2020): 1144–58. https://doi.
org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1662466.
Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge, 1998.
Westfhal, Gary. Science Fiction, Children’s Literature, and Popular Culture:
Coming of Age in Fantasyland. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York,
NY: The Free Press, 1978.
Whitley, David. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2008.
Wilbert, Chris. “Profit, Plague and Poultry: The Intra-Active Worlds of Highly
Pathogenic Avian Flu.” Radical Philosophy 139 (2006): 2– 8. www.
radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp139_commentary_profitplague
poultry_wilbert.pdf.
Wright Jr., David C. “Constructing a Grand Historical Narrative: Struggles
through Time on Highlander: The Series.” In Space and Time: Essays on
Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, edited by David
Wright Jr. and Allan W. Austin, 116–30. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.
Wright Jr., David C. and Allan W. Austin, eds. Space and Time: Essays on Visions of
History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.
01
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Part III
Pestilentia Loquens
Narrative Agency of Disease
2
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5
Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman
Feminist Environs
Viral Becomings in Nicola Griffith’s
Ammonite
Şafak Horzum
Non- hierarchically calibrating women’s bodies and viral agents,

Ammonite (1992) by British-American writer Nicola Griffith presents an
account of multiple becomings on a fictional planet. A novel of people,
in the author’s own words, Ammonite is a narrative “that attempts to
look at biology,” one “that shows readers different ways to be,” and one
“that takes them to other places,” but only in “a woman-only world”
which glows with “the entire spectrum of human behavior.”1 Focusing
on the novel’s echoes of the posthuman feminist attempt to “reconstruct
pasts and imagine futures that do not isolate a single thread [out of dual-
ities] but that expose their intertwined histories (and presents) with vio-
lently oppressed peoples and nonhumans,”2 this chapter aims to illustrate
how human actors are intertwined with viral bodies and how they unfold
together to navigate the narrative in Ammonite. The posthuman feminist
alternatives against (neo)liberal humanism proposed in Griffith’s novel
decentralise the human and critique its conventional alignment with the
realm of bios “that has traditionally been reserved for Anthropos.”3
On these premises, I argue that Griffith’s narrative deconstructs the
thresholds between dualisms such as nature/ culture, body/
mind, and
matter/discourse, thus rhizomatically assembling to point at “an open-
ended, interrelationship, multi-sexed and trans-species flow of becoming
through interaction with multiple others” when the posthuman subject
“exceeds the boundaries of both anthropocentrism and of compensatory
humanism, to acquire the planetary dimension.”4
“Grenchstom’s Planet—GP, Jeep—”5 a planet where a former colony
was established and terraformed by the Earthlings around 200 or
300 years ago (suggestively in the twenty-first century), is rediscovered
by the Durallium Company five years before the arrival of the protag-
onist, Marghe.6 In its hundreds of years of isolation, GP and its settlers
lost contact with the Earth, got deprived of the Earth’s techno-science,
and began to lead a pre-industrial, agricultural life. The Company’s satel-
lite surveys show that GP’s indigenous population is around one million
humans that live all over the planet as scattered communities. Besides the
extra-terrestrial planet and its inhabitants, two curious discoveries about
GP remain as the main actors delivering an alternative narrative of the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-9
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104 Şafak Horzum

enmeshment of humans and nonhumans in the novel: (1) “Jeep’s natives
were one hundred percent female” and (2) “Jeep the virus, named after
the planet.”7
Jeep virus acts as the primary material-discursive entity of symbiotic
adaption in GP. Not much is known about the virus: not its strength,
weakness, longevity, or specific vectors. What is mainly of concern to
the Company is the fact that any man infected with it is unable to sur-
vive. For this reason, the Company treats the Jeep virus as a designed
biological weapon and never lets any personnel who have been in GP
and infected with the virus get out of the planet or the spaceship Estrade.
Just one exception would be enough to set this so-called anti-humanist
weapon loose on the Earth and cause the elimination of the male sex.
Soon after landing on GP, Marghe learns that the virus is latent in its
very long (40/60-day) incubation period, but has a high cytopathogenic
effect in the disease phase to kill infected men in almost six hours. After
the survival of 80% of female Company security personnel on GP—the
Mirrors, researchers could identify that the Jeep virus acts “a bit like
a retrovirus” and “integrates with human cell DNA.”8 The Company
personnel is oblivious of its origins—if it is zoonotic—yet aware that
its ways of transmission are unlimited: “air, water, saliva, sperm, food,
feces… everything.”9 Throughout the disease period, infected women lay
motionless for three days, and their bodies get weaker during this viral
transformation. Such disturbing aspects of an incomprehensible pathogen
are knotted in the human’s fear of the other, and the virus becomes the
epitome of absolute alterity in Derridean sense because it shatters the
concept of the liberal human, which rests on the wilful, able, and rea-
sonable male human. With Jeep’s intrusion into the human bodymind,10
all those characteristics of the human, on which Homo sapiens heavily
relied, collapse: Men are exterminated, wilful resistance is denied, able
bodies and minds are crippled, and reasonable approaches are failed by
Jeep. What remains at hand is whatever is associated with the opposite
of the liberal human: zōē; or women, disorder, bodily weaknesses, and
irrational reproduction amid wild nature.
The fear of the nonhuman other haunts the Company and insinuates
itself into the neoliberal human’s anxiety of non- centrality and non-
exclusivism among other nonhuman beings. To defy this fear, Marghe is
commissioned on GP, to become a part of an in-vivo test; i.e., to experi-
ence an experimental biofactured vaccine—the FN-17—against Jeep as
a “guinea pig”11 of the Company. During her investigation of GP’s indi-
genous naturecultures as a linguist-anthropologist, Marghe’s first native
home becomes the Echraidne, a native tribe on GP, and there she learns
that Jeep sickness is known as “baby fever”12 because only preterm
babies get this uncommon disease, but never an adult woman. This fact is
closely related to the ‘entangled’ nature of the virus and humans, which is
revealed with an old story in the history of the Echraidne tribe. According
to this legendary story, the Echraidne’s ancestors fled from a death world
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Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman Feminist Environs 105

governed by the Death Spirit. In the new place they migrated, the Death
Spirit was not present itself, but also not absent because even its asleep
status claimed many lives of these migrants and, in return, gave surviving
women the miracle of parthenogenesis. Resonating with the planet-
migration scenarios/dreams of today, this legend is the narrative record of
how the Earthlings escaped from a post-apocalyptic and disease-stricken
world and settled into a new, pristine planet. However, Jeep for these
original settlers is a super-historical absolute other. For Jacques Derrida,
such an other is beyond one’s expectation and comprehension due to its
“neutrality” and “singularity.”13 As in Jeep’s case, this other is unknow-
able before the human’s encounter with it. The human subject that will
encounter this other is fully unaware of the physiological and psycho-
logical characteristics of this alter subject. In this regard, any attempt to
understand and know the absolute other is a kind of transformation of
that neutral and singular other into the form of the familiar, the known,
the multiple. Then, the more the original surviving settlers experienced
this super-historical Jeep virus, the more they recognised it as a part of
their bodies and identities.
Shifting the hubristic human subject’s position in its relations with
its others, super-historical and later historical aspects of Jeep posit a
posthumanist union, “a relationship of mutual supplementarity.”14
“Indeed, our very existence,” as Roberto Marchesini argues, “depends
on openness, because without hosting alterity … humans would be
‘sterile’.”15 Simply arriving and existing on GP re-establishes the ever-
present contract of constant change for beings: the agentic fusion of sev-
eral bodies for innumerable times by hosting one another in their own
bodies. Unconsciously (as in the basis of most bodily “intra-actions”16
in Karen Barad’s term), the first settlers interact with the virus—“other
entity, separate, alien, foreign, divergent, term of comparison, back-
ground from which to emerge”—and notice that it is “capable of refer-
ential action” by providing their bodies “a contribution-orientation for
expression and for the construction of identity”17 through parthenogen-
esis. The viral-human bodies then construct a novel way of evolution
for these new posthuman identities. Wiping out the male population of
original settlers, Jeep acts as a leveller of hierarchies among humans and
nonhumans in conventional humanist contexts. As an agentic force, it
introduces an alternative way of living on a horizontal relationality.
This horizontal relationality is unfolded in Marghe’s second native
home in the town of Ollfoss. Her experiences in and during her escape
from the harsh snow- covered Tehuantepec plateau make her realise
that her body and mind have already been put into a transformation
sustained by GP. Her loss of fingers in Tehuantepec winter as well as the
erasure of her ‘Earth’ identity in the Echraidne tribe move her towards
understanding the surrounding landscape as an autonomous body with
more-than-human generic capacities. One step removed from the hier-
archical anthropocentric view, Marghe is further introduced with the
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system of trata, a more horizontal way of living. Trata, denoting treaty in
English, means a custom of trade based on oral and behavioural actions
of giving and taking among GP communities. Shown as manifestations
of caring for family members and the ones in need, this give-and-take
system also shapes families and communities more effectively than
money-based financial orders. The medium of exchange in a trata varies
from emotions, stories, goods, and physical assistance—anything and
everything that could connect at least two sides of a communication. In
return for her new family’s care for her physical well-being in Ollfoss,
Marghe is expected to pay them by telling her story about her journey
from the Earth to the GP. In doing so, she also gets transformed from an
other into the familiar among this indigenous family. Thenike, a viajera18
meaning a person who culminates in one body all such careers of a
storyteller, a bearer of news and tales, a judge of conflicts, and a healer,
draws attention to a point in Marghe’s subjectivity. She wonders how her
journeys as an anthropologist affect her: “And these places you go, the
people you find, do you come to care for them? Or do you only study
them, like strange shells you might find on the beach?”19 This query acts
as a call for Marghe to connect with where she goes, whom she interacts
with, and what she observes. Thenike, this way, invites her to participate
in GP’s naturalcultural entanglements in an embracive manner.
To discover her new becoming and to communicate with GP, Marghe
is led to striking a gong in Ollfoss. This is a method of synchronising with
one’s environment in the town, a way of echoing with the pulse of the
planet especially before seed time, ripening period, and harvest season.
By sounding the gong and triggering “a vitality intrinsic to materiality” as
Jane Bennett would call it,20 Marghe sows the seed of her emerging sub-
jectivity. She “vibrates and merges with” electromagnetic surges of GP in
an extended meditation, “to affect and to be affected.”21 Her surrounding
physical environment in all its particularity and multiplicity is affective,
preparing her new posthuman identity to ripen further in this horizontal
connectivity. Her bodymind opens for intense “processes of becoming”
and a new “notion of multiplicity” which is “not a pluralized notion of
identity” but “an ever-changing, non-totalizable collectivity, an assem-
blage defined not by its abiding identity or principle of sameness over
time, but through its capacity to undergo permutations and transform-
ations”22 in its multidimensionality. This tantalising insight into one’s
constant co-emergence (with anything and everything) proves our symbi-
otic response-ability once the notion of becoming is recognised as intra-
actional, both chosen by and arbitrary to the human consciousness.
During this gonging experience, Marghe learns that a change in her
has already begun. What is left for her is just to accept this change. Her
infection with the virus follows this seeding time. First, a stiffing ache
and a searing fire escalate in her body, toe to head; then, “some cruel
beast with talons and beak steeped in fire and acid”23 possesses her body
and plays with it by burning it one moment and freezing on another.
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Jeep’s nonhuman alterity outside is now inside the human subject. For
this reason, semiconscious and sick Marghe does not want to return to
her body since it is
no longer entirely hers. The virus lived in it now, in every pore, every
cell, every blood vessel and organ. It slid, cold and in control, through
her brain. If she recovered, she would never be sure what dreams
and memories were her own, and which were alien. She belonged to
Jeep.24
During this process of viral becoming, Marghe’s “material- semiotic

assemblage of skin and consciousness refers to a sense of uncleanliness”25
and indicates the emergence of a chimerical identity, a plural subject-
ivity. This sense of somatic entrapment and violation, however, is defied
by Thenike who repudiates Marghe’s identification with uncleanliness:
“Unclean? No. Your body is changing, just as it does every time you
get sick and another little piece of something else comes to live inside
you.”26 The human body’s communication with microorganisms is
clearly given here as a new mode of ‘becoming with.’ Just as Moira
Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd state in their appropriation of Benedict de
Spinoza’s approach to individuality, “our identities are determined and
re-determined through processes of emotional and imaginative identifica-
tion with others, based on the relations of partial and shifting relations
of similitude and dissimilitude.”27 Connected to Marghe’s emotional and
imaginative responses to her viral disease, this moment captures the viral
“matter as an active ‘agent’ in its ongoing materialization”28 in Marghe’s
body, as Barad would define it. “All life connects,” Thenike professes29;
all life is continually reconfigured, redetermined in innumerable material-
discursive rhizomes.
After accepting Jeep in her deepest parts, Marghe recovers quickly
and discovers her ripening posthuman self through her acuter five senses
heightened by the virus. All sensory events seem to materialise for her;
apparently invisible sounds and beams convert into entities of many
shapes, colours, and fragrances. Thenike explains this change as an
affirmative aspect of the virus which has cleansed Marghe’s body from
the adjuvants added to the FN-17. “Resilience,” as Pramod K. Nayar
states, “is the image of continuity.”30 Marghe’s resilient identity con-
struction here is one crucial step she has taken to reinstall a self which,
for Claire Colebrook, means “to maintain oneself through time, with the
future not being a simple unfolding but a continual variation enabled
by the recalled richness of the past.”31 On this journey of variations
and recollections of her identity, her viral transformation manifests a
symbiotic adaptation and offers horizontality with her surroundings on
this alien planet. In her new positive onto-epistemological condition,
she prepares for deepsearch, “a ritual trance” allowing a GP woman
to “access the memories of her ancestors,” a ritual “of naming, of
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108 Şafak Horzum

conception, of bonding.”32 Marghe describes her first deepsearch experi-
ence as being “inside herself” in an exceptional and unthinkable way,
“listening to her body as a whole, a magnificent, healthy whole.”33
Using her virally improved abilities of memory and perception during
the deepsearch, she revisits her childhood memories and past experiences
that have already been embedded in her cells. Her preceding emergences
and configurations submerge and encounter her newly-budding viral
becoming in “what felt like days of communication between herself now
and herself of many thens.”34 These revisits represent ever-emergent iden-
tities of a subject through “iterative intra-actions,” in Barad’s words,
which “are the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are
produced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of phe-
nomena and the (re)making of material-discursive boundaries and their
constitutive exclusions.”35 Material phenomena that ceaselessly interact
(and intra-act) in moments of becomings constitute new formulations of
subjectivities, and these agentially formulaic selves manifest themselves
via what is left both outside and inside those material ‘and’ discursive
phenomena. In this manner, the existence of more than one Marghe is
revealed and embraced in quest of her posthuman self.
Reverting the neoliberal capitalist human’s “chrononormativity”
as further discussed and illustrated in Ruth Clemens and Max Casey’s
chapter (this volume), Marghe trespasses the supposed limits of her
bodymind’s spatio-temporality. This capacity enables her to reach out
to the human’s primary entanglement with the virus just as Thenike as
a viajera travels the planet’s spatio-temporal accumulations of material-
discursive phenomena. She does this through her meditative trance rit-
uals and delivers these planetary and archaic stories to her listeners.
She can actualise this because “time and history form one open and
dynamic whole, every force contributing to the composition and force
of every other part”36 in multifarious dimensions of the planet’s spatio-
temporality. In one case where Marghe also participates, Thenike takes
her audience to the memories of Goths, who are legendary, intelligent
creatures/natives of this planet and originally used to live in Ollfoss. In
the trance, they witness how Goths built henges out of standing stones to
worship their gods for the future of their generations and how they met
a spaceship landing on their habitat:
[T]‌he sky was split by light and thunder and a bolt from god thrashed
down and through the trees in a trail of noise and fire. They were
knocked over by the blast, and the ground trembled under their feet
as the black bolt ground and smashed through the trees. There was a
great burning, and alien smells.37
This is the arrival of the original settlers displacing and forcing GP’s
native species, Goths, to a migration. Marghe is able to transcend her
own bodymind and access the Goth memories via her viral becoming in
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Ollfoss “where life as it once was,” as Colebrook would agree, “haunts
the present and where remaining human is a prima facie good.”38 Such
nonhuman experiences and inscriptions of planetary memories are
extant and expansive in their intra-active communications with humans.
Capturing these incessant communication events, Griffith constitutes a
planet’s “autobiogenography,” in Nayar’s conceptualisation, through
Marghe’s posthuman “inheritances, lineages, and genealogies.”39 In that
sense, GP’s human communities might be aware of the horizontal relations
of GP beings; however, GP and Jeep also make them comprehend that the
landscape and its ecology as a whole act more hegemonically than the
human settlers: “Whatever the past, and, however violently subsuming
the preliminary mourning for ‘the human’ may be, a certain archival
hegemony prevails”40 on the planet. Under the planetary domination,
only Jeep women mediate the retrospective viewpoints of the surrounding
multiplicities, as a part of which that they “seek to understand.”41
As seen in the Company’s and the Mirrors’ insufficient understandings
of and approaches to the planet and its virus, patterns of fear and hatred
“are all implicated in [even unconfirmed] zoonotic ‘spillover’ events.”42
Nevertheless, Thenike’s tale entangled with Marghe’s resilience invites
these narrow minds to perspectivism for the ecology of Jeep. Only then
do they comprehend that their fear stems from their own alienness, or
“strange strangeness”43 in Timothy Morton’s terms, in these environs
since either Goths already had antibodies against Jeep, or they were a
part of the same whole. Regardless of the settlers’ stigmatisation, the
Jeep virus provides a corrective to the humanist vantage point and a
remediation of the past wrongdoings by strange strangers. Besides the
sociocultural and biological-informational forms that planetary memory
takes, the story reveals that people in GP incorporate the memories of
the landscape and nonhumans that interact with that landscape within
their bodies. While deepsearch is a method of revisiting these embedded
images, story-telling acts as the source of collective onto-epistemology
because “[l]‌anguage and memory,” for Bronwyn Davies, “are embodied,
political, and heavily saturated with emotion… . Memories have the
accumulated weight of associated memories and imagined possibil-
ities.”44 In GP, spoken, performative and material languages of human,
landscape, and other nonhumans cooperate with imaginations of
bodymind in those story-telling trances. Jeep, thus, purges human lan-
guage by transcending it.
Explicating the transformative and communicative capabilities of
bodies, Donna J. Haraway underscores that “bodies as objects of know-
ledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.”45 In Ammonite, material-
semiotic patterns in women manifest themselves through their gift of
conception: parthenogenesis. The virally reconfigured women trespass
dualistic boundaries of reproduction by leaving the male out of the pro-
creative algorithm. In all their material and social interactions, Jeep
bodies “shift from within” in a “very tricky”46 way, and thus generate
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new meanings and bodies during a unique experience of pregnancy. As
the virus is installed into the human core and runs through “the center of
the DNA like a bright electoral thread,”47 two women (mostly partners in
metabolic synchronisation) get into deepsearching together, but this time
not in their own bodies yet in each other’s. During this intimate medita-
tive quest, their consciousness travels from each other’s eyes to ovaries
and reaches the ready egg. Changing the chromosomes and rearranging
“the pairs of alleles on each one,”48 two women accomplish the first step
of asexual reproduction—ploidy—and witness mitotic multiplication of
each other’s ovum. Despite the increasing prevalence of genetic recombin-
ation in many beings in contemporary sciences, such a narrative obviously
belongs to the realm of fantasy (at least for the moment in the early twen-
tieth century). Yet, we should keep in mind that the horizon of the fantasy
delivers a multiplicity of worlds, beings, and becomings “not necessarily
known through the senses, or lived experience.”49 Hence, oscillating
between distinct social and biological realities, Marghe becomes the
vibrant model of humans and nonhumans co-emerging together. She and
her partner Thenike constitute “emergent historical hybridities actually
populating”50 GP. In this sense, Ammonite emphasises the posthumanist
aspects of entanglement and co-emergence with beings’ mutual influences
on one another. Griffith’s portrayal of our immense relationality reminds
us of Haraway’s words drawing on Bruno Latour’s work: “[W]‌e have
never been human and so are not caught in that cyclopean trap of mind
and matter, action and passion, actor and instrument. Because … we are
bodies in braided, ontic, and antic relatings.”51
Scientifically voicing the virus-human enmeshment, Katherine S. Pollard
interrogates the human’s viral becomings in her article “What Makes Us
Human?.” At one point, she draws attention to “the evolution of the
immune system” accelerated by “the constant adaptation of pathogens
to our defenses, leading to an evolutionary arms race between microbes
and hosts.”52 Marghe’s tale of viral becoming is not different. Similar to
the traces of this arms race left in our DNA, Jeep’s tracks can be followed
as the ones of other retroviruses “that survive and propagate by inserting
their genetic material into our genomes.”53 The method of this pursuit
in addition to the deepsearch rituals is the children of the above-detailed
asexual conception. Offspring who are conceived at the same time by at
least two women participating in the ritual are called soestre, meaning
sister in Afrikaans. While standard patterns of womanhood and mother-
hood are shattered as such, identity formations in a community are also
dislocated on biological, social, political, and psychological grounds. In
Ammonite, the concept of soestre reformulates the concepts of household
and family in all native tribes as each house is “organized around two
or more soestre and their tent sisters, who might or might not be bio-
logically related.”54 Griffith’s imagination of all-female households and
communities liberates the concept of family from gendered (and mostly
patriarchal) boundaries. Triggering de-materialisation of hierarchies in
1

a way to support the horizontal relationality in the social sphere, such
dissolutions of boundaries foster the prescribed, imagined, and assumed
roles of subjectivity and womanhood in GP. In her survey of the devel-
opment of posthuman feminist theories, Rosi Braidotti clarifies this lib-
eration of sexuality from its sex-gender binary as a “life force” enjoying
“more transversal, structural, and viral connotations.”55 Employing the
possibility of “thinking the unthinkable,” the non-binary queerness of
Jeep women foregrounds the act of desire, “the capacity to express and to
be affected,”56 as a core of their intra-actions with other non/humans and
their environments. In doing so, Jeep women become more than what
has long been structured by “the normative social apparatus of gender,
which is a form of governance that can be disrupted through processes
of becoming-minoritarian/becoming-women/becoming-animal.”57 That
is how multiple becomings of womanhood on such horizontal relations
provide women with a choice of motherhood that is uncaptured by gen-
dered mechanisms. Unintended pregnancies and parenthoods are outside
Jeep’s queer embodiment.
Without any heteropatriarchal imposition on the identity of woman,
family comes to mean people who choose to come and live together in
one place, not because of some obligations resulting from biological
ties among them, but because they desire to do so. In this mode of
relationality, motherhood becomes far less than an obstacle in a woman’s
life in GP. It does not necessitate the reduction of a woman’s subjectivity.
Rather, it proposes alternatives modes of becomings for her on, again, a
horizontal alignment. Since children are not regarded as properties of the
couple or the parent(s), but individual members of that household, every
adult cares for them, teaches them, and connects with them. In their ado-
lescence, these children get actively involved in community life through
several practices of social life. Such attachments bring no burden in the
contemporary sense as “[c]‌ loseness to residential parents (biological
and, when present, stepparents) [is] highly correlated with feelings of
family belonging in all family types.”58 Jeep offspring multiply possibil-
ities of new horizontal becomings for the ones related to them. Symbiotic
adaptations of each household individual with a biologically unrelated,
yet planetarily/materially/environmentally related, member help create
rhizomatically constructive relations in posthuman feminist environs as
in Ollfoss.
In Ammonite, experiences with the land, the people, the environment,
and the nonhuman are shown to possess agential consequences on a sub-
ject. Marghe is the prime example. Yet again, experiences of the same
kind, of the same pattern bring the cluster of sameness, oneness in a not-
quite-positive way. Our posthuman existences in our native lands are
multiplied in every relation we build, for sure; however, dwelling in the
familiar accompanies frustrated dwindlings in small- scale becomings.
The Echraidne and Briogannon tribes, to give an example, are shaped by
the harsh, ever-snowed, scarcely fertile environment on the Tehuantepec
2
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112 Şafak Horzum

plateau. The Echraidne women rarely accept an outsider into their com-
munities, and in rare cases they do accept one, they demand her to forget
her past identity but to become one of them for good. The authoritar-
ianism, tribalism, and fanaticism in them are concomitants of their iso-
lation from GP’s multiplicities, “full of unprecedented challenges.”59
Thenike explains its biological-environmental reasons: The Echraidne
women are
born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the
same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats,
reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s
not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or
their mother’s mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as
the unknown.60
Their harsh existence proliferates with the harsh environment around

them which has established strict traditional norms and inflexible rules.
Their embodied information about the vibrancy of life is limited to the
past and separated from the present.
The same is valid for Port Central security personnel, in other words,
the Mirrors who are named after their “mirror-visored helmet.”61 Should
the Echraidne and Briogannon stand for pre- industrial tribalism, the
Company and Mirrors in this alien planet represent hyper- industrial
imperialism. Off their own planet, these Earthlings are isolated both
in terms of their desolation to live in Port Central, their working-living
base, away from their own species, customs, and environments familiar
to them throughout their lives, and in respect of their choice of living
in the brackets of their high-tech territory. For the Port Central com-
munity, GP is replete with non/human absolute others that need famil-
iarisation or ‘domestication.’ These migrants’ traditional perspective
of liberal humanist ways hinders their ability to connect with GP’s and
Jeep’s horizontal trajectories. The same diagnosis is compelling for the
aforementioned tribal natives who have stuck to their ancestral memories
originating from the twenty- first-
century settlers. Their Earth-centred
backgrounds—despite the planetary spatial distance and the environ-
mental alterity— force them to operate around “prefabricated ethics
and ideals”62 in an anthropocentrically and patriarchally hierarchical
structure.
Imagine yourself travelling from the Earth to Mars. In this exhil-
arating and anxiety- breeding experience, two things are certain for
you to encounter: change and the unknown. These two powerful phe-
nomena embody what the original settlers—hence the Echraidne and
Briogannon—and the Port Central women have survived. Theirs is the
combination of a mutual onto-epistemological trauma and an emotional
backlash. Similarly ramifying such a combination, British-Turkish nov-
elist Elif Shafak discusses the current condition in which the worldlings
3
1

are: “[I]‌n the face of high-speed change, many people wish to slow down,
and when there’s too much unfamiliarity, people long for the familiar.
And when things get too confusing, many people crave simplicity.”63
GP reserves too many changes, too much unfamiliarity, in the face of
which no space is left for individualities and multiplicities. Therefore, the
Echraidne and Briogannon choose to follow a hierarchical and andro-
centric tribal life with their authoritarian, power- seeking, revengeful
leader Uaithne who deems herself the reincarnated body of the awakened
Death Spirit to unleash death and misery over all the planetary beings.
Akin to this, the Mirrors and their leader Danner remain stuck to their
humanist stance in their avoidance of entangling with GP communities
and residents. Both sides rely on dualistic patterns and their sociopolitics
are (mis)guided by collective sentiments that are “further amplified,
polarised.”64 As Shafak points out, at this critical crossroads enters into
the picture the demagogue who
understands how collective sentiments work and how he—it’s usu-

ally a he—can benefit from them. He tells us that we all belong in
our tribes, and he tells us that we will be safer if we are surrounded
by sameness.
GP’s demagogues are obviously ‘she’s that accentuate the toxic mascu-
linity of (neo)liberal humanism. Under the hierarchical rule of both sides,
Uaithne and Danner represent unquestioned patriarchal authorities and
desire no agency of any subject other than their own. Although these
two seem disconnected from each other on the surface, they sustain one
another. They remain in a dialectical relationship, outside of a rhizomatic
relationality.
Marghe as a posthuman subject who has experienced several material-
discursive changes in this planet via her intra-actions with numerous
unfamiliar entities pushes these two sides towards an awareness for a
symbiotic adaptation when they get into an armed conflict at the end of
the novel. Tired of their isolations, both the Echraidne and Briogannon
and the Port Central reach their tipping points and begin fighting against
each other. No more than some sort of religious or psychotic fanati-
cism, the reason for the clash between these two certainties imperils
their abilities (as well as of the ones in proximity to them) to survive. In
the midst of their encounter, Marghe makes her final move in her new
identity as a viajera by storytelling. First by addressing Danner and the
Mirrors, Marghe explains the rationale behind the destructive violence
of the combined tribes: They are dying of insufficient food sources in
the harsh environmental conditions, and they cannot understand “that
it’s possible to live another way. They live inside themselves in a way
it’s almost impossible to understand.”65 Due to their dislike of plurality,
the tribes cannot deal with the multiplicity posed by the Earthly arrivals,
and they choose the Port Central and Mirrors as their prime enemies
4
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114 Şafak Horzum

to be eliminated. Seeing Marghe’s transformation and survival, Danner
seems inclined to the possibility of a new horizontal becoming. The hard
part of resolution lies with the tribal women following Uaithne, the self-
proclaimed Death Spirit. With all her embodied knowledge out of her
viral becoming, Marghe addresses them and declares:
You have amongst you a liar and a deceiver, one whose heart is
twisted and empty, who leads you to a destiny that is false… . You
seek death, and I say to you: it comes… . The death I demand of you
will be harder still! … I demand of you the Great Death. The death
of change.66
In this, Marghe specifically addresses Aoife, the rightful leader of the

Echraidne, whose rule was usurped by Uaithne. As in the case of Danner
and the Mirrors, the leader of these hierarchically functioning native
communities needs convincing first. Aoife’s decision to ‘change’ and then
murdering Uaithne materialises the narrative agency of Marghe’s oracy.
In this instance of trata between differing sides, Griffith promotes the
way GP beings “live and interact” in GP—a hub of “comprehensive,
multi-layered, plural, and all-encompassing” networks, or, in Francesca
Ferrando’s words, “the most powerful manifestation of the political and
ethical praxis.”67
The instances from the narrative dimensions of non/ human co-
emergences are already seen in Thenike’s ritual and Marghe’s deepsearch
given above. However, Marghe’s affective address, as Serenella Iovino
and Serpil Oppermann would contend, “generates new narratives and
discourses that give voice to the complexity of our collective, highlighting
its multiple and ‘fractal’ causal connections and enlarging our horizon of
meanings.”68 These posthuman narrative agents proceed in constant webs
of relationalities with multiple other posthuman agents, and they do this
without any non/human intentionality. Or at least, it is more complex
than what we simply understand of it. Narrative agency of matter means
not to “enhance human qualities in fictive or material domains,” but to
mark “the vitality, autonomy, agency, and other signs that designate an
expressive dimension in nonhuman entities.”69 Such material and semi-
otic togetherness create two protagonists and their combined/correlated
stories. Marghe as an assemblage site of human and nonhuman agents
in GP voices “narrative emergences that amplify [GP’s social and envir-
onmental] reality, also affecting [those two clashing sides’] response[s]‌
to this reality.” Thereupon, the tribes and the Mirrors embrace “a
posthuman ethical frame in each moment of [their] lives, aware of [their]
individual, social, and species-specific habits of existence”70 as well as
“new and more complex levels of [this] reality.”71
The process of posthuman subjectivity in Ammonite requires the rec-
ognition of “the autonomy of affect as a virtual force that gets actualized
through relational bonds”72 as observed in Marghe’s and Thenike’s
5
1

horizontal connections they have grafted onto their selves. Unaware of
each and every agentic force of beings they connect with, these women
are inscribed with the narrative agencies of where they live, what they eat,
whom they interact with. In Başak Ağın’s conceptualisation, they become
“mattertext”: “an agentic tool that triggers change on the body, just as
our carbon footprints, ‘written’ on the atmosphere, or a viral code that
is inscribed into the DNA.”73 The Jeep virus always already has its own
textuality embedded in its materiality. So does the GP landscape. “Such
inscription” on the naturecultures in this alien planet, therefore,
does not essentially activate the involvement of a human form of

existence. Nor does it require the literal or metaphorical interpret-
ations of a human agent. In fact, the human is only one of the many
catalyzers at work in enacting both matter and text.74
When humans like Marghe and Thenike are included in the narrative
emergence of this mattertextual becoming, anthropocentric voices of
horizontal relationalities become merely outspoken. Here, it is worth
remembering Braidotti’s elaborate declaration of the posthuman feminist
subjectivity:
in me … is at home with zoe, the post-anthropocentric subject.

These rebellious components for me are related to the feminist con-
sciousness of what it means to be embodied female. As such, …
I am an incubator and a carrier of vital and lethal viruses; I am
mother-earth, the generator of the future. In the political economy
of phallogocentrism and of anthropocentric humanism, which
predicates the sovereignty of Sameness in a falsely universalistic
mode, my sex fell on the side of ‘Otherness’, understood as pejorative
difference, or as being-worth-less-than. The becoming-posthuman
speaks to my feminist self….75
Seeking the posthuman sights of symbiotic assemblages in posthuman

feminist— albeit fictional— environs, this chapter has analysed the
improbability of static subjectivities and the always- already present
conditions of beings that are able to live, think, and become in multi-
farious senses in Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite. As examined in Marghe’s
and Jeep’s viral becomings, one body is imbued with other bodies, and
replete with tales about their material-semiotic becomings in the past
and present. For this reason, it is “absurd to think that complex self-
organizing structures need a ‘brain’ to generate”76 new bodies full of
data. The entanglement of posthumanisms and feminisms in the contem-
porary age also maintains this hand-in-hand condition of once-dualistic
notions of human’s connections with nonhumans, even on a pathogenic
level. That is why Griffith’s rewriting of the world in a differently-abled,
subversive dimension challenges the (neo)liberal humanist appropriations
6
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116 Şafak Horzum

of existence and mirrors our posthuman condition here and now. Our
ceaseless potential of ‘becoming with’ materialises the communication
and intra-action between non/ human bodies and the planet that lets
infinitude proliferations of new bodyminds and mattertexts.
Notes
1 Nicola Griffith, “Nicola Griffith Talks about Writing Ammonite,” in
Ammonite (New York, NY: Del Rey, 2002), 376, Google Play Books.
2 Alison Sperling, “Anthropocene,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-
Century Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth Goodman (London: Bloomsbury,
2019), 320.
3 Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene
Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017), 32.
4 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 89.
5 Nicola Griffith, Ammonite (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1993), 4, Adobe
Digital Editions Epub. Although GP and Jeep have double meanings and
mean the same, I will use each one for different purposes for the sake of
clarity in this chapter. Hereafter, GP refers to the Grenchstom’s Planet while
Jeep indicates this planet’s indigenous virus (except their interchangeable uses
in the quotations from the novel).
6 For a detailed discussion on engineering planets other than Earth for the
human survival in science- fiction genre, see Chris Pak, Terraforming:
Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016).
7 Griffith, Ammonite, 11, 7.
8 Griffith, Ammonite, 34.
10 In a critical posthumanist sense, the term ‘bodymind’ here is used to
emphasise the fictionalised divide between the body and the mind since
the Enlightenment. Subverting the mind’s superiority (as pumped by lib-
eral humanist philosophies and ideologies), bodymind as a compound here
underlines the material turn in posthuman and environmental studies; there-
fore, the word ‘body’ is preposed in it. The suggestion of the union between
the mind and the body has so far appeared in diverse contexts. A similar usage
to mine, for instance, can be found at Floyd Merrell, Sensing Corporeally:
Toward a Posthuman Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2003). In a disability studies context, this compound is also used by Margaret
Price; see Margaret Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of
Pain,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–9.
From an environmental humanities perspective, Wendy Wheeler also adopts
this term to refer to “phenomenologically whole creatures embodied in an
environment which also is really a part of us [humans]”; see Wendy Wheeler,
The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 18. Likewise, bodymind in psych-
ology and psychotherapy has long been used to signify synchronical and
symbiotic functionings of body and mind; i.e., see Heward Wilkinson, “An
Inspired Resurrection of Freudian Drive Theory: But Does Nick Totton’s
7
1

Reichian ‘Bodymind’ Concept Supersede Cartesian Dualism?,” International
Journal of Psychotherapy 5, no. 2 (2000): 154–6. What is common in all
these variations is the denial of Cartesian binarism, as in Carol A. Taylor’s
posthumanist use of the term, although Taylor prefers to employ the term
as ‘mindbodies’ in the plural instead of ‘bodymind’; see her chapter entitled
“Knowledge Matters: Five Propositions Concerning the Reconceptualisation
of Knowledge in Feminist New Materialist, Posthumanist and Postqualitative
Approaches,” in Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical
Posthumanist Terrain across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide, ed. Karin
Murris (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 41–2.
13 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying –Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits
of Truth”, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1993), 33.
14 Eric Jonas, “Historicity and Alterity: Revisiting the Foucault-Derrida Debate,”
Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
22, no. 4 (2014): 594.
15 Roberto Marchesini, “Nonhuman Alterities,” trans. Elena Past, Angelaki:
Journal of Theoretical Humanities 21, no. 1 (2016): 161–2; italics removed.
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
17 Marchesini, 162.
18 Viajera means a woman traveller in Spanish. Griffith uses several languages
in GP habitats like English, Spanish, Irish, Welsh, Afrikaans, and Greek.
Suggestive of the colonial premises by ancient Greece, England, and Spain,
Griffith’s blending these languages, I claim, also subversively reformulates the
nature-culture continuum in the past lifestyles of African, Gaelic, Celtic, and
ancient Hellenic communities.
21 Bennett, 32.
22 Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,”
Topoi 12, no. 2 (1993): 170.
no. 2 (2021): 155.
27 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and
Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 78–9.
28 Barad, 151.
30 Pramod K. Nayar, “Visualising Resilience: Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde,”
Critical Survey 32, no. 4 (2020): 81.
31 Claire Colebrook, “Afterword: The Time of Planetary Memory,” Textual
Practice 31, no. 5 (2017): 1020.
32 Griffith, Ammonite, 105, 185.
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118 Şafak Horzum

34 Griffith, Ammonite, 198; italics added.
35 Barad, 179; italics removed.
36 Colebrook, 1020.
37 Griffith, Ammonite, 183–4.
38 Colebrook, 1017.
39 Pramod K. Nayar, “Genetics and Auto/ Biography,” in Research
Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies, eds. Kate Douglas and Ashley
Barnwell (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 180.
40 Colebrook, 1019–20.
41 Barad, 26; italics in the original.
42 Amber R. Huff and Tom Winnebah, “Ebola, Politics and Ecology: Beyond
the ‘Outbreak Narrative,’ ” IDS Practice Paper in Brief, No. 20 (February 1,
2015): 1.
43 Timothy Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, The Strange Stranger, and
the Beautiful Soul,” Collapse 6 (2010): 275; italics removed.
44 Bronwyn Davies, (In)Scribing Body/ Landscape Relations (Walnut Creek:
AltaMira Press, 2000), 40.
45 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 200.
46 Haraway, Simians, 201.
49 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 44.
50 Donna J. Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York, NY: Routledge,
2004), 300.
51 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), 165.
52 Katherine S. Pollard, “What Makes Us Human?,” Scientific American 300,
no. 5 (2009): 49.
53 Pollard, Ammonite, 49.
55 Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman Feminist Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Feminist Theory, eds. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford
56 Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 108–9.
57 Braidotti, Posthuman Feminist, 689.
58 Valarie King, Lisa M. Boyd, and Brianne Pragg, “Parent-Adolescent Closeness,
Family Belonging, and Adolescent Well- Being across Family Structures,”
Journal of Family Issues 39, no. 7 (2018): 2015.
59 Elif Shafak, “The Revolutionary Power of Diverse Thought,” Filmed
September 2017 in New York, NY, TED Video, 21:49. www.ted.com/talks/
elif_shafak_the_revolutionary_power_of_diverse_thought.
62 Şafak Horzum, “Hegemonic Hospitality in Relation to Diasporic Male
Identities in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart,” in Representations
9
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of Diasporic Identities in Britain, ed. A. Deniz Bozer (Ankara: Hacettepe
63 Shafak.
64 Shafak.
66 Griffith, Ammonite, 287–9.
67 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthuman Feminist Ethics: Unveiling Ontological
Radical Healing,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds.
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London: Bloomsbury,
2020), 141.
68 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction: Stories Come to
Matter,” in Material Ecocriticism, eds. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
69 Serpil Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism:
Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency,” in Material Ecocriticism, eds.
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2014), 30.
70 Ferrando, 156.
71 Iovino and Oppermann, 8.
72 Rosi Braidotti, “Preface,” Language and Intercultural Communication 20,
no. 5 (2020): 395.
73 Başak Ağın, “(Erratum) Animated Film as an Eloquent Body: Seth Boyden’s
An Object at Rest as Mattertext,” Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal
Bilimler Dergisi 18, no. 1 (2020): 383.
74 Ağın, 383.
75 Braidotti, Posthuman, 80–1; italics in the original.
76 Manuel DeLanda, “Interview with Manuel DeLanda,” in New Materialism:
Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann
Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 43.
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375–6. New York, NY: Del Rey, 2002, Google Play Books.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics.” Topoi
12, no. 2 (1993): 167–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00821854.
Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.
Haraway, Donna J. The Haraway Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004.
Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Horzum, Şafak. “Hegemonic Hospitality in Relation to Diasporic Male Identities
in Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart.” In Representations of Diasporic
Identities in Britain, edited by A. Deniz Bozer, 41–68. Ankara: Hacettepe
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2015): 1–4.
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17. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.
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Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
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King, Valarie, Lisa M. Boyd, and Brianne Pragg. “Parent-Adolescent Closeness,
Family Belonging, and Adolescent Well- Being across Family Structures.”
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0192513X17739048.
MacCormack, Patricia. Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory.
Surrey: Ashgate, 2012.
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doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2016.1163839.
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https://doi.org/10.1080/713672059.
21
6
Power or Despair
Contagious Diseases in Turkish
History and Miniature Paintings
Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan
In the opening pages of her novel Our Tragic Universe (2010), where
she explores such issues of life, death, and its aftermath, Scarlett Thomas
draws attention to a double demise that links the end of the universe to
the end of our story-telling activities. She writes:
As the universe gets ready to collapse, no one will be writing poetry

about it or making love for the last time or just bobbing around,
stoned and listless, waiting for annihilation, imagining something
beautiful and unfathomable on the other side. All hands will be on
deck for the ultimate goal: survival.1
But is it so? Can our stories not persist even in the face of extinction,
destruction, and annihilation? The narrative beings that we are, can we
just not hold on to our narratives and hope, perhaps, that they will pull
us from the brink of death?
Even ancient wisdom divulges how much Homo sapiens enjoys telling
stories. Taking our mimetic tendencies as the basis of our story-telling
activities, eminent philosopher and Plato’s disciple Aristotle (fourth cen-
tury BCE) highlights how imitation is indeed “co-natural with human
beings from childhood,” and states that “in this they differ from the
other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their
first acts of understanding by means of imitation; also all human beings
take delight in imitations.”2 Thus, coordinating the essence of human
beings with their story-telling pursuits, Aristotle draws attention to the
story-filled environments inhabited by the human imagination. Enthused
by this Aristotelian notion of narrativity, which underlines the story-
laden essence of the human, the German folklorist and ethnologist Kurt
Ranke (1908–1985) introduces in 1965 the concept of Homo narrans,
which refers to the story-telling human being.3 Ranke’s perspective puts
the emphasis on human conceptualisations through stories enacted
by human factors. This chapter, however, different from the centrality
of the human in Ranke’s Homo narrans, pays attention to the stories
told by both human and nonhuman agentic bodies, which I configure
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-10
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Power or Despair 123

as concurrences. Bearing in mind the posthumanist idea that neither the
human nor the nonhuman has ever been self-contained entities but are
always already bound with one another, it entails a vision of meaning
filtred through human imagination by means of stories. It thus points to
how, in Karen Barad’s words, the intra-acting naturalcultural formations
can reveal their embodiments by means of story-telling, without definite
borders, locations, momenta, or time.
Indeed, the most fascinating story uncovering the intricate
naturalcultural happenings resides in our bodies. The essence of our
bodies, DNA, tells the multi-temporal and cosmic multi-species stories of
our inheritance. Functioning as our cosmic scribe, DNA stores the stories
of our lives to convey them to the next generations. Showing “a hybrid
palimpsest of additions, deletions, viral code insertions and so on,”4
DNA hints at a myriad of possible stories and diversities in life forms.
In The Language of Genes (1993), the biologist Steve Jones grants DNA
its power of story-telling and underscores that “each segment of DNA is
a message from our forebears and together they contain the whole story
of human evolution. Everyone alive today is a living fossil and carries
within themselves a record that revisits the birth of humankind.”5 The
same storing and archiving happens in all beings that share the same
cosmic energy, hence revealing their “inherent creativity.”6 Translating
the human cogency into the cosmic assemblages that make up our bodies,
then, one could interpret our story-telling routines on both literal and
metaphorical levels and say that we really love the act of narration, even
in our bones and genes: We are filled with stories. To make it even more
clear, the worldly formations that we experience every second are filled
with stories. And these stories are intra-active. Broadly summarising what
I have outlined above, our ancient story-teller, DNA, “is not limited to
the physical boundaries of life forms, but rather expresses itself in and as
what we call ‘the environment’.”7 So, these ancient and recurrent stories
in all bodies are spontaneously ordered to reveal intra-active and porous
bonds in all agencies.
What is more interesting is that these stories that fill our existence
are not totally ‘human’ stories. Attending to Donna Haraway’s statement
that “every species is a multispecies crowd”8 with their overlapped and
overstratified stories, one can ask how much of a person is human as set
by humanist and Enlightenment philosophies. This questioning leads us
to “the knowledge that we have never been human and so are not caught
in that cyclopean trap of mind and matter, action and passion, actor
and instrument.”9 Elemental, viral, and bacterial formations inside our
embodiments, for instance, reveal how our human identities are actually
shaped by nonhuman agents. Timothy Morton aptly states that “we are
not ourselves, if by that we mean independent and singular beings, but are
made up of others.”10 This indeed points to how our bodies are gates for
nonhuman stories. Morton further explicates how life forms are porous
composites as “life forms are … made from their environments, including
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124 Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan

sunshine and chemicals from exploding stars. There is no way rigidly to
separate the biosphere and the non-biosphere.”11 Illustrating the plot of
“the interplay of human and nonhuman forces”12 in the novel dynamics
of planetary and cosmic systems, our bodies thus become “an assemblage
of microbes, animals, plants, metals, chemicals, word-sounds, and the
like.”13 To put it somewhat differently, our bodies are eye-witnesses of the
constant stories of the collaborations between humans and nonhumans.
In the interest of tracking the story-telling processes beyond human
imagination, this chapter invites a rethinking of how humans are
enmeshed with nonhuman stories ascribed in human and nonhuman
bodies, elements, the physical environments, cultural practices, the
Earth, the planets, and the cosmos. Theorised by Serenella Iovino and
Serpil Oppermann, materialism ecocriticism calls into question the dom-
inance of human narrative acts by extending this pleasure to nonhuman
beings, which are themselves narrating their stories independently
from and interdependently with the human. By doing so, Iovino and
Oppermann not only reveal how every being is keen on telling its cosmic
inheritance by means of volatile and different stories, but they also lib-
erate the story-telling act from the limits of human beings. The concept
of storied matter, coined by Iovino and Oppermann, aims at showing
how “matter is endowed with meanings and is thick with stories.”14
Exploring how “every material configuration” is “telling”15 a unique yet
interconnected story, hence emphasising “the narrative aspects of agentic
materiality as intermingled dynamic emergences and discursive forms,”16
material ecocriticism re-configures our fragile and volatile relationships
both within ourselves and with nonhuman bodies, highlighting how
nonhuman agents are creating their own narration regardless of human
intervention.
Neither human lifespan nor its perception is enough to configure how
trees, for example, are telling their own stories revealing the structure
of their ancestors and transmitting their entangled codes to the next
generations. Of course, we can make sense of it by looking at the layers in
their trunks, and we can even eyewitness their births and deaths. But we
cannot fully comprehend how they communicate with the surrounding
elemental bodies and with one another. We cannot speak the language of
the trees, and that is why they seem so silent to us. The English novelist
John Fowles (1926–2005) underlines their intrinsic narrations stating that
“they were already more than trees, their names and habits and characters
on an emotional parity with those of family.”17 Further drawing attention
to their being a “multispecies crowd,” to echo Donna Haraway, Fowles
talks about how a tree shares its existence with other beings that he names
as “co-tenants, its wild birds and beasts, its plants and insects,”18 “other
societies of plants, … mammals, [and] microorganisms.”19 Basing his
observation on the stories of the trees, Fowles terms what he experiences
as “individual presentness” of the trees that he reads as if reading a story
from his own “individual presentness.”20
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen traces the same “individual presentness” in the
elemental stories told by stones. Emphasising their dynamic positions as
“ancient allies in knowledge making,”21 Cohen compels us to re-think and
re-evaluate matter in terms of respecting its narrative potentials carried
through histories and spaces. Apart from opening up terrestrial and
extra-terrestrial stories of stones, Cohen further underlines intra-active
performativities and calls the way stones act upon surrounding bodies,
energies, times, locations, and environments “lithic ‘friendship’.”22
Interrogating the process that takes “for a body to be no longer a person
or a life, but material that can be moved, that can be used to build a
place”23 like the house a person is dwelling in, Cohen’s performative per-
ception of the stone becomes isomorphic with Haraway’s inter-species
performativity. Similar to Cohen’s remarks on the compost story of
human and nonhuman formations in the embodiments of stone, Haraway
speculates on interactive relationships with nonhuman animals, asking
“(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is
‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?”24 It is quite interesting,
though, to see that the same practice of becoming worldly is mentioned
by Avicenna (Ibn Sina, c. 980– 1037), which implies becoming One
not only in terms of spiritual togetherness but also in material terms.
All bodies transform into each other within indefinite possibilities and
without borders, hence narrating an overlapped history through various
reproduced stories. In relation to these transformations, the German friar
Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) makes a reference to Avicenna to high-
light Avicenna’s configurations on worldly performativities in Book of
Minerals (thirteenth century):
Avicenna says that … animals, just as they are, are sometimes changed
into stones, and especially [salty] stones. For he says that just as
Earth and Water are material for stones, so animals, too, are material
for stones. And in places where a petrifying force is exhaling, they
change into their elements and are attacked by the properties of the
qualities [hot, cold, moist, dry] which are present in those places, and
the elements in the bodies of such animals are changed into the dom-
inant element, namely Earth mixed with Water; and then the mineral-
izing power converts [the mixture] into stone, and the parts of the
body retain their shape, inside and outside, just as they were before.25
Interestingly, Avicenna here in Magnus’ interpretation explicates how

matter is endowed with various organisms and elemental formations,
hence creating a narrative compost onto which the terrestrial journey of
multiple beings is inscribed. Exemplifying, in this respect, how “matter
and meaning coalesce in these narrative potentialities of the physical
world,”26 stone becomes the embodiment of porosity and enmeshment.
Elaborating on the notion of material ecocriticism, this chapter ana-
lyses contagious diseases as a naturalcultural amalgam that is narrating
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an enmeshed story extending beyond spatial-temporal limits. Framed on
the basis of Iovino and Oppermann’s theories, similar to Fowles’ trees
and Cohen’s stones, contagious diseases emerge as storied narrations,
the impacts of which we can observe in our physical, psychological, cul-
tural, and social practices. This observation impels us to take diseases as
“posthuman biocultural creatures” as Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu names in
his chapter (this volume). These creatures, Yazgünoğlu furthers, reinforce
an in-betweenness where human and nonhuman intersect, hence showing
that “the host-parasite distinction has already broken down.”27 When
the dynamics of the current SARS-CoV-2 are taken into account, the
current pandemic immediately shows how a viral formation dynamically
acts upon every sort of cultural and physical happening, transforming
every practice from religion to education. This transformation consecu-
tively reveals how anthropocentric borders are intricately and intrinsic-
ally already eroding in the nonhuman entanglements of the world. As
Ruth Clemens and Max Casey (this volume) also remark, our intertwined
relations with the nonhuman agents of disease translate our meaning-
making practices into the material world. This means that the world
is entangled in its own intra-active, dynamic agencies, in which Homo
sapiens is only one of the agents that trigger change. Reminding us of
how viruses, bacteria, and other disease-carrying microorganisms reshape
what meanings we produce in our chrononormative understanding of
being and acting, then, Clemens and Casey aptly point out the multiscalar
relationality that conveys diversities in temporality, alongside other
human-centred notions, such as spatiality and narrativity. Returning to
our current states of being, then, it is possible to observe, in light of the
ongoing pandemic, how the stories of the world are being retold and
rewritten into the large planetary body of which we are part. Radically
changing all power dynamics and connecting all the world digitally with
an obligatory digital turn in everyday life, the continual spread of the
COVID-19 disease at present has been creating a new world system in
which human beings are compelled to adapt. As Elana Gomel contends
in her chapter “The Epidemic of History: Contagion of the Past in the
Era of the Never- Ending Present” in the edited volume Embodying
Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary
Discourse (2021), “the coronavirus pandemic is history unfolding in real
time, impacting everything from the global economy to race relations in
the USA.”28 Echoing Gomel’s words, then, the virus at hand showcases
its amplified activity through societal, discursive, and physical practices:
SARS-CoV-2 illustrates the active agency of viruses.
Apart from their narrative activities on discourses, as in the activity
of COVID-19, viruses also point to the porosity of various organisms. In
need of live hosts, they incorporate life and death within their positions
between bios and zoē. Spending “billions of years perfecting the art of
surviving without living,”29 such viral agencies demand consideration as
biological impediments to re-define what life is. Strictly rejecting being
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categorised as living or non-living, viruses not only cross but also blur all
the boundaries set by human discourses. Their agential recalcitrance to
being defined and categorised takes a more amazing step when we look
more closely at their formations. Lacking “a metabolism of their own,”30
they are material instantiations of intra-bodies porosity, telling a very
posthuman story in their porous formations.
Such intra- active and trans- corporeal— in Stacy Alaimo’s term—
possibilities illustrate not only “how various substances travel across
and within the human body but how they do things—often unwelcome
or unexpected things,” and are at times “contending with dangerous,
often imperceptible material agencies.”31 This acknowledgement of
various agencies as actors puts emphasis on the fact that “bodies are no
longer seen as purely discursive constructs, nor as biological substances
with boundaries.”32 By doing so, it reconceptualises the Human “within
the material flows, exchanges, and interactions of substances, habitats,
places, and environments.”33 Significantly, the prefix “trans” in Alaimo’s
concept of “trans-corporeal” in fact “indicates movement across different
sites” opening up a perception of “the often unpredictable and unwanted
actions of human bodies, non-human creatures, ecological systems, chem-
ical agents, and other actors.”34 Taking all of these into consideration, if
we take sides, how are we going to decide what kind of a story is ascribed
into our bodies? Does it bring forth power, opening up new paths for
new potentialities, or despair, turning our environments into desolate and
fearful spaces? To be able to answer these questions, this chapter delves
into a brief history of contagious diseases in Anatolia to comprehend
their interspecies stories through different scales, times, and spaces.
Reinforcing “inhuman forces, elements, and non-human entities as
active, agentic, and expressive denizens of the Earth,”35 disease stories
throughout Turkish history have radically shaped cultural imaginaries.
Envisioning material and discursive formations beyond human control
and imagination, the narrative power of agentic contagious diseases
can be tracked back to the travel writings of the Ottoman explorer and
traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682). In his Seyâhatnâme, Evliya Çelebi
records his travels also referring to a number of contagious diseases of
his time. In addition to making a textual and historical contribution in
terms of tracing a history of contagious diseases, he also allows space
for the discussion of how certain diseases are interwoven with cul-
tural imaginaries and discursive formations. For example, he mentions
an 80-archine long column, which is believed to be charmed to protect
humanity from plagues, narrating in detail how its destruction leads to a
disease-infected city:
This column was the guarantee of a city free of plagues. However,

when that column was destroyed to construct Beyazıd Hân Turkish
bath, that day İslâmbol [İstanbul] was covered with plague. One of
Sultan Beyazıd’s sons died of the plague in the Davutpaşa garden.36
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Incorporating fearful scenarios of plague-stricken places and anxieties
with agentic disease formations, this column mixes the material and the
discursive, providing a posthumanist narrative linking human and non-
human imagination. Therefore, the agency of the contagious diseases
transforms cultural imaginations, which, as a result, brings forward
different material conclusions such as the naturalcultural embodiment of
this column, taken as a magical token guarding the city from contagious
diseases. This cultural imagination coordinates the column with storied
matter as the column “becomes a site of narrativity, a storied matter,
embodying its own narratives in the minds of human agents and in the
very structure of its own self-constructive forces.”37
Looking at the spatial- temporal history of disease formations in
Turkish history throws us back to the sixth century when the Plague of
Justinian, the first-known Yersinia pestis (bacterium) originated plague,
struck Constantinople, and totally changed social practices back then.
Diffusing its naturalcultural narration into varied sorts of cultural
practices and imaginations, this plague, coming from China by means of
the rat code-transmitters, even affected religious doctrines, political and
economic formations, and cultural happenings. Such a similar scenario!
Indeed, Anatolian land history voices many intermittent plague outbreaks
that hit the humanity and generated many new formations. Experiencing
plague almost every century from the sixth century onwards, Anatolia
witnessed how contagious diseases narrate their lethal stories beyond
human imaginations. Resulting in a scarcity of coffin and gravedigger, for
instance, the plague outbreak in the eleventh and twelfth centuries fed on
death, filling most of the public places with heaps of decaying bodies.38
This lethal story extended towards trade formations, and “killing 600
people every day, 1466 plague outbreak resulted in masses moving out-
side the city centres. Moreover, 1470 plague outbreak caused the halt
of trade in the metropolis,”39 that is İstanbul. As a result of various
interactions with deadly contagious diseases, people had to re- settle
trade relations and routes. They further encountered various composite
formations resulting from a disease outbreak intermittently in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. Killing nearly 1,000–1,200 people every day,
1778 plague outbreak similarly halted the dynamic commerce and com-
pelled the city-dwellers to escape into safe areas in the countryside, hence
transforming the city centre into desolate and abandoned localities.40 In
these intra-active narrations, plague outbreaks not only changed human
existences and embodiments but also fundamentally modified the façade
and texture of the city, hence passed their storied creativities—lethal in
this case—into human lives. Nineteenth century outbreaks led to the
enclosure of brothels where it was easier for a person to be infected in the
alarming case of a contagious plague.41 In the nineteenth century, cholera
and typhus outbreaks, estimated to have come from Russia by means
of Circassian immigrants, leaked their mortal agencies into the hearts
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of certain cities such as Trabzon and İstanbul, and resulted in approxi-
mately 15,000 deaths. Pointing out a unique composition of “a radical
dismantling of the boundaries between human and nonhuman agencies,
the social and the natural, and above all between matter and discourse,”42
these multi-time outbreaks embodied how intra-species and intra-beings
transformations result in dynamic possibilities of different happenings in
discursive and material practices.
History is also marked by the combination of battle scenes and inevitable
contagious diseases, arising out of congregating a mass of male warriors
inside trenches with non-hygienic conditions. One of the repercussions of
1402 Battle of Ankara, for example, was a plague outbreak all around
Anatolia as the contagion emerged in the encampment of Emir Timur
(1336–1405) and spread to Anatolia with the gradual progression of
the Timurid and Ottoman troops and the mobility of these armies.43
Holding military success dearer than communal health and well-being,
the dominant policy was to send soldiers showing symptoms back home,
which consequently induced the spread of the contagion all throughout
Anatolian villages, thus worsening the control of the spread. Evacuating
infected soldiers from the military camps, however, could not hinder the
spread of the contagious diseases within the trenches. Similar accounts of
the intermingled nature of warfare and disease abound Turkish history.
The records are not certain regarding how many of soldiers died fighting
and how many died of contagious diseases in the trenches during the
1854 Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the Greco-
Turkish War of 1897, 1912–1913 Balkan Wars, 1914–1918 First World
War, and 1919–1923 Turkish War of Independence.44
One of the British trench poets, who was killed after his night patrol
at the age of 27, Isaac Rosenberg’s (1890–1918) poem entitled “Louse
Hunting” written for the Battle of the Somme (1916) invokes a similar
interconnectedness of war and diseases. Rosenberg writes about the
calamity soldiers had to resist in the dramatisation of the image of
lice hunting on the soldiers and soldiers hunting lice on their bodies in
his poem:
Nudes –stark and glistening,

Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.
Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.45
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Reduced to material diseases and disturbances, soldiers scratch to ease
their pain feverishly, feeling obliged to burn their clothes so as to extin-
guish the lice eggs. Inhabiting various possibilities of contagious disease,
the problem of louse brought forward harsh physical conditions. These
calamities exceeded the boundaries of the trenches to the spatiality of the
civilians mainly because of the “mobility of the armies and the precar-
ious medical assistance,”46 and this consecutively led to a communal fight
against diseases. For instance, such headlines frequently seen on Turkish
newspapers in the 1940s reveal the magnitude of a country policy to raise
awareness on how to keep oneself safe from such contagious diseases as
malaria and typhus: “Malaria is the enemy of our homes, our health, and
our progress”; “The day when we get rid of malaria is when our country
will reach beauty and wealth”47;
Hygiene is of utmost importance to fight against louse. Shave your-

selves frequently to prevent them from nesting on your bodies,
and wash yourselves using soap. Boil your clothes. Do not stay in
crowded places long and try to avoid sleeping with someone closely
as much as you can.48
One gets really shocked realising the similarity of the methods for
protecting oneself from contagious diseases ranging from the 1940s to
2020 COVID-19 outbreak. What is more shocking, though, is to trace
this similarity back to the fifteenth century. Recommendations by the
Turkish surgeon Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385–1468) to wash hands
frequently, to stay away from the crowd, to keep the social distance,
to eat well and healthy, to rest, to stay home as much as possible, and
to cover face against contagion49 in the face of a contagious disease
echo today’s cries for the alarming COVID-19 table. Choosing a visual
medium to convey naturalcultural stories of contagious diseases to make
these recommendations clear to Turkish people, Sabuncuoğlu presents his
own miniatures that he himself drew as a visual aid to understand certain
treatments and the position of the patient and the doctor and makes them
available as a storied matter revealing a material and discursive amalgam,
telling the story of the diseases and viruses by means of pictorial and med-
ical details.
Contributing to the illumination of a manuscript, most of the miniatures
visually illustrate celebrations of royalty “by their royal battle scenes,
scenes of enthronement, scenes witnessing the generosity of Sultans,
hunting and sportive scenes; and sometimes even scenes celebrating their
funerals. As a result, large number of their miniatures are in the nature of
historiography and annals” recording “various incidents of the Sultan’s
career, including details of his various land campaigns, his naval battles,
sieges of enemy fortresses, his hunting expedition, his sportive interests,
and several other such displays of strength.”50 Functioning as material
extensions of cultural celebrations, such miniatures turn into effective
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devices of keeping historical records under surveillance. Apart from
those celebratory miniatures, Metin And also mentions those that were
made for scientific purposes and those on astrology, cosmography, div-
ination, and magic, showing “the constellations of the zodiac, with fixed
stars rendered either in schematic form or in personified, diagrammatic
compositions of magical signs, featuring demoniac, fantastic animals and
evil figures.”51 In all cases, miniatures demonstrate active compositions of
interconnected bodies and agencies including, for example, the agential
interplay of paper, pen, paint, knowledge, imagination, and imitation,
thus forming “agentic assemblages with the power to instigate long-
standing effects.”52 Locating the sick and the surgeon—that is basically
himself—in the physical environment, these miniatures also give us an
idea of Ottoman environmentalism. Rather than a constructed hospital
building, treatments are outside in the physical environment, of which
human bodies are obviously an inseparable part. This location of the
human is obviously not Cultural or Natural, but naturecultural, indi-
cating the congregation of human and nonhuman. The materiality of
miniatures then becomes an embodied narrative story through which
economic policies, geographical power dynamics, and social and cultural
relations exhibit their intra-creativities.
Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu prefers this narrative materiality to convey his
medical knowledge and configurations from one generation to another.
Submitting pictorial details of his medical treatments, paediatric surgical
procedures, and his experiments on nonhuman animals and himself to
those who are interested in his science, Sabuncuoğlu also makes use of the
healing properties of water and music creating a material kinship between
the human embodiment and elemental and acoustic agencies “which
combine and collide with the agentic field of our species.”53 By means of
this material kinship that he builds between two nonhuman agencies and
human bodies that materially inhabit varied forms of water and music
(water is one of the core essentials of human body, and music resides
in our bodily circulations of blood and heart beat in rhythmic terms),
Sabuncuoğlu aims at bonding “the sorts of multispecies relationships
emerging among us”54 with the help of healing powers of elemental and
acoustic agencies.
“Accepted as the first pediatric surgical atlas,”55 the historic illustrated
medical record Cerrahiyyetü’l Haniyye (1465; Imperial Surgery) describes
how operations can take place with the right methods, equipment, and
positions. Having only three manuscripts in Paris Bibliotheque Nationale,
İstanbul National Library, and İstanbul University Institute of Medical
History,56 this medical book of miniature illustrations entails “numerous
original techniques in a variety of surgical specialties.”57 Choosing Turkish
as his medium of manuscript in a period when Arabic was the language of
science and Persian was the language of literature, Sabuncuoğlu demands
the illumination of Anatolian peoples in medical terms. He also gives
extensive space to the treatments of contagious diseases, one example
2
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1
Figure 6.1 Example (1) of cauterisation for the treatment of leprosy.

Source: Taken from Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu’s Cerrahiyyetü’l-Haniyye.a
a Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu, Cerrahiyyetü’l-Haniyye, ed. İlter Uzel, Vol. 1 (Ankara:
Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2020), 198.
of which is how to treat leprosy, the most common contagious disease

of the Ottoman Empire. Recommending cauterisation of the lesions for
these treatments (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2), these miniatures capture the
moment where medical experience intersects with material contagious
disease of leprosy.
This disease itself, caused by Hansen bacilli (bacterium), deserves
a closer look to uncover its dangerous trans-corporeality. Entailing the
dissolution of human-embodied agency into a decaying and mouldering
body, this disease questions the privileged position of Homo sapiens.
Along with revealing material on-going possibilities and taking human
existence closer to a non-existence with its erasure of perfect ontological
form and with its reminiscences of death, leprosy feeds on naturalcultural
intersections. Moreover, these intersections in return shape cultural
imaginations, one example of which we can observe in Evliya Çelebi’s
Seyâhatnâme. Describing hot springs of Bursa, Evliya Çelebi mentions the
Bath of Çekirge Sultan, whose “water is [believed to be] effective against
mange and leprosy” and furthers his remarks exemplifying that a person
who has suffered from leprosy for forty years may be cured of that
affliction by entering the water and also drinking it for forty days.
His facial hair will be restored, his voice will be as loud as that of
the prophet David, even his sexual prowess will return so that he can
have progeny. It is known that lepers lose their brows and lashes, and
31
Figure 6.2
Example (2) of cauterisation for the treatment of leprosy.
Source: Taken from Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu’s Cerrahiyyetü’l-Haniyye.a
a Sabuncuoğlu.
their voices, and their sexual prowess. And, God save us, it is said to
be a contagious disease from which one should flee as from a lion.
That is the reason why, in towns throughout Turkey, the lepers dwell
in a separate quarter, outside the city.58
From this narration, the water of the Çekirge Sultan Bath forms an extra-
body narration and extends its material creativity to cultural and medical
imaginations. From this perspective, “encoded with a mesh of meanings
and narrative trajectories,”59 the Çekirge Sultan Bath is a storied matter,
filled with its own narration acting actively upon cultural imaginations.
Nevertheless, it seems apt to highlight here that, different from Evliya
Çelebi, who remains to be a knowledge transmitter in the material-
discursive intersections, Sabuncuoğlu himself adds another layer of the
storied materiality of leprosy through his contribution of miniature
drawings. Sabuncuoğlu’s miniatures on how to treat a leper situate lep-
rosy in his conceptual dismantling and horizon blended with his cultural
imagination and his medical knowledge. Therefore, these miniatures cap-
ture the agency of this contagious disease with its enmeshment with human
forces, hence creating a material and discursive interference. This inter-
ference invokes Karen Barad’s views on agency, which she coordinates
with “possibilities for worldly re- configurings.”60 As Barad argues,
“agency is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans for that
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matter. It is an enactment. And it enlists, if you will, ‘non-humans’ as well
as ‘humans’.”61 In a manner that resonates with what Barad contends,
Sabuncuoğlu’s congregation of his experimental knowledge with the
material embodiments of human patients and contagious diseases also
creates an amalgam of human-nonhuman agencies. Inscribing this con-
gregation onto an illustrated form of surgical book, Sabuncuoğlu presents
an outline of “onto-epistemology” which is, in Barad’s term, “the study
of practices of knowing and being.”62 As a repository of knowledge,
experience, diseases, treatments, imagination, locations, momentums,
energies, and certain times, Sabuncuoğlu’s miniatures display an interplay
of matter and meaning, that is mind and body, exemplifying constant
onto-epistemologies.
Sabuncuoğlu’s other renowned book is Mücerreb-nâme (1468; On
Attemption), in which he describes his various medical experiments.
Accepted as “the ﬁrst Turkish experimental textbook,” the book consists
of “many mixtures consisting of herbal drugs for pain treatment” which
forms “a general medical experiment catalogue that contains more than
20 pain-related sections about the preparation of drugs, used experi-
mentally on animals, patients, and the author himself”63 (see Figure 6.3)
These experiments are significant as they are “first experimental studies
of the Turkish medical history.”64 Mücerreb-nâme further tells how
Sabuncuoğlu narrates the stories of herbs in his treatments suggesting
materia medica, that is “medicine obtained in mixtures of various herbs and
their products” by offering the ingredients of various “medicated tafﬁes,
creams, pomades, plasters, ointments, lotions, and oral preparations.”65
These medical ingredients are posthuman becomings combining human
study and imagination with nonhuman actors and plant agencies. And
this understanding allows us to develop a critical and ethical stance within
which to house our perspectives about human-nonhuman binaries. That
is to say, these posthuman becomings, embodied in the ingredients, rup-
ture the singularity of human subjectivity, and furnish the “recognition
of interconnectedness” as a “key to this process of corporeal entangle-
ments with the uncanny agencies [contagious diseases in our case] that
populate the living spaces alongside the earth’s native vegetal, mineral,
and animal entities.”66 These ingredients made up of various agencies—
whether vegetal, mineral, animal, or human agencies (or all together)—
venally and regularly show that “we don’t simply live on the Earth: we
are the Earth.”67
Sabuncuoğlu’s medical pastes and ointments ravelling in an ingredient
also reveal the disease history of the time, hence transmitting historical
as well as medical knowledge entangled within the materiality of the
book. In Mücerreb-nâme, Sabuncuoğlu mentions various ointments
and medical pastes that aim at curing contagious diseases. One of those
pastes is Merhem-i Havariyyun (which is also known as Merhem-i Rusul
or Pesliha), which heals plague. A combination of various nonhuman
entities such as opopanax—which is also known as Hercules’ allheal,
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Figure 6.3 Sabuncuoğlu’s experimentation with the antidote which he prepared

on himself.
Source: Taken from İlter Uzel’s Amasyalı Hekim ve Cerrah Sabuncuoğlu
Şerefeddin (1385–1470).a
a İlter Uzel, Amasyalı Hekim ve Cerrah Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin (1385-1470)
(Amasya: Amasya Valiliği, 2004), 77.
mastic, myrrh, and olive oil,68 this medical paste represents an intricate
confluence of human and nonhuman agencies, as it requires a human
being carefully administering the sciences of botany, anthropology,
anatomy, and medicine. Furthermore, the quantities of each essence and
entity change based on which season one is preparing this paste, showing
seasonal, hence terrestrial agency on this medical paste as well. Seasons
are tied to the cosmic energies that keep the Earth and the Sun rotating,
and the cosmic location of our galaxy rests on another cosmic energy
that keeps the planets in their locations with the right momentum and
gravity force, which amazingly links this medical paste to the cosmic
stories reflected and narrated upon the terrestrial seasonal changes. This
awareness not only reminds us of our “bodies in braided, ontic, and antic
relatings”69 co-emergent with all the other nonhuman bodies and forces,
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but this comprehension also invites a re-thinking of “the questions of
agency, creativity, imagination, and narrativity”70 as meaning-making and
story-telling practices are re-distributed, in a flattened ontology, among
every becoming, be it human or nonhuman, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial.
As our delight in story-telling activities also reveals, in every human
practice of meaning-making, we tend to revisit earlier narratives that
make up our past. For instance, Stefan Herbrechter (this volume) points
out how we often return to Albert Camus’ The Plague in times of crisis like
ours. Following Herbrechter, I would suggest that we also tend to revisit
and remember Aristotle because every time we return to past narratives,
we come to acknowledge that we are enacted by our narrative practices.
Therefore, we need to return to Aristotle here once again accept Homo
sapiens as story-telling animals. In spite of this acceptance, however, what
I question in this chapter is the centrality of human subjectivities within
those story-telling practices, as the sole and single most sovereigns of
meaning- making practices and knowledge production. Therefore, the
central position assigned to humans in Ranke’s conceptualisation of
Homo narrans, I believe, needs to be shifted in focus, from the Homo
genus to the rest of the planetary bodies.
If we build our arguments upon the insights from new materialisms,
material ecocriticism, and the notion of storied matter theorised by
Iovino and Oppermann, it seems that every being demands transmitting
its own perception of the cosmic story. That is to say, every agency stores
its way of life and narrates this stored information in various ways. This
perspective displaces human beings as the ultimate knowledge produ-
cers. Furthermore, looking at the stories told by humans, we can also
clarify how nonhuman actors are efficient agents acting upon discursive
formations. Therefore, the stories this chapter analyses uncover the con-
currence and co-emergence of material and discursive formations telling
multi-species stories. Sabuncuoğlu’s miniatures exemplify this concur-
rence in their blend of material beings like pen, paper, paint, cultural
imagination, plant agencies, animal and human factors, political and
economic dynamics, medical knowledge, geographical happenings, and
cosmic forces. In this way, they show how every being loves telling stories
in its unique form.
To return, then, to what Scarlett Thomas notes, we feel compelled to
question whether there is an end to our narrative practices. When the
quotation from Our Tragic Universe at the very beginning of this chapter
is revisited, Thomas wonders for us all and points out:
As the universe gets ready to collapse, no one will be writing poetry

about it or making love for the last time or just bobbing around,
stoned and listless, waiting for annihilation, imagining something
beautiful and unfathomable on the other side. All hands will be on
deck for the ultimate goal: survival.71
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To respond to the question that I raised in relation to this quotation,
I would say that I disagree with this approach because one needs to see
that survival is the ultimate story. So, at the end of the universe, there will
be lots of stories. Every being strives to survive in its unique story, like the
viruses or human beings. This survival will bring forward how everything
is delicately tied to each other for the very survival itself.
Survival is the real story itself that we can trace in our DNA.
Survival is the ultimate story that is inscribed in the alarming COVID-
19 table worldwide.72
Notes
1 Scarlett Thomas, Our Tragic Universe (London: Canongate Books, 2010), 6.
2 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing,
2006), 10.
3 Wilhelm F. H Nicolaisen, “Review: Homo Narrans. The Poetics and
Anthropology of Oral Literature,” Fabula 42, no. 2 (2001): 170.
4 Timothy Morton, “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary
Review 32, no. 1 (2010): 7.
5 Steve Jones, The Language of Genes (London: Flamingo, 2000), 3.
6 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York, NY:
Zone Books, 1997), 16.
7 Morton, 8.
8 Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 165.
9 Haraway, 165.
10 Morton, 7.
11 Morton, 9.
UP, 2010), 31.
13 Bennett, 121.
14 Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied
Matter,” Frame 26, no. 2 (2013): 55.
15 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality,
Agency, and Models of Narrativity,” Ecozon@ 3, no. 1 (2012): 79.
16 Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism,” 56.
17 John Fowles, The Tree (London: Vintage, 2000), 9.
18 Fowles, 26.
19 Fowles, 31.
20 Fowles, 56.
21 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 4.
22 Cohen, 53.
23 Cohen, 70.
24 Haraway, 3.
25 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967), 52.
8
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27 Morton, 8.
28 Elana Gomel, “The Epidemic of History: Contagion of the Past in the Era
of the Never-Ending Present,” in Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of
Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse, eds. Sandra Becker, Megen
De Bruin-Molé and Sara Polak (University of Wales Press, 2021), 219.
29 Sarah Kaplan, William Wan, and Joel Achenbach, “The Coronavirus Isn’t
Alive. That’s Why It’s So Hard to Kill,” Washington Post, March 23, 2020,
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/23/coronavirus-isnt-alive-thats-
why-its-so-hard-kill/.
30 Andrea T. Da Poian and Miguel A. R. B. Castanho, Integrative Human
Biochemistry: A Textbook for Medical Biochemistry (New York, NY:
Springer, 2015), 10.
31 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
33 Stacy Alaimo, “New Materialisms, Old Humanisms, or, Following the
Submersible,” NORA –Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19,
no. 4 (2011): 281.
34 Alaimo, “New Materialisms,” 282.
35 Serpil Oppermann, “The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical
Reflections,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 51, no. 3 (2018): 10.
36 Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Vol. 1 (İstanbul: Kardeş Matbaası, 1969), 58.
All the Turkish sources used in this chapter were translated by the author
herself.
37 Iovino and Oppermann, 83.
38 Mesut Ayar and Tarık Özçelik, “-XIX. Asır Ortalarına Kadar-Osmanlı’da
Veba Salgınlarının Tarihçesi,” in Osmanlı’da Salgın Hastalıklarla Mücadele,
eds. İbrahim Başağaoğlu, Ahmet Uçar and Osman Doğan (İstanbul: Çamlıca,
2015), 55.
39 Ayar and Özçelik, 59.
40 Ayar and Özçelik, 59–60.
44 Hamdi Doğan, “Vefayata Mahsus Vukuat Defterlerine Göre Salgın
Hastalıklardan Ölümler: Adıyaman Örneği,” 21. Yüzyılda Eğitim ve Toplum
6, no. 18 (2017): 599.
45 Isaac Rosenberg, “Louse Hunting,” in The Faber Book of War Poetry, ed.
Kenneth Baker (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 259–60.
46 Poian and Castanho, 13.
47 Ceren Utkugün, “Haber Gazetesi’ne Göre İkinci Dünya Savaşı Yıllarında
Afyon’da Koruyucu Sağlık Hizmetleri ve Bulaşıcı Hastalıklarla Mücadele,”
International Journal of Social and Educational Sciences 4, no. 7 (2017): 4.
48 Utkugün, 7–8.
49 Sema Sezen, “1400’lü Yıllarda Kovid-19 Tedbirlerini Uyguladı: Sabuncuoğlu
Şerefeddin,” Yeni Birlik, April 10, 2020, www.gazetebirlik.com/haber/1400lu-
yillarda-kovid-19-tedbirlerini-uyguladi-sabuncuoglu-serefeddin-1138/.
50 Metin And, Turkish Miniature Painting: The Ottoman Period (Ankara: Dost
Yayınları, 1974), 106.
51 And, 115.
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54 Haraway, 51.
55 Cenk S. N. Büyükünal and Nil Sari, “Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu, the Author
of the Earliest Pediatric Surgical Atlas: Ceraahiye-i Ilhaniye,” Journal of
Pediatric Surgery 26, no. 10 (1991): 1151.
56 Hüsna Kılıç, 16–18. yy Osmanlı Minyatürlerinin Tasarım İlkeleri Açısından
Değerlendirilmesi ve Çağdaş Yorumları, Master’s thesis (Selçuk University,
2015), 22.
57 İlhan Elmacı, “Color Illustrations and Neurosurgical Techniques of Şerefeddin
Sabuncuoğlu in the 15th Century,” Neurosurgery 47, no. 4 (2000): 951.
58 Evliya Çelebi, An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels
by Evliya Çelebi, trans. Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (London: Eland
Publishing, 2010), 38.
59 Oppermann, “The Scale of the Anthropocene,” 10.
60 Karen Barad, “Interview with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews
& Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI:
Open Humanities Press, 2012), 55.
61 Barad, “Interview,” 55.
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (London: Duke University Press,
2007), 185.
63 Suleyman Ganidagli et al., “Approach to Painful Disorders by Şerefeddin
Sabuncuoğlu in the Fifteenth Century Ottoman Period,” Anesthesiology 100,
no. 1 (2004): 165.
64 Uzel, 79.
65 Ganidagli et al., 166.
67 Steven Hartman and Patrick Degeorges, “ ‘DON’T PANIC’: Fear and
Acceptance in the Anthropocene,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in
Literature and Environment 26, no. 2 (2019): 457; italics in the original.
68 Uzel, 74.
69 Haraway, 165.
71 Thomas, 6.
72 For a similar analysis by the author, you can check “Episode 31: Multispecies
Entanglement and Contagion in Ottoman Travel Writings and Miniatures,”
a podcast for the Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and
Pandemic produced by the Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State University.
The podcast is available at https://sites.psu.edu/liberalartscollective/unravel
ing-the-anthropocene-podcast/episode-31-multispecies-entanglement-and-
contagion-in-ottoman-travel-writings-and-miniatures/.
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no. 4 (2011): 280–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2011.618812.
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De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York, NY:
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Doğan, Hamdi. “Vefayata Mahsus Vukuat Defterlerine Göre Salgın Hastalıklardan
Ölümler: Adıyaman Örneği.” Yüzyılda Eğitim ve Toplum 6, no. 18 (2017):
597–615.
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Part IV
Contagious Networks
of Communication
41
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7
Hyperobjects, Network Ontologies,
and the Pandemic Response in
Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio
Jayde Martin and Ben Horn
Unlike other Coronavirus breakouts such as Severe Acute Respiratory

Syndrome CoV- 1 (SARS CoV- 1) and Middle Eastern Respiratory
Syndrome (MERS CoV), the SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has
forced the global community to confront two realities simultaneously: the
infinitude of infectious diseases and the unquestionable interconnected-
ness of beings and things. The virus has made us unavoidably aware that it
and our bodies are entangled with multiple biological, governmental, and
ecological entities, clarifying that our previous claims for “individualism,
autonomy, responsibility and self-determination”1 have never been valid.
In fact, the posthuman nature of our world, in its “post-anthropocentric”
and “post-dualistic” facets,2 has never been more obvious. In accordance
with these facets, this chapter seeks to explore the posthuman entangle-
ments of human and nonhuman bodies within Greg Bear’s pandemic
narrative, Darwin’s Radio (1999). Bear’s novel depicts scenarios similar
to those faced by the global community in the face of the COVID-19
outbreak. Just like the viral spread of information, and its consequences,
on social media in our panic-stricken, digitised times, Bear’s metaphor
of “network connections”3 figuratively displays the entanglement of
autopoietic systems, the ontology of viruses, and their posthuman affects.
We aim to illustrate this by employing the ideas foregrounded by systems
theorists from both first-and second-order cybernetics to draw out the
text’s latent posthumanist qualities.
Bear’s novel focuses on a fictive virus, named Scattered Human
Endogenous RetroVirus Activation, or SHEVA, from the non- coding
region of the human genome, which causes atypical pregnancies in
women. Women who carry the virus develop mask-like protrusions and
“teardrop dapples of demelanized skin”4 on their faces, and these prove
key to later communicating with their mutated children. After the ini-
tial outbreak, a Taskforce is formed, including the protagonist, biologist
Kaye Lang and archaeologist Mitch Rafelson. SHEVA patients are not
welcome in society and are the targets of increased violence. As a result,
the Taskforce believe they must find a cure. However, Kaye discovers
that SHEVA is, in reality, a short-term, directed form of evolutionary
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-12
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146 Jayde Martin and Ben Horn

adaptation, whereby the genome agentially mutates in response to envir-
onmental stresses. To test Kaye’s hypothesis, Kaye and Mitch deliberately
have a SHEVA child despite the mass hysteria around these ‘deformed’
children. Eventually, biopolitical controls are implemented forcing Kaye
and Mitch into conflict with the state. The SHEVA virus highlights the
complex entanglement of Homo sapiens and their relationship to the
geophysical environment, microbiological bodies, and global societies,
reminding us of Francesca Ferrando’s definition of posthumanism as
“post-anthropocentric” and “post dualistic.”5
In this chapter, we engage with the interconnectedness of different
networks— biological, environmental, informatic, and technological.
Bear’s ‘network connections’ are metaphorical explanations of the cyber-
netic communication within autopoietic systems. Just as posthumanism
confronts us with what we have always- already been, Bear’s novel
presents us with a chance to reconfigure our understanding of interactions
as more than human-to-human encounters. These interactions, as Niklas
Luhmann, Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, and Bruce Clarke would
also argue,6 take place within autopoietic systems in which humans
are one node among many.7 From this perspective, Bear’s novel poses
a challenge to the individualism and autonomy of the humanist sub-
ject. We define autopoietic systems as systems that operate by commu-
nicating cybernetically because they “communicate about their own
communications to choose their new communications.”8 To put it simply,
we argue that autopoietic systems are a group of nodes in a rhizomatic
structure, which communicate cybernetically about their interactions,
and through such interactions, they augment, lose, or add various other
nodes as the system continues to exist. The interactions and intra-actions
of these nodes are cybernetic because the nodes within these systems
are involved in a continual process of transformation. As information is
exchanged between the nodes, they change their structure, their methods
of communication, and finally the entire system. Bear uses the meta-
phor of the neural network to describe the ways in which his ‘network
connections’ work, arguing through the character of Mitch, “[w]‌ho’s
going to buy that all things in nature function like the human brain?”9 To
demonstrate our understanding of how an autopoietic system operates,
we will follow Bear’s example. One of the autopoietic systems involved
in the neural network would be the functioning of the Homo sapiens
brain. Each nerve cell within the brain would be a node communicating
cybernetically through chemical and electrical signals, which gives rise
to the transformative structural plasticity of the brain. Some of the other
autopoietic systems that interact synergistically with the Homo sapiens
brain would be the Homo sapiens immune system, metabolic system, and
systems of verbal communication.
As Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan (this volume) points out, Homo sapiens
are storytellers. This chapter also works loosely with the idea of narrative,
acting as a site of interaction between human and nonhuman beings, and
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Hyperobjects in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio 147

a space of emergent becomings. In Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear speculates
upon a new chapter in both human and nonhuman stories. When non-
human entities are also viewed as narrative creators, human stories quickly
become entangled in them. As Yılmaz Karahan states in her chapter, non-
human agents create their own stories with or without our interference,
but they can also intertwine their stories with our own. Darwin’s Radio
is a local manifestation of hyperobjects as they synergistically interact
with human psychic and social spaces. The text performs the meeting
between the narratives of the hyperobject and humanity, highlighting, as
Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum (this volume) note in their introduction,
the openness of the relationships between material and discursive phe-
nomena. Therefore, Darwin’s Radio is an example of a natural-cultural
human and nonhuman story that helps us explore the interactions and
intra-actions involved in pandemic crisis-responses.
Hyperobjects, Autopoietic Systems, and Cybernetic

Communication
In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World
(2013), Timothy Morton coins the term “hyperobjects,”10 which provides
another way of understanding the autopoietic systems in Darwin’s Radio.
Hyperobjects have various properties: viscosity, non-locality, temporal
undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. To briefly define each, viscosity
is the way they “stick” to other objects11 (their imminent involvement
with other entities which can be thought of as material entanglement).
Non- locality explains how parts of a hyperobject that we encounter
are not directly the hyperobject itself. Temporal undulation describes
the timescales of these objects, which often outlast Homo sapiens lives.
Phasing depicts how they occupy a higher-dimensional phase-space that
humans cannot directly encounter, and finally, interobjectivity is about
how they form part of a system of connections with other objects.12
For Morton, hyperobjects are vast creatures with designs of their own,
which are already present in human biological composition, psyches,
and social spaces. Smaller objects within a system may be the immediate
manifestations of these larger hyperobjects. The interconnectedness of
these hyperobjects undermines the autonomy and individualism of the
humanist subject, both spatially and temporally.13
Hyperobjects and autopoietic systems exhibit much the same proper-
ties. Here we use evolution as an example to demonstrate how hyperobjects
and autopoietic systems are the same. This is not only because it is the
most thematically relevant to Darwin’s Radio but also because Morton
uses evolution as an example of a hyperobject,14 and, as a term, autopoietic
systems originate from evolutionary biology.15 Firstly, both hyperobjects
and autopoietic systems are viscous. Evolution involves not just gen-
etics and biological classifications but also the physical constituents of
these species and their extended phenotype—the different ways in which
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these species interact with their environments. Each of these elements is
a node within the self-regulating system of evolution. Secondly, they are
both non-local. Any one phenotype is a self-regulating system, as well
as a manifestation of the hyperobject evolution. Thirdly, they both have
undulating temporality. While the instances of genetic mutation, from
conception to gestation, are momentary, for these changes to become
established adaptations to changing environments is a much longer pro-
cess. Fourthly, they are both phased. The timescales on which evolution
takes place and the subtleties of its effects are vastly removed from Homo
sapiens perspectives; an individual cannot directly experience it. Finally,
both exhibit interobjectivity. Evolution is dependent on communica-
tion between different human and nonhuman actors within a variety of
ecosystems. The evolution of one species is a result of cybernetic commu-
nication between all actors within the hyperobjects, which demonstrates
the intricate and complex interobjective connections between them.
Hyperobjects are autopoietic systems. The meetings between
hyperobjective autopoietic systems create liminal spaces in which they
interact with one another synergistically. Synergistic interactions create a
productive space between entangled entities.16 There is a distinct identifi-
cation of actors in synergistic relationships with one another, yet the syn-
ergy between them is something that traverses their borders. Within these
synergistic spaces between hyperobjects, there can be several different
results including, but not limited to, friction and integration. Nodes in
hyperobjects, like humans, animals, and viruses, transmit information
between each other cybernetically. During these processes, information
perforates borders, mutating and replicating itself.
The long-lasting nature of hyperobjects forces us to reconceptualise
our coexistence with unfamiliar timescales. In Bear’s text, these timescales
coexist with characters and readers in the narrated present, which have
a transformative potential. Therefore, futures gestate within the pre-
sent, like a retrovirus. Darwin’s Radio thus depends on and embodies
its hyperobjectivity, with its viscosity entangling characters and readers
alike. Hyperobjects are inherently future-oriented: their timescales “flow
backwards from the future into the present”.17 The nature of evolu-
tion necessarily implies future generations; through SHEVA, this occurs
immediately within human experiential time. The rapid onset of SHEVA
mutations and the development of a new species collapse this future
into the present. It likewise connects humans to past and future SHEVA
mutations and thus to vastly different timescales. Rather than an event,
SHEVA is an entity congruent with present species that may lead to their
future mutations. The non-locality of hyperobjects means that smaller,
apparently separate entities are entangled with others. An example of
this is heavy rain, which may be “simply a local manifestation of some
vast entity I’m [we are] unable directly to see,”18 such as global climate.
This inability to see vast entities that may be steering us without our
knowledge renders such objects uncanny. This applies to language and
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literature, which may be considered hyperobjective.19 They reveal a non-
living pattern of information that produces real effects, which may be the
traces of other entities. This applies to Darwin’s Radio, too, which may
be a local manifestation of hyperobjects such as the development of cul-
ture, evolution, and viruses.
Network Ontologies in Darwin’s Radio

SHEVA proliferates itself in people’s minds, activating different
behaviours in response, producing significant effects in the body and
the body politic. For state actors such as Marc Augustine, SHEVA sig-
nifies the inhuman ‘other’ to the self, conjuring images of infection and
mutation. Meanwhile, Kaye embraces this other and otherness ‘within’
the self. Likewise, as SHEVA is an endogenous retrovirus, it effectively
erases the difference between self and other, as language does. Bear expli-
citly draws a comparison between linguistics and genetics when Kaye
describes chromosomes as “biological grammar.”20 The structural simi-
larity between genetic and semiotic information illustrates how the
hyperobjects of language and evolution function synergistically. This is a
form of post-dualism, blurring the boundary between the biological and
the informatic. SHEVA is inextricably linked to research models, protest
signs, and ideas formed in the minds of patients. This synergy between
biological and informatic hyperobjects renders their exchange of infor-
mation cybernetic. Information is yet another metaphor used to describe
DNA. If DNA is informatic in nature, then it is like a “semiotic com-
puter.”21 Bear’s layering of semiotic, informatic, and genetic networks
disrupts the dialectic of self and other that sustains the individual
organism at the textual level.22 The interactions between these different
linguistic and non-linguistic networks of associations can give rise to new
signifiers and patterns of meaning, in a similar way that multiple entities
can contain traces of different hyperobjects. As the relationship between
the signifier and the signified is not a matter of singular reference, but
of multiple associative references, existing linguistic configurations can
be augmented to produce new configurations of meaning. In the case of
hyperobjects, the fact that linguistic signifiers may contain traces of them
makes them metonymic, where a part of something is taken as a mani-
festation of the whole.
Just as DNA holds the information of past, present, and future poten-
tialities so does Bear’s text. He utilises signa novi (signs of the new)23 to
create new words, a linguistic novum, which uses existing language to indi-
cate what is new. SHEVA is one such linguistic novum, and the language
used to signify it, “Scattered Human Endogenous RetroVirus Activation,”
employs existing linguistic patterns to communicate the name of this new
(and fictive) virus to the readers. Therefore, this creation of a new lan-
guage and its signification are “exploratory mutations,”24 illustrating the
networks of relations of which they are parts. Their altered metonymic
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configuration produces new forms of meaning. Similarly, these textual
mutations resemble the biological mutations (signa novi) produced by
SHEVA. Existing microbiological material is augmented to produce new
genetic configurations. The hyperobject evolution depends on the recom-
bination of these microbiological materials, which makes them meto-
nymic for a larger hyperobject. The biological novum born out of SHEVA
is the genetic mutation it facilitates. The biological material it uses to
create these mutations exists and has existed in the Homo sapiens genome
for millennia. In both cases, these signa novi may be local manifestations
of hyperobjects. This is the reason why we argue, to repeat ourselves once
more, that Darwin’s Radio depends on and embodies its hyperobjectivity,
with its viscosity entangling characters and readers alike.
Bear’s depiction of the material interdependence of hyperobjects has
a Darwinian heritage as he describes how the interaction of different
entities may produce liminal synergistic spaces. Specifically, Charles
Darwin shows how the species Homo sapiens is synchronic while evolu-
tion and related hyperobjects are diachronic. In On the Origin of Species
(1859), Darwin uses the metaphor of an entangled bank to describe the
multiplicity of forms that emerge via processes of natural selection:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many

plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various
insects … and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to
reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each
other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all
been produced by laws acting around us… . Whilst this planet has
gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple
a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being, evolved.25
This entangled materiality re-appears in The Descent of Man (1871),

where Darwin writes that the human is “structured” like all other organic
beings on Earth and, thus, must be included with them.26 The appearance
of entanglement throughout Darwin’s works is significant. It shows that
forms or structures of life such as birds, plants, and insects are synchronic;
they are local manifestations of hyperobjects. The diachronic, meanwhile,
consists of these synergistically interacting hyperobjects; namely the bio-
sphere, planet Earth, and evolution. This expanded diachronicity shows
not only the synergistic relationships between these hyperobjects but also
their production and loss of entities throughout history. In the entangled
bank example, animals, plants, the planet, and the like are coterminous
with past, present, and future generations.
This temporal entanglement, as Morton calls it, is an interference
pattern27 in which the time of one object intersects with another. Geological
deep time is one such example.28 It persists outside of human experiential
time, and yet is entangled with it, as in Kaye’s encounter with the gravesite
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of the small town of Gordi. Just as the virus collapses the future into the
present, Kaye’s presence at the gravesite connects her with the rhythms
of geological history. The graves are a synchronic snapshot of multiple
intersecting diachronic hyperobjects. The site is hypothesised to be the
bed of an old mountain melt stream, the probabilistic connotations of
“hypothesized”29 highlights a material, yet spectral, relationship between
what the Gordi gravesite used to be and is now. ‘Hypothesised’ includes
an element of speculation. Speculation is constituted of unevidenced ideas,
the uncertainty of speculation, and therefore, Kaye’s hypothesis produces
this theory of the grave as possibly being an old melt stream spectral. The
fossilised presence of the melt stream buried under the soil among the
dead bodies is a haunting image of nonhuman time and motion enduring
in the present. The presence of these fossilised objects confuses the human
characters’ linear understanding of time. The objects appear to occupy
two time zones within the text’s narration—within the narrative pre-
sent and a past prior to this narration. Such simultaneous presences and
absences render these objects ‘haunting.’ Haunting describes the non-
local interaction between hyperobjects, as they are never fully present to
one another:
The bodies were almost unrecognizable, pale brown bone encrusted

with dirt, wrinkled brown and black flesh. Clothing had faded to
the color of the soil, but these patches and shreds were not army
uniforms: they were dresses, pants, coats. Woolens and cottons had
not completely decayed. Kaye looked for brighter synthetics; they
could establish a maximum age for the grave. She could not immedi-
ately see any.30
Bear’s use of multiple interwoven clauses in this description mimics

the indistinguishable connection between the grave and its underlying
geological strata, blending objects in a state of material interrelation
from biomaterials to mundane human artefacts, tools, and fabrics. The
author’s employment of this haunting demonstrates the entanglement of
the materiality of the body with that of the soil. When the bodies are
described as “wrinkled brown and black flesh,” Bear ties the body to a
geophysical scale of temporality.
The excavated graves and accumulated objects also act as a syn-
chronic snapshot of a diachronic geological time. All these items are
united in their potential to become future layers of spatiotemporal
strata. The bodies are frozen in a state of decay, becoming “unrecog-
nisable,” yet this decay shows they ‘are’ material entities. Their loss of
form is entwined with their becoming-strata as biomaterial will become
geomaterial. The proliferation of objects, such as tools, clothing, flesh,
and microbes, forms nodes in a geological hyperobject since their decay
and transformation are instances of cybernetic communication between
these nodes.
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Represented by their differing rates of decay, these fading ephem-
eral objects— “dresses, pants, coats”— form an intersection between
different timescales. This is most obvious when Kaye points out that the
“brighter synthetics” will help her establish an approximate age for the
grave because it is less biodegradable and therefore works on a different
time scale of decay than the other material. That the biodegradable items
have “not completely decayed” shows their differing temporalities in
comparison to the “melt stream,” which has virtually vanished. Like
viruses, geological time troubles the borders of the human, both phys-
ically and temporally. That the bodies are “wrinkled” and “encrusted
with dirt” highlights their material interrelatedness in the present. Their
being “encrusted” with dirt connotes the material texture of time, as geo-
logical interactions inscribe themselves on objects. If history is a legacy of
inscriptions of objects on other objects, as Morton describes,31 then one
can see that the “pale bone encrusted with dirt” provides a tangible way
of reading different timescales.
This entanglement recurs throughout the novel, as SHEVA has
appeared multiple times throughout hominid evolutionary history. For
this reason, Bear demonstrates the mutual imbrication of natural and
cultural history without reducing one to the other.32 As in Bear’s pano-
rama of decay, objects mark and are marked by intersecting temporal
phases. These cybernetic interactions open onto cosmic vistas when Kaye
describes the night sky as an “ancient darkness” full of stars.33 Initially,
the night’s sky is anthropomorphised by the adjective “ancient.” This
adjective works to collapse the nature of cosmic temporality so that it can
be understood in terms of human experiential time. “Ancient” is usually
used to refer to the history of some of the first Homo sapiens civilisations,
thus anthropomorphising the cosmos. This also brings the cosmos into
the orbit of the character’s gathering. The sky’s status as a background for
the Homo sapiens’ gathering allows the characters to both isolate them-
selves from the object of the cosmos and, in turn, to constitute themselves
as human subjects congregating together in a world of objects. However,
owing to the expansion of space and the sheer distance it takes light to
travel,34 the ‘presence’ of the stars that appear to Kaye are actually images
from millions of years ago.35 These age-old after-images intersect with the
Earth’s atmosphere and any observers to create the appearance of being
fully present, while in reality, they evoke the haunting quality of cosmic
time. While appearing to Kaye and her friends, these same stars will most
likely have transitioned to another phase of the stellar cycle.36 The static
nature of the cosmos as a discrete object upon which human subjects
exist is therefore complicated.
The existence of complex life on Earth, including Kaye and her friends,
has resulted from the synergistic interaction of hyperobjects such as evolu-
tion, distant stars, and geological formations. As stars burn, they accumu-
late elements in their core. These elements are ejected in supernovae and
thrown into space.37 Under gravity, they coalesce, forming new celestial
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bodies.38 This passage of materials between bodies imitates the logic of
a virus communicating elements across space. The panspermia hypoth-
esis argues that life is distributed by asteroids carrying microorganisms.39
This means that the origin of terrestrial life may be viral; the universe has
an epidemic of life. By the same token, these bodies (stars, planets, biotas,
species, etc.) bear spectral traces of the synergistic activity of hyperobjects
which have ‘stuck’ to them. They become a very material ghost40 because
the ghostly traces of cosmic and geological hyperobjects are inscribed
into their materiality. The term “ancient” strains at the limits of human
history, indicating the spectral presence of deep time, as the night sky is
populated with photonic ghosts. By doing so, Bear shows that the spec-
tral is material. This spectral relationship undermines the individualist
human subject by exposing its entanglement within larger systems, and
the nonhuman entities that permeate human bodies.
Hyperobjects have multiple scales of coexistence, which Bear
recapitulates in the recurring metaphor of an entangled neural network
with “emergent thoughtlike properties.”41 Kaye gives the examples of
nerve cells in a brain, cells in an individual, an individual in a species,
and species in an ecosystem. Though this seems anthropocentric, as
Mitch believes no one will “buy” that nature functions like “neurons
in a brain,”42 this moment must be treated dialectically. Instead of
whether everything behaves like neurons in the brain, the question
becomes whether minds are part of an emergent pattern of adaptation
and perception in different interlocking hyperobjects. Mitch’s comment
that emergent properties confuse him is the appropriate affect since
hyperobjects ‘confuse’ such boundaries. This confusion is illustrated in
Kaye’s reference to microscopic entities as “labourers” for humankind,
their “opponents,” and their “mothers.”43 Kaye’s separation of bacteria
into categories of labourers, mothers, and opponents creates a tension
between the humanist view of humanity as ontologically separate from
nonhumans and their coexistence with hyperobjects. Earlier Kaye recalls
“[b]‌acteria made us. They take us back in the end,” in her dream of the
Georgian dead bodies.44 Like his depiction of objects as future geological
strata (being-toward-fossilisation), Bear here unites humanity in a future
return to bacterial slime. Motifs of slime and a loss of bodily consistency
appear throughout Darwin’s Radio. Yet this slimy, uncanny intimacy is
not nihilistic. Instead, Bear uses it to portray our cybernetic interconnect-
edness with microbiological, evolutionary, and geological hyperobjects.
The hyperobject of microbiological environments and the passage of infor-
mation between nodes within it reveals a deep coexistence, as pre-living
genetic material is a possibility condition for life.45 At the DNA level, par-
ticularly in the case of endogenous retroviruses, the distinction between
what is ‘authentic’ Homo sapiens genetic material and what is a viral
code insertion becomes obsolete.46 In the case of SHEVA, viruses trouble
the distinction between what is living and non-living, highlighting the
coexistence of the human with the nonhuman. These microbes are both
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our past and future. This ambiguous quality complicates Kaye’s remark
on bacteria as “labourers,” “opponents,” and “mothers.” Through these
terms, Kaye defines bacteria purely in relation to the human as labouring,
disposable, and procreative bodies. Her reduction of bacteria to such
relations betrays an all- too-
humanist ontology, though the narrative
seemingly undermines this. Indeed, Bear shows us that the logic of bac-
teria and the genome is of a deeper, a-human coexistence47: “Bacteria
made us. They take us back in the end. Welcome home.”48
Bear achieves something similar with viruses when Kaye encounters
outdated images of phage in a lab, which are described as “bizarre” and
“spaceshiplike,” hovering above the enlarged image of an Escherichia coli
bacterium.49 Alien abduction is analogous to the effect of hyperobjects on
other entities, jettisoning them from a stable lifeworld into a new phase of
history, another abstract space-time. However, with lysogenic phage, this
alienation runs far deeper, connecting organisms to continuums of non-
living beings. “Metazoans,” non-bacterial life forms, “carry dormant
retroviruses in their genes.”50 As with Homo sapiens, “one third”51 of the
human genome is retroviral. Since both metazoans and Homo sapiens
carry retroviruses, this undermines the humanist subject by challenging
the perception that the human genome is ontologically separated from
nonhuman life forms. It likewise undermines the separation of living and
dead matter, as viruses have an uneasy relationship with categories of
death and life. As retroviruses are part of the human genome, this means
that the living human body is composed of non-living entities. Pointing
out how much of our DNA consists of apparently junk DNA, Bear
highlights that there is no self-identical essence of humanity, thus further
problematising the autonomy and individualism of the humanist sub-
ject. Instead, it attests to the nested nature of contingent interactions that
constitute what is ‘natural.’ By including SHEVA, a human endogenous
retrovirus that “jumps”52 around the Homo sapiens genome, the virus
becomes a site of intersection for the hyperobjects of evolution, retroviral
microbiology, the Homo sapiens genome, and the panspermia theory.
The humanist idea that viruses are separate from the Homo sapiens
genome would render a conventional view of SHEVA as alien; how-
ever, referring to them as ‘alien’ links the biological with the geocosmic,
as ‘alien’ implies something beyond human experiential and terrestrial
space. In doing so, Bear likewise deepens the extent to which people are
entangled in nested temporalities and ontological spaces because a retro-
virus’ timescale is linked to a possibility that remained before the forma-
tion of planet Earth.
SHEVA is modelled upon the lysogenic phage’s adaptation (concealing
itself within the host organism) to better explain its pathogenic processes
and how it alters the genome. The phage’s metaphorical “spaceshiplike”
design invokes multiple hyperobjects through this imagery: the cosmic,
evolutionary, microbiological, and planetary. The alienness of
“spaceshiplike,” and its connection to spaceflight, creates an association
51

between the cosmic hyperobject, and in turn, the hyperobject of planet
Earth, because of its relationship to the wider cosmos. Spaceflight can
also be a metaphorical descriptor of the panspermia theory as microbes
‘take space-flight’ on the back of comets and meteors. Referencing the
adaptations of the phage in comparison to a bacterium (E. coli) brings
two microbes into an adaptive relationship with one another connecting
this “spaceshiplike” nature of the phage to the hyperobjects of evolu-
tion and microbiology. The phage, then, is a result of the synergistic
interactions between these hyperobjects. Phage showcases the result of
these hyperobjects because phage is used as a model for SHEVA’s func-
tionality; the above synergistic analysis also applies to it. Both SHEVA
and Phage, then, are the products of hyperobjects’ synergistic interactions.
Kaye mentions that lysogenic phage “jump ship” at the first sign of
“stress,” which also refers to how SHEVA functions.53 Bear’s use of the
ambiguous term “stress” as the activation for endogenous retroviral
‘jumping’ demonstrates how SHEVA’s pathogenesis is also a result of
hyperobjects’ synergistic interactions. The relationship between environ-
mental, biological, or societal stress involves many hyperobjects including
that of the planetary environment, local environment, Homo sapiens
genome, and cultural history. In the rhetoric of epidemiology, viruses
and disease- carrying microorganisms are treated as invasive agents
from the outside. Yet Bear’s treatment of SHEVA makes it clear that
SHEVA and the hyperobjects that give rise to it and us are not external
to the human, but internal. This productive synergy undermines sev-
eral dichotomies associated with both humanism and scientific practices,
between predator and prey, nature and culture, genetics and environ-
ment, and subject and object. The ‘otherness’ of SHEVA originates within
the human genome, connecting it to entities beyond itself that alter its
expression. Resonating with new advances in “fields like epigenetics and
synthetic biology” and their attendant discourses,54 Bear’s text enacts
the hybridity it describes, combining devices, characters, discourses, and
their respective mutations, which raises awareness of, and connects us
to, different hyperobjects. This is yet another instance of how Darwin’s
Radio is, itself, a hyperobject.
This attunement is further illustrated in Kaye’s dreams of the
Georgian gravesite. Just as the SHEVA virus passes through borders,
the hyperobjects of deep time and evolution travel through human psy-
chic spaces as haunting, spectral presences. Kaye’s dream could be one
example of the local manifestations of these hyperobjects. Kaye is haunted
by the dissolution of the material body into bacteria, fearing both her
bodily decay and the realisation that her body is made of nonhuman
entities. The common perception of death “marks the outer boundary
of the limited time we have at our disposal”55 which causes the sense of
biohorror she feels when she wakes. The concomitant sense of disgust
characterises a form of biohorror for her that comes from the sight of
her body breaking down into a nonhuman multiplicity. If the Anthropos
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enlists nonhuman entities for its construction,56 Kaye’s horror stems
from a confrontation with this fact. In her dream, the body of a Homo
sapiens breaks down into a bacterial landscape. Through the descrip-
tion of decay, Bear folds deep time into the present, connecting death to
life via the process of the carbon cycle. Bodily matter disintegrates into
its elemental components to be used as food (biological fuel) for other
microorganisms. Bear offers Kaye’s dream as an example of her eco-
logical attunement to nonhuman beings despite her humanist perception
of it. Therefore, this dream likewise marks Kaye’s initial defensive desire
to return to “animal innocence,”57 confirming her humanist stance. Her
remarks imply that the human alone has the capacity for introspection
and examination while animals lack “history,” “character,” and thus
“awareness” and “introspection.”58 Yet in Bear’s narration, the non-
human world is not inert, but a surging space of “industrious beings.”
It is also paradoxically grotesque and beautiful, with the bacterial
architectures being described as “lovely” and “cheerful.”59 The afterlife
of decay, or what returns from the perceived experience of death—the
end of consciousness—is not abject, but a source of innovation. “Slime”
is the first adjective used to describe this mass of “industrious beings.”
As the passage continues, it outlines both the grotesque and beautiful
aspects of the dissolution of the Homo sapiens body. Bear then changes
the adjective to call this process and its nonhuman actors by their sci-
entific name: “biofilm.” Doing this transforms the abject description
of this process into a generative one. Kaye’s dreams act as a liminal,
synergistic space between hyperobjects. Their ‘nightmare’ quality stems
from a confrontation with this origin in otherness. Despite her fears, as
depicted by this instance of biohorror, Kaye confronts something beyond
the perceived boundary of death. She realises that her conscious mind
has its origin in nonhuman entities and that these entities will outlast it
via the cybernetic communications and transformations involved in the
hyperobject of the carbon cycle.
The realisation that hyperobjects will outlast us points to a view of
nonhuman entities that are always outside themselves and transform life.
In Darwin’s Radio, this transformation is depicted as the genome slowly
developing a prototype for “the next type of human,”60 developing a
new species within the genetic structure of the Homo sapiens. Here the
genome denotes a multiplicity, a network that pre-exists the individual
nodes that it is composed of. SHEVA literalises this due to its capability
of creating multiple trans-speciation events prior to its discovery. Prior
to the narrative present within Darwin’s Radio, SHEVA mutated Homo
neanderthalensis DNA into Homo sapiens. Within the narrative present,
SHEVA mutates Homo sapiens DNA into Homo novus.61 In such cases,
what takes life beyond itself is this viral activation, a signal concealing
a blueprint of a future species that humans in the present intercept. As
Kaye says, “SHEVA [is] Darwin’s radio.”62 In an interview with Greg
Knollenberg, entitled “A Conversation with Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio
7
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& Darwin’s Children” at the end of the novel, Bear describes viruses as
carriers of genetic information, akin to signal noise on a radio, a meta-
phor which informs the title of his novel, merging the technological, the
genetic, and the literary in a posthumanist reading of life.
Kaye’s investigations reveal that the intelligence of the SHEVA virus is
a decentralised, adaptational network rather than an intentional mind. In
this model of intelligence, cognition and adaptive responses are not located
within a central organising agent, analogous to the brain in individual
Homo sapiens. Instead, it is dispersed across multiple entities or nodes in
different networks, whose synergistic interactions can yield novel results.
SHEVA does not follow conventional humanist understandings of Homo
sapiens intelligence, nor is it directed by any anthropomorphic entity; it
has a nonhuman agency that is divorced from any intelligence produced
by a network that includes a central nervous system. SHEVA’s intelligence
is nearly formless, operating as an archetypal example of nonhuman cog-
nition and intelligence. This is because its act of directed mutation is
“distributed across a wide spectrum of human and nonhuman entities”
and is not the “exclusive prerogative of Man/Anthropos.”63 Novel viruses
weaken the exclusive nature of the humanist subject,64 as illustrated in the
trans-speciation event Bear describes.
Kaye’s statement that “mutation” does not always refer to deformity
and disability but also produces “useful novelty”65 creates a posthumanist
understanding of natural selection and its function as an adaptation to
changing environments. The popular response to the SHEVA children in
Darwin’s Radio is to other Homo novus through dehumanisation and dis-
crimination, and the biopolitical nature of this othering process reaches
its apogee in “concentration nurseries”66 for the mutated children. Kaye
later states that the responses to SHEVA by the Taskforce, Americol,
various state actors, and NGOs are immature, as if they were “behaving
like children.”67 This immaturity is depicted in the narrative as the defen-
sive biopolitical response to the virus’ weakening of genetic, political, and
disciplinary borders. The defensiveness of these groups is immature as
they attempt to impose an image of man, as Anthropos, onto the porous
realities of evolution that Kaye describes. In Kaye’s words, this would
amount to a kind of willed-naivety coupled with the self-assuredness of
the infantile. By likening the SHEVA mutations to the knowledge of pro-
creation, “how babies are made,”68 Kaye draws attention to the fact that
we came from others. Indeed, the repression of this fact supports the
infantile assumption that the image of man as Homo sapiens is ahistor-
ical. This quality is rendered in the uncanny doubling at work in Kaye’s
comment about witnessing a ‘different kind of pregnancy’ due to the
SHEVA mutations. While the mutations are new, the process of mutation
is not; “it isn’t new –it’s happened many times before.”69 Here, Kaye’s
sentences enact a layering of temporality, in which the creation of a new
subspecies is simultaneously old and new. It is also immediate and his-
torical, happening ‘many times before’ on an evolutionary scale and will
8
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happen again. Therefore, Kaye indicates that evolution is a hyperobject
that enables multiple becomings simultaneously.
These clashing temporalities demonstrate the properties of temporal
undulation, viscosity, phasing, non-locality, and interobjectivity present
in hyperobjects. The presence of these nonhuman agencies interrupts the
narration of linear time. When Jackson reproaches Kaye’s comment that
the genome is “more clever than we are,”70 he figuratively represents the
normalising “image of man”71 as Anthropos, as well as its linear projection
forward in time. This directly contrasts with the porous, interconnected
image of humanity that Kaye uncovers, illustrated by the multiple tem-
poralities in her sentences. Indeed, it is also reflected in her attitude of
ambivalence: “I have no idea what kind of children will be produced… .
But they will not be monsters.”72 Kaye’s ambivalence towards the SHEVA
mutations, but confidence that the new subspecies ‘will not be monsters’
dramatises her openness to new forms of temporality and to an inter-
connectedness with hyperobjects. The nature of mutation as multiple
becomings at this moment illustrates the properties of the hyperobject
evolution. Mutations as non-local manifestations of evolution are always
emergent. The mutation’s creation of a subspecies expresses evolution’s
viscosity and interobjectivity as it creates a species shift that instigates
new synergies between hyperobjects due to the extent of this change.
Finally, the multiple temporalities also demonstrate the phasing of evo-
lution as a hyperobject. Kaye mentions that Homo novus is currently the
only aspect of the hyperobject of sub-speciation that they can see.
Her ambivalent embrace of genetic difference and an unfixed image
of the human contrasts the defensive formation of Americol and other
biopolitical entities, against the weirdness and novelty of hyperobjects.
The weirdness of these intra-actions creates a “sensation of wrongness”:
[A]‌weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it

should not exist, or at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the
entity or object is here, then the categories we have up until now used
to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not
wrong after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.73
The inadequate conceptions Mark Fisher refers to here are what Rosi
Braidotti calls the “image of man”74 as Anthropos, defined as a fixed, iso-
latable, and rational subject. The resistance to accepting the plasticity of
the human genome (and by implication the plasticity of the human form)
is the immaturity Kaye refers to. The defensive biopolitical formations
brought about by Americol and other bodies stem from the reluctance
to acknowledge the inadequacies of our concepts of the image and the
genome, and thus the weirdness of the hyperobject of evolution that the
subspecies Homo novus mutation entails. This mutation is a local mani-
festation of the hyperobject evolution, embodying the weird physicality
of their traces and our coexistence with them. In the image of the SHEVA
9
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children and the “different kind of pregnancy,” Bear stages a confronta-
tion between the humanist image of man as Homo sapiens and a plurality
of posthuman becomings. Kaye’s confidence that these children “will not
be monsters”75 points to how the ‘apparently’ monstrous emerges from
within the human.
Hyperobjects are weird because their existence is validated by our
current epistemological systems, but we cannot directly experience
them. Hence, their local manifestations point to our enmeshment with
them and an externality that emerges from our scientific reason, despite
not being reducible to it. The weirdness, or the monstrous quality, of
Homo novus does not simply come from their non-adherence to clas-
sificatory hierarchies. Instead, it points precisely to the failure of nor-
mative classifications and the futility of attempts to fully domesticate
the weirdness of these local manifestations of the hyperobject evolution.
The demands of the biopolitical establishment, Americol, Augustine, and
others, for a complete separation from this internal difference that is the
core of hyperobjective weirdness, are what Kaye deems immature. This
weirdness is threatening to existing relations of domination, born out of
an infantile repression of our co-origin and coexistence with the non-
human, leading Kaye to describe the ruling bodies as acting “like chil-
dren.”76 The novelty of the weird is that it “opens up an egress between
this world and others,” and thus from our anthropocentrism. In this
case, weirdness as a mark of “real externality”77 is achieved through con-
tact with hyperobjects, whose local manifestations, such as the SHEVA
children, have the power to both terrify and fascinate. Morton argues
that hyperobjects produce a similar “cognitive weirdness” due to their
capacity to alter life on Earth and the “passion and horror”78 we feel
when confronted with them. In turn, the SHEVA children’s weird phys-
icality profoundly alters the cybernetic communications within other
hyperobjects, and within human social and psychic space.
However, Kaye is not afraid of the novelty SHEVA produces. Instead,
she embraces this otherness as a radically new form of humanity, whose
future is unpredictable, as she says, she has “no idea what kind of chil-
dren will be produced… . But they will not be monsters.”79 The humanist
binary of atypical and typical genome structure is redrawn here to dem-
onstrate that the ‘typical’ genome as comprised of various atypicalities,
which are the key for both species survival and eventual evolution. The
dialectical opposite of the ‘typical’ genetic construction of man ‘coming
undone’ is the simultaneous growth of a new species: Homo novus. This
transforms the idea of the human from a fixed genetic essence into a vector
of revision and transformation, much like the function of viruses. Her
embrace of the new subspecies demonstrates her openness to disregarding
the previously accepted ‘typical’ genetic construction associated with the
“image of man” that forms the standards of liberal humanism. Kaye
recognises the plasticity of the human genome, accepting the nonhuman
relationship that SHEVA and the genome share.
0
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The coming undone of Homo sapiens and its coming together with
Homo novus denote an embrace of differences internal to the human.
The SHEVA children practice new forms of communication. These new
forms anticipate new posthuman organisations, based on “collectivity,
relationality and … community building”80 because they enable more
complex communication to create such relations. Despite characters’ fear
of Homo novus as “UFO aliens,”81 Homo novus is not fearfully strange.
Although biologically related to humanity, they are better equipped to
express their internal intellectual and emotional landscapes, which can
foster multi-species relationships. All members of this subspecies are cap-
able of greater empathy than Homo sapiens. Homo novus can “talk”82
with all five senses. Stella has “active vomeronasal organs”83 that indicate
mood and function like pheromones, which others can scent and taste.
Bear states that “a sweet musky scent followed Stella wherever she ran,”84
which Homo sapiens could also smell and reacted pleasantly to. They also
communicate via touch, as Stella and another Homo novus child “held
hands,” and Stella can feel “the shivers of response”85 he emits through his
skin in return. Kaye remarks that Stella, and by implication other Homo
novus, will teach them (Homo sapiens) to “really talk.”86 The “really”
stresses Homo novus’ such capacity to overcome the deadlocks of linguistic
communication by propagating new ways of communicating, as discussed
and illustrated by Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü (this volume).
Bear describes their dappled spots on their cheeks as visual representa-
tion of mood. Homo novus’ pupils “fleck with color”87 to create a similar
effect. The two examples given are “fawn and gold” when Stella is happy,
and “red”88 when Kaye is distressed. Stella and a Mexican Homo novus
communicate in both English and Spanish simultaneously; “his mouth
moved in a way that Stella was familiar with, shaping the sounds passing
along both sides of his ridged tongue.”89 These new senses also become
new nodes that communicate cybernetically with each other to change
the existing system. Therefore, these new forms of communication also
allow the genus Homo to interact differently with hyperobjects. Being
able to better foster empathy changes not only Homo novus’ interaction
with their societies but also a myriad of hyperobjects, found in society,
the biosphere, evolution, and geological systems, from an entirely novel
perspective. Therefore, this also increases Homo novus’ ability to form
new posthuman organisations, which transcend Homo sapiens’ biological
capacity and allows them to “really talk,”90 and therefore understand
their environment and the hyperobjects of which they are composed.
Doing so enables a greater kinship with others and otherness, enhancing
their ability to actualise “collectivity, relationality and … community
building,”91 indicating a coming together of both the human and non-
human to form a new node ready to change the system.
Bear contrasts this optimism with the humanist fear that Homo
sapiens may “flake away like dust,”92 which ironically recapitulates and
inverts the Biblical motif of creation from dust. However, Bear’s use of
1
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this Biblical myth conceals a posthumanist element. Specifically, it is
not creation from nothing, but creation from something nonhuman—
the dust—and a return to this something nonhuman. “Flaking away”93
entails creation and dissolution, where the subject dissolves in favour
of interconnection with different hyperobjects. Through SHEVA, Bear
compels us to confront a future that is radically “without us,”94 at least
as we currently are, by staging a confrontation with the self ‘as’ the other.
This “world without us”95 is a world of new forms of intimacy, where the
current picture of ‘us’ as familiar human subjects, with all the ideological
imbrications that come with this, has been corroded by cybernetic forms
of communication and its coexistence with hyperobjects. As Ağın and
Horzum (this volume) also highlight in their Introduction, this “world
without us”96 is haunting, as implied by the horror of “flaking away”97
because this corrosion troubles the outdated yet familiar dualisms of
presence/absence and life/death.
Through characters like Kaye and Mitch, Bear undermines several bin-
aries key to pandemic responses, healthy and unhealthy, typical and atyp-
ical, and human and nonhuman. Bear’s pandemic narrative demonstrates
the realities of viral transfers of information within cybernetic commu-
nication systems, and the interaction of different hyperobjects. It also
demonstrates the fluidity of synergistic interactions between hyperobjects
due to the activation of SHEVA and the mutations of Homo novus.
With this enhanced view of our posthuman entanglement with these
hyperobjects, Bear provides an alternate model for pandemic responses
to those currently implemented under a neoliberal capitalist economy.
Examining the latent posthumanist elements in Darwin’s Radio allows
us to reconceptualise pandemic responses in a productive light, without
allowing the readers to dismiss the horrors of such a reality.
Notes
1 Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
2 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism,
Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations,” Existenz,
8, no. 2 (2013): 27; Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), x.
3 Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 197.
4 Bear, 300–303.
5 Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, 54.
6 Niklas Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems,” in Sociocybernetic
Paradoxes: Observation, Control and Evolution of Self-steering Systems, eds.
Felix Geyer and Johannes Van Der Zouwen (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1986),
172–175; Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years
of Microbial Evolution (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1997);
Bruce Clarke, “Rethinking Gaia: Stengers, Latour, Margulis,” Theory, Culture
and Society 34, no. 4 (2017).
2
6
1

7 This chapter interprets Bear’s “network connections” as synonymous with
cybernetic communication between nodes in an autopoietic system.
8 Felix Geyer, “Sociocybernetics,” in International Encyclopaedia of the
Social & Behavioural Sciences, eds. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes
(Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), 14552. Our understanding of cybernetics is
informed by Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd revised ed. (New York, NY: The MIT
Press, 1961).
9 Bear, 197.
10 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the
World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1–3.
11 Morton, Hyperobjects, 27.
12 Morton, Hyperobjects, 2–3.
13 For definitions of the autonomous human subject and its problematisation,
see Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 29; Rosi
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
15 Gail Raney Fleischaker and Lynn Margulis, “Autopoiesis and the Origin of
Bacteria,” Advances in Space Research 6, no. 11 (1986): 54.
16 Peter A. Corning, Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics and the
Bioeconomies of Evolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
18 Morton, Hyperobjects, 47–48.
19 Prudence Gibson, “Art Theory/Fiction as Hyper Fly,” in Aesthetics after
Finitude, eds. Baylee Brits, Prudence Gibson and Amy Ireland (Melbourne:
re.press, 2016).
20 Bear, 201–202.
21 Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 241.
22 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 241.
23 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 13.
24 Wiener.
25 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by The Means of Natural Selection
(London: John Murray, 1859), 488.
26 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), 74.
27 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, 143.
28 Franklin Ginn et al., “Introduction: Unexpected Encounters with Deep
Time,” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 1 (2018): 221.
29 Bear, 17.
30 Bear, 17.
32 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48.
33 Bear, 40.
34 Michael J. I. Brown, “When You Look Up, How Far Back in Time Do You
See?,” The Conversation, last modified December 27, 2018, https://theconve
rsation.com/when-you-look-up-how-far-back-in-time-do-you-see-101176.
3
6
1

35 Brian Handwerk, “Deepest Ever Hubble View: ‘History of the Universe
in a Single Image’,” National Geographic, September 27, 2012, www.
nationalgeographic.com/ s cience/ a rticle/ 1 20926- h ubble- s pace- t elescope-
deepest-most-detailed-view-science-nasa.
36 Brown.
37 Simon Worrall, “How 40,000 Tons of Cosmic Dust Falling to Earth Affects You
and Me,” National Geographic, January 28, 2015, www.nationalgeographic.
com/ s cience/ a rticle/ 1 50128- b ig- b ang- u niverse- s upernova- a strophysics-
health-space-ngbooktalk.
38 “Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array,” National Radio
Astronomy Observatory, accessed June 18, 2020, https://public.nrao.edu/tel
escopes/alma/.
39 Seth Shostak, “Comets and Asteroids May Be Spreading Life across the
Galaxy: Are Germs from Outer Space the Source of Life on Earth?,” October
26, 2018, www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/comets-asteroids-may-be-
spreading-life-across-galaxy-ncna924916.
40 Nick Mansfield, “ ‘There Is a Spectre Haunting …’: Ghosts, Their Bodies,
Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change,”
Borderlands E-Journal 7, no.1 (2008).
41 Bear, 197.
42 Bear, 197.
43 Bear, 41.
44 Bear, 41.
45 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (London: Harvard University
Press, 2010), 67.
46 Bear, 41.
47 This chapter uses a-human rather than nonhuman or inhuman, which defines
entities through a negative relation to the human, to describe a relation that
could easily be without the human.
48 Bear, 34; italics in the original.
49 Bear, 42–43.
50 Bear, 43.
51 Bear, 43.
52 Bear, 49.
53 Bear, 49.
54 Tom Idema, Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and
Environmental Posthumanism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 180.
55 Bear, 34–35.
56 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 120; Rosi Braidotti, “Preface: The Posthuman as
Exuberant Excess,” in Philosophical Posthumanism, by Francesca Ferrando
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), xi.
57 Bear, 34–35.
58 Bear, 34–35.
59 Bear, 34–35.
60 Bear, 201.
61 Bear, 376.
62 Bear, 224.
63 Braidotti, Preface, xii.
4
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65 Bear, 272.
66 Bear, 344.
67 Bear, 341.
68 Bear, 280.
69 Bear, 280.
70 Bear, 278.
71 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 105. The image of man is elevated to the
top of a hierarchy of ontological worth. The image of man is exclusionary
built on sexism, homo and transphobia, colonialism and racism creating a
fake universal which becomes normative.
72 Bear, 280.
73 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 15.
74 Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 105.
75 Bear, 280.
76 Bear, 280.
77 Fisher, 18.
79 Bear, 280.
81 Bear, 414.
82 Bear, 414.
83 Bear, 419.
84 Bear, 426.
85 Bear, 428.
86 Bear, 414.
87 Bear, 429.
88 Bear, 414, 422.
89 Bear, 429.
90 Bear, 414.
92 Bear, 341.
93 Bear, 341.
94 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1
(London: Zero Books, 2001), 5.
95 Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 5.
96 Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 5.
97 Bear, 341.
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7
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8
Entangled Humans, Entangled
Languages
A Posthumanist Applied Linguistic
Analysis of COVID-19 on Reddit
Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the dynamic relations between the
human and nonhuman agentic bodies, more clearly than ever. As Jayde
Martin and Ben Horn (this volume) underline, we have come to realise
the connections between and the relationality of multiple actors, which
are entangled with not only our bodies but also other “biological, govern-
mental, and ecological entities.” Understanding those complex relations
within the context of the entanglement of matter and meaning-making
practices is the core of posthumanist thought, and what emerges from
such understanding is new ways of interpreting the intricate webs of life
between “the mind, the body, and the world” as “a continuum,”1 rather
than a hierarchy of self-contained entities, as Pramod K. Nayar also
puts it. Within this continuum, as Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu (this volume)
contends, “the body and inhuman actors are implicated upon each other
in such negative and affirmative ways that it is impossible to think of the
self as bounded and autonomous, independent from other-than-human
entities.” If the neurons in the brain “are only nodes” that “pass on infor-
mation” to one another within “a network.”2 then how can we conceive
language as one that exists beyond our interactions with the nonhuman
actors within and around us? Is it possible to view the human language
as independent from “other-than-human biological organisms or sen-
tient beings,”3 or even “impersonal agents, ranging from electricity to
hurricanes, from metals to bacteria, from nuclear plants to information
networks”?4 The answer to this question requires a comparative visit to
the mainstream strategies employed in linguistics and the emergent field
of posthumanist applied linguistics within the new posthuman paradigm.
Conventional approaches to linguistics often presume a pre-existing
link between language and the brain, which overlooks the other intri-
cate relationships between language and agents that intra-act with it.
For instance, Noam Chomsky5 views language as a unique ability that
resides in the mind, which is separate from all the other things that
surround it and its speaker, as well as from other parts of the brain. For
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-13
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168 Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü

Chomsky and generative grammarians, language is a separate facility in
the mind. This view has dominated the landscape of linguistics for quite
a while. Apart from Chomsky, cognitive linguistics, which may or may
not include corpus studies, attribute language to cognition as well as fre-
quency effects. Some researchers like Ewa Dąbrowska6 mention different
frequency effects stemming from social background differences and state
that varying levels of exposure to texts can lead to individual grammatical
systems, but this does not show the whole picture from a posthumanist
point of view because it leaves the nonhuman agentic forces out of the
equation. Other subfields within linguistics, such as sociolinguistics
and ecolinguistics, can be considered slightly more inclusive of other
narratives than human-centric ones, which respectively take into consid-
eration gender, culture, social status, and how linguistic patterns affect
nature. But still, none of these approaches fully acknowledges the status
of other-than-human-beings and their narratives. In other words, even if
these approaches include the above-mentioned factors in their analyses,
the problem lies in (i) the fact that these factors are still human-based and
therefore show only one side of the story, and (ii) that these factors are
analysed to empower human-based activities. A posthumanist account,
on the other hand, would entail other agential powers that shape and are
shaped by language. Put differently, a posthumanist linguistic approach
would posit that language goes far beyond what we receive as input from
the external world and produce as output. Language, in such approach,
is understood as a diffracting agent, indicating the dynamic links between
the inner and outer input we receive. Those inputs are bound in our
natural-cultural entanglements with the world and the language itself.
When we carry out mundane activities in our daily lives, for example,
our past experiences are part of our decision-making processes. These are
correlated with our momentary lexical preferences, changing morpho-
logically and pragmatically, say, for instance, when we are at a restaurant
ordering food or when we teach a second language in the classroom.
Therefore, each individual’s past and present trajectories are composed
of vibrant, naturalcultural entanglements characterising their lexical
choices, phonology, and syntax, along with their vocabulary, articula-
tion, and sentence structure. These are entangled with one another, with
the individual’s bodily and mental experiences, as well as with the envir-
onment. In other words, rather than exist in a vacuum, on an ontologic-
ally separate plane from the individuals that utter them, they are part of
the naturalcultural continuum, of which the individual is a part.
This entanglement, sometimes called a translingual formation,7 implies
inextricable links between natural occurrences and cultural practices.
Shaila Sultana, Sender Dovchin, and Alastair Pennycook’s example of
the Chinese woman selling mangoes at her stall is one good example to
illustrate this.8 Whenever this seller calls out to customers by emphasising
the colour yellow, not only does she expect to advertise her mangoes, but
she also desires to establish a connection between the colour yellow and
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Entangled Humans, Entangled Languages 169

the freshness/tastiness of her mangoes. At first glance, it may seem like
an evocation of association between the colour, the taste, and the fruit as
we know it. However, this extends beyond the promotion of mangoes.
It is a momentary and collective assemblage of the fruit, the colour, the
perception of the buyer, and the barter-of-money-and-the-good, which
enacts the relationality of the human and nonhuman forces. Showcasing
how the onto-epistemologies of the corporeal and the linguistic co-exist,
this assemblage does not only include the fruit, its colour, and its ripeness,
which is a necessary cultural element for our understanding of the fruit
to be considered edible and tasty, pointing out the intra-action between
the lexical choices and the corporeal goals. It also involves the customers’
economic backgrounds, which have been affected by their past and pre-
sent life trajectories, their natural-cultural entanglements. Put into per-
spective, whenever a customer is lured into buying a mango at her mango
stall by following the yellow-therefore-tasty fruit line of thought, it attests
that we have connections with the world around us and within us. These
connections, we believe, are bridged by our physical and mental processes
of perception and language. Evidently, one can add other agentic forces
into this mango-seller example, such as the woman’s voice, the buyer’s
gut bacteria that lead them into craving sweet foods, and perhaps the
environmental conditions that have led to that exact moment where a
minor-scale economic exchange took place. These connections undermine
the belief that language is a tool that exists independently in one’s skull
and points to a much more encompassing understanding of language;
one that embraces the natural-cultural assemblages where language also
exists as one of the complex agents at play.
While thinking about language as a complex web of active agents
is not easy, the example of the mango- seller can assist this new
understanding of language. Making things more complicated, however,
is the existence of another game-changer in this dynamic web of agentic
forces, which is our digital/online selves. The heightened presence of
our online personas with the COVID-19 outbreak formulates an even
more complex set of relations among human and nonhuman bodies.
The more we move towards a posthumanist, post- anthropocentric
ontology, the concept of the ‘self’ becomes, as Rosi Braidotti points
out, more “embodied, embedded, and transversal”9 than ever before.
“Deeply steeped in the material world,” Braidotti writes, we “connect
but also differ from each other.” She continues: “And yet we are struc-
turally related to one another, to the human and nonhuman world
that we live in.”10 Bearing in mind this explanation by Braidotti on a
multi-scalar relationality, and following from Sultana, Dovchin, and
Pennycook’s discussion of a young woman’s digital self on Facebook,11
we suggest that our social media posts and updates index how we want
to represent our ‘selves,’ and therefore, our verbal and written output
have long merged with our ontologies. These outputs represent a part
of our reality, how we desire to become ourselves on the Internet, and
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how we are positioned in a natural-cultural-technological entanglement
with the world. This dynamic entanglement among our physical selves,
virtual identities, meaning- making processes, and our perception of
the world convenes to create a yarn of ‘multi-scalar relationality,’ as
Braidotti would put it.
Although the examples above seem to clarify how language itself is
one of the agentic powers in the complex dynamics of life, and despite
the proliferation of posthumanist theories and practices in various fields,
linguistics still suffers from a primarily anthropocentric discourse. It is,
therefore, important to acknowledge that a posthumanist approach to
linguistics would not be able to achieve ground-breaking results over-
night. Language (and its study) remains to be anthropocentric; there-
fore, this chapter only seeks to reveal whether the gaps in assumptions
proposed by linguistics can be augmented and reconceptualised within
and by posthumanist thought. When we say that language is some-
thing special to us, the claim that the language is the essence of what
constitutes a human enlarges the divide between Homo loquens and
others that are ‘deprived of’ the ability to speak. In other words, it is
based on a major distinction between humans (those who can ‘speak’
languages) and nonhumans (things/beings that lack the ability to ‘speak’
in human standards), hence the “humanist accounts of language, lit-
eracy, and learning”.12 As language teaching is directly related to the
study of languages and linguistics, this humanist approach also has other
implications, such as “the ‘inhumanity’ of things non-Western,”13 due
to the reductionist definition of the human based on qualities such as
“Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD).”14
Cognition, as part of this methodology, is still regarded as an input/output
system where the brain is thought to be in a solipsistic existence. Under
such understanding of cognition, there lies the implication of a represen-
tationalist view, meaning that ‘there are things out there in the world’ and
‘we have the exact same image represented across everyone’s brains for
the word uttered.’ Considering the posthumanist maxim that “language
has been granted too much power,”15 however, materialisation cannot
be reduced to a process where there are things waiting to be named by
the human subject. The deconstruction of the hierarchical dichotomy of
the discursive/material thus supports the recognition of the entanglement
of language within the phenomena. Following from this, if we decon-
struct the dichotomy of interior/exterior, not only do we depart from
regarding these as a personal belonging, but we also understand how
language and cognition are distributed across beings, places, and time.
Then, cognition can be understood as a process that “draws on brains,
bodies and surroundings, including other cognizers, artefacts, social
relations and environmental structures.”16 Once we come to terms with
the idea that language is not a simple, individually possessed choice res-
iding in one’s skull in mere solipsism, we realise that it transcends beyond
being a simple apparatus that is an extension of cognition. It becomes an
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assemblage “embodied, embedded and distributed across people, places
and time.”17 This is the moment where contemporary applied linguistics
and posthumanism convene to create posthumanist applied linguistics.
It is with such approach that throughout this chapter we discuss the
necessity of embracing a posthumanist understanding of linguistics,
where language materialises as part of our embedded, embodied, and
transcending selves, dependent on both natural and cultural processes.
In our case analysis, we discuss the use of language in the digital world
as an anthropocentric racialised tool. Taking our cue from Betsy Rymes
and Andrea R. Leone’s citizen sociolinguistics (CS),18 we argue that an
augmentation of CS towards a posthumanist direction would enhance
our chances of understanding how we enact our posthuman phenomeno-
logical enmeshment through our verbal and written utterances. Aiming
to overcome the “sharp divide between human language and nonhuman
communicative systems,”19 which has racist, ethnic, sexual, gendered,
and classed implications, we seek to “map where the effects of differences
appear,”20 by expanding the definition of the word ‘citizen’ in CS into
a more comprehensive form and taking both linguistic data and other
forms of semiotics (e.g., images, emoticons, sounds) as our ‘citizens,’ i.e.
agentic powers that inhabit the world of intra-actions.
The Study
The research presented here became more and more relevant as the
COVID-19 outbreak kept being associated with a certain ethnic back-
ground on online platforms. Here, we analyse the cumulative effect of
the material-discursive practices online in the performative activities of
stigmatisation through COVID-19. For the analysis, we sampled com-
mentaries on Reddit, under threads accompanied by memes with racist
captions, which associate the agency of the virus with ethnic identity,
resulting in the cultural subordination and ethnic stereotyping of patient
zero (including the other patients before it spread over to other parts
of the world). In such subordination and stereotyping, one’s political
stance, geographical location, and naturalcultural background were
often part.
The sampled data were from threads all of which had accompanying
memes that had one of the following tags: #ChineseVirus, #KungFlu,
#ChineseFlu. Because memes allow for vibrant assemblages where
images, GIFs, and various practices of language coexist, it was an
important factor for a thread to bear a meme in order to be eligible to be
sampled from. The sampling process was three-fold: (i) We identified tags
to conduct a search on Reddit, (ii) identified the three most commented
threads, which had at least one of the tags, that included a meme, and
(iii) checked the same thread every week, picking the first 10 commen-
taries and compiling a corpus of 82 metalinguistic commentaries in total
over a period of three weeks. The data were collected between March
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and April 2020, when the outbreak reached a global havoc. Throughout
the study, the commentators’ identities were pseudonymised to pro-
tect confidentiality. While analysing the data, Carmen Lee’s qualitative
meaning-based content analysis method and coding technique,21 which
comprised two stages, were used: (i) semantic valence of commentaries
and (ii) social categories (e.g., race). The semantic valence of commen-
taries was divided into three subcategories (positive/ neutral/
negative).
Such division allowed for the inclusion of what Karen Barad calls “agen-
tial cuts”22 in our meaning-making practices. That is, enmeshed with our
natural-cultural processes, social categories would help researchers iden-
tify what sorts of attributions an online community tends to employ to
dehumanise others as well as demonstrate an overall linguistic landscape.
To ensure reliability in our coding, we recruited two other coders who
were instructed and were asked to analyse our coding. If we reached an
agreement of 80%, we accepted the reliability of the coding done for that
string of data. The ones that fell below the 80% mark were deleted. To
this end, we argue how the findings lead us to another definition of lan-
guage. Unlike what many contemporary applied linguists claim, human
speech is not the crucial aspect of linguistic communication as we do
not centralise our focus only on suffixes, prefixes, and so on, but we
also find ourselves in an intra-action with and within human and non-
human agents. This distribution enables us to see that language(s) is/are
embodied, enacted, distributed, and spatial, thus indicating the need to
rethink language on multiple levels as an active, vibrant agent of constant
relationships between humans and nonhumans. Such view is especially
significant when the racialised embleming and stigmatisation of people
of Asian descent (particularly the Chinese) within the recent Coronavirus
context are considered.
The following figures are the memes that accompany threads with one
of the above-mentioned hashtags, i.e. #ChineseVirus, #ChineseFlu, and
#KungFlu, which appeared on Reddit in the heightened number of online
discussions of SARS-CoV-2 between March and April 2020. Upvotes,
indicating a sense of popularity among the community, were used as a
sign of engagement in the threads and were also used in the selection of
the three threads. For the purposes of this chapter, among a large number
of commentaries, only the most eligible ones for our arguments are
displayed in tables and discussed here. Thread (1) was first published by
iam4real on March 18, 2020, after Weijia Jiang’s tweet (see Figure 8.1)
on how they were discriminated against because of the virus. The thread
has a total of 91% upvotes.
The following commentaries were sampled under Figure 8.1, as
illustrated in Table 8.1.
Thread (2) was made online on March 24, 2020, by Reddit user
iam4real. The thread bears a meme (Figure 8.2) that accompanies the
thread subject. The meme particularly draws on Jesus’ sermon on loving
everyone unconditionally. The thread has an 89% of upvotes.
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Figure 8.1 Weijia Jiang’s tweet.
Table 8.1 Commentaries sampled under Figure 8.1
Positive Negative Neutral
1. (1.P.1) Imagine (1.Ng.1) I mean was itit (1.Ne.1) Just imagine the
if Azar all of a China that started off shit we’d hear if the
sudden started a global pandemic virus came from Africa
calling HIV/AIDS by eating bats like or the Middle East
the homo virus fucking idiots?
2. (2.P.1) Covfefevirus (2.Ng.1) *Releasing (2.Ne.1) Sometimes
a bioweapon and I hear about things like
blaming it on Eating this and at first I can’t
bats believe they’re real,
then I remember that
I have low expectations
3. (3.P.1) “Look at my (3.Ng.1) Maybe don’t (3.Ne.1) Imagine
Asian-American eat endangered discriminating against
over here!” species and people humans at all?—
will stop making fun this post made by
of your joke of a internationalist gang
totalitarian culture
Source: Table by authors.
Table 8.2 illustrates the commentaries sampled under Figure 8.2.

Thread (3) was also published on March 26, 2020, by an anonymous
user. The thread displays a screenshot (Figure 8.3) of a Facebook post
and its subsequent meme-comment. This screenshot contextualises the
stereotyped Chinese accent with an accompanying utterance. The thread
has a total of 76% upvotes.
Under Figure 8.3, the following commentaries were sampled. Table 8.3
showcases them.
Table 8.4 shows the distribution of the total number of commentaries
among the three valence categories. While distributing comments
across their predominant valence categories, we paid attention to words
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Figure 8.2 Love everyone meme.
1. (1.P.2) Spanish flu (1.Ng.2) I call it the (1.Ne.2) What about the
originated in Kansas, it corolla virus Spanish flu? Is that racist?
was called the Spanish
flu because that’s
where it had the most
cases. People didn’t call
it the Spanish flu out of
spite like they do with
the “Chinese virus”
2. (2.P.2) Classic political (2.Ng.2) Sweet and sour (2.Ne.2) Though this will affect
correctness over sicken the Chinese populace as a
compensation whole, much more negatively
than it will affect the CCP itself
3. (3.P.2) We should call it (3.Ng.2) This post’s aim (3.Ne.2) Then why not just
the Corona virus or is to push the idea that call it the Wuhan virus?
COVID-19 because calling a virus that A geographically based
that’s what it’s called originated in China the name sounds more plausible
China virus somehow if no one wants to use the
makes you a racist and officially designated name of
whatever a phobe COVID-19

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Figure 8.3 Facebook post.
1. (1.P.3) No, be scared (1.Ng.3) The (1.Ne.3) If someone in a

of us, it’s funny Chinese fucking position of respect can say
seeing people run created that something like that then his
away when you fake virus followers will think it’s ok.—
cough any genocide ever
2. – (2.Ng.3) Ching (2.Ne.3) Then why not just
Chong, sum call it the Wuhan virus?
ting feels wrong A geographically based name
sounds more plausible
3. – (3.Ng.3) Sumwan (3.Ne.3) In China, Black
nook bom Panther did bad because he’s
chyna black
that expressed empathy, and rejection of racism to label them as positive.

Under the negative category, we included comments that expressed
expletives, aggression, and hostility. Finally, the neutral category included
those which did not state a specific stance on racism and other types of
dehumanisation.
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Table 8.4 Semantic valence of commentaries
Semantic valence Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Total
Positive 11 11 1 34
Neutral 14 9 6 29
Negative 10 12 8 30
Total 35 32 15
From the Perspective of Citizen Sociolinguistics

This chapter, as mentioned earlier, draws on the augmented definition of
‘citizen’ and uses CS as a method to sample the data. In this section, we
believe it is important to analyse the sampled data briefly from the per-
spective of CS first. CS aims to seek sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic
phenomena through the eyes of language speakers. The general evaluation
of COVID-19 memes from the eye of the speakers seems balanced across
the valence categories (see Table 8.4). During this analysis, the following
social categories arose: region, race, and education. Comments that point
out to a race (2.Ng.3 and 3.Ng.3) specifically display the orthographic
features of what seems to be East Asian languages (Chinese in this case).
These comments could also lead us to think that these commentators
pointed out to education of the commentators. Because spelling is taught
to those who are educated, bad spelling could be considered a lack of edu-
cation. 3.Ne.3 refers to another racial category. By referring to a popular
TV series’ failure in China due to one’s skin colour, the speaker posits
their opinion of how racism is an everyday happening in China. 1.Ng.2
reveals how the speaker identifies this virus with a particular location
(Japan) by naming the virus a well-known car model by Toyota, though
the origin of the virus is far from Japan.
This brief analysis of the emerging social categories based on the
COVID-19 memes through the perspective of CS tells us several things
about the current outlook on language. First, CS, as part of contem-
porary linguistics, has a reductionist approach to such phenomena. That
is, when one refers to a racial category saying ‘black’ in 3.Ne.3, tying the
failure to the Chinese being racist against blacks, we are forced to narrow
down the definition of ‘black.’ In other words, what is the criterion to be
validated as black? Are people supposed to be acting, talking in a certain
way, be born into a certain culture, have a certain tone of skin colour?
This kind of perspective disregards the diversity among those people by
reducing the inclusive definition of being black. Second, a representation-
alist view within contemporary linguistics, where CS is also situated, is
another issue. This view accepts that there are things waiting to be named
by a human being. Many comments can be utilised to exemplify this.
71

Turning to 1.Ng.2, we see how using ‘corolla’ is a weapon to get others
to imagine the same semantic image in their minds. That is, even though
the referent (the car) is of Japanese origin, by means of phonetic resem-
blance, the speaker both expects a uniform representation of Asians to
appear in everyone’s minds and reduces Far Eastern peoples’ somatic var-
ieties into a ‘slant-eye’ cliché. Thirdly, contemporary linguistics falls short
of expanding out of discursive practices. Clear, based on textual analysis
only (which both discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis from
cultural studies could have performed), we can learn a few things about
one’s sociolinguistic understanding of certain linguistic phenomena.
Discourse analysis would focus on the structure of strings of data, the
syntactic order, and perhaps phonology. While critical discourse analysis
would focus on racism, it would remain on a discursive level. Nevertheless,
as mentioned before, we need to take the corporeal into account to fully
account for one’s linguistic and decision-making processes. That is, our
past experiences, our birthplaces, momentary biochemical happenings
in our bodies, socio-economic backgrounds, or even the scent in one’s
vicinity can convene to intra-act with our decisions. Language is neither
independent of natural-cultural assemblages, nor is it at the centre of
communication, sitting in solitude. It is these momentary assemblages
of both corporeal and cultural amalgamations that lead to a certain use
of stylistics as in 1.Ng.2, 2.Ng.3, or 3.Ng.3. CS and contemporary lin-
guistics prove inadequate to demonstrate the effects of these differences
in natural-cultural assemblages across speakers. These differences are
diffractions, which are then tied to “our knowledge-making practices”
and “the effects they have on the world.”23 As Donna Haraway right-
fully says, we can only “map where the effects of differences appear”24
if and only if we consider these amalgamations and their effects on our
linguistics-decisions. It is the introduction of posthumanism to linguistics
that enables us to recognise and analyse these assemblages to account
for linguistic styles in detail. Hence, we turn to an in-depth evaluation
of these data from a posthumanist applied linguistics standpoint in the
following section.
Positive Valence
In this category, as mentioned earlier, we included comments that called
for things such as empathy and a rejection of racism. As seen in 1.P.1,
this commentary, drawing on double-standards, references a past event
of similar nature to what happened in 2020. The US secretary of health
at the time when the HIV pandemic hit the US in the 1980s set forth
the start of many -isms but most significantly heterosexism and homo-
phobia against the LGBT community by dehumanising those who had
contracted the HIV. Whenever commentators present their local his-
tory and compare it to global trajectories, like COVID-19, language
transcends the material restrictions of one’s skull and starts to intra-act
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with other actants such as other local histories and happenings. This
creates a yarn of meanings, a vibrant assemblage,25 where the utterances
continuously influence one another and nature-cultures of individuals
(e.g., the placement of dehumanising speech acts, racism, and stigma-
tisation). While the current linguistic understanding of language assumes
that language is the mere centre of communication, these examples dem-
onstrate a different story. Consider the educational background of this
commentator, or their political stance. These are clearly cultural elem-
ents that play an agentic role in the linguistic decision-making processes
of individuals. However, these elements are linked to one’s nature. That
is, depending on where one is born, the education about their country’s
history will change, so the location will also have an agentic power on
one’s political stance (e.g., the Bible Belt). When pulled together with
the comment, these clearly show that the commentator does not want
to become one of the bodily actants by criticising the double-standards
in this assemblage where they might end up becoming another racism-
perpetuating actant. The verb ‘imagine’ stipulates the -ism, the double
standard, it would create the act of doing what the commentator suggests
and the backlash it would receive from the LGBT community, while the
same counteraction is not created in the case of “Chinese Virus.” Thus,
this suggests that some groups are more dehumanised than others. From
another perspective, one might suggest that the verb implies a humorous
semantic meaning. Depending on one’s mood at the time when reading
the commentary, or one’s past experience with the verb’s connotation, the
reading might change. Once again, this points to a distribution of cogni-
tion. Put differently, cognition is not the sole decision-maker in this case,
but it is more of a combination of agents which are distributed across
space and time (e.g., the verb might have different connotations based on
one’s geographic location and past experiences based on socio-economic
status). This recalls Barad’s diffraction, which occurs based on our own
perspectives and judgements along with how we are affected by the out-
side world, consisting of human and nonhuman agents, which are in a
deeply “entangled phenomenon.”26 The effects of this phenomenon are
realised through diffractions; diffraction is seeing or inspecting something
through another one. Since we reach verdicts based on our diffractive
entanglements (e.g., the connotation of a word), what we diffract will be
inevitably different.
The diffracted meanings have even deeper layers underneath if we con-
sider humour another diffractive agent in the complex web of language.
When Donald Trump made the spelling mistake by writing “covfefe” on
his Twitter account, for example, the internet instantly made it a humour
material. Feeding on the internet’s humour culture, 2.P.1 was born and it
was a salient remark, layered in a multitude of meanings. Quite clearly,
the user references Trump’s speech. Dissecting this commentary, one layer
reveals the misspelt word “covfefe,” while another one reveals the virus.
These are two of the agents, however, while in a deeper layer we find the
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last reference, which is the semiotic power of the combination of these
two words (covfefe and the Coronavirus); that is, the discriminatory face
of the Trump administration.
From a more detailed perspective, there unfolds a story. A consumer
of Reddit, upon seeing this commentary, is bound to be in an intra-action
with many things. The commentary states a wordplay, mixing Trump’s
misspelt tweet and the Coronavirus. The person reading the commentary
needs to know the misspelt tweet incident to understand the Trump ref-
erence. If the reader does know both references (the virus name and the
tweet), then a cognitive process should begin in the reader’s mind. If we
imagine the reader from a selective omniscient point of view, this person
can be reading the commentary while swiping through the internet cas-
ually on the phone in a relaxed state of mind, hoping to find some enter-
tainment. The political standpoint of their family may be in favour of
the right wing, and thus the person might adhere to what the family has
been supporting. Depending on the immediate situation, and the personal
opinions, background of the reader, the commentary will create a different
effect. The consumer will not only link the virus to internet humour
(covfefe), but also go through a cognitive process connecting the Trump
administration’s political standpoints to the virus. The racist aspect of
this political standpoint is realised when the commentary is coupled with
Figure 8.1 under the thread (1). This commentary demonstrates that lan-
guage is not only controlled by cognition but is in a constant intra-action
in a greater entanglement.
The interpretation given above indicates that there can be a story (or a
set of stories) that can be told about all the events leading up to the reader
consuming and interpreting this commentary as racist (or entertaining),
from which the reader is not separate. The reader’s final verdict or the reac-
tion to the commentary will be largely based on the agentic powers that
their background story contains, such as the family’s political standpoint,
the person’s immediate psychology, amount of access to news and media,
etc. Although it is not easy to recognise the existence of such web of stories
and matters, a posthumanist lens would diffract those stories and matters,
thereby making us aware of differences. From a conventional perspective,
however, other methods of analysis would focus on what the consequences
may imply, rather than considering the agencies that make the events arrive
at a certain point. This is why CS, without a posthumanist touch, would
fall short in discovering stories. Instead, it would be limited to numerical
data which, as seen in this chapter, do not prove anything related to ‘how’
a reader concludes these commentaries or how everyone’s natural-cultural
differences overlap and create these differences in our linguistic decisions.
As another option, discourse analysis would provide an analysis which
would still fall short on the bodily aspect. That is, it would merely base
itself on the text and disregard the other parts within this entanglement. The
occurrences, concepts, and/or physical presences cannot be separated from
their stories, their backgrounds that are constantly intra-acting with one
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another and “particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations
of the world) become meaningful.”27 It would certainly not be reasonable
to ignore the story aspect of ‘things’ as long as we know how much influ-
ence it has. In order for us to see ‘things,’ ‘beings’ in as much detail and
clarity as possible, we need to incorporate a posthumanist perspective that
is able to provide us the story of the matter.
Negative Valence
2.Ng.2 and 1.Ng.2 are two good starting points for our analysis. Here,
we see a few cultural references. Clearly, China, through sweet and
sour wordplay in 2.Ng.2, is given a bodily representation. This cultural
element is situated next to ‘sicken’ because the commentator is likely to
believe that China’s poor mishandling of wet markets was the hotbed for
the virus. Simply put, by replacing chicken with sicken, one aims to dehu-
manise the Chinese and their culture, since it establishes a connection
between the cuisine and the sickness. This cultural element (sweet and
sour), however, had a natural agent and travelled across space. That
is, when the Chinese started to immigrate to the US, they brought their
cuisine together. In this case, the cuisine is considered a body, the material
part. As the body moves, it intra-acts, and all these intra-actions create
entanglements of linguistic meanings. Therefore, we need to address the
material aspect of occurrences as they constitute and reveal the true back-
ground of the phenomena. Posthumanism offers that very much needed
aspect for us to gain insight into facts and background stories, enabling
us to see the whole picture as clear as possible.
1.Ng.2 is a similar story. Corolla both refers to a car manufactured by
Toyota, a Japanese car manufacturer, and bears phonetic resemblance to
the word corona. One’s socio-economic background is also determinant
in this matter of meaning-making. Whenever one utters corolla, thinking
they are referring to China and dehumanising the Chinese people, they
are doing more. Extending the coverage of racism from China to Japan
could tell us that during the commentator’s schooling, for example, they
may have been taught of a West-East binary opposition where West has
superiority over the other/East and that the Westerners are taught that
the Easterners physically/facially resemble one another. This leads us to
another reductionist perspective (as seen in the ‘black’ example above),
which can be weaponised against certain races. Once again, the diffractive
patterns, our entanglements, become significant in showing us the path
for one to even utter such a phrase.
1.Ng.1 is a two-fold remark. By referencing eating habits, which may
have been true or false as there has been no scientific proof for that yet,
the user overlooks the agency of evolution and human intervention in
nature. As Ursula Heise rightfully states, other forms of life diminish
(or is altered), resulting “from current human interventions into nat-
ural ecosystems.”28 This intervention, that is how China mishandled wet
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markets and convened wildlife for a number of reasons under the same
roof, is, among many, the natural, cultural, social, and political element
here. The policymakers have this bodily agentic power over nature. The
policies they make become through intra-actions with their cultural back-
ground. It is no stranger to many that meat-eating practices across the
world vary greatly from cows to insects. The movie Contagion (2011),
for example, reveals the source of the global pandemic dealt with in its
plot as the live animal markets. Those markets exist even today in many
Asian countries and are not controlled by any authorities working to pre-
vent animal abuse or such tragedies. The policies enable those markets to
continue in the same way, thus allowing for places where many animals
from different habitats meet in the most inadequate circumstances, such
as unsanitary flimsy cages which fully pack hungry, tired, and peaky
animals, mindlessly stacked on top of each other. This unfortunate meeting
results in their corporeality (saliva, faeces, dead bodies, etc.) to combine
in unhealthy ways which are likely to produce dangerous outcomes. From
there, it is plausible to suggest that the policymakers’ (lack of) actions,
different species and their material intra-actions, conditions of those live-
stock markets, and the people who shop there with no doubts are all
agents of this intervention in a web. Those may change the trajectories
for many, as is the case in the COVID-19 outbreak. Overlooking these
agents do not grant the user the right to be racist, but rather demonstrates
the destruction humans have caused since the beginning of their reign in
the world. Once again, one’s upbringing, if it was Western-centric for
example, may lead to such an overlook of the bigger picture.
2.Ng.3 is another example that supports our view of language.
Although used as derogatory and unknowingly of its actual meaning,
“ching chong”29 is indeed a meaningful word (青葱) in Chinese that
points out to scallions or young times. Despite being unrevealed to the
user, this translingual act (when the derogatory use in English is ignored)
demonstrates a notion of distributed language across space, available to
all users at all times. In other words, from a bodily aspect, ching chong
requires a Chinese person to exhale, using their lungs, lips, and larynx to
articulate this phrase. Moreover, this bodily aspect or the sound waves
that carry ching chong are transported across space (e.g., when the
Chinese immigrated to the US and established communities) and were
used as a label to identify the Chinese. Ching chong became popular in the
Hollywood, especially after the Chinese commenced founding communi-
ties. The constant intra-action between the human and nonhuman beings
resulted in a word being a dehumanising weapon used across communi-
ties and later in movies. These movies then inevitably influenced people’s
linguistic decision-making processes, for example subconsciously forcing
the audience to couple ching chong and a certain stereotype. One’s back-
ground should be socio-economically appropriate enough to allow for
such movies to be viewed and the racist interpretation to take place. That
is, if one’s socio-economic stability is not adequate for them to have the
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time to watch TV or let alone own one, then one may not have the direct
access to the source of this dehumanisation. Similarly, the interpretation
may be affected based on one’s educational background, which is also
linked to socio-economic circumstances. For example, if the person has
attended school in an area where awareness of racism is low, their inter-
pretation may differ from those who have higher levels of awareness on
the issue. We should not forget to mention the cultural representations
of other cultures in one’s upbringing, too. All these entanglements recon-
figure the ‘meaning’ of utterances. At first glance, the stylistic we notice
here in 3.Ng.3 is the orthographical copying of phonological systems of
(probably) Chinese and/or other East Asian languages. On a close inspec-
tion, we also observe this comment references the accent of an English-
speaking person of Asian origin, or with a first language from East Asia.
This natural element is also coupled with the cultural background of the
commentator. Only those English speakers who have been exposed to an
East Asian language, or an English-speaker with an East Asian mother
language will recognise this orthographic workaround. Evidently, this
recognition may require one to have certain amount of education, socio-
economic stability, cultural background and exposure with regard to
location where it is available, and a worldview that oppresses the other.
Neutral Valence
Under this category, there are several examples. Many comments attempt
to justify the use of geographic locations to name the virus as “China
virus.” At first glance, a comment like 2.Ne.3 seems fine. However, as we
delve deeper into the nature-cultures in this part, we see how one’s nature
affects their culture. To begin with, depending on someone’s spatial pos-
ition in the world, there may be an attempt to dehumanise others. There
is a common presumption in the non-Western world assuming that most
people born and raised in Western cultures are inclined to see the cultures
they were raised in as ‘superior’ or ‘greater’ to the non-Western. Not
necessarily true, this assumption can actually be applied to all cultures
regardless of the West/East dichotomy because, as we all know quite well,
all formal educations contain the aim of elevating the culture of a country/
nation/people/tribe over the others in order to create a sense of commu-
nity. Be that as it may, however, such presumptions are accompanied
by notions of capitalism and civilisation. These concomitant notions
are mostly associated with the Western countries due to their colonial
practices disguised under the theme of civilising the ‘rest’ of the world.
For that reason, if their culture is one that belongs to the ‘Western’ world,
then the education, the socio-economic backgrounds, and the political
stance and the utterance will, very likely, configure and reconfigure the
meaning of this entanglement, and as the observers (linguists or speakers)
are also a part of the entanglement, we are also in an intra-action in
and with the meaning-making process. That is, if their education is a
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totalising and dichotomy-inducing one and if this is someone who lives
in a ‘prosperous’ country where contagions are handled seriously, this
person may be more likely to be prone to othering.
Turning our attention to 1.Ne.3, we should be focusing on the fact
that “any genocide ever” is given a voice, it is being quoted. Any geno-
cide ever, or even just the concept of genocide, is an abstract one with
its condition being (re)configured in and through intra- actions. This
comment acts as if an abstract concept, an idea without a body can talk
and the comment quotes “genocide” to convey a message. Here, it is
plausible to mention how an abstract concept can be given an ability of
a bodied material, a human specifically, by someone on Reddit and it is
not received absurd, but it is even taken as humour (if we assume emoji
to be a sign of emotions). The word “genocide” directly criticises racism
by stating how the human race justifies anything discriminatory/offensive
when they come from a position of importance or power.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, our main purposes were to demonstrate the
following: (i) Words do not have determinate meanings; (ii) language is
not solely based on and controlled by cognition as applied linguistics
would assume; and (iii) this representationalist assumption of applied lin-
guistics, that is the assumption that words have determined meanings,
contributes further to the nourishment of harmful -isms. The need to
reconceptualise language in a posthumanist framework arose from the
lack of the inclusion of matter, and the lack of an onto-epistemology. In
a contemporary applied linguistics analysis, we would not include these
as ‘sciences’ attempt to remain objective by disregarding the entangle-
ments, the performativity of these entanglements, and how these convene
to become specific phenomena. As we have seen in the analyses of the
commentaries of three threads, “[m]‌eaning is not a property of individual
words”; on the contrary, meaning—in all its plurality—in our utterances
is “an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of
intelligibility and unintelligibility.”30 Put differently, every time a lin-
guist attempts to analyse any spoken or written discourse, their analysis
emerges through and with intra-actions of the agents. A posthumanist
applied linguistics would then push beyond the restrictions of the current
practices. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, racism has peaked,
which was realised in the online communities’ attempt to mark a par-
ticular group of humans ‘less-than-human.’ It is salient to re-evaluate
our current understanding of (and approaches to) language for the sake
of deconstructing ideas of language encouraging division and exclusion.
Under the current understanding of human language, we can claim that
representationalism is, perhaps, one of the most problematic issues which
might lead to further dichotomies. Consequently, by attributing a repre-
sentationalist nature to what surrounds us and to languages, we create
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opportunities for ‘things’ to be named (e.g., people of Asian descent) and
for stereotypes to be created for these ‘things’ (e.g., by power holders,
privileged groups of people). Communication among humans does not
necessarily position itself in human minds but rather emerges through
and in intra-actions within (supposedly linguistic) phenomena.
Notes
1 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 40.
2 Nayar, 40; italics in the original.
3 Başak Ağın Dönmez, “Posthuman Ecologies in Twenty-First Century Short
Animations” (Ph.D. dissertation, Hacettepe University, 2015), 29.
4 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction: Stories Come to
Matter,” in Material Ecocriticism, eds. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), 3–4.
5 Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New
York, NY: Praeger, 1986), 12–3.
6 Ewa Dąbrowska, “Individual Differences in Grammatical Knowledge,” in
Cognitive Linguistics: Key Topics, eds. Dagmar Divjak and Ewa Dąbrowska
(Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019), 231–50.
7 Shaila Sultana, Sender Dovchin, and Alastair Pennycook, “Transglossic
Language Practices of Young Adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia,”
International Journal of Multilingualism 12, no. 1 (2015): 93–108.
8 Sultana, Dovchin, and Pennycook.
9 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 38.
10 Braidotti, 38.
11 Sultana, Dovchin, and Pennycook.
12 Alastair Pennycook, Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (London: Routledge,
2018), 8.
13 Yen Ren Ting, “Foreign Language Teaching in China: Problems and
Perspectives in Chinese Educators on Chinese Education,” Canadian and
International Education 16, no. 1 (1987): 59.
14 Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People
in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61.
15 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801.
16 Sune Vork Steffensen, “Beyond Mind: An Extended Ecology of Languaging,”
in Distributed Language, ed. Stephen J. Cowley (Amsterdam: John Benjamins
17 Pennycook, 51.
18 Betsy Rymes and Andrea R. Leone, “Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media
Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life,” Working Papers
in Educational Linguistics 29, no. 2 (2014).
19 Vyvyan Evans, The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 258.
20 Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 200.
5
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21 Carmen Lee, “ ‘My English Is So Poor… So I Take Photos’: Metalinguistic
Discourses about English on FlickR,” in Discourse 2.0: Language and New
Media, eds. Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2013), 73–84.
22 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 827.
2007), 72.
24 Donna Haraway, 200.
26 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 73.
28 Ursula K. Heise, “Reduced Ecologies: Science Fiction and the Meanings
of Biological Scarcity,” European Journal of English Studies 16, no. 2
(2012): 100.
29 Linguee, s.v. “Ching Chong,” accessed December 19, 2020, www.linguee.
com/chinese-english/translation/%E9%9D%92%E8%94%A5.html.
References
Ağın Dönmez, Başak. “Posthuman Ecologies in Twenty- First Century Short
Animations.” Ph.D. dissertation, Hacettepe University, 2015.
Anonymous User. “Mi Cough on You.” Reddit, March 26, 2020. www.reddit.
com/r/DarkHumorAndMemes/comments/ewg3z0/mi_cough_on_yu/.
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28,
no. 3 (2003): 801–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321.
Chomsky, Noam. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.
New York, NY: Praeger, 1986.
Dąbrowska, Ewa. “Individual Differences in Grammatical Knowledge.” In
Cognitive Linguistics –Key Topics, edited by Dagmar Divjak and Ewa
Dąbrowska, 231–50. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019.
Evans, Vyvyan. The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg,
Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992.
Heise, Ursula K. “Reduced Ecologies: Science Fiction and the Meanings of
Biological Scarcity.” European Journal of English Studies 16, no. 2 (2012):
99–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.703814.
Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. “The Weirdest People in
the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61–83. https://
doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.
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iam4real. “When Someone Calls It ‘The Chinese Virus’.” Reddit, March 24, 2020.
www.reddit.com/ r / t rippinthroughtime/ c omments/ f o50jj/ w hen_ s omeone_
calls_it_the_chinese_virus/.
Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.”
In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–
17. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.
JamalMal1. “The ‘Chinese Virus’ to the ‘Kung Flu’ Now.” Reddit, March 17,
2020. www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/fk7sez/the_chinese_virus_to_
the_kung_flu_now/.
Jiang, Weija. “This Morning a White House Official Referred to #Coronavirus
as the “Kung-Flu” to My Face. Makes Me Wonder What They’re Calling it
behind My Back.” Twitter, March 17, 2020. https://twitter.com/weijia/status/
1239923246801334283.
Lee, Carmen. “ ‘My English Is So Poor… So I Take Photos’: Metalinguistic
Discourses about English on FlickR.” In Discourse 2.0: Language and New
Media, edited by Deborah Tannen and Anna M. Trester, 73–84. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013.
Linguee, s.v. “Ching Chong,” accessed December 19, 2020, www.linguee.com/
chinese-english/translation/%E9%9D%92%E8%94%A5.html.
Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.
Pennycook, Alastair. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge, 2018.
Rymes, Betsy, and Andrea R. Leone. “Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media
Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life.” Working Papers
in Educational Linguistics 29, no. 2 (2014): 25–43.
Steffensen, Sune V. “Beyond Mind: An Extended Ecology of Languaging.” In
Distributed Language, edited by Stephen J. Cowley, 185–210. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing, 2011.
Sultana, Shaila, Sender Dovchin, and Alastair Pennycook. “Transglossic Language
Practices of Young Adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia.” International Journal
of Multilingualism 12, no. 1 (2015): 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790
718.2014.887088.
Ting, Yen R. “Foreign Language Teaching in China: Problems and Perspectives
in Chinese Educators on Chinese Education.” Canadian and International
Education 16, no. 1 (1987): 48–61.
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Part V
From Medical Humanities

to Medical Posthumanities
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9
HIV, Dependency, and Prophylactic
Narrative in Bryan Washington’s
“Waugh”
Stian Kristensen
Since its burgeoning availability in 2012 in the United States and else-
where, the HIV preventive medication commonly referred to as pre-
exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has incited cultural debates around the
legacy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While it has primarily been associated
with gay men, HIV is now largely associated with other marginalised
groups, especially people of colour, particularly those who are gay,
bisexual, or transgender.1 These are also groups to whom medication,
whether for HIV prevention or treatment, may be difficult to acquire—be
it due to the cost of the medication, lack of information or health services,
or moralistic attitudes towards medication—in a way that echoes what
Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum call “the intersections of (dis)advantage”
in their Introduction (this volume). PrEP has, in this regard, reanimated
questions pertaining to the distribution of medical drugs, and the ways in
their availability or lack thereof affect these marginalised social groups.
As issues of race, class, and/or gender play a role in determining one’s
access to healthcare, they remind us of how health and disease are
situated concepts, which also evokes a tendency of memorialising HIV/
AIDS in contemporary narratives.
With the increased availability of PrEP, there has been a proliferation
of both academic and artistic interventions that, in different ways, seek
to understand the aftermath of AIDS, such as Matthew Lopez’s play
The Inheritance (2018), or draws inspiration from AIDS activism, such
as Ryan Murphy’s television program Pose (2018), Robin Campillo’s
film 120 BPM (2017), or Yen Tan’s film 1985 (2018), to name a few.
Alongside these, we have seen revivals of major AIDS plays on stage and
in film, with Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart adapted for HBO (2014)
and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America revived on the West End (2018).
Among these examples, two significant points draw our attention. The
first is that the representational politics of these works tend to conflate
HIV/AIDS and white male homosexuality, except for Pose, which centres
on people of colour, transgender people in particular. The second one
is that memorialisation has a tendency to conceive of AIDS as a past
issue, while UNAIDS reports that in 2019, around 38 million people were
living with HIV. Of these, only 26 million have access to antiretroviral
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-15
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190 Stian Kristensen

treatment. Furthermore, between 500,000 and 970,000 people died of
AIDS-related illnesses in 2019.2 The continued presence of HIV/AIDS
seems to be largely forgotten in public discourse and narratives of the
epidemic.
Rather than construing AIDS as a past issue, I wish to consider some
of the consequences of its presence. For his exhibition at the Chicago Art
Institute, AIDS activist and artist Gregg Bordowitz designed a banner,
with red text over a yellow background, reading “The AIDS Crisis Is Still
Beginning.”3 With the incitement to memorialise AIDS, and the notion
that we have entered the “age of HIV,”4 this statement reads counter-
intuitively. But this evokes the posthuman concept of temporality, which
merges the past, the present, and the future. Although not explicitly
stated in the banner, what Bordowitz implies is that making history is a
process of deflection, of distancing ourselves from the emergency within
which many people continue to live. Pointing at a non-anthropocentric
temporality, then, this banner underlines the epidemic’s incessant co-
emergences in diseased bodies and communities, as Rosi Braidotti would
contend. Such co-emergences hint at “the virtual totality of a block of
past experiences and affects, allowing them to get recomposed as action
in the present, thereby realizing their unfulfilled potential.”5 What is
more, that the crisis is still beginning suggests that, unless we realise this
incessant co-emergence collectively, it may get worse.
Bordowitz’s statement is provocative, and we may wonder what we
can make of the psychosocial mechanisms that undergird our ability to
deflect and distance ourselves from the emergency of AIDS. In the edited
collection AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (2020), Ian Bradley-Perrin
writes: “The fear that we could become that which we define ourselves
against is the fundamental motivation to take preventive medication.”6
Taking this suggestion as a cue, we may also consider the act of consuming
preventive medication as potentially, and at least in part, motivated by
pro-social tendencies. While the politics of PrEP are contentious, as pre-
vention replaces cure as a fundamental goal,7 or even the wide distribution
of treatment, we may consider that some consume it in order to protect
others as well. Nevertheless, following PrEP’s CDC approval, I suggest
that we have seen the slow unfolding of such a prophylactic form of
thinking about HIV: The cultural process of memorialising the epidemic
reads, in this regard, as preventing us from confronting the ongoing real-
ities of HIV/AIDS, or projecting and displacing the crisis onto others.
In this chapter, I analyse Bryan Washington’s short story “Waugh,”
first published in The New Yorker in October 2018 and subsequently in
his 2019 collection of short stories Lot, to better understand how anx-
ieties about HIV/AIDS linger in contemporary fiction. I argue that these
anxieties are made present by the way of a logic of contagion and pre-
vention, which in turn rely on the expectation that seroconversion—the
point in which HIV antibodies have developed in the blood—is immi-
nent. The prophylactic narrative represents a mechanism by which one’s
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HIV, Dependency, and Prophylactic Narrative 191

awareness of this possibility is projected onto others. My argument is
that “Waugh” negotiates the consequences of prophylactic thinking: The
story portrays changes in the group dynamics of a multi-ethnic group of
five sex workers after their self-appointed white leader Rod tests positive
for HIV. The story is written in the third person, focusing on Poke, Rod’s
favourite out of the four and the one he initially shares his diagnosis
with, meanwhile keeping it secret from the others. When the rest of the
group are made aware of Rod’s diagnosis, Rod leaves the group, refusing
any offer of care or housing by Poke—who by then is living with one of
his clients, Emil—rendering him homeless. The narrative takes place in
Houston, Texas, in the neighbourhood Montrose, where the group live in
a one-bedroom apartment, and starts with the narrator describing Poke’s
work routine, and the nearby facilities that provide the group with some
safety—such as the pharmacy and the diner. Here, the group manage to
find clients, and Poke “tried to keep things local”8 for the sake of comfort
and safety.
Some of Poke’s clients, known as tricks, however, “had to be com-
fortable”9 and for these sessions, Poke would travel home with them.
Recounting one such scenario, the narrator describes Poke “sucking off
some doctor” on call. “The doc’s pager went off, and he wouldn’t leave
Poke at his place, so he drove him to the hospital and stuck him in the
waiting room.”10 The narrator makes it clear that the doctor conceives
of Poke as a threat to his personal belongings, and it is indicated that
the economic exchange temporarily situates Poke in the doctor’s owner-
ship, Poke being “stuck” in the waiting room. The narrator emphasises
that the group have found ways to navigate their work, and the risks
associated with it: Indeed, Poke’s visit to the hospital is benign, framed
in the text almost as a joke, considering the risks one may otherwise face
as a sex worker.
Rod provides the group with a set of rules by which to navigate such
instances: “don’t do anything you wouldn’t do twice; never, ever, ever
double-wrap your rubbers; never give your government name.” These
rules stress the boys’ vulnerability to others, and shape the way they
navigate their work. When Poke asks Rod why he cannot share his gov-
ernment name, “since his name was his name and it’s what he’s called,
Rod christened Poke as Poke.”11 The boys all have different nicknames
that reduce them to essential characteristics: Poke’s question makes Rod
conceive of Poke as “thicker” than the others, whereas Google is Filipino,
named after a racial stereotype in which East Asians are particularly
adept at computers; Nacho is Latino, and named after the Mexican dish.
Indeed, as Tan Arda Gedik and Zeynep Arpaözü (this volume) claim,
language is imbricated in both representational and material processes:
We utilise language in order to interact with and comprehend the world.
This entails the constitution of normative, often racialised expectations
that affect how we conceive of human and non-human others, as well
as subjectivising processes. This argument applies to the case of the
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nicknames in “Waugh” too. Representing essentialised characteristics,
the boys’ nicknames rest on an assumption that sharing one’s govern-
ment name is an intimate experience. In this way, the nicknames pre-
vent a particular form of intimacy with their clients and remove the
potential ambiguities of the name. Indeed, the nicknames subvert the act
of naming by referring to non-gendered and non-human objects: tech-
nology, food, gestures, or things, rather than names we associate with
living persons.
Rules, we learn, become “patterns. Patterns became routines. Routines
meant a sure buck most days of the month, and that’s what kept the lights
on.”12 These rules take on the quality of a medical regiment: They are
instituted in order to keep the boys safe and economically stable. They
function to prevent accidents, such as HIV infections, within the group.
The problem with the rules, as we will see, is that they do not fit every
situation, and Poke finds other ways of navigating his working life. In
one sense, these rules come to liken a narrative, or in the least constitute
a repeated narrative of successful or less successful tricking, with minor
variations, and sustaining the self in the face of continual risk; a prophy-
lactic narrative.
Rod is aware that his role as the leader is temporary, saying that one
day the group are “gonna beat my fucking ass.” Rod’s ass is an important
aspect of the short story, and is construed as a point on the body that is
particularly vulnerable to contagion. Indeed, Nacho refers to Rod as a
cunt and as “el pinche pendejo blanco,” which translates to “the white
fucking asshole,” stressing the ass as a point of feminisation and vulner-
ability.13 The phrase suggests that it is his ass, as an abject location on
the body, from which his whiteness originates. If the anus is the source
of Rod’s whiteness, we may consider this as being due to its repression:
Because the anus represents a point of vulnerability, an entry into the
body. Indeed, Paul B. Preciado argues that the constitution of masculine
subjectivity is predicated on the repression and privatisation of the anus
as a penetrable space.14 As we will see, HIV is conceived similarly, as
abject, representing the border between self and non-self that is repressed
for the sake of the self’s consistency.
Rod’s anus comes to take on properties of what Nancy Tuana refers
to as “viscous porosity.” The term seeks to conceptualise ways in which
distinctions often serve as intermediate junctions, that distinctions do
not “signify a natural or unchanging boundary,” but rather intermediary
positions. In this case, what the constitution of self in “Waugh” stresses is
that the fully integrated, homogenous self is a fiction, however necessary
such fiction may be. Rather, it is a site of “resistance and opposition” that
is imbricated in material processes, “in interactions, including, but not
limited to, human agency.”15 Here, we see how Rod’s interaction with
HIV seems to incite the rewriting of a self that was previously sustained
by the way of a prophylactic narrative separating HIV negative self from
HIV positive other.
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The viscous porosity of the anus is further emphasised in a scene that
was cut from the version of the text found in Lot, where the narrator
recalls Nacho telling Poke to wear a different shirt, unless he wants to be
seen as a “pato.” Pato is the Spanish word for duck that, when used as a
slur, plays on the similarities of the gait of a duck and that of a man who
has been anally penetrated.16 The anus is, in other words, a site of “resist-
ance and opposition,” partially constitutive of white masculinity by virtue
of its repression, but also a site of feminisation. It is a porous border,
and I suggest that there is a parallel to be drawn between the material-
discursive construction of the anus and the self in the short story: It is the
point of the body that renders the self-vulnerable. When Rod later will
disclaim that he is ‘fucked,’ this plays on the double meaning of the word;
Rod understands that he has been ‘fucked,’ and that this has led to him
being ‘fucked over.’ As we will see, to be fucked over refers to a temporal
and narrative structure. For this reason, “the anus” as a porous entity
“becomes a barometer”17 for the physiological well-being and psycho-
logical integrity of the group.
Amid such temporal and vulnerable becomings, connections between
characters are fostered through the concurrences and conglomerations
among race- , sex-, ethnicity-
, and class- based cognates of othered
identities. There is a special bond between Rod and Poke, “something
in the way of kinship,” partially derived from Rod perceiving Poke
as being without “history,” having “hit the streets straight out of
shelter. Rod hadn’t seen him swapping needles,” making Poke “a true
victim of circumstance.”18 For Rod, Poke is ennobled by a perceived
sense of innocence: Rod understands that Poke is not at fault for his
circumstances. Indeed, Poke is framed as naïve, and his name intimates
someone who is poking around idly. It is furthermore suggestive of a
colonial perception of non-European or racialised others as childlike,
without history or civilisation. Washington thus emphasises that cer-
tain attitudes towards racialised others linger, and, as we will see, this
makes it possible for Rod to project risk onto the other boys in the
group. The prophylactic narrative in “Waugh” is one of racialisation,
gendering, and othering, the repression and projection of Rod’s poten-
tial vulnerabilities, whereas Poke’s “poking around” is suggestive of
an attitude that looks beyond the rigidly demarcated frames of self
and other.
When Rod discloses his serostatus to Poke, Rod “shut his eyes, and
told Poke he was sick; he’d finally caught the bug.” They look at each
other, “Rod with the lighter skin. Poke’s a little darker,” and Poke asks
if Rod is sure, suggesting that Rod take another rapid test, to which
Rod replies that he had taken three.19 The emphasis the narrator lays on
Poke’s skin being darker than Rod’s evinces, perhaps, an awareness of the
reader’s assumption that the person of colour to be the one to contract
HIV. That Rod averts his eyes from Poke intimates that he experiences a
form of shame from contracting HIV, and it is his disclosure that makes
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his whiteness visible in the text. Moreover, referring to HIV as “the bug”
has several intimations: A bug may refer to a computer glitch or error; it
may refer to an obsession or, more explicitly, an insect. Referring to HIV
as the bug shapes how the group relate to and engage with HIV as an
object of knowledge.
HIV possesses each of these qualities: It is conceived as something that
just happens, sneaking up on one. “There’s no clock on that shit,” “all of
a sudden”20 it may render the infected person incapacitated. There is also
the sense that HIV is an obsession. First, because of Rod’s rules of engage-
ment when providing for their clients: Their work involves consciously
or unconsciously navigating around HIV. Second, this is due to how HIV
is an absent-presence in their neighbourhood: The narrator explains that
the boys
didn’t know much, but they knew about HIV. They knew the way
it hung over Montrose. They took their precautions. And then there
was the rule, Rod’s rule –you got sick, you were gone. No questions.
No exceptions. Your ass was on the street.21
HIV seems to be a form of abstract knowledge: The boys are aware of

it, and their awareness of HIV shapes the way they interact with others
and navigate their working lives. Indeed, as I suggest, it is imbricated in
gendered and racialised understandings of others. HIV is abstract in the
sense that their clients represent potential sources of contagion, but this
has particular implications for the bodies that are perceived through the
lenses of race and gender.
Tess Charnley claims that the AIDS crisis saw the “US government
and media” as projecting a message telling certain people to “prevent
death” by closing “your orifices.” The body of the HIV-positive person
was perceived as “an embodiment of contamination, of the uncertainty
of boundaries, and as a site of abjection.”22 As such, HIV is framed as an
epistemological issue, an issue pertaining to the boundaries that sustain
the social order. In “Waugh,” the boys know about it, but it is unclear
exactly what the boys know, other than that whether or not one has
“caught the bug” determines your ability to work. When Rod describes
himself as “fucked,” this is due in part to him not knowing “who it
was” he derived it from. The word fucked has several resonances, refer-
ring to the act of “fucking” from which he contracted the virus, and the
burgeoning realisation of being “fucked over” by the virus. Rod’s stress
on not being able to “tell you who threw that shit to me,” suggests that
knowing who the source was might have made the situation less “fucked,”
and that the lack of knowledge makes the situation unbearable. Indeed,
Rod’s juxtaposition between HIV and shit further stresses that HIV is
abject: An object that has to be “radically excluded” in order to sustain
the self, representing the unbearable border separating self from other.23
There is the sense that, for Rod, to know who infected him may aid him
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in deflecting the experience back onto the other: Without this knowledge,
the infection represents a point of contact between self and other.
Such point of contact recalls what Ağın and Horzum contend in their
article “Diseased Bodies Entangled.” The authors suggest that “com-
municable diseases confound our primary visions of ourselves as self-
contained entities by making the porosity of our bodies palpable,” and
therefore, disease may be experienced as a disruption of the self and
our ways of navigating the world. Ağın and Horzum further argue that
the onset of disease instigates a “human tendency to seek linear caus-
ality between disease and morality,”24 which, I claim, has a tendency
to take the form of individualisation. The disease is conceived in moral
terms insofar as it represents the failure of the self to sustain its self-
containment. In this sense, HIV is better understood as an agent upon
which narrative trajectory is projected, rather than as constituting its own
narrative. Indeed, “Waugh” indicates that it is due to the impossibility
of narrating the trajectory of the virus—it having no clearly delineated
narrative structure other than a presupposed chain of transmission that
is, in Rod’s case, impossible to trace—that, in part, makes it unbearable.
It is this lack of knowledge of HIV and its origin that brings about a
dissolution of the prophylactic narrative. Poke implies this, wanting to
tell Rod “that he’d thrown it to himself –and that’s what didn’t compute.
Not with all Rod’s yelling about safety. All the precautions he ran them
through.”25 Poke’s immediate reaction is to moralise and individualise
the issue, and to suggest that Rod is at fault for contracting HIV. This
reaction is offset by Poke’s knowledge of the safety measures Rod has
insisted upon. Poke indicates that something else must have happened,
and I suggest the epistemological break Poke expresses represents an
awareness of the structural inequalities that sustain the epidemic. HIV
is abject in the text because of its social significations and their material-
economic implications: Poke stresses that there are clinics that can aid
Rod, but Rod indicates that acquiring help would be futile. When he
leaves, Rod says that Poke should “be safe,” flashing “a grin.”26 The grin
heavily implies an awareness of the impossibility of staying fully safe,
that the prophylactic narrative of safety and risk cannot fully protect
them from becoming that which they define themselves against. Safety is
an impossible achievement because of our mutual dependency. It is just
that sustaining one’s safety is easier for some than it is for others, due to
their geographic location and economic status. As the narrator stresses,
HIV “hung over Montrose” as an absent-presence, contouring the boys’
working lives.
These suppositions on Rod’s part rely on a particular construct of
selfhood, made apparent in Rod’s rules. This is, as I have suggested, a
contained self: Rod stresses that the boys “keep that shit [drugs] out-
side. They would use a fucking condom.”27 Rod constructs a rigid demar-
cation between inside and outside of the group and of the self. Rod’s
emphasis on using condoms further stresses the anxiety of bringing HIV
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into the group: Their lives are, in a sense, determined by navigating such
prophylactic measures. Poke and the other boys “did their best to adhere”
although
occasionally accidents happened, and sometimes rules were

overlooked. And sometimes, Poke found a better way, or a way that
was better for him, but if he’d learned anything at all it was that
sometimes you kept those things to yourself.28
While the group share their income in order to provide for each other,
there are certain aspects of their work experience that they keep to them-
selves: At stake is the creation of a particular form of interiority, one in
which intimate objects, such as Poke’s method of working and their gov-
ernment names, are kept in.
The juxtaposition between the body and the psyche as interior spaces
constitutes an environment in which there is a shared knowledge of the
body: The body and its ailments have to be part of the group’s knowledge,
because the contaminated body represents a threat to their social and eco-
nomic security. Indeed, this is stressed by Rod’s insistence that they are
not to be perceived as sloppy, a word that denotes lack of control over
bodily fluids, or the commingling of bodily fluids. As Charnley underlines,
anxieties of HIV/AIDS tend to take on the worry of penetration and the
leaking of bodily fluids.29 When Rod stresses that they do not “double-
wrap” their condoms, this indicates that the fear of rupturing the condom
and its attendant leaking is highly prevalent, so much so that one may
want to double-down on prophylaxis. The word sloppy resonates with a
particular understanding of HIV as an intrusion into the body of the self
and the group. Antonyms to sloppy are careful, meticulous, but in this
case, we may also consider the words tough or contained. The condom
is meant to contain potentially contagious sperm: Failing to wear one is
therefore sloppy. To become HIV positive refers back to a moment of
penetration of the virus into the body. But Washington is again careful to
frame this in social and economic terms: If they are perceived as sloppy,
this will damage their reputation, thus their ability to find clients. It is the
social stigma around HIV, the construction of contaminated, risky bodies
as opposed to safe bodies, rather than the bodies themselves that is at
issue. Indeed, many HIV-positive people on treatment have a suppressed
viral load, meaning that passing HIV on is highly unlikely even if there is
a commingling of bodily fluids.30
The group constitution rests on a prophylactic narrative, a rigid
demarcation between HIV positive and negative, perhaps due in part to
an awareness that the free clinics are subject to neoliberal economic pol-
icies that utilise ideas about abject bodies to justify lack of spending on
welfare services.31 The boys are, perhaps, more keenly aware that they
are subject to economic and political decisions outside of their control.
As Rod is getting ill, the other boys start to notice, and Poke is concerned
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about Rod’s well-being, particularly as an economically disadvantaged
person: Poke recalls seeing “sick men under the bridges in Midtown.
He’d seen shrunken hands squeezing loose strips of cardboard. Poke
knew that everything could and would be fine, until all of a sudden it
wasn’t.”32 Poke displays an awareness that homelessness may be Rod’s
future, due in part to the lack of social services available to him, but also
from the stigma associated with getting help. Indeed, as I suggest below,
this makes sense in light of the economic context of the United States:
The privatisation of healthcare facilities and the concomitant tax levies
for the rich depend in part on the constitution of “abject,” gendered and
racialised subjects, who are constructed as needy and dependent on a
dismantled and dismantling welfare state. The “all of a sudden” tem-
porality of HIV, which may suddenly render Rod ill and incapacitated, is
reflected in the economic system: Indeed, Rod seems to imply that there is
no point acquiring help because these institutions may disappear, as well.
While there is support available to them, this is potentially temporary.
Both Rod and Poke are aware that, due to HIV’s erratic pathogenic
progress towards becoming the chronic illness known as AIDS, rendering
the body susceptible to opportunistic infections, there is no easy way of
knowing when Rod will become ill. Becoming HIV positive entails the
entry of a new temporality, where the sudden appearance of a symptom
may constitute a crisis. We may construe this as a posthuman tempor-
ality, in which the introduction of a non-human viral agent institutes a
new experience of time, and awareness of the body as subject to a wider
economic, social, and ecological context. But for Rod, the temporal crisis
is primarily economic, pertaining to his ability to get by: When Poke
suggests that they acquire treatment for Rod, Rod laughs it off, “From the
doctor. With my insurance.” Poke stresses that there are services available
to him: “You know about the clinics. All the volunteers on Jackson… .
There’s places you can go for free.” Rod says he will visit one of them,
but is hesitant, it only having been a day since he received the diagnosis.
“It’s been a day since you found out, Poke said… . There’s no clock on
that shit. Maybe you got it from your first fuck.”33 Rod responds to this
with violence, hitting Poke in the face.
In one sense, we may consider that Poke’s suggestion has Rod reconsider
his past experiences, and that an awareness of the possibility of having
contracted HIV taints these recollections. There is another sense that
Poke’s suggestion may be experienced by Rod as an admonition, implying
that Rod has been sloppy. Ruth Clemens and Max Casey (this volume)
suggest that illness, as an interaction between human and pathogen,
disrupts the humanist, linear conceptualisation of time that is necessary
for the constitution of the subject proper. The onset of illness represents
a temporal disjunction in need of resolution through the reconstitution
of the self, often by recourse to familiar narratives of selfhood. Following
what the authors suggest, I argue that this structure tends to replicate
the linear, progressive narrative of capitalist accumulation—one that Rod
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stresses, as we will see, when he comments on Poke’s gaining weight as a
symbol of “progress” and “upward mobility.”34 Infection thus represents
a temporal disjunction by virtue of the dissolution of the prophylactic
narrative, a narrative that presupposes an ideal white, masculinised body
that is safe from the contamination of the non-human other.
There is a gendered nuance to the infection: HIV infections, as I empha-
sise above, tend to be conceived in terms of penetration and commingling
of bodily fluids, whether in the act that has led to the infection such
as unprotected penetrative sex, drug injection with an infected needle, a
blood transfusion, or, ultimately, in the penetration of the body by the
virus.35 Part of the issue, then, is that the ideal subject is conceived as
masculine in the heteropatriarchal sense: impenetrable and contained,
not sloppy. There is the sense that Rod perceives his seroconversion as
feminising—he has, as Charnley would say, been leaked into. Poke’s con-
ception of the illness is not moralistic, however: We have seen how the
moralistic idea—that Rod is at fault for contracting the virus—errs with
Poke. Rather, Poke implies that contracting HIV in Montrose is an almost
arbitrary, geographically specific occurrence.
Things change as Rod continues to keep his diagnosis a secret from
the group, and as he keeps “fucking around” around with clients. “Over
pride,”36 Poke observes:
But Rod still tricked, four, five, six times a week. And Poke knew there
was something wrong with that. Something irremediably fucked. He
never wondered if Rod used protection because he knew that he did
not, and Poke tried mouthing the words to himself, just to see what
they’d sound like: Our leader has failed us. Worse than the guys he’s
gotten rid of. More lost than they were.37
At stake in this passage are the two different interpretations that Poke has
at hand to understand Rod’s tricking. One is moralistic, an understanding
that Rod has failed to respond in an appropriate manner to his diag-
nosis. While one such interpretation conceives of Rod as psychically lost,
I suggest that we read Poke’s understanding of Rod as implicated in a
wider social, economic, and cultural frame that is detrimental to their
safety. But this context has specific geographical consequences: The lack
of distributive justice of medications and services does not directly affect
all people and their attendant environments, but has a skewed impact,
being particularly detrimental to some more than others.
Washington thoroughly stresses that these boys are economically
disadvantaged, making the best of the situation into which they have been
thrust. “Waugh” also emphasises the group’s dependence on each other:
Initially on Rod, who provides the apartment, acquires handouts from
charities, provides for the group, and demarcates its boundaries. But they
also rely on accessible services such as HIV clinics, local institutions like
the pharmacy or the diner, which forms part of the reason as to why Poke
91

prefers to keep his work local. Sometime after Rod receives his diagnosis,
Poke starts living with one of his clients, Emil, who provides for Poke.
In the meantime, Poke is looking for Rod, who by then has disappeared.
Washington indicates that Rod represents or expresses certain cultural,
moralistic assumptions, prevalent in his attitude towards the other boys.
In their article on the genealogy of the word “dependency,” Nancy
Fraser and Linda Gordon foreground the gendered resonances of the
word. They suggest that dependency has come to take on the meaning
of “an individual character trait,” associated with people with a “lack of
willpower or excessive emotional neediness.” Due to these associations,
the word has particularly gendered resonances, as a stigmatised and
“feminized sense of dependency attaches to groups considered deviant
and superfluous.”38 As I suggest above, the prophylactic narrative utilised
in order to ward against the unbearable reality of the HIV/AIDS epidemic
consists, in part, of two forms of othering: racialisation and gendering.
There is the sense, then, that Rod takes on a white, masculine, paternal
role in the group in an attempt to be, or be perceived as, independent.
Hegemonic masculinity is usually taken to be self-contained, autonomous,
and tough, and is, in this sense, not to be sloppy. While the others under-
stand that Rod’s rules cannot be obeyed rigidly, it seems like Rod cannot
face the disintegration of these rules—which is why Poke understands
that he is “more lost” than others who have faced a similar predicament.
Indeed, when we learn that Poke is on PrEP, and that he can acquire
PrEP for free through one of the clinics, the intersectional disadvantages
become more evident. There is the sense that Rod construes the fact that
he is white and masculine as, perhaps, prophylactic enough. Despite both
Poke’s and Rod’s vulnerability to the disease due to their professions, it
is Poke who is more susceptible to social stigma, and Rod views himself
as somewhat ‘untouchable’ by the disease, although this is not the case.
This is what I refer to as the prophylactic narrative: The idea that some
are naturally safer than others due to certain characteristics, such as race
and gender, which surfaces one more time in the following scene. As the
other boys realise that Rod is HIV positive, Poke attempts to defend him:
“Okay. Whatever. But you think you just breathe that shit in?”39 The
others respond that they are aware infections do not work like this, but
stress that they “can’t have niggas walking around talking shit about us,
too. Saying we’re sloppy.”40 This has already been happening, but Poke,
who spends most of his time with Emil and has other “tricks he turned
regularly,” had been unable to see the repercussions.41 This inability
leads Poke to leave the group, staying with Emil, while Rod disappears,
looking for him.
Initially Poke considers searching for Rod at the health centres, “but
he decided against that –help was the last thing Rod was looking for. He
had too much hubris. That was the reason Poke was out here searching
for him in the first place.”42 The word hubris may be conceived as ennob-
ling, but in this particular case, Poke seems to use the word ironically:
02

It is a lofty word to use, making fun of what Poke perceives to be Rod’s
heightened feeling of pride. Poke suggests that it is due to his pride that
Rod cannot face the consequences of the infection, to acquire medication
and care, since doing so would confront him with his vulnerability and
dependency on others; hubris is, in this sense, a front for the purposes of
sustaining the self.
At times, Poke manages to find Rod. When Rod comments on Poke
having gained some weight, saying, “Fat shows upward mobility. Fat
means progress. Growth,”43 Rod plays with some tenets of contemporary
capitalism, economic progress, and growth, as a material and narrative
structure that he is excluded from. It “shows” on others, while Poke
looks at Rod, thinking that Rod is lost, “as if he were waiting for some-
thing. This thing he’d been cheated out of, his end of the deal.”44 Poke
continues to look for Rod, and sometimes finds him. Rod had “become
part of the scenery,” until one day Poke cannot find him: “He looked for
a long time,”45 concludes the short story. Poke intimates that Rod has
been “cheated out of” class mobility and that, ultimately, the prophy-
lactic narrative is about money. Thus, Rod’s hubris seems to stem from
a belief in the possibility of an upward economic trajectory that, once
climbed, will provide safety.
HIV is only mentioned by name once in “Waugh,” albeit it is the sero-
conversion of the leader of the group that instigates the narrative. Indeed,
the text focuses on Poke, relegating Rod somewhat to the side-lines: It
is Poke’s interpretation of the situation we read, rather than Rod’s. As
I have suggested, “Waugh” represents the dissolution of the prophy-
lactic narrative, and advancing this dissolution, Washington makes
the white, masculinised leader the HIV-positive character to emphasise
that HIV is not only an issue amongst racialised and gendered others.
Considering HIV to be other people’s issue is, rather, one of the psycho-
social mechanisms undergirding the economic disparities and distributive
injustices that sustain the epidemic.
In one sense, this paradigm is not entirely new: The conflation of
deviant sexuality and disease is, as Jennifer Terry argues, one of the ways
in which scientific and medical discourses have construed deviant sexual
subjects over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science
and medicine may, in this regard, provide explanations for social and
national anxieties about others, making natural what is in fact historical.
As she writes, the emergence of AIDS and its attendant discourses were
conducive to changes in the material conditions that undergird the con-
stitution of subjects. More recently, PrEP forms part of such a material-
discursive landscape, “produc[ing] new ways of imagining the body in
relation to subjectivity” and, we may add, in relation to others.46
Following the consequences of the prophylactic narrative frame, which
I have delineated as I read it in “Waugh,” one of the issues that emerges
out of such frame is that prevention and treatment takes the place of cure.
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To borrow the words of Eric Cazdyn, the prophylactic narrative seeks to
maintain the status quo, in the face of a
system [that] cannot be reformed (the cancer eradicated, the ocean

cleaned, the corruption expunged), then the new chronic mode
insists on maintaining the system and perpetually manage its consti-
tutive crises, rather than confronting even a hint of the terminal, the
system’s (the body’s, the planet’s, capitalism’s) own death.47
Where Cazdyn points to the new chronic mode of experiencing time,

I argue, we add prophylactic: It is not only that we cannot seem to con-
front the system that produces the inequalities, and as Cazdyn points out
ecological devastation, but that we deflect the actual structural causes of
these inequalities onto social groups. Indeed, prophylactic thinking is part
of the chronic: Prophylaxis is only necessary as long as that which is to be
prevented still exists. As previously stated, the availability of treatment
worldwide would largely, if not fully, obfuscate the need for PrEP; the
presence of a widely distributed cure would certainly do so.
“Waugh” frames the material and psychosocial conditions of selfhood,
intimating that to have a self, one has to be a human being in possession
of interiority. In one sense, Nacho, Google, and Poke have nothing to
lose, it is Rod who relies on a prophylactic logic of risk and safety to
sustain himself and the group. As Washington implies in the short story,
however, money and the economic context in which one lives are the most
important aspects of prevention. If Rod had health insurance, he would
have been safely employed and thus safeguarded. When Rod remarks
on Poke’s “upward mobility,” Poke has come to represent an ideal that
Rod has been “cheated out of.” While the narrator does not specify what
this deal consisted of, as I write above, Washington implies that it is eco-
nomic and social mobility: Rod being hard-working and providing for his
group in order to procure his and their safety indicates this. Rod seems
to understand his seroconversion as a failure to move upwards in the
class trajectory: That what is in fact a failure of the state to provide for
its subjects is shifted back onto the self which, due to its contamination,
is no longer a self.
This is the issue with what I refer to as prophylactic logic: the idea
that HIV is reserved for ‘the other.’ Infection renders this narrative moot.
In one sense, when Rod tells Poke that he has “finally caught the bug,”
the “finally” indicates some sort of relief. We may read this as suggesting
that the self is hard to sustain: It is a rigidity and containment that, once
breached, is difficult to reconstitute. Above, I suggest that the boys’
nicknames present essentialised racial characteristics to others, including
their clients. Rod and Poke function differently and are, in this regard,
complementary names. Representing a paternal and disciplining char-
acter, the name Rod is evocative of the biblical idiom “spare the rod,
spoil the child.” The name Rod emphasises his phallic qualities, whereas
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Poke’s is evocative of a less potent erection, and the act of poking—a
sustained, tedious thrusting motion. In yet another sense, however, the
name Poke evokes the phrase “poking around,” looking and observing
as a process of searching for alternatives to the present situation. That
Poke is perceived as having no history emphasises this: For Rod, it is per-
haps not just that Poke is dumb, “thicker” than the others. Rather, Poke
represents a form of potentiality.
My claim is that Poke represents a potentiality latent to a construct
of selfhood that does not rigidly demarcate between self and other. This
is not a self that navigates the world by the way of a prophylactic logic,
not motivated by a desire to define the self against others, but rather
understanding our mutual dependency. One issue is that Poke, who is
already feminised and racialised, effectively winds up caring for the white,
masculinised leader. In this sense, Poke is thrust into a feminised structure
of care work. But it is also from this position that Poke manages to find
alternatives. To suggest, as Bordowitz does, that the AIDS crisis is still
beginning serves to emphasise the danger of the prophylactic narrative
that processes of memorialisation tend to replicate: To rigidly demar-
cate past from present, self from other, serves to overlook the presence
of HIV/AIDS in the present and the structural inequalities that sustain
the epidemic. Washington is keenly aware of this posthuman tempor-
ality, as Poke straddles the tendency to moralise and individualise Rod’s
behaviour—the notion that Rod’s failure is the cause of his demise—and
understanding Rod’s continued “tricking” in the face of his diagnosis as
geographical. When Rod first shares his seroconversion with Poke, Rod
says that he had “finally caught the bug.” To become HIV positive is
framed as an expectation, while the word “finally” may signify relief, an
opportunity to lower his defences. Once infected, Rod indicates that there
is no longer a self to protect.
Where Rod initially saw Poke as “thicker” than the other boys,
Washington stresses that what Rod conceives as stupidity is merely a
different logic of selfhood. Whereas Rod seeks to protect the self from
the other, Poke realises his dependency on others, poking around for
alternatives to Rod’s paternalistic rules. For Poke, Washington implies,
the end of the epidemic may be reached only after we realise our entangle-
ment and mutual dependency.
We may also consider that the final sentence of the short story, “He
looked for a long time,” gestures towards the idea of transformative
possibilities. As I suggest above, Poke seems to be on the lookout for
alternatives, “poking around” for something better. Writing about the
work of Joan Slonczewski, Colin Milburn suggests that there are two
forms of speculation, one which
considers the future in terms of the present, modulating the future

with tools for mitigating and profiting from risk, including stochastic
models, insurance schemes, financial derivatives, industry roadmaps,
3
0
2

and technological forecasts. But there is also a form of speculation
that opens to uncertainty, envisioning the conditions of the future as
less knowable than transformable –allowing for other worlds than
this one.48
One mode of speculation concerns, in other words, the procurement

of capital through the calculation of risk, while the other considers the
future as malleable, as potentially better. Indeed, when I have previously
emphasised Bordowitz’s claim that the “AIDS crisis is still beginning,”
I have sought to reconsider the prophylactic narrative that forecloses the
presence of HIV/AIDS by relegating it to the past; but there is the sense
that Bordowitz’s statement ambiguously forecloses the future. If the AIDS
crisis is still beginning, it is bound to go on for much longer. This reading
has us consider the costs, economic and human, of an epidemic the end
of which is already overdue.
Another reading is, as I write above, the idea that AIDS will keep
happening until we collectively realise what is happening, but the real-
isation is not enough to end the epidemic. There has to be some sort of
collective action or political mobilisation. Poke’s insistence on looking
for Rod suggests that it is possible to change the future. As “Waugh”
demonstrates, change is not only desirable, but necessary: While mor-
alistic assumptions are part of what keeps Rod from acquiring medica-
tion, Washington also indicates an awareness that the clinics themselves
may be temporary institutions. As such, Washington stresses that the
material context is a local context, with particular services, people, and
institutions that are subject to an overarching economic structure that, in
turn, connects the local with wider social, moral, and material conflicts.
Crises such as HIV/AIDS may occur to anyone, and the economic impact
it may have is difficult to predict. My argument has been that Washington
points us towards the moralistic assumptions that undergird a psycho-
social repression of the epidemic, one that takes the form of a prophy-
lactic narrative separating the self from the other. One of the challenges
Washington poses is how to disentangle the prophylactic narrative that
sustains the self, while working to better the lives of those at the margin of
society. Doing so requires being attentive to the material aspect of our lives,
to trouble what and who we conceive of as human: In the terms of this text,
it is a notion of individualism, in which the other is construed as contagion
and potentially harmful to the structure of the self that has to be effaced.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Linda Villarosa, “America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic,” The
New York Times, June 6, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/
americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html.
2 Global HIV & AIDS Statistics, 2020 Fact Sheet (UNAIDS, 2021), www.
unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet.
4
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3 Jennifer White and Meha Ahmad, “We Are ‘Still at The Beginning’ of the AIDS
Crisis, Says Artist Gregg Bordowitz,” WBEZ91.5Chicago, May 21, 2019, www.
wbez.org/shows/morning-shift/we-are-still-at-the-beginning-of-the-aids-
crisis-says-artist-gregg-bordowitz/4ea116a8-297d-42c6-8c6e-9ec9433e2fa2.
4 As indicated in the title of David Caron’s memoir. See David Caron, The
Nearness of Others: Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
6 Theodore Kerr et al., “Dispatches on the Globalizations of AIDS,” in AIDS
and the Distribution of Crises, eds. Jih Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz and
Nishant Shahani (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 41.
7 Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and
Illness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 6.
8 Bryan Washington, Lot (London: Atlantic Books, 2019), 153.
9 Washington, Lot, 154.
11 Washington, Lot, 154–55.
14 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York, NY:
Feminist Press, 2013), 72.
15 Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms,
eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 194.
16 Bryan Washington, “Waugh,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2018, www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/waugh.
17 Jonathan A. Allan, Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus
(London: Zed Books, 2016), 29.
22 Tess Charnley, “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-
19,” Anthropocenes –Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no. 1 (2021): 2–3.
23 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993), 9.
no. 2 (2021): 150–2.
29 Charnley, 3.
30 Simon Collins, “The Evidence for U=U (Undetectable =Untransmittable):
Why Negligible Risk Is Zero Risk,” i-base, October 1, 2017, https://i-base.
info/htb/32308.
31 See, for example, Imogen Taylor, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and
Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013).
5
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2

35 See Steven F. Kruger, AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality. Fiction and
Science (New York, NY: Routledge, [1996] 2011), 36–7.
38 Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing
a Keyword of the US Welfare State,” in Fortunes of Feminism: From State-
Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, by Nancy Fraser (London: Verso
Books, 2020), 87.
46 Jennifer Terry, “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant
Sexuality,” in Posthuman Bodies, eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149–51.
47 Cazdyn, 5.
48 Colin Milburn, “The Future at Stake: Modes of Speculation in The Highest
Frontier and Microbiology: An Evolving Science,” in Posthuman Biopolitics:
The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski, ed. Bruce Clark (Lubbock, TX:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 135.
References
Cultural Crossroads of Posthuman Narrative Agents.” SFRA Review 51, no.
2 (2021): 150–7.
Allan, Jonathan A. Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus.
London: Zed Books, 2016.
Caron, David. The Nearness of Others: Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness.
Charnley, Tess. “Leaking Bodies in the Anthropocene: From HIV to COVID-19.”
Anthropocenes –Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 2, no. 1 (2021): 1–4. https://
doi.org/10.16997/ahip.933.
Collins, Simon. “The Evidence for U=U (Undetectable =Untransmittable): Why
Negligible Risk is Zero Risk.” i-base, October 1, 2017. https://i-base.info/htb/
32308.
Creed, Barbra. The Monstrous-Feminine. London: Routledge, 1993.
Fraser, Nancy, and Linda Gordon. “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a
Keyword of the US Welfare State.” In Fortunes of Feminism: From State-
Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, by Nancy Fraser, 83–110. London:
Verso Books, 2020.
6
0
2

Global HIV & AIDS Statistics, 2020 Fact Sheet. UNAIDS, 2021. www.unaids.
org/en/resources/fact-sheet.
Kerr, Theodore, Catherine Yuk-Ping Lo, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Sarah Schulman, and
Eric A. Stanley. “Dispatches on the Globalizations of AIDS.” In AIDS and the
Distribution of Crises, edited by Jih Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz and Nishant
Shahani, 29–59. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Kruger, Steven F. AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality. Fiction and Science.
New York, NY: Routledge, [1996] 2011.
Milburn, Colin. “The Future at Stake: Modes of Speculation in The Highest
Frontier and Microbiology: An Evolving Science.” In Posthuman Biopolitics:
The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski, edited by Bruce Clark, 133–60.
Lubbock, TX: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the
Pharmacopornographic Era, translated by Bruce Benderson. New York, NY:
Feminist Press, 2013.
Taylor, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal
Britain. London: Zed Books, 2013.
Terry, Jennifer. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant
Subjectivity.” In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira
Livingstone, 135–61. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Tuana, Nancy. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms,
edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188– 213. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2008.
Villarosa, Linda. “America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic.” The New York Times,
June 6, 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-
epidemic.html.
Washington, Bryan. Lot. London: Atlantic Books, 2019.
Washington, Bryan. “Waugh.” The New Yorker. October 22, 2018. www.
newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/waugh.
White, Jennifer, and Meha Ahmad. “We Are ‘Still at the Beginning’ of the AIDS
Crisis, Says Artist Gregg Bordowitz.” WBEZ91.5Chicago. May 21, 2019.
www.wbez.org/stories/we-are-still-at-the-beginning-of-the-aids-crisis-says-
artist-gregg-bordowitz/4ea116a8-297d-42c6-8c6e-9ec9433e2fa2.
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10
The Vampire as Posthumanist
Pharmakon
Towards a Critical Medical
Humanities
Ronja Tripp-Bodola
This chapter reads narratives of vampires and vampirism in the long

twentieth century as expressions of shifting attitudes towards conta-
gion. It discusses Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Octavia E. Butler’s
Afrofuturist Fledgling (2005) to argue that the changes in attitude, ultim-
ately, lead to an embedded and embodied posthuman subjectivity and
knowledge.1 The philosophical concept of the pharmakon2 at the centre
of the readings will help to delineate the development, and to highlight
the links to medical discourse and social practices.
Blood pathologies or prion viruses, contamination or radiation dis-
ease, STDs or biotoxins –cultural imaginaries abound with vampiric
tales about contagion, and the narratives significantly vary in their
presentations of symptoms, aetiology, virulence, or pathogenesis. As their
responses to the Anthropocene, colonialism, consumerism, or climate
change are intricately linked to developments in the life sciences, the term
‘posthumanist pharmakon’ will serve as a shorthand to capture the intri-
cate interactions of these tales with biopolitics and bioethics. Ultimately,
this chapter contributes to discussions in critical health humanities as
it discusses vampire narratives as a speculative response to debates on
posthuman pathogenesis.
Pathogens, Pathogenesis, and the Pharmakon

Defined by their categorical ambiguity and troubling mobility,
vampires do not rest easy (or easily) in the boxes labeled good and
bad. Always transported and shifting, the vampire’s native soil is
more nutritious, and more unheimlich, than that.3
The philosophy of medicine has stressed the problems of classifica-

tion, causation, and diagnosis.4 The relation of symptoms to certain
pathogens, their pathogenesis, and aetiology remains a construct, and
diagnoses conjectures, albeit evidence-based. These aspects of medical
philosophy are rendered, often explicitly, in fictional and non-fictional
vampire accounts, and the figure of the doctor plays a prominent role in
them, particularly since Stoker. Though steeped in folkloric notions and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-16
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208 Ronja Tripp-Bodola

Christian doctrine about death and disease, the most formative vampire
narrative that shaped a century of reiterations coincided with the advent
of modern medicine.
Vampire accounts often “associate outbreaks of vampirism,” as Nick
Groom points out, “with contagion, making them vectors and conse-
quently part of the history of infectious diseases.”5 Though blood-sucking
creatures date back to pre-Christian times and Vampire folklore predates
the first Vampire narratives, from Romanticism onwards the tales are
clearly distinct from their predecessors in this regard. Early enlighten-
ment scholars argue that it is actual diseases at the core of a mythopoetic
explanation; for example, porphyria.6 Later, it was infectious diseases
such as tuberculosis that lent their symptoms to the Victorian narratives
and beyond.7 The distinction is important because the focus had shifted:
from a narrative of causation to prevent the dead from rising and wreak
havoc in a zombie-style fashion8 to speculative renderings about a con-
cept –bacterial contagion –and how to prevent spread or, if caught, how
to cure it. Yet, as Mary Hallab puts it, vampires both embody our fears in
this regard and “stand for our deepest wish—not to have to die.”9 Their
stories are about life and death, the human form and humanity, as much
as they are about medical ethics. As prolonging life expectancy is at the
core of the medical sciences that prompted bioethical and posthumanist
discussions in the later twentieth century, the narratives of the vampire
changed, as well.
All of this to say that these changes share a common core, and the
stories centre around the pharmakon/pharmakeus. In nineteenth-century
narratives and particularly Stoker’s novel, the vampire is host and
pathogen: They are the living pathogenesis and the walking mechanism
of infection. They were “perceived both as a symptom and a cause of an
ailing … body politic.”10 Often ‘originally’ human patients themselves,
vampires become an ambiguous figure of the poisonous ‘trans-human’
magician who, at the same time, is the doctor who cures one from phys-
ical limitations by not only providing eternal life but also certain physical
enhancements. This way, they actively undermine the dominant scientific
and biopolitical discourse and the grand power narratives, which is why
they need to be shunned from society.
In their dual nature of patient and doctor (pharmakeus), they are both
remedy and the poison: They are the pharmakon, a concept that Jacques
Derrida expounds on in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In his reading of Phaedrus,
the philosopher discusses how writing gets dismissed as the pharmakon:
It is merely a secondary, flawed tool that is potentially harmful –a poison
to memory. However, Derrida argues that the pharmakon is extremely
ambivalent as it means both poison and cure. According to him, con-
sequently, it produces an incessant play of binary oppositions crucial
to Western tradition such as remedy/poison, speech/writing, good/bad,
and interior/exterior. For example, when treated as “an impurity, the
pharmakon also acts like an aggressor or a housebreaker, threatening
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The Vampire as Posthumanist Pharmakon 209

some internal purity and security,”11 when in fact it is always already
internal and part of the house. This is why vampires, as it says in Donna
J. Haraway’s epigraph above, are truly unheimlich: They used to be
part of the home (German Heim)12 but were externalised because they
represent the shadows of our existence, like the doppelganger. This
explains their always-shifting mobility that Haraway mentions, as well:
“The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the produc-
tion of) difference. It is the différance of difference…. Contradictions and
pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacritical, differing,
deferring, reserve.”13
Doing Harm –Pharmakos and Physician Scapegoats

As such, vampires become a threat to humanist society and must be
expelled from that society. In response to Derrida, René Girard discusses
the pharmakos in the context of legitimised violence as a means to
restore order to a community. As part of an annual ritual, or in par-
ticular instances of a bad drought, for example, members of the society
were branded as the “scapegoat,” they were blamed for the chaos and
shunned from society: “The Platonic pharmakon functions like the
human pharmakos and leads to similar results…. This use polarises
the maleficent violence on a double, who is arbitrarily expelled from the
philosophical community.”14
While this alone is of interest for a critical discussion of biopolitics,
techno-posthumanism, or entangled species, what is most interesting
for the present discussion is the role of the doctor or magician-healer,
to whom the same applies. Doctors were often blamed and turned into
scapegoats. For example, they were blamed for not curing Cholera,15
and “medicine was, in a sense, a monstrous occupation.”16 According
to Derrida’s reading, the connex of the physician and writing or bookish
knowledge is at the core of the issue:
As opposed to the true practice of medicine, founded on science, we

find indeed, listed in a single stroke, empirical practice, treatments
based on recipes learned by heart, mere bookish knowledge, and the
blind usage of drugs. All that, we are told, springs out of mania:
“I expect they would say, ‘the man is mad’; he thinks he has made
himself a doctor by picking up something out of a book (ek bibliou),
or coming across a couple of ordinary drugs (pharmakiois), without
any real knowledge of medicine.”17
Apropos shifting and mobility, based on Plato’s criticism of administering

‘remedies’ that would only lead to metastasisation,18 Derrida sees the
pharmakon as creating the open process of dissemination, which the
figure of the physician puts an artificial stop to. In the framing text,
“Outwork,” Derrida writes:
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Dissemination endlessly opens up a snag in writing that can no
longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural,
nor any form of presence can pin/pen down [agrapher] the trace.
Dissemination treats—doctors—that point where the movement of
signification would regularly come to tie down the play of the trace,
thus producing (a) history.19
Physicians are intricately linked to writing practices, and this patient his-
tory (the “History of Present Illness”) is inherently forceful in its descrip-
tion, in addition to a doctor’s ‘pre-scriptions.’ Furthermore, the French
“l´histoire” is more ambiguous than Barbara Johnson’s English transla-
tion suggests: The history springs not just from a certain form of forceful
arrest of a dynamic process; it is, thus, also just a story. “It is precisely
this ambivalence that both the physician and the writer must master”20 in
their common fight over “life and death.”21
Writing Patients
Jens Lohfert Jørgensen calls Stoker “a seismograph of late Victorian
science and culture,”22 and it certainly was the product of scientific as
well as political zeitgeist. The socio-cultural and medical changes that
had taken place over the previous few decades had profound and long-
lasting effects on modern medicine as well as Victorian literature. They
were biopolitical in nature and steeped in bioethical debates: Darwinism,
evolutionism, bacteriology as a new, emerging field alongside an early
biologist psychiatry. The “Contagious Diseases Act” and the law that
prohibited vivisection were just passed, and the medical profession
dominated the scientific discourse, the medical gaze and its politics. What
makes Dracula stand out among other novels of the 1890s is the extent
to which biopolitics and bioethics are part of the plot.
Groom traces Stoker’s literary and cultural predecessors, and it is clear
that Stoker owed much to the nineteenth-century precursors as well as
Eastern European folklore.23 However, he did not just update the med-
ical discourse but made significant changes and added original elements.
Firstly, in his rewriting of the established tradition of vampiric litera-
ture, Stoker added the lunatic asylum, the degenerate madman, and the
doctor.24 While this element was equally central to the novel as it was to
Dracula’s influential first screen adaptation by Tod Browning in 1931
with Bela Lugosi portraying the protagonist, the second innovation was
forgotten until Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of the novel25: the role
of modern archival media and ‘discourse networks.’ Both relate to our
reading of the vampiric pharmakon.
The epistolary novel, which consists of a variety of texts, is quantifiably
dominated by two doctors. The notorious, eccentric Abraham Van
Helsing “M.D., D. Ph., D. Lit. etc. etc.”26 became synonymous with vam-
pire hunters and spawned an army of descendants. Dr. Seward, on the
12

other hand, is less known despite the fact that it is his medical voice that
dominates the discourse –that is, literally his voice as he keeps his ‘diary’
with a phonograph. The use of this ground-breaking recording device
marks him as the modern man of science and technology. His first entry,
however, presents him to the reader as a ‘patient.’ He tries to ‘cure’ his
love sickness by dealing with his patients, regaining control and power:
25 May.—Ebb tide in appetite to-day. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so

diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty
feeling… . As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing was
work, I went down amongst the patients. I picked out one who has
afforded me a study of much interest… . I questioned him more fully
than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the
facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now
see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point
of his madness—… .27
After a blow to his masculinity, Dr. Seward’s response is to empower

himself through dominating his patient as he wants to become the
“master” of his case while “keeping” him where he is. From the very
start, Dr. Seward’s character points to the power relations involved in
psychiatric patient care and exacerbates them to the point of abuse. The
‘lunatic’ or degenerate is conceived of as a subhuman subject for study,
not a suffering individual to be cured.28
In addition to Dr. Seward’s questionable motivations, he sedates the
patient for no medical reason but to steal his notebook: “I gave Renfield a
strong opiate to-night, enough to make even him sleep, and took away his
pocket-book to look at it.”29 The patient keeps minute records of all the
insects and animals he catches. This is a significant detail because it points
to the relation of writing, recording, and classifying in medical discourse,
and Renfield’s notes challenge the power-relation of the doctor-patient
interaction. Furthermore, Renfield and the Count are interlocked, they
both write by hand, as opposed to almost everyone else in the novel. The
raw data of numbers and charts that he creates is closely connected to
the colonial practices and therefore points to the counter-colonisation,30
Renfield being an executive clerk who writes more when Dracula is
nearby. Erik Butler, therefore, suggests that writing is at the root of con-
tagion and calls Renfield a “graphomaniac”31 as he sees writing as the
contagious pathogen.
Stealing the notebook marks not just the power struggle with the
Count over Renfield. It also shows that he is trying to control the written
narrative by absorbing it into his phonographic trace. This gesture is
paired with a reflection on bioethics:
My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a

new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating)
2
1

maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he
has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many
flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a
cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps? It
would almost be worthwhile to complete the experiment. It might be
done if there were only a sufficient cause. Men sneered at vivisection,
and yet look at its results to-day! Why not advance science in its most
difficult and vital aspect—the knowledge of the brain? Had I even
the secret of one such mind—did I hold the key to the fancy of even
one lunatic—I might advance my own branch of science to a pitch
compared with which Burdon-Sanderson’s physiology or Ferrier’s
brain-knowledge would be as nothing.32
The reader sees many written (and transcribed) accounts that make up
the novel and both the Count’s and Renfield’s stories, but never their own
texts. Like Renfield and the Count consume their victim’s life force, the
doctor consumes his patient’s stories to grow his “bookish knowledge”:
The “Cruelty to Animals Act” (1876) and the anti-vivisection movement
that Dr. Seward is referencing had raised questions about medical bio-
ethics, specifically about research motives and cruelty. While Renfield
is treated as a specimen that the scientist collects, observes, and then
classifies, the animals are worth being sacrificed for the greater good. Not
only does Seward defend vivisectors who were demonised by society,33
but the way Seward treats Renfield is a “sinister [sign] that the doctor
is aligned with Dracula; and the lunatic is one locus of their struggle for
mastery.”34
Stigma of the Infected

What is more surprising than the vampire as a healer, let alone the Count
as the scapegoat of the novel,35 is that the doctor becomes an aggressor
who potentially makes matters worse. While Seward, the scientifically-
oriented doctor, tries to “pin/pen down” his pet lunatic, Van Helsing takes
on the Count.36 Van Helsing is, according to Seward, a “philosopher and
a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and
he has … an absolutely open mind.”37 Seward, on the contrary, is a rep-
resentative of narrow-minded rationality, he is ill-equipped to understand
the concepts that Van Helsing brings up, so he labels them abnormal38:
“ ‘Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?’ … ‘Would I were!’ he said.”39 He is
well aware that his failure to understand things outside of his “bookish
knowledge”40 caused the death of his patient, though it is technically the
Count who kills him.
Van Helsing is not “mad” in Derrida’s/Plato’s terms, but he is siding
with madness, that is, a “degenerate” rationale. As doctors are involved in
the battle “between science and the occult –and not always on the side of
science,”41 Van Helsing knows that it is some kind of infection, caused by
3
1
2

Mina drinking the counts ‘contaminated’ blood. Some of their methods
might loosely tie in with antibacterial measures42 but consecrated wafers
and hypnosis/metempsychosis are Christian elements that in Dracula
become occult pharmaka to remedy the infliction:
He have infect you—…. He infect you in such wise, that even if he do

no more, you have only to live—to live in your own old, sweet way;
and so in time, death, which is of man’s common lot and with God’s
sanction, shall make you like to him. This must not be!43
Not trusting in God’s better judgement, his magic fails: The wafer that
Van Helsing places on Mina’s forehead only burns her. It leaves a trace,
a stigma of infection. The doctor literally stigmatises her, a manifest-
ation of the figurative stigma that, according to Erving Goffman, inflicts
restrictions on an individual’s well-being and interferes with treatment
and prevention,44 for example the stigma of infectious diseases.45 The
wafer as the pharmakon and the doctor as the magician leave her worse
off than she was.
While Dr. Seward considers sacrificing a cat, Van Helsing drives a
stake through Lucy’s heart which raises much less concern. The vampire
is less than an animal and can be experimented on without the trace of
an ethical conundrum.
The nineteenth- century Development Hypothesis, most famously

demonstrated in Darwin’s revelations of humanity’s animal origins,
revised Victorian faith in humanism—and thus in heroism—in ways
that involved both denial and abashed embrace. Throughout the
century, guardians of powerful institutions affirmed their shaky
humanity by cataloguing and thus controlling animals as van Helsing
does Dracula.46
Dracula exemplifies the deployment of humanist biopower in response

to the racialised, dehumanised Other, the aggressive invader. This links
directly to the advent of bacteriology. Bacteria were thought of as more
aggressive and destructive than other pathogenic factors. Their procre-
ative qualities made them more powerful, and their invisibility an object
of fear.47 Furthermore, the medical discourse explicitly compared bac-
teria to demons, while the surging spiritualism movement “found scien-
tific legitimacy in its reference to bacteria.”48 The disease or illness that
Lucy is suffering from is described in terms of symptoms of tuberculosis,
and Dracula himself is characterised by “bacteria-like features. The count
is polymorphic, … he is capable of entering even hermetically sealed
rooms.”49
Dracula’s counter-colonisation is not just feared because of potential
racial contamination or his uncontrolled, unregulated reproduction via
contagion: “And so the circle [of infection] goes on ever widening, like as
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the ripples from a stone thrown in the water.”50 He aims at “colonis[ing]
the world with his own kind”51 that is neither alive nor dead and therefore
outside of the biopolitical control. As a sovereign power, Count Dracula
is killing, and letting a select few live who then continue his mission.
Thus, he threatens the subversion of the entire biopower, so vampires are
constructed to represent the Other that they can “let die.”52 Vampires
are conceptualised into an invasive subhuman species that challenges the
biopower and brings its ethical structures to light. And while biopower
and governmentality triumph in the end, the questions of humanist ethics
in Dracula remain ambiguous, as the borders between the species are
slowly starting to erode.
Interlude –Human Mirrors to Posthuman Interfaces

The rapidity with which our Draculas become dated tells us only that
every age embraces the vampire it needs.53
The cruel and violent humanism of Stoker’s Dracula would infect a cen-
tury of vampire narratives to come. Mostly, they would shift to the only
modern medium not mentioned in the novel, the only one in which the
Count would leave a trace.54 Dracula, quantifiably underrepresented in
the novel,55 would become an iconic, luminous superstar in the darkness
of movie palaces. The proliferation of the oversimplified good versus
evil storyline quickly became formulaic. Additionally, while Dracula
dominated and colonised the screen, he eventually became a parody of
himself. This paved the way for later vampire comedies, a formulaic
genre itself that only recently was reinvented by Jemaine Clement and
Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2020).
The twentieth-century cultural and media history of Dracula and Van
Helsing’s descendants has been widely discussed: The affinities between
vampires and visual culture (specifically cinema),56 nationalism as well
as fascism,57 and sexuality58 and capitalism59 all prove Nina Auerbach’s
point –every generation has its own vampire that mirrors their biopolitical
threat at the time. Formulaic story-telling and clichéd visuals were not
the only reason why the fascination had dwindled. The attention slowly
had shifted away from organic matters to machines. Aris Mousoutzanis
lists the rise of 1940s information technology and cybernetics, the emer-
gence of molecular biology after the decoding of the human DNA, ‘new
biology’ such as in vitro fertilisation, and finally “relevant technoscientific
developments such as cosmetic and prosthetic surgery [as well as] an
increasing preoccupation with viral outbreaks and diseases.”60
Paving the way for the posthuman pharmakon of vampire narratives
of the new millennium, it is significant that more original movie vampires
re-emerged during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, as well as in the
1990s, in the context of cyborgs.61 Auerbach, quoting Haraway, puts it
this way:
5
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In a culture turning from humanism to computers and cyborgs,
in which authentic transcendence is associated not with nature or
bodies, but with ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and
organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,’
even uninfected vampires are debilitated because trapped in out-
moded organicism.62
In short, the vampire had to be reimagined in relation to both humanism

and cybernetics.
Being Posthuman
Who are my kin in this odd world of promising monsters, vampires,
surrogates, living tools, and aliens? How are natural kinds identified
in the realms of technoscience? What kinds of crossings and offspring
count as legitimate and illegitimate, to whom and at what cost? Who
are my familiars, my siblings, and what kind of liveable world are we
trying to build?63
The new millennium saw, again, a proliferation of vampire narratives.

They were correlated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the events often
termed an “attack on humanity.”64 Not surprising, then, that many
shows, games, and movies continued the same formula of a Manichaean
fight, and often vampires were reduced to their pre- Enlightenment,
zombie selves.65 Elements started to shift ever so slightly, paving the way
for posthuman examples.66
Few vampire narratives of the early twenty-first century are rethinking
the vampiric tradition as completely as Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling
(2005). It offers a critical meta-narrative and reframes the tales of patho-
genesis and contagion with discourses on embodied and embedded
posthumanist subjectivity and the end of the Anthropocene.
In Butler’s narrative, so- called Ina (capital I) live together with
humans (lower case) in a symbiotic relationship. The reader learns
about Ina’s history, laws, customs, and ethics through the eyes of
Shori Matthews who is initially as ignorant about them as the reader.
Her first-person narrative sets in after she “awoke to darkness”67 in a
cave, with amnesia and severe head injuries but “hungry –starving!”68
After killing some animal that later turns out to be a human being, she
emerges from the dark cave and has to relearn everything. The blatant
birth metaphor is confirmed by her first human symbiont Wright, who
calls her Renee –“A friend of mine told me it meant ‘reborn.’ That’s
sort of what’s happened to you.”69 This comes full circle at the close of
the novel when she again awakes from a coma, but this time recognises
the human and knows now that Ina do not kill humans –and that she
should not dehumanise them –her learning and development as a sub-
ject is completed.
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Shori is young, in human biology and also by Ina standards. She looks
like a preteen, when in fact she is in her fifties. Everyone treats her repeat-
edly like a child which is a point of conflict in her “aetonormative”70 world.
Other characters prompt several other renegotiations of intersectionality
and power relations –in addition to age, that is race, gender, species, and
gene technology: She is a black female child who is genetically engineered
as well as an interspecies hybrid of human and Ina. As Ina and humans
are different species and cannot interbreed, Shori’s hybrid nature is
considered by some abomination and prompts the conflict that leads to
her family being killed and leaves her injured and half-dead in the cave:
“She said she thought she was an experiment of some kind,”

Wright said.
“Yes. Some of us have tried for centuries to find ways to be less
vulnerable during the day. Shori is our latest and most successful
effort in that direction. She’s also, through genetic engineering, part
human. We were experimenting with genetic engineering well before
humanity learned to do it—before they even learned that it was
possible.”71
In her search for information, the vampire meta-narrative forms the back-
drop for her quest. Wright immediately calls her out for biting him and
licking his blood. At first, she needs to study from books, but she does
not find this kind of “bookish knowledge” helpful –that is knowledge
of the humankind that the reader also shares. Later, she comes across
the narratives of her kind, about the origins of Ina and how they relate
to humans. She learns that Ina used writing to archive knowledge long
before humans, and that there are two different kinds of theories about
where they came from. Some claim they are extra- terrestrial beings,
stranded on Earth. Others believe in an evolutionary explanation of a
common ancestor: “We’re too genetically similar to them for any other
explanation to be likely. Not all of us believe that, though.”72
The biggest difference to the “vampire mythology” is the symbiotic
relationship between the species. This is based on a mutual benefit that
ties them together: The Ina need to feed on their blood, while injecting
saliva venom into their symbionts. Like the pharmakon, it is both a poison
and a remedy, and it picks up the notion of “cross-species medicine”73:
inoculation. The downside is the addictive quality of the “powerful hyp-
notic drug”74 that is Ina saliva. It makes humans “highly suggestible and
deeply attached to the source of the substance. They come to need it.”75
The upshot:
Your immune system will be greatly strengthened by Shori’s venom,

and it will be less likely to turn on you and give you one of humanity’s
many autoimmune diseases. And her venom will help keep your heart
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and circulatory system healthy. Your health is important to her…. It
is mutualistic symbiosis. You know you’re joined with her.76
Humans do not turn into Ina, they do not become undead. They are also
not treated as slaves or minions, because their Ina belongs to them, as
well. Mere feeding, the survival of the zoē, does not do. They need con-
tact, their embrace and skin contact. They need to be loved. Both Ina and
symbionts die without one another.
Physicians and the End of the Anthropocene

Hence, in Butler’s novel, the pathogen does not ‘make’ a vampire, and
vampirism is not a disease. Shori comments on the absurdity of turning
one species into another: “ ‘That would be very strange,’ I said. ‘If a dog
bit a man, no one would expect the man to become a dog. He might get
an infection and die, but that’s the worst’.”77 The focus is shifted to the
pathogenesis of the symbiosis, which is explained at length as it takes
more than just one bite. And the pathology, technically an addiction, is
considered in their embedded and embodied, relational situatedness. It
is not stigmatised; it does not need to be cured. In fact, it is repeatedly
described in the book as healing to the human subjects, particularly their
loneliness.
The limited perspective serves as the traditional control of informa-
tion and horizon, but in combination with Shori’s loss of memory creates
a specific ‘subjectivity’ that generates ‘posthuman knowledge,’ both for
herself and the reader. Shori is truly a posthuman subject as Rosi Braidotti
conceptualises it. Gradually, her precarious state of zoē turns into bios,
combined with technology.78 Humans are not rejected by Ina, but they
are integrated and embedded into each other’s worlds. They form a sym-
biotic relationship, rather than an opposition. More than that, Shori’s self
is entangled, embedded, and her subjectivity is relational.79 No need for
heterotopias80 to expel unwanted organisms, they neither have hospitals
nor prisons.
The posthuman knowing subject has to be understood as a rela-

tional embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity….
Two related notions emerge from this claim: firstly, the mind-body
continuum –i.e. the embrainment of the body and embodiment
of the mind –and secondly, the nature- culture continuum –i.e.
‘naturecultural’ and ‘humanimal’ transversal bonding.81
However, as half breed without a memory, Shori becomes for some Ina
a persona non grata, a scapegoat. She is stigmatised as ‘less than’ even
though she is more than all of her relatives: “You’re not [Ina]! And you
have no more business at this Council than would a clever dog!”82 The
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novel also negotiates exactly the “racist” or rather species-ist notions of
humans as Other, inferior and to kill without moral quandary.
As soon as she regains her knowing at the end of the novel, Shori
becomes the quintessential posthumanist pharmakon. She is a better
version of both Ina and human. She does not have to sleep during the day
and can be exposed to the sun, and she can grow back limbs and even
heal her own fractured skull. Ina die, though they live much longer. They
are neither undead nor techno-cyborgs, but back to being fully organic.
And this is where the physicians re-enter the narratives.
Physicians were mostly absent from the narratives since the shift away
from organic matter towards cybernetics and machines in the 1940s,
apart from a few Mengele-type characters.83 In Fledgling, they return as
helpers and allies, not as hunters. The thin demarcation between the two
and the dual nature of the doctor is, again, made apparent. In Fledgling,
Ina are able to heal themselves, but also have doctors and lawyers in
their families to help the other symbionts to remain invisible to the
institutionalised medical gaze of biopower. During the big family tri-
bunal, it is suggested by the opposing party that Shori is questioned about
her previous injuries by a physician. “It was intended to be offensive …,
to treat me as human rather than Ina and, of course, to humiliate me.”84
After answering his questions, “the doctor stared at me, and his expres-
sion went from disbelieving to a look that I could only describe as hungry
…, very, very hungry.”85
Once again, the physicians mirror the “very hungry” vampires, who
“feed” on the other species and their embodied knowledge. Here, the
figure of the pharmakeus comes full circle. The doctor is not threatened
and does not need to kill the scapegoat. However, he is now in an inferior
position and cannot treat them as lab rats, either. It is suggested, though,
that he would if he could, if only for financial gain. The attempt to procure
longevity and to fight human mortality has been linked traditionally to
both biopower and capitalism, but in Fledgling he is prevented from doing
potential harm because he lives embedded in a posthuman society that
exists beyond the Capitalocene. While the sovereign power of Dracula to
‘kill and let live’ was fought by the representatives of biopower, Dr. Seward
and Van Helsing, the ‘live and let die’ of biopolitical humanism here
succumbs to the ‘live and let live together’ of the posthuman convergence.
Posthuman Knowledge –Towards a Critical Medical

Humanities
The proper subject of the posthuman convergence is not “Man”, but
a new collective subject, a “we-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-
not-one-and-the-same” kind of subject.86
This chapter argues that vampire narratives change, but at the core is
still the pharmakon/
pharmakos: It exposes mechanisms of biopower,
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questions bioethics, renegotiates human exceptionalism and undermines
binaries that are at the core of medical practice and medical humanities87
to this day.
The current role of medical humanities in medical education in the
United States still serves a blatantly humanist agenda. Moreover, medical
humanities globally are at a “critical juncture,” and it is not clear, where
the field is headed.88 There are few initiatives related to technology and
AI,89 but most often, the humanities are reduced to, or equated with “the
Arts.”90 Literature, for instance, is recommended to combat burnout or
to promote physician empathy.91 At best, narrative medicine is taught,
which is perpetuating and affirming binaries that feed into mechanisms to
“control of the bodies –the animality –of the body politic.”92
In 2017, Anna McFarlane wrote that the “need for a medical
posthumanism builds with the increasing availability of complex biotech-
nologies.”93 Currently, the debates about race and racial underpinnings
of adverse health outcomes in the United States –exacerbated during the
2020 pandemic –have brought to the fore discussions on how medical
humanities can contribute to medical education to improve the outcomes
and promote equity. Calls to integrate critical race theory into the cur-
ricula94 are laudable, albeit unrealistic without an institutional frame-
work that allows for critical posthumanist thinking.
To teach critical medical humanity that would question biopower
and the medical episteme requires a postdisciplinary approach that
emphasises “mixity, hybridity and difference [that] makes for a practice-
oriented and relational style of teaching.”95 The necessary framework
fosters non-competitive, non-exclusionary strategies that would allow
physicians and humanities scholars to work together. Furthermore,
following Kristen L. Eckstrand and colleagues, it needs to be embedded
in its community and “embrace personal and collective loci of responsi-
bility, … examine and rectify unbalanced power dynamics, [and] engage
all stakeholders in the process of change.”96
Finally, it has been argued that certain genres such as science fiction,97
speculative fiction, or Afrofuturism (as exemplified above) are better
equipped to serve as a springboard for a critical engagement with
humanism in the medical humanities. In a similar vein, I have argued
here and elsewhere that the specificity of relevant theoretical frameworks
and critical concepts such as intersectionality,98 biopolitics,99 or the
pharmakon allows a focused discussion that is inherently practice-
oriented, thus paving the way for a postdisciplinary posthumanism
debate in medical education.
Notes
1 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); see also
Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,”
Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019): 31–61.
0
2

2 will draw on both Derrida’s and Girard’s interpretations of the concept.
Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), 61–172; René Girard, Violence
and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
3 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_ Witness@Second_ Millennium. FemaleMan_
Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience, 2nd ed. (New York,
NY: Routledge, 2018), 215.
4 See the discussions and overview provided in Miriam Solomon, Jeremy
R. Simon, and Harold Kincaid, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy
of Medicine (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), chapters on “Concept of
Disease,” 5– 15, “Realism and Constructivism”, 90– 100, “Causality and
Causal Inference in Medicine”, 58–70.
5 Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2018. Kindle), ch. Introduction (Black Death, para. 1).
6 It is still a recurring popular trope; see Ann M. Cox, “Porphyria and
Vampirism: Another Myth in the Making,” Postgraduate Medical Journal
71, no. 841 (1995): 643–4.
7 Jens Lohfert Jørgensen, “Bacillophobia: Man and Microbes in Dracula, The
War of the Worlds, and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’,” Critical Survey, 27,
no. 2 (2015): 41.
8 Vampires are creatures of the Enlightenment, and that distinguishes them
from Zombies; Groom, The Vampire, ch. Introduction (para. 4). They
challenge humanism and humanist ideals, particularly since the nineteenth
century; Groom, ch. Ghostly Theology (Rising Dead, para. 9).
9 Mary Hallab, “Vampires and Medical Science,” Journal of Popular Culture
48, no. 1 (2015): 168.
10 Groom, The Vampire, ch. The Lands of Blood (The Undead Body Politic,
para. 4).
11 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 128.
12 In her feminist rereading of Freud, Julia Kristeva reinterpreted “das
Unheimliche” in the above sense, and Haraway was certainly familiar with
Kristeva’s interpretation: Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à Nous- mêmes (Paris:
Fayard, 1988).
14 Girard, 296.
15 Groom, The Vampire, ch. Bleeding Gold (Sickening Filth, para. 20).
16 Groom, The Vampire, ch. Bleeding Gold (Sickening Filth, para. 20). See also
James C. Cowan, “The Pharmakos Figure in Modern American Stories of
Physicians and Patients,” Literature and Medicine 6 (1987): 97.
18 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 100– 1. See also Groom, The Vampire, ch.
Introduction (Black Death, para. 2): “[T]‌he idea … that infection could circu-
late independently did not develop until the end of the century,” which made
it all the more frightening, see also Jørgensen, 38. Thus, it is intricately linked
to modern vampire tales.
19 Derrida, “Outwork,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The
Athlone Press, 1981), 26.
20 Cowan, 95.
1
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22 Jørgensen, 41.
23 Groom, The Vampire, ch. The Count, Dracula.
24 Valerie Pedlar, The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian
Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 136. There had been
shorter stories that correlated mental health with vampirism, albeit female
mental health; see Groom, The Vampire, ch. Mortal Pathologies (Supernatural
Connoisseurship, para. 18–20).
25 Friedrich Kittler, Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1993), 56.
26 Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York, NY:
Norton, 1997), 106.
27 Stoker, 61.
28 Pedlar, 156. Renfield is stigmatised a lunatic, which raises the question of
whether the same ethical standards apply to him; see Groom, The Vampire,
ch. Mortal Pathologies (Exhibiting Atrocities, para. 4), referencing the
posthumanist argument of David Roden.
29 Stoker, 71.
30 Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse
Colonization,” in Dracula, eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York,
NY: Norton, 1997), 462–70.
31 Erik Butler, “Writing and Vampiric Contagion in Dracula,” Iowa Journal of
Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2002): 18.
32 Stoker, 71.
33 Groom, The Vampire, ch. Mortal Pathologies (Exhibiting Atrocities,
para. 29).
34 Pedlar, 142.
35 Il-
Yeong Kim, “Stoker’s Dracula as a Figure of Pharmakos/ Scapegoat,”
British and American Fiction 21, no. 2 (2014): 37–55.
36 On the findings of Ferrier, his influence on early biological psychiatry and
how this relates to Dr. Seward, see “zoophagus man” in Pedlar, 142.
37 Stoker, 106.
38 Pedlar, 145.
39 Stoker, 173.
41 Hallab, 168.
42 Jørgensen, 40.
43 Stoker, 278.
44 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1963).
45 This is still a pressing concern as the most recent pandemic has shown: Sanjeet
Bagcchi, “Stigma during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” The Lancet Infectious
Diseases 20, no. 7 (2020): 782.
46 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 91–2.
47 See also Kerim Can Yazgünoğlu’s chapter (this volume).
48 Jørgensen, 41.
49 Jørgensen, 41.
50 Stoker, 190.
2

51 Pedlar, 139.
52 This argument is based on Foucault’s distinction between sovereign power
and biopower, the former takes lives and lets live, the latter lives and lets
die, Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De
France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey (New York, NY: Picador, 2003), 247.
53 Nina Auerbach, 145.
54 Kittler, 56.
55 Kittler, 55.
56 David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel
to Stage to Screen, rev. ed. (New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 2004).
57 For example, Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of
the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
58 Groom, The Vampire, ch. The Count, Dracula (XXX Vampires).
59 Groom, The Vampire, ch. Bleeding Gold.
60 Aris Mousoutzanis, “ ‘Death Is Irrelevant’: Gothic Science Fiction and the
Biopolitics of Empire,” in Gothic Science Fiction, 1980– 2010, eds. Sara
Wasson and Emily Alder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 60.
61 Mousoutzanis, 64–70.
62 Auerbach, 177.
63 Haraway, 52.
64 Gaia Giuliani, Zombi, Alieni e Mutanti. Le Paure dall’11 Settembre a Oggi
(Firenze: Le Monnier, 2016).
65 Stacey Abbott, Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 177–97.
66 For most relevant, recent discussions, see Deborah Mutch, ed., The
Modern Vampire and Human Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), as well as Michael Hauskeller, “Life’s a Bitch, and Then You Don’t
Die: Postmortality in Film and Television,” The Palgrave Handbook of
Posthumanism in Film and Television, eds. Michael Hauskeller, Thomas
Drew Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015), 205–13, and in the same handbook Curtis D. Carbonell, “A Contest
of Tropes: Screened Posthuman Subjectivities,” 153–62.
67 Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling (New York, NY/Boston, MA: Grand Central
68 O. E. Butler, 1.
69 O. E. Butler, 13.
70 Alluding to heteronormativity, it is the adult normativity by which children
are judged; see Maria Nikolajeva, Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature
for Young Readers (London: Routledge, 2010).
72 O. E. Butler, 67. On companion species and Donna J. Haraway’s question
who is closer to whom in regard to Fledgling, see Pramod K. Nayar, “A New
Biological Citizenship: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,” Modern
Fiction Studies 58, no. 4 (2012): 807–10.
73 Originally from cows to humans, Groom, The Vampire, ch. The Cultures of
Death (Unnatural History, para. 14).
77 O. E. Butler, 123.
3
2

79 Kelly Devitt, “Childhood Sexuality as Posthuman Subjectivity in Octavia
E. Butler’s Fledgling,” Science Fiction Studies 47, no. 2 (2020): 220; also in
reference to Braidotti.
80 On the notion that both rest on the same strategies, see Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York, NY: Vintage, 1995), 228.
82 O. E. Butler, 238.
83 For example, in the first movie of the Underworld franchise, Underworld,
directed by Len Wiseman (Lakeshore Entertainment, 2003).
84 O. E. Butler, 275.
85 O. E. Butler, 276.
87 Jeffrey P. Bishop, “Rejecting Medical Humanism: Medical Humanities and
the Metaphysics of Medicine,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29, no. 1
(2008): 15–25.
88 Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, “Entangling the Medical Humanities,”
in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, eds. Sarah
Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
89 Kirsten Ostherr, “Artificial Intelligence and Medical Humanities,” Journal of
Medical Humanities (2020).
90 Silke Dennhardt et al., “Rethinking Research in the Medical Humanities: A
Scoping Review and Narrative Synthesis of Quantitative Outcome Studies,”
Medical Education 50, no. 3 (2016), 290.
91 Dennhardt et al., Rethinking Research, 290. A critical discussion is provided
by Zoe Adams and Anna Reisman, “Beyond Sparking Joy: A Call for a
Critical Medical Humanities,” Academic Medicine 94, no. 10 (2019): 1404;
and by Charlotte Blease, “In Defense of Utility: The Medical Humanities and
Medical Education,” Medical Humanities 42, no. 2 (2016): 103–8.
92 Bishop, 22.
93 Anna McFarlane, “Medical Humanities,” Critical Posthumanism, Online,
para 5, accessed December 2, 2020, https://criticalposthumanism.net/medi
cal-humanities/.
94 Jennifer Tsai and Ann Crawford-Roberts, “A Call for Critical Race Theory in
Medical Education,” Academic Medicine 92, no. 8 (2017): 1072–3; William
Viney, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods, “Critical Medical Humanities:
Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Medical Humanities 41, no. 1
(2015): 2–7.
96 Kristen L. Eckstrand et al., “The Priority of Intersectionality in Academic
Medicine,” Academic Medicine 91, no. 7 (2016): 905–6.
97 Gavin Miller and Anna McFarlane, “Special Issue: Science Fiction and the
Medical Humanities,” BMJ Medical Humanities 42, no. 4 (2016).
98 With Erin Capone, “Intersectionality and Mental Health,” in Palgrave
Encyclopedia of Health Humanities, eds. Paul Crawford and Paul Kadetz
(Cham: Springer Nature, 2022, forthcoming).
99 “The Lessons (Not) Learned: Literary Bioethics and Biopolitics from Stoker
to Atwood,” in The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing
Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing, eds. Jayjit Sarkar and Jagannath Basu
(Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2021), 267–83.
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CODA
Affirming the Pathogenesis
Başak Ağın
In the fictional worlds of literature and visual arts, contagious diseases,

imaginary or real, can mean many things at once. This volume, both as
a whole and with its individual chapters, also attests to those various
layers of meaning. Divided into five parts with two chapters in each, the
‘heroic couplets’ of Posthuman Pathogenesis explore the depths of such
multiple layers, with separate but complementary approaches to and
interpretations of disease from the perspective of ‘many posthumans.’
Those multiplicities immediately call to mind other imminent examples
of literary and cinematic multiverses, which could not somehow find a
place in this volume but have employed the theme of contagion to denote
and connote several imports in their own interpretative ways. With the
explicit or implied meanings in the works spreading like viral bodies and
paving the way for the burst of other insinuations, various pioneers of lit-
erature and film industry, in a sense, employed their own implosive strat-
egies, starting as early as the ancient times and extending their range until
the present. What I mean is that, resonating with Stefan Herbrechter’s
classification of the ‘many posthumans’ as “speculative or futural (we
will be posthuman), retrospective (how we became posthuman), proces-
sual (we are becoming posthuman), [or] reverse-teleological (we have
always already been posthuman),”1 there has been a spatio-temporal dis-
persion of implosive strategies in reading, understanding, and interpreting
contagions and their impact on both human and nonhuman actors of
the planet.
Despite the ten different posthumanist outlooks on the matter, which
are presented through the chapters focusing on a wide range of works from
the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, I believe this spatio-temporal
dispersion requires further discussions on the medico- socio-environ-
mental implications of contagious diseases and the impact and capacities
of the posthumanist theories in relation to our study of such diseases.
Therefore, this CODA section functions like a navigation marker that
guides through the tunnels of meaning between what we produce out of
our analyses and what the reader extracts from them. Composed of two
parts, namely, “Pathogenic Implosions: Heroic Couplets, Tragic Times”
and “Further Conversations over Posthuman Pathogeneses,” it is an exit
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-17
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from a lengthy piece of music orchestrated by heterogeneous, posthuman
actors of literary and cultural scholarship. The first part involves further
discussions of what contagion has come to mean in diverse texts to pro-
vide a summary of what this volume seeks to highlight from a different
angle, while the second part elaborates further on those meanings in an
engaging conversation with some of the authors of this volume.
Pathogenic Implosions: Heroic Couplets, Tragic Times

Contagious diseases have found a place in literature and arts since
Antiquity, and they have often served more purposes than what appears
on the surface. The plagues in the heroic verses of The Iliad (c. eighth
century BC E ) and Oedipus Rex (c. 429 B CE ), for example, indicated
corruption in society, connoting the displeasure of the deities with the
sinful deeds of the kings or the population in general. As Priscilla Wald
underlines, these plagues were understood to be sent by gods as a sign
of their fury upon the governing principles of the sickly culture, and
thus obliged the immoral “to assume responsibility for their actions”
by “illustrat[ing] the relationship between the group and an anomalous
individual.”2 Likewise, through Geoffrey Chaucer’s heroic couplets in his
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), we are informed that the
character of the Summoner suffered from a virulent disease, by which
Chaucer presented a harsh caricature of not only this officer of the church
but also the corrupt society of England at the time. The Summoner was
expected to “ferret out delinquents in morals, especially in matters of for-
nication and adultery, and to bring them before the ecclesiastical courts,”
but was depicted in the Prologue as “hot and lecherous as a sparrow,”3
through which Chaucer added yet another satirical figure to his criti-
cism of corruption in religious authorities. The poet, by juxtaposing the
image of the venereal disease with that of a sacred duty, linked immor-
ality with sexually transmitted disease and thus critiqued the dishonesty
and hypocrisy that prevailed in the society of the time. About 350 years
later, in 1742, Alexander Pope would follow a similar pattern of heroic
couplets in Book IV of The Dunciad, where he likened the spread of the
1728 Plague in England to the spread of ‘Dullness,’ “the great mother of
ignorance.”4 The poet, in his reading of the plague of stupidity, would
draw his cases from various fields, collating several images across discip-
lines and genres. He employed “images from the sciences, specialized and
technical fields, images of incongruence and of juxtaposition, images of
astronomy and medicine, of grotesque formlessness.”5 It is in this sense
that the chapters of this volume share at least an ‘imagery’ of ‘heroic
couplets’ referring to the enmeshment of matter and meaning-making
practices with regard to disease.
Although some of the literary or visual texts that immediately come to
mind when we think of human-pathogen relations could not be fit into
the scope of this volume, it is worth discussing at least a few of them in
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this array. Looking into our even more complex systems of advanced
capitalism in the twenty-first century, one can identify an almost identical
pattern of implosions to those explored in the texts from Antiquity to the
early modern times. This pattern also appears in literary and visual texts
dealing with the connections between the social and the medical through
present-day narratives. Those implosions emerge in diverse narratives
ranging from the Shen Fever in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), for instance,
in which the compulsory repetition of routines parallels the collapse of
society, to the zombie virus outbreak in The Walking Dead (2010–2022),
which turns into a battle of survival against both the zombies and the
rival human communities. This means that disease as a concept still shows
itself in various metaphorical forms. Those metaphors bear importance
in our understanding of the posthuman and posthumanities because they
conjure up the material and the discursive practices at hand, displaying
the intertwinement of the personal and the political.
In several episodes of Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–
2020), for example, disease as a curse signifies the patriarchal attempts
to reinforce the political and discursive order of bios, revealing itself in
the form of the reign of Satan and the Dark Church. In “Chapter Twelve:
The Epiphany,” dated 5 April 2019, Sabrina is attacked by the three
Plague Kings, Asmodeus, Purson, and Beelzebub. In the following epi-
sode, entitled “Chapter Thirteen: The Passion of Sabrina Spellman,”
broadcast on the same date as the previous one, Dark Lord punishes
Sabrina by making her familiar Salem and her friend Roz ill. In “Chapter
Twenty-Nine: The Eldritch Dark,” which first aired on 31 December
2020, Blackwood invokes the first of the Eldritch Terrors, the Eldritch
Dark, which is referred to as ‘the Plague of Absolute Darkness,’ to seek
revenge for his lost position as the head of the Church of Night. Along
with the Lovecraftian hints of these terrors, the common theme that
revolves around the three chapters is that the concept of disease acts as a
pivotal agent since it stands for a site of contest for power. Bringing my
own posthumanist repertoire into the play, then, it is possible for me to
read Sabrina and her companions as the emblem of zoë and analyse their
battle against the patriarchal Satanic Order as a fight against the polit-
ical and discursive realm of bios, symbolised by Satan himself and Father
Blackwood, for instance. But my aim in this CODA is not to delve further
into literary and mediatic examples.
Sifting through all these patterns of implosion (of the social into the sci-
entific) from a contemporary posthumanist perspective, what I draw as a
conclusion is a two-fold experience. The first is that our former (and even
some of the current) patterns of interaction with contagions have always
involved negative connotations. The attributions we make to the category
of zoë, which, in the words of Rosi Braidotti, “used to be called ‘Nature’,”
are ones that deny the “persistence of life independently of rational con-
trol.”6 The posthumanist discourse, which shatters our problematic rela-
tionship with the nonhuman, has shifted the direction of those negative
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connotations towards an affirmative ethics. Five main points of emphasis
in posthumanist thought, as Pramod K. Nayar summarises them, have
come to challenge our anthropocentric value systems and steered them
towards a flattened ontology: The first of these underscored points is the
“co-evolution and multispecies origins of life,”7 which indicates a con-
stant redistribution in the agentic capacities of the human since Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolution. The second one is “the necessity of alterity
to subjectivity,”8 mostly energised by the Derridean understanding of
the absolute other. The third point, “the linkage of embodied life with
environments,”9 not only hints at the material and ontological turn in
the twenty-first-century Western thought but also signals an inevitable
collaboration between the posthumanities and what has evolved from
ecocriticism as the literary analysis of environmentally oriented texts to
the comprehensive field of environmental humanities. The fourth one
involves the research into “the emergent (rather than immanent) nature of
consciousness and the self,”10 which parallels Braidotti’s formulation of
posthumanism based on the idea of radical immanence and the Deleuzo-
Guattarian readings of Spinozan monism. And finally, the fifth point of
emphasis is “the stability of systems in dynamic interaction with envir-
onments,”11 as in Cary Wolfe’s posthumanism fed by the work of Niklas
Luhmann and as in the material-feminist approaches to posthumanism,
owing much to the idea of symbiotic life developed by Lynn Margulis.
From these five points, one can easily link the problematic relation-
ship of Anthropos with the environment within and around (him). “An
anthropocentric Weltanschauung,”12 as Francesca Ferrando underlines,
is directly connected to the rise of Anthropos as a central figure, as the
measure of all things in a mechanical universe, and as the single most
enthroned body occupying the only governing space in the centre of that
universe. The primary impact of the posthumanist thought, whose main
principles have been condensed into the five points above, has been to
shift our understanding of the human from a top-rank actor to one of
the many geological agents on the planet. This is why the chapters in this
book and their authors are involved together in the implosive processes of
meaning-making as posthuman actors, and they do not insist on reading
the bacterial or viral bodies as the displaced other, which poses a threat as
the source of discontent for the human. Instead, the authors focus on how
disease traverses the embedded and embodied experiences of the self in
relation to those multiple, heterogeneous bodies that compose life within
and around. But this does not mean that they leave behind altogether
the negative connotations of disease in social and cultural aspects of life.
They simply readjust our perspective and employ various tools ranging
from, say, a magnifying glass to an oil immersion lens.
In line with what Nayar and Ferrando underpin in their quotes above,
and echoing the outcomes drawn from the chapters, the second experi-
ence that emerges out of the repetitive patterns of interactions between
humans and diseases is that contagions have never been matters of medical
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sciences alone. Either a metaphorical set of meanings has accompanied
them in literary or artistic works, or contagions have always already been
part of the assemblages formed by “macro-and microactants,”13 that is,
the confederate of distributive and comprehensive agencies of knowledge,
bodies, and phenomena, including all the planetary inhabitants, human
and nonhuman alike, along with our decision-making mechanisms and
policy-making strategies of governing and financing bodies. Right here
in this moment, we are in the middle of a pandemic experience as we
produce ideas on the literary, cultural, and artistic portrayals of disease,
contagion, viral and bacterial agencies, and our interactions with them.
And what I derive from all this experience is further pushing me towards
Karen Barad’s aptly put words: “We are a part of that nature that we seek
to understand.”14 This almost poetic sentence, which has been part of
my haunted experiences, affective assemblages (of which I am part), and
collective imaginings (that we bring together as posthumanities scholars)
since the beginning of my posthuman studies in the early 2010s, leads me
into the imploded knots of matter and meaning. If posthumanism, as we
understand it, seeks “an ontology that rematerializes the social and takes
seriously the agency of the natural,”15 to acclimatise Nancy Tuana’s beau-
tifully composed sentence to the purposes of Posthuman Pathogenesis,
those knots of matter and meaning, I believe, will be resolved better in
threads woven by the other contributors of this volume.
Further Conversations over Posthuman Pathogeneses

Ağın: Now, I will repeat myself. We are in the middle of a pandemic
experience as we produce ideas on the literary, cultural, and artistic
portrayals of disease, contagion, viral and bacterial agencies, and our
interactions with them. So, I present you with two sets of questions. Here
is the first one: While writing your own chapter, what real or fictional
experiences have haunted you? What factual or imaginary assemblages
(of the human and the nonhuman) produced effect and affect in your
lives/environment? What does this volume, as a ‘collective imagining’ as
Braidotti would call it, tell its readers?
And my second set of questions will be a follow-up to the first one:
Based on what you have discussed in your chapters and in your research
areas in general, what do contagions (be they fictional or real) tell us? How
would you incorporate what they narrate into the posthumanist thought?
Why does posthumanism matter in our understanding of contagions?
And most importantly, what would you say on the intersections of med-
ical, environmental, and posthumanities? Why do they matter?
Horzum: Let me begin. At the commence of all this pandemic experience

lied sincere phone conversations between me and you (the two editors of
this volume) as well as the idea that led to the emergence of Posthuman
Pathogenesis. While borders were thickening due to lockdowns and strict
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measures on travels, emotional bonding between friends and families
was thickening too. All these occurrences became possible via one non-
human actor, namely SARS-CoV-2, whose agency conglomerated with
the agencies of all other inhabitants of the Earth, but this time visible
even to the unseeing eye. Ecocritics and posthumanist scholars, in their
discussions of global warming, climate crisis, pollution, and garbage
patches, have always pinpointed our co-emergences and entanglements
with nonhumans. But such discussions must have sounded like parents’
telling a bedtime tale to their children since most of us could easily turn a
blind eye on such intricate non/human relations before 2020. Or rather,
as Ursula K. Heise discusses at length in Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet (2008),16 the words ‘global’ and ‘world’ have had a false sense
of remoteness, an alienation effect on us who have failed to realise that
consequences of such disastrous changes would have local effects.
When the pandemic confined us to our homes, we were enforced to
dwell in a kind of “because of me” idea: “Someone I hold dear can get
infected and die because of me, my contacts, my being a potential carrier”
or “I can die because of someone else.” Thus, the novel Coronavirus has
erased a hierarchy between the self and the other, holding a mirror up to
our self-centred and irresponsible acts, at least to a certain extent. The
contagion has led many of us to a sense of “enforced empathy” since, for
many, empathy is not altruistic, but rather selfish. As we have fictionalised
the notion of empathy around humanist ideals, this new kind of enforced
empathy has firstly made humans take genuine steps for caring for one
another. Secondly, it has broadened humans’ embrace for the environ-
ment and nonhuman beings since we have acknowledged the ancient fact
that humans and nonhumans are to live and become together, to matter
together, and to thrive and disappear together. Globally erupting like a
volcano of the “invisible” and the overlooked, the COVID-19 pandemic
made the human confront its insolence and hypocrisy. I will further
elaborate on this experience in what follows but let us hear what other
contributors have to say first.
Tripp-Bodola: As hermeneutic animals, we need to make sense of what is

going on around us, we crave meaning. We usually fall back on precedents,
past experiences or learned frames and scripts to cope with a situation.
In times of crisis, as David Trotter once observed about the modernist
novel, the fabric of meaning wears thin, and the fissures often take the
shape of an injury, a wound, or ‘trauma.’ In our case, the word ‘unprece-
dented’ marked that gap of meaninglessness. And yet there were images,
narratives, and concepts that fit the bill and that were haunting me: I saw
post-apocalyptic imaginings, particularly from the 1970s, merge with
contagion narratives from the 1990s right in front of my eyes, on the
screens if not my immediate surroundings.
The new mediascape of screening services responded rapidly to the gap
and produced narratives that were located at the intersection of the medical,
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the environmental, and posthumanities. Above all that location is marked
by ethics, by the question of how to live a good and meaningful life, how
to take care of ourselves and others, and whom to include in that ethics of
care. As a large part of the world was in isolation, at the centre of that eth-
ical focus was the self. It came as no surprise that those narratives revisited
an old familiar: The doppelganger returned, not as a dark shadow self, an
expelled scapegoat, but as Arthur Rimbaud’s je est une autre, ‘I is an other.’
Clones, parallel timeline selves, Zombie-esque, or extra-terrestrial twins—
these doubles were less threatening than their precursors and illustrated the
encounter with an estranged self that is seen clearly for the first time.
They posed questions about one’s identity, values, and humanism,
for the response to contagion and its social twin, stigma, are nothing, if
not antisocial. There was another scenario at the beginning of the pan-
demic, a narrative frame that immediately haunted not just me but the
entire society I live in. It is based on the notion that uncertainty and a rift
in social contacts inevitably lead to a breach in social contracts. People
became doomsday preppers; gun purchases went through the roof.
However, instead of the looting and pillaging, people stayed at home. All
of them. Instead of taking from the neighbours, people were focused on
their own home improvement. Not visiting the grandparents became the
moral imperative rather than neglect of care. Animal shelters ran out of
animals to adopt as humans flocked to animal companions, begging the
question who rescued whom.
Narratives of contagion are deeply rooted in ethical debates, and this
one tested our previous narratives of embodiment, care, and dangers
of entanglement. Braidotti’s posthumanist collective of “ ‘we-are-(all)-
in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same’ kind of subject”17
challenges our notions of self and the way we want to live our lives: When
the economies opened and no one rushed back to their jobs, the stock
exchange tanked. Economists thought they had the numbers wrong but
what was wrong were their interpretive parameters. People didn’t want
to go back to just any job. They would rather wait for a job that makes
sense for their lives that is meaningful to them.
Kristensen: I would like to answer these two questions separately. First,

about the meaningful jobs and changing environments, I have a few
words. At the time I was kindly invited to contribute to this volume,
I was about to leave Manchester, where I was writing my doctorate, to
move back to my parents. Like many others, I felt the economic impact of
the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside a growing disillusionment with the
possibility of an academic career, which in turn sparked, perhaps unsur-
prisingly, a heightened interest in Marxist theory. This interest has been
fuelled by my comrades. I have treasured the time I got to spend with
my friends, my partner, and my family. Particularly the opportunity, at
the time of finishing up my chapter, to help my sister tend to the sheep at
her farm.
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Initially confined to a small flat, I have spent much of the last year
going on walks. Through parks and neighbourhoods, past rundown
pubs, houses, and an immensity of litter. I paid attention to the chan-
ging habits of the people surrounding my location, the way the local
homeless population were forced to alter their habits in response to the
pandemic, disappearing from city streets to busy intersections in the hope
of acquiring money. Reading Marx and writings about Marxist theory,
alongside the onslaught of news reports about government and business
spending practices or cuts during the pandemic, stresses the import-
ance, to me, of going beyond collective imagining to collective action.
Particularly, as the actions and decisions of a few have very real, and
often deadly, material consequences for many.
As for the second question, I can say that contagion tends to be imbued
with ideas about otherness: Originating due to a latent excess within the
self and group; as deriving from elsewhere; or as an excess latent to the self,
brought forth by the intrusion of otherness. As a ‘collective imagining,’
I like to think that the collection presented here points to viable social
change, or at least diagnose the issues that need a cure. While my own
article points to one literary example stressing the presence of the AIDS
epidemic, diagnosing one issue—individualism—that needs a cure, I wish
that it might lay the groundwork for considering what is to be done.
One thing is pointing to the advantages of, as I call it, ‘poking around,’
another to translate this knowledge into social practices that can lead to
change. It is here I think the humanities, medical, environmental, and
posthuman, may be of vital importance. What I am more curious about,
however, is whether the conclusions drawn in the academic humanities
can affect real, material, social change within those constituencies and
avenues—like the distribution of medication, treatment, and care—that
it theorises about, be it on local and global scales. One challenge I have
begun to pose myself and would like to extend to the humanities more
widely is a more overt attentiveness to political economy. I think this is a
crucial step forward.
Horzum: Similar to what Kristensen experienced at the onset of the

corona-borne lockdowns in early 2020, I had to make some urgent
decisions, at the top of which came my transportation from Cambridge,
MA, USA, where I stayed as a Harvard fellow, to where I am currently
based, Ankara, Turkey. This decision, like many others of mine as well as
of several other millions of people, was actually related to an amalgam of
medical, political, social, and economic policies. At the intersection of all
these policies remained the posthuman manoeuvre the universe has long
demanded from humans. The issue of health politics (in relation to eco-
nomics, racial diversity, and social structure) in the US during the Trump
administration, for instance, was always controversial, and it reached
havoc during the Corona crisis. Not all could afford to live in sound
conditions in the US. Interestingly and satisfactorily enough, Turkey has
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had a much more all-encompassing public health politics, and most of its
citizens abroad—including me—rightfully demanded to return home, in
case of the infection and its treatment free of charge. This, I am saying
of course, based on the comparison of my experiences in Boston and
Ankara, at least at the beginning of the pandemic.
Yet again, the pandemic notified us that this sense of decision at will
was an illusion. Unaware of billions of intra-activities among innumer-
able assemblages outside our perception, we used to or “chose” to care
for what we deemed fit for survival as long as we lived. We realised
during the Coronavirus pandemic that there was no place for a nihilism
of “après moi, le deluge” since we do not get a say in (viral) death. It is
well known that death, as one of the most terrorising traumas, has led
humans to several onto-epistemological practices of productions, arts,
and rituals—just to leave a trace on Earth after one’s unavoidable end.
However, when having few rights on one’s body during such crises fuses
with having no right in one’s death rituals, this terror of death/expiry in
the face of contagion aptly reminds me of Sophocles’ Antigone (c. 441
B C E ) and the titular character’s meaningful struggles to give a proper
burial for Polynices as “there are honors due the dead.”18 Unavoidably,
the necropolitical policies and decisions throughout the management of
this global crisis have upended our conventional ethico-onto-epistemo-
logical notions and praxes (like funerals and burials of the diseased) to
the extent of the emergence of new posthumanist ones in more horizontal,
non-anthropocentric ways.
The zenith of these non- anthropocentric co- emergences unsurpris-
ingly begins with the human itself as it is the one species that has most
harmed the planet and therefore needs a substantial change and purifica-
tion. The collective affects and imaginings people were left with or driven
into have led them to interrogate the real worth of life, self, other, and
such institutions as family. On personal and planetary levels, we have
come to accept that we are only a brick in the wall. Therefore, without
falling into the tribalism of our own species, we need to manage living
in harmony with others. Just as I discussed in my chapter, the existen-
tial maelstrom of the pandemic, moreover, has subverted the institutions
of liberal humanism like marriage. On personal and institutional levels,
many people noticed they situated themselves around false imperatives,
ethics, values, and companions. That is why, for example, divorces
have begun skyrocketing all around the world,19 despite the differences
in different cultures and geographies. What I observe and experience in
the mesh of what we have all been going through is the fact that we
humans need a set of fundamental changes in our lives in, perceptions of,
perspectives about, and approaches to the world we inhabit. Like Marghe
in Ammonite, the humanity, I wish to believe, is about to give birth to its
ultimate posthuman identity.
Yazgünoğlu: Well, I think this is a matter of how we conceive our
identities against life, a matter of counterintuitive premises on which we
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build our human selves. Hyperviruses, as I would call them, following
Timothy Morton’s argumentation about hyperobjects, have been always
already part of dark life predicated on material agencies and multiple
entanglements of the human and the nonhuman. We believe that there is
a so-called light at the end of every darker tunnel though death becomes
inevitable in the face of the hyperpandemic of COVID-19. Indeed, in the
collective imagining, the experiences of the pandemic, be they real or
imaginary, push us to the edge of the pointlessness of life itself. We could
not accept life as it is; life is dark, messy, chaotic, and dirty, for in the
collective archetypes of anthropocentrism, the human has been imagined
as an ideal of hygiene, totally hyperseparated from viruses, bacteria, and
dirty life. Nonetheless, through the hyperpandemic, a coherent whole
of sunny life breaks into smithereens. The human in this sense becomes
more and more dangerous, anthropocentric, and even barbaric in their
feelings, sensations, and behaviour, showing complete apathy towards
those who are affected by viruses, or had COVID-19, as they do towards
nonhuman animals. I totally agree with Susan Sontag’s words in Illness
as Metaphor (1978) that “[n]‌othing is more punitive than to give a dis-
ease a meaning.”20 Humans exploit the predicament of the pandemic to
elicit fears, control, loss, uncertainty, and death, as they do to nonhuman
animals and environments.
The pandemic, broadly speaking, leads to a wave of fear and unpredict-
ability, as it supposedly becomes a signifier of irrational fears and bigoted
values such as xenophobia and ecophobia. The role of posthumanities in
the historical moment is that in the face of death and dark life we can find
a drive for a meaningful life, inspiring us to demonstrate love and empathy
towards the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanist theories make us
cognizant of a posthuman life that neither merely depends on affirma-
tive politics of love nor supports fears, uncertainty, and death. Instead,
a posthuman life provides us with a sense of continuity and security to
some extent, holding a mirror up to the dark and affirmative natures of
hyper viruses and the pandemic. Posthuman reality is composed of hybrid
assemblages and inhuman agencies which cannot be divided into separate
realms of nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, and life and
non-life. Holding the view that the threshold between the human and the
inhuman (viruses, animals, bacteria, and plants) is a porous and viscous
terrain where inhuman vital forces penetrate into the very texture of
everyday life, I emphatically highlight the idea that the survival and exist-
ence of the human are not related to life but to overcoming death through
the idea of the entangled life of the human and the inhuman. Rather than
identifying life as being always subservient to its negation, death, I take
hyper viruses as a starting point for a posthuman life, remarking that
the virus as a ‘non/life’ actor illustrates the imbrication of life and death,
the corporeal and the incorporeal, and the human and the inhuman in
affirmative and negative ways. In this view, posthumanities would be the
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death of modernity’s anthropocentric illusion predicated on stigmatising
the outsider, be it a virus, the non-Western, LGBTQ+, or the animal,
one that prevents us from recognising the messy and dirty worlds we
have made.
Narratives, stories, and fables about the pandemic have altered our
relationship with life and temporality. Thus, I have found myself turning
to storytelling and literature of the contagion so as to give meaning to my
own loneliness and fragmented, fearful self. Nevertheless, irrespective of
the alienation we feel during the pandemic, we need to embrace solidarity
and communal healing. In Orhan Pamuk’s words,
I realize that fear elicits two distinct responses in me, and perhaps in
all of us. Sometimes it causes me to withdraw into myself, toward
solitude and silence. But other times it teaches me to be humble and
to practice solidarity.21
This epitome must be the key to the intersections of medical, environ-

mental, and posthumanities for future pandemics. Through this lens,
these studies need to make meaning of the pandemic, showing the human
as an imbricated part of the communal solidarity of the nonhuman.
Gedik and Arpaözü: That constant shift between solitude or silence and
humility and solidarity is something we experienced, too. To be precise,
however, the most real thing we experienced was the virus itself that we
were writing about. With all the material existence of the pandemic and
its implications, one of us, Zeynep, had the chance to become-one-with
the virus itself. Currently, we believe that a part of the virus and a part
of Zeynep became one (in the form of antibodies) in her body, blurring
the line between human and nonhuman. Apart from this, both of us
have experienced major depression due to the ongoing pandemic and its
implications. But we are fine—although we have experienced a lot of
change.
Throughout the writing of our chapter, which roughly spans about
15–16 months, a lot has changed in our lives. For instance, one of us,
Tan, is now in a loving relationship, a factual assemblage that would
have never become true had it not been for the pandemic. Thus, the
intra-action of the author, his partner, and the virus in this entanglement
formed an assemblage to enable the beginning of their relationship. This
relationship, as Tan himself calls it, is a posthuman one. Apart from this,
within this entanglement (of us and the virus), we have seen an incredible
boost in our academic lives because of reduced social interactions and
heightened lockdown measures.
What this volume tells its readers is that no matter from which field
one approaches posthumanism, we are always entangled with what we
deem more-than-human. So much so, these fields we have in the volume,
ranging from linguistics and literature to cultural studies and medical
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humanities, are intertwined more than we have ever deemed them to be.
Therefore, this volume stands as an epitome for other researchers because
it demonstrates that posthumanism can be an overarching framework.
From a linguistics point of view, we can tell our readers that language
consists of what contemporary linguistics wants to account for. Namely,
language is not based on mere symbols or cognitive processes but also it
is a mixture of those former agentic bodies and the nonhuman agents. In
this case, we see the entanglement and the intra-action of language, lan-
guage use, and the virus alongside other local but important nonhuman
agents. Broadly speaking, then, it is difficult to pinpoint where language
begins and ends because it is beyond the longstanding signifier/signified
dualist approach.
We would also like to incorporate the fluidity of categorical
distinctions here. These questions are significant at this point: When
does the virus enter the body? Where does the virus/human begin and
end? The fluidity here comes into our lives with contagions and their
social implications. Thus, one can say that this is compatible with
posthumanist thought, especially if one considers the flat ontology
posthumanism brings about.
Once we realise that we are not in the centre of the universe that we
are disconnected from everything else (in different ways such as lan-
guage as a dividing line), we experience a shift in reconfiguring how we
understand life and therefore contagions. Put differently, contagions are
nothing but a relationality in our intra-action with our surroundings.
Posthumanism, therefore, urges us to redefine response-ability in dealing
with and defining contagions and their implications. If we want to elim-
inate harmful-isms, and other unwanted consequences, we should decon-
struct and reconstruct behaviour patterns that are anthropocentrically
fuelled.
This volume tells us that we are all entangled and whatever happens
in one category (for instance environmental humanities) ends up affecting
(or intra-acting with) other categories (medical, for instance). This intra-
action has multiple societal and personal outcomes for the agents that
are entangled within that intra-action. Thus, becoming-one-with one of
these categories employing posthumanist thought will entail and uncover
important findings in the other categories. Overall, this re-solidifies the
fact that we are all entangled like the roots of a rhizome.
Martin and Horn: That rhizomatic reference and the reference to

Morton’s hyperobjects are two main things we totally agree with. For
us, too, SARS-CoV-2 and its affect upon nature-cultures has been monu-
mental, and we can only briefly illustrate the things that have affected us as
we worked together. Co-writing during the pandemic was an interesting
experience, our chapter brought us together whilst quarantine had kept
us apart. We both experienced a haunting dissolution of organised time.
Often minutes and hours passed slowly, yet weeks, months, and even the
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year 2020 passed us by almost without realisation. The move to digital
communication was exhausting, often leading to overstimulation from
both socialising and working online. It created a dissolution of personal/
professional boundaries. Mortality haunted us; we were too close yet too
separate from others. If we were to get too close, we could die. Yet, we
were separate from all our loved ones because of this. We experienced
a collective understanding of death while undergoing an atomisation of
the self. The virus, then, clearly brought us an awareness of how the
viral, biological, spatial, digital, economic, and environmental agents
intra-acted to curate our lives. Our perspectives shifted, and it felt as
if we had become somewhat self-aware local manifestations of the very
hyperobjects we were identifying in our text. The cybernetic connected-
ness of all beings had never been clearer, and it was surreal. This volume,
we hope, will motivate readers to join us in considering the interconnect-
edness of all things and accordingly affect a change in their behaviour to
reflect this knowledge.
And when it comes to why all this matters, we can broadly sum-
marise our ideas as follows: Viruses are liminal entities. They occupy a
space between persons to spread, and they occupy a space between trad-
itional categories; neither animal nor vegetal, neither living nor dead.
As posthumanist thought often reminds us, viruses form a significant
portion of Homo sapiens genetic material. Hence, they remind us of our
irreducible embeddedness, reminding us that man qua Anthropos is a
collective, porous, and an ever-emergent entity. Posthumanist thought
allows us to better conceptualise the origins of our genome as co-evolved
with dormant contagion. This understanding of genetic and micro-
biological plasticity that exists within all beings brings an awareness
of viral mutation as it coexists with us and interacts with all beings.
Such connectedness creates new avenues to consider our impact on the
environment, in the development of new strains. Our interaction with
them highlights the genetic plasticity of all beings and the reality of all
beings’ capacity for genetic change. SARS-CoV-2 in particular breaks
down the dualisms of the infected and the uninfected or the healthy and
the unhealthy, as people develop symptoms long after contracting and
transmitting the virus. Many people are also asymptomatic meaning that
those infected cannot be easily identified and categorised. Viruses high-
light that there is always more to know about the biological body and
the discursive practices around it. Medical and environmental human-
ities as well as the posthumanities, then, de-reify the artificial categories
that individuals and actors impose onto visions of both the human body
and the environment.
Vital: Martin and Horn have a point when they indicate the liminality of
the virus, as well as our co-existence and constant interactions with the
bodies within and around us. I also agree with Yazgünoğlu, on his point
about the alteration of our relations with life and temporality through
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narratives. These comments show how much all of us have internalised
the posthumanist thought.
For me, living in central Brazil, the pandemic started at the end of
March with the first lockdown in the city of Anápolis, in the state of
Goiás. The last days of March coincide with the last rains of the wet
season (in Brazil, especially in the Cerrado biome, there are only two
well-defined seasons: dry winter and wet summer, lasting six months
each). Thus, in my city, the first days of the pandemic occurred con-
comitantly with very dark, rainy days, where the city’s silence contrasted
with the almost uninterrupted sound of rain and thunder. As a historian
who works with waters and the nature of their action, I could not help
but think about the processes of creative death which, in my opinion,
characterises water in its radical indifference to human desires and
representations. As I say in my articles, water is life, because it is creative
death: It passes, takes away, dissolves, and reconfigures material forces
and processes that, in the encounter with humans, force the production
of new meanings and symbols. In the following months, my wife became
pregnant, and we had a child, which made me reflect more about ges-
tational processes that emerge from ruptures and contingencies. Thus,
the notion of creative death, death processes that induce the gestation of
new processes, death as a prerogative of life, and vice versa was much
more evident in the pandemic in view of the pregnancy of my wife and
the birth of my first child.
I consider this work as a meeting place of multiple concrete experiences
in the COVID-19 pandemic, which induced imaginative processes. Each
phrase in this work emerged from experiences with reflection, and above
all, experiences without reflection. But I dare say that all authors have a
bit of Lucy Simian to them, running away from the contagion, looking
for answers, looking for permanence while inescapably flowing with the
pandemic storm. Although the dissolution of the processes that mark
life and that constitute living reaches everyone, it does so in different
ways, producing different temporalities. The experience of contagion,
whether in the pandemic or the epidemic of joy in The Amazing World
of Gumball series, reminds us that to be alive is to be immersed in the
randomness which is life’s most evident manifestation. Therefore, the
posthumanist line of thought becomes urgent for us to understand con-
tagion as encounters, contingencies that are always beyond the humanist
illusion of the human as the centre of a supposedly manageable universe.
This seems to be how posthumanism can contribute to medicine: To think
of human health as part of the processes of permanence and flux, above
all as contingencies, as we are all hopelessly subject to the ongoing trans-
formations of the encounters that somehow permeate our bodies.
Yılmaz Karahan: I would like to start with a similar story to Vital’s,

and mine is a mixture of anxiousness as well as hope, too. My personal
experience of the COVID-19 lockdown actually helped me. At the very
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beginning of our lockdown, I learned that I was pregnant. This of course
created surprise and joy, but anxiety, too. Now I had the responsibility
of the health of another spirit growing inside me and sharing my body.
This happened to be the most fascinating story uncovering the intri-
cate naturalcultural happenings in my body. Within the essence of my
body, I was already sharing multi-time and cosmic multi-species stories
of my and my husband’s inheritance. I was sharing everything with my
baby. And she was listening to my body, every second. And I could not
escape from it at all. Then I thought about how we form a storied matter
together. I was evidently transforming with my babygirl. But I was not
only sharing the beautiful parts of my body; I was also sharing microbes,
bacteria, vermin that actually form the core of human bodies. The abject
was now the source of appreciation and even beauty. With my preg-
nancy, I was deeply exposed to the materiality of my body, which, in
anthropocentrism, invokes fear, hatred, and disgust as it shatters the
privileged cultural subjectivity of human existence. The embryo within
is a living non-life, like a virus. Moreover, my baby is a posthuman con-
currence, resulting from political and economic dynamics, geographical
and digital factors, cultural and social happenings, material and discur-
sive formations that made me and my husband together. The agency of
the embryo was shaping me, was changing me, and I was changing it
too. The agential forces around were shaping us. Cosmic agencies, viral
agencies, political agencies, and the scale cannot be calculated.
And now my baby girl, Dolunay, which means ‘full moon’ in Turkish,
is six months old as I type my answers to this CODA section. We chose
this name because we wanted her to radiate light and bring healing in
the darkest times, like this one with a worldwide virus outbreak. Now,
another abject experience is breastfeeding. Interestingly, the milk is
produced specifically for the baby for that specific moment—so it is a
being in its intra-activity. What I mean is that if the baby is not well,
then the milk is the cure. The milk is the healing, confidence, life. It is
the healing for the infant’s soul, body, and mind. Through breastfeeding,
I am now sharing my cultural, psychological, and material inheritance.
We are transforming our bodily stories and narrations together.
As for the second question, well, looking at the disease stories, I realised
how viruses carry messages and might contain some parts of human evo-
lution. They were even efficient in erasing many important people in his-
tory. For instance, the main reason for the eradication of two civilisations,
Machu Picchu and Tulum, is supposedly the spread of diseases such as
smallpox, measles, cocoliztli, salmonella, and mumps, which came from
Europe. Such examples of course can be multiplied. Moreover, this pan-
demic indeed helped us realise the porosity of our bodies, onto which
posthuman stories of varied agential encounters are inscribed. This makes
us intertangled with various agents. I hope healing will soon come with
this enlightenment. We are all together in this world—in this universe. So,
love yourself, love life itself!
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Clemens and Casey: Because all the authors commenting here have
offered so much for us to agree with, we would like to elaborate more
on the intersections of the medical, environmental and posthumanities.
To be able to fully address such intersections, our constellation of the
posthuman must include not only new conceptions of concepts such as
subjectivity and consciousness but also identity. The medical encounter
is a site where subjects find and negotiate identity categories, and modes
of mimetic identification constitute our encounter with pathogenic
organisms. Thus, it is important to address how identity operates both
as the point of articulation for posthuman subjectivity, and as the point
where subjects reach political intelligibility within humanist systems of
power. Here, identity is defined as a subject’s self-image; it is constituted
through iterative and conscious processes of identification that allow
subjects to find social intelligibility in the world. From the perspective
of trans studies, where identity has always been a central concept, David
Valentine describes identity as a “product of modern power, arising as a
reaction to the demand that the subject identify hirself in the context of
modern systems of biopolitical governance.”22 Identity is vital for partici-
pation in the medical encounter, which still requires an ostensibly ill sub-
ject to find modes of self-representation and recognition that will allow
them to access care. This is a point that many transgender people, for
example, will be very familiar with, going back to the 1970s when trans
women would circulate copies of Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual
Phenomenon (1966) amongst themselves so as to know what identity
needed to be performed in order to qualify for sexual reassignment
surgery in early clinics. This, in turn, reinforces the medical narrative
of transness, which has moulded the forms of self-expression that are
recognised as legitimately trans. Identity— as the recognised image(s)
of subjectivity—has for many years been conceptualised as something
constructed, fluid, and multiple, but at the same time, it has tended to
carry with it implicit humanist assumptions. As Valentine goes on to
argue: “identity always (by force of its vernacular currency) implicitly
smuggles stable subject positions into critical social scientific analyses—
especially along the axes of race, gender, and sexuality—even as scholars
argue against such essentialisms.”23 Given that one cannot escape iden-
tity, either in the context of literary or artistic production or in the con-
text of medicine, posthumanist thought must consider how to think with
identity, its fluid and constructed categories of intelligibility, while also
criticising many of its implicitly humanist foundations. In our chapter, we
look at how the multiplicity of temporalities that the experience of dis-
ease makes apparent leads to a destabilisation of the autonomous human
subject’s ability to articulate themselves. This process of articulation can
be seen as identity work, and our chapter raises the question of how iden-
tity must be remediated in situations where the medical and social rec-
ognition of the human-pathogen interaction—in this case, a recognition
named HIV—precludes a renegotiation of identity under humanist terms.
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Because of this, we believe that identity can be seen not only as the point
of articulation for subjects within humanist biopower, but that we might
even consider identity ‘as’ the intersection of the medical, environmental,
and posthumanities.
Final Remarks
While I thank all the contributors of this volume for their incredible per-
severance and patience as we went through too many hardships during
the production (or composition) of this volume, I would like to close this
CODA section by turning to the points of convergence between med-
ical humanities, environmental humanities, and posthumanities, which
culminate in the postqualitative methodologies emerging in the twenty-
first century. Shifting our attention from our self-imposed subjecthood
to multiple subjectivities of the posthuman ecologies of this planet, a
postqualitative mindset of research enables us to think-with, feel-with,
and become-with our objects of analyses. When that object is a patho-
genic body or the overall concept of pathogenesis, things shift from our
comfort zones and become precarious, forcing us to acknowledge the
agency of the ahuman/inhuman/nonhuman. While this is no easy task,
the recent COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that our relations with
life, temporality, or spacetimemattering are easily disentangled and re-
entangled in multiple ways that the knowing subject of the Enlightenment
ideals would never imagine. This kind of acknowledgement requires a
dynamic understanding of matter and of bodily natures, recalling Simone
Fullagar’s aptly posed questions on the body, movement, and confine-
ment to home. Referring to home not as the spacious, natural space-time
of oikos but as the four walls that imply ‘constraint’ and threaten the
idea of the human as a so-called self-contained entity, Fullagar raises the
following issues that lead us to rethink the ways we produce situated,
embedded, and embodied knowledges:
COVID-19 has restricted movement practices largely to the ‘home’

(configured as private spaces, assumed to be available and safe)
and the rise of digital platforms has materialised fitness practices in
different ways for different bodies… . Moving images of ourselves and
others (live streaming) become enfolded through flows that connect
local and global sites and circuits of exchange (money, friendship,
families, gender normativity, health imperatives, advertisements,
etc.). Questions arise about the thresholds, edges, folds and inten-
sities through which the (gendered) embodiment of digital fitness
is enacted and assembled –what if we were to follow the camera,
the blush of pleasure, pain or shame, attuning to how images travel
affectively and how they entangle with embodied histories and trouble
the (gendered, racialised and so on) politics of place (home, gyms,
sport clubs, physical education, parks, marketing, clothing, etc.)?24
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Paying attention to the details or to the differences that are created out
of interference patterns here may implode into further meanings for our
readers. While the engagement of the reader with those further readings
is a posthuman experience in itself, the questions posed here, I believe,
provide us with a toolbox to entangle ourselves with, and they also help
us to re-entangle our constructed and biological ‘novel’ experiences that
accompany the emergence of the novel Coronavirus as a disease-causing
pathogenic agent, leading to suffering and death. At the same time, how-
ever, they invoke hope through personal, academic, and/ or political
experiences in ways we have not imagined before. Such imagination finds
one of its best expressions in Karin Murris’ words. “Ironically,” Murris
writes, “the current grand narrative conflates the virus (SARS-CoV-2)
with the disease (COVID-19),”25 and therefore, it reconstructs the age-old
dualism of the human as self and the nonhuman as the other. However, as
Murris further argues, “SARS-CoV-2 can also be seen as an open invita-
tion to reconfigure matters of scale and put into question the micro/macro
binary of a world that is not only uncertain but that is indeterminate,”26
reminding us of the ways we know, be(come), and do ‘with’ the world in
our posthuman entanglements. As this volume and its chapters showcase
altogether and separately, there is always space for rethinking the human
and its relations with its others, which means there is always space for
moving out of bios. There is always, reiterating Yılmaz Karahan’s words
in this section, space for hope. Composing novel forms of heroic couplets
is, then, just a matter of scale, in which the only criterion is no longer the
human. Bearing all this hope in mind, I consider this postqualitative turn
in our research methodologies will flourish further with the intersections
of medical, environmental, and posthumanities, creating engagements
that enact affirmative models of ethico-onto-epistemology.
Notes
1 Stefan Herbrechter, “Postfiguration, or, the Desire for/of the Posthuman,” in
Book of Abstracts for Posthuman Mimesis: Embodiment, Affect, Contagion
(Leuven, 2021), 14.
2 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
3 Thomas J. Garbáty, “The Summoner’s Occupational Disease,” Medical
History 7, no. 4 (1963): 348.
4 J. E. Riehl, “Fogs and the Plague in The Dunciad: Arbuthnot’s Medical
Influence,” CEA Critic 44, no. 3 (1982): 5.
5 Riehl, 5.
6 Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of Life as Bios/Zoe,” in Bits of Life: Feminism at
the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, eds. Anneke Smelik
and Nina Lykke (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008), 177.
7 Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 53.
8 Nayar, 53.
9 Nayar, 53.
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10 Nayar, 53.
11 Nayar, 53.
12 Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2019), 104.
2007), 26; italics in the original.
15 Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms,
eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2008), 188; italics in the original.
16 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental
Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 28–49.
18 Sophocles, The Theban Plays of Sophocles, trans. David R. Slavitt (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 23.
19 Richard Seifman, “COVID-19 Impacts on Marriage and Divorce,” Impakter,
March 25, 2021, https://impakter.com/covid-19-impacts-on-marriage-and-
divorce/.
20 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1978), 58.
21 Orhan Pamuk, “What the Great Pandemic Novels Teach Us,” New York
Times, April 23, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/sunday/
coronavirus-orhan-pamuk.html.
22 David Valentine, “Identity,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2
(2014): 103.
23 Valentine, 104.
24 Simone Fullagar, “Re- turning to Embodied Matters and Movement,” in
Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist
Terrain across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide, ed. Karin Murris
(New York, NY: Routledge, 2021), 127.
25 Karin Murris, “Introduction: Making Kin: Postqualitative, New Materialist
and Critical Posthumanist Research,” in Navigating the Postqualitative,
An Introductory Guide, ed. Karin Murris (New York, NY: Routledge,
2021), 25–6.
26 Murris, 26.
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Afterword
Posthuman Healing and Revealing
Francesca Ferrando
Once Upon a Time…

Once upon a time, there was a pandemic caused by the Coronavirus. It
was the 21st century on planet Earth. Humans were getting sick; many
were dying. And so, they asked: “How did this happen?” A clear answer
resonated: “The spread of COVID-19 is the result of the existential dis-
respect of non-human life and habitat degradation.” And so, the humans
asked: “What can we do?” The answer was: “Change your habits, change
your views. Right here, right now.”
Anthropocentrism as Disease
The pandemic made it very clear: Anthropocentrism is a serious problem.
If we, humans, keep anthropocentrism at the core of our social dynamics
and values, we are heading towards our own self-destruction. A consistent
percentage of our species relies on anthropocentric views which are the
root cause of bodily diseases (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), as well
as of mental disorders. Anthropocentric views are based on a diseased
perception of who we are, at the social, species, and planetary levels:
Instead of perceiving the human as part of the planet, such conceptions
separate the human from the rest of existence, privileging (some) humans
as exceptional, and thus, in charge. But the pandemic clearly showed
that we are deeply interrelated with all life forms, and that viruses do not
respect our self-constructed human primacy. We matter, but not because
we are ‘more’ than others. We need to relocate the human as part of the
planet in symbiotic relations. Understanding where we are at can bring
the change we need right here, right now. In this spirit, recognising our
disease can bring ease and healing; acknowledging a pathogenesis can
turn into a path of wisdom and possibility.
According to Wikipedia, “Pathogenesis is the process by which a dis-
ease or disorder develops. It can include factors which contribute not
only to the onset of the disease or disorder, but also to its progression
and maintenance.” Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek: The term
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288244-18
8
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248 Francesca Ferrando

genesis means “creation,” “birth”; the word pathos means “suffering,”
but also “experience,” and “emotion.” In order to address the patho-
genesis of a disease, we need to understand that the physical manifest-
ation of a disease is not disconnected from its mental roots, which are
to be found in a flawed perception of the Self. If we truly understand
who we are at the existential level, as individuals, as societies, and as
a species, many of the sources of our diseases will become clear. To be
of value, such a self-enquiry must be thorough and address everything,
including our habits, diets, and environments (in fact, these have a
direct impact on the epigenetic expressions of our DNA); our relations,
communications, and intra-actions; our thoughts, dreams, and values.
This is why philosophy, approached through its Greek etymology as
the “love of wisdom” (that is philos, “love,” and sofia, “wisdom”), is
something that can enhance our lives: Know yourself. Every tradition
of wisdom, from ancient times to the contemporary world, underlines
one key aspect to the full existential realisation: Know who you are.
That is the best gift we can give to ourselves, our societies, our species,
and our planet.
Posthumanism as Awareness
Posthumanism is not just a theory. When the pandemic started, the
posthuman movement had to pose this fundamental question: Was
posthumanism just another academic trend, or was it something that
could help us navigate this historical moment? If it were just an aca-
demic trend, it would not be much of help in dealing with the crisis
prompted by COVID-19. But indeed, posthumanism, approached as a
way of existing, did help many of us navigate this specific moment. With
this understanding, we also realised that the ivory tower of academia,
where posthumanism had been nurtured for many decades, was to be
opened; our duty was to be present. Posthuman presence: to be present
for the community, by bringing posthumanism to the public discourse.
The crisis prompted us to become public intellectuals, and posthumanism
is now emerging as a way to understand who we are in the 21st cen-
tury, helping us navigate everyday life in full existential awareness, espe-
cially during a crisis. A crisis is not necessarily something bad or good;
it is a moment of decision and choice, which brings along the possibility
of an epiphany. Such an epiphany comes with a revealing that is sin-
cere and honest to the bone, allowing us to understand where we are at
every level. For instance, at the social level, a lot of the injustices that
were already happening before the pandemic emerged even more clearly.
Social inequities exacerbated the spread of COVID-19 in specific commu-
nities characterised by higher rates of poverty, less access to healthcare,
larger households, and so on. Similarly, at a personal level, the pandemic
9
4
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Afterword 249
brought harsh clarity. With social distancing (for those who had the pos-
sibility of distancing, as many did not), people were surrounded by them-
selves: brutal honesty, somehow hard to digest. But the point is that such
honesty must not be digested. If we truly want to heal, we (as individ-
uals, as societies, and as a species) must face these realisations: fully and
thoroughly. They are not just the results of COVID-19; they were there
before, but we were too diseased to acknowledge them. Now, we can
change them. Now we can heal ourselves.
This important book is a result of this fundamental wave of change,
which approaches posthumanism as an active perspective to manifest
ways of existing. Posthuman Pathogenesis is a precious tool to under-
stand the world we live in, and to bring possibilities in our collective
imaginaries. In this brave new world of global pandemics, its message
is urgent. If we want to understand where we are at, we cannot simply
approach pathogens as the invisible ‘enemies’ in the lost anthropo-
centric war. Viruses are biocultural entities, the presence of which is
intertwined with our medical economies, global biopolitics, and viral
spatio-temporalities of the 21st century; they must be perceived, more
extensively, as power dynamics in network ontologies. This volume
sheds light on the understanding of viruses and bacteria, as ‘they’ are
part of ‘us.’ Think, for instance, of the microbiota in our guts, which
play a critical role in regulating our health, and which are physically
‘us.’ So, who are we? Only a deep, multilayered answer to this question
can bring ease and healing. Together, we can create different paths of
existence; together, we can deconstruct disruptive habits that have been
part of our species for too long. We can only do this together, and so
it is very important to connect all these layers –the individual, the
social, the species, the planet, and beyond: the micro and the macro.
It’s not too much, it’s not too little: It’s what it is, and it’s our response-
ability. By reading Posthuman Pathogenesis, we are acknowledging
that anthropocentrism is a vision of the past; that posthumanism is
not only an academic theory but a way of existing; and that we are
together in this, being different and related. On one side, viruses, bac-
teria, and human and non-human animals are constantly co-evolving.
For example, think of the organ of the placenta, which develops
during human pregnancy in the uterus: One protein (syncytin), that
is essential to its formation, originally became part of the genome of
our ancestors via a retrovirus infection. On the other hand, honouring
wildlife and their habitats will enhance not only our ability to coexist
with other species but also our health, respecting natural boundaries,
ecological balance, and the environment, thus avoiding the spread of
many pathogens as well. To heal as a species, we can no longer think
of the human in absolute separations, nor in forced anthropocentric
hybridisations. We are, also, the Others…
0
5
2
250 Francesca Ferrando
Once Upon a Time…

Once upon a time, there was a disease called anthropocentrism. It was the
21st century on planet Earth. Humans were healing; many were realising
who they were. And so, they asked: “Who are You?” There was no
reply; just mirrors, everywhere. And then, a clear answer resonated, in all
voices, languages, and sounds, from everywhere: “I am You. You are Me.
We are Everything.” And so, we understood. And then, there was silence.
1
5
2
Index
12 Monkeys see Gilliam, Terry AIDS 2, 11, 15, 52, 68–9, 71–2, 173,
28 Days Later see Boyle, Danny 189–90, 194, 196–7, 199–200,
28 Weeks Later see Fresnadillo, Juan 202–3, 214, 234
Carlos Alaimo, Stacy xiv, 4, 52, 127
120 BPM see Campillo, Robin The Amazing World of Gumball 12,
1985 see Tan, Yen 82–95, 96n20, 240
Ammonite see Griffith, Nicola
absolute other 105, 112, 230 Anatolia 127–9, 131
actant 42, 46, 55, 178; macro- 231; Angels in America see Kushner, Tony
micro 46, 231 androcentrism 12, 113
affect 67, 77, 88, 93–4, 106, 114, Anthropocene 37, 46, 54, 139n72,
153, 190, 231, 235, 238; 207, 215, 217
posthuman 145 anthropocentrism xv, 4, 12, 14, 29,
affective 66, 217; assemblage 1, 3, 7, 36–7, 52–4, 103, 105, 115, 126,
231; dimension xvi; environment 4; 153, 159, 169, 170–1, 230, 236–8,
intensity 72 241, 247, 249–50; post-xv, 10, 24,
Afrofuturism 219 26–7, 115, 145–6; non- 77, 190,
Agamben, Giorgio 28, 50 235
agency 1, 10, 12, 66, 68, 72, 76–7, anthropomorphism 43, 84–5, 87, 88,
85, 87, 95, 113, 126, 128, 132–3, 152, 157
135–6, 171, 180, 231–2, 241; Antigone see Sophocles
human 82–3, 192; human(ist) 64; Aristotle 122, 136
of matter 7; nonhuman 14, 63, 82, assemblage xv-xvi, 1, 3, 6–8, 12–14,
157, 243 45, 90, 106–7, 114–15, 123–4, 131,
agent 3–4, 6–7, 9, 11–13, 15, 43, 169, 171, 177–8, 231, 235–7
52, 57n14, 65, 67–9, 74–5, 90, Atwood, Margaret 6; The Handmaid’s
95, 107, 124, 126–8, 131, 136, Tale 6
155, 157, 167–9, 172, 178, 180–1, Auerbach, Nina 16, 214
183, 195, 229–30, 238–9, 241; autopoiesis 3
disease-carrying 6–7, 10, 244; autopoietic systems 14, 66–7, 145–8,
human 11, 14, 114–15, 123, 128, 162n7
167, 172; infectious 86–7; micro Avicenna 125
13; nonhuman 14, 114, 123–4,
126, 147, 167, 172, 197, 238; Ballard, J. G. 42
posthuman 114; story-telling 8–9, Barad, Karen xiv, 4, 88, 105, 107–8,
42, 114; viral 11, 13, 103, 197 123, 133–4, 172, 178, 231
agential cut 88, 172 Bear, Greg 14, 145–161, 162n7;
agentic forces 42, 71, 76, 105, 115, Darwin’s Radio 14, 145–161
168–9, 170–1, 178–9, 181, 241 becoming 1, 3–4, 12–3, 45, 66,
Ağın, Başak 115, 195 103–16, 125, 134, 136, 147, 151,
2
5
252 Index
158–9, 193, 227; with 1, 4, 13, colonialism 164n71, 207; post-xiv
17n3, 125, 238 communitas 51–56
Before She Sleeps see Shah, Bina Constantinople 128
Benjamin, Walter 63–4 Contagion see Soderbergh, Steven
Bennett, Jane xiv, 4, 12, 46, 56–7n14, Coronavirus xiv, 2, 23, 43–4, 126,
83–5, 90, 97n24, 106 145, 172, 179, 232, 235, 244, 247
Berlant, Lauren 63 COVID-19 xiv-xv, xvii, 1, 7–10,
biocultural 126, 249 13–14, 17n11, 24–27, 30, 37n2,
biohorror 155–6 44–6, 50, 66–7, 77, 89–91, 94, 126,
biopolitics xvi, 10, 16, 26, 27–8, 130, 137, 145, 167, 169, 171, 174,
42–56, 58n47, 75, 146, 157–9, 176–7, 181, 183, 232–3, 236, 240,
207–10, 214, 218–19, 242, 249 243–4, 247–9
biopower 5, 213–14, 218–19, cowpox 9
222n52, 243 cybernetics 3, 145–161, 214–15, 218
Black Death 2, 220n5, 220n18 cyborg 3–4, 16, 214–15, 218
Blindness see Saramago, José
bodymind 12, 104, 106, 108–9, 116, Darwin, Charles 150, 210, 213, 230;
116–17n10 The Descent of Man 150; On the
Borrowed Time see Monnette, Paul Origin of Species 150
Boyle, Danny: 28 Days Later 1 Darwin’s Radio see Bear, Greg
Braidotti, Rosi 3, 7, 17n10, 54–5, Death in Venice see Mann, Thomas
58n47, 111, 115, 158, 162n13, Defoe, Daniel: A Journal of the Plague
164n71, 169–70, 190, 217, Year 1
229–31, 233 Dent, Tory: HIV, Mon Amour 11,
Brazil 5–6, 8, 240 68–78
Butler, Octavia E. 207–19; Fledgling Derrida, Jacques 3, 15, 105, 208–9,
207–19 212, 220n2
The Descent of Man see Darwin,
Campillo, Robin: 120 BPM 189 Charles
Camus, Albert 10, 23–37, 38n8, diffraction 8, 168, 177–80
38n14, 38n20, 39n31, 39n34, 136; disability studies xiv, 69, 116n10
The Plague 10, 23–37, 38n8, 136 DNA 4, 42, 47, 104, 110, 115, 123,
The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer, 137, 149, 153–4, 156, 214, 248
Geoffrey Dracula see Stoker, Bram
capitalism 23, 54–5, 63–4, 67, 74–5, The Dunciad see Pope, Alexander
182, 200–1, 214, 218, 229
The Carhullan Army see Hall, Sarah ecocriticism 230; material see material
Cerrahiye-i İlhaniye see Sabuncuoğlu, ecocriticism
Şerefeddin ecophobia 6, 236
Cerrahiyyetü’l Haniyye see empathy 90, 160, 175, 177, 219, 232,
Sabuncuoğlu, Şerefeddin 236
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury entanglement xiv, xvii, 4–11, 14,
Tales 16, 228 26–7, 37, 45, 52, 64–78, 86–7, 89,
The Child Garden see Ryman, Geoff 95, 104, 106, 108–10, 115, 126,
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina 16, 134, 139n72, 145–7, 150–3, 161,
229 167–83, 202, 232–3, 236–8,
China 128, 173–6, 180, 182 243–4
Cholera Attack 2–3, 17n11, 128, 209 environmental humanities see
Chomsky, Noam 167–8 humanities
citizen sociolinguistics 14, 167–84 environmentalism 23, 131
Clarke, Bruce 14, 146 “Epidemic” see Neves Marques, Pedro
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 125–6 Esposito, Roberto 51–54
Cold War 63 ethico-onto-epistemology 235, 244
Colebrook, Claire 64–5, 67, 70, 72–3, Evliya Çelebi 127, 132–3;
75, 78, 107, 109 Seyâhatnâme 127, 132
3
5
2
Index 253
evolution 9, 13–14, 24, 28, 42–7, heroic couplet 16, 227–8, 244
56n7, 93, 95, 105, 110, 123, heterosexism 177
145–160, 180, 210, 216, 230, 241 HIV 2, 11, 15, 68, 71–2, 173,
189–90, 194, 196–7, 199–200,
Facebook 169, 173, 175 202–3
feminist 103, 115, 220n12; dystopia HIV, Mon Amour see Dent, Tory
6; material 7, 12, 17n6, 230; studies Homer: The Iliad 16, 228
xiv Homo: loquens 170; narrans 122,
Ferrando, Francesca 114, 146, 230, 136; neanderthalensis 156;
247–50 novus 156–61; sapiens 104,
Fisher, Mark 158 122, 126, 132, 136, 146–8,
Fledgling see Butler, Octavia E. 150, 152–60, 239
La Fontaine 48 homophobia 6, 164n71, 177
Foucault, Michel 26, 28, 222n52, Horzum, Şafak 195
223n80 human: and the environment 17n3,
Fowles, John 124, 126 31, 37, 247–50; nature 26, 30, 32,
Frank, Arthur 65, 67, 70, 74 64; as parasite 49–50, 52, 56; and
Freeman, Elizabeth 66, 70 the planet xiv, 91, 116n6, 247–50;
Fresnadillo, Juan Carlos: 28 Weeks reproduction 5–6, 44, 53, 104,
Later 1 109–10, 249; solidarity 10, 24, 32;
Fukasaku, Kinji: Fukkatsu no hi/Virus sovereignty 65–7, 73, 77
1 humanism 24, 26–7, 29, 30–34, 36,
Fukkatsu no hi/Virus see Fukasaku, 38n14, 38n19, 39n40, 64–7, 69–70,
Kinji 74–5, 95, 109, 113, 115, 123, 146,
153–7, 159–60, 209, 213–15,
gender 2–3, 5, 8, 15, 29, 43, 67, 218–19, 220n8, 232–3, 235, 240,
110–11, 168, 171, 189, 192–4, 242–3; deconstruction of 10; liberal
197–200, 216, 242–3; norms 82; 28, 35, 73, 103–4, 112–13, 116n10,
roles 84 159; tragic 10, 23, 27, 30–37,
genetic: classification 147; engineering 39n34
216; information 45, 47, 149, 157; humanities 27, 219, 234; critical
modification 8; mutation 148, 150; health 207; critical medical 218;
plasticity 239 environmental 8, 13, 16,
Gilliam, Terry: 12 Monkeys 1 116–17n10, 230–1, 233, 237–9,
Girard, René 15, 50, 209, 220n2 242–4; medical xvi, 15–6, 65, 77,
Griffith, Nicola: Ammonite 12, 219, 231–2, 237–9, 242–4; medical
103–116, 116n5, 117n18 post- 15; post-xvi, 1, 3, 7–8, 13,
Grosz, Elizabeth 17n6 16, 17n3, 229–31, 233, 236–7,
239, 242–4
Hall, Sarah 53; The Carhullan Army Hurricane Katrina 63–4, 71
53, 54 hyperobject 14, 145–61, 236,
The Handmaid’s Tale see Atwood, 238–9
Margaret
Haraway, Donna J. xiv, 3–6, 66–7, I Am Legend (2007) see Lawrence,
109–10, 123–5, 177, 209, 214, Francis
220n12, 222n72 I Am Legend (1954) see Matheson,
Harootunian, Harry 63–4, 66, 70–1 Robert
Harry Potter see Rowling, J. K. identity xv, 6, 69–71, 82, 85, 93–4,
Harvey, David 63 105–7, 110–13, 233, 242–3;
Hayles, N. Katherine 11, 43–4, 47, autonomous 65, 69–70; biological
56n7 51; chimerical 107; construction of
healing 131, 217, 237, 241, 247–50 105; ethnic 171; environmental 51;
Heise, Ursula K. 180, 232 individual 65, 70; posthuman 106,
Herbrechter, Stefan 10, 38n21, 136, 235; social 51
227 The Iliad see Homer
4
5
2
254 Index
illness 2, 11, 34, 64–71, 73–8, 89, 122, 126, 126, 156, 161, 208, 210,
190, 197–8, 210; AIDS-related 190; 240–1; embodied 230; form xv, xvi,
chronic 197; and death 34; disease 47–8, 52–5, 123, 154, 247; human
and/or 11, 66, 68, 213; effects of xv, xvi, 45, 47, 52–5, 67, 123, 154,
11; narratives of 78; temporality of 180, 247; modern 84–5; non- 236,
74; writing 65, 69–70, 74 241; origin of 44, 230; sciences
immunitas 51 207; -sustaining environment xv,
immunity 9, 43–4, 48, 50–3, 56, 66 xvii; symbiotic 230; urban 13; web
implosion 4, 6–7, 9, 16, 227–9; as of 3, 167
methodology/process/strategy 7–8, leprosy 132–3, 132–3
10, 16, 227, 230 Lopez, Matthew: The Inheritance 189
inclusive disjunction 64–5, 67, 70, The Lord of the Rings see Tolkien, J.
72–3, 75–8 R. R.
incubation 66, 72–3, 77, 104 “Louse Hunting” see Rosenberg, Isaac
India xv Luhmann, Niklas 14, 146, 230
influenza 74
The Inheritance see Lopez, Matthew Ma, Ling: Severance 16, 229
inhuman 10–1, 28–9, 31, 35–7, 42–5, Magnus, Albertus 125
127, 149, 167, 236, 243 Mandel, Emily St. John: Station
inhumanity 29, 37, 170 Eleven 1
intentionality 27, 43, 84–5, 87, 94–5, Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice 1
114, 157 Manson, Marilyn 2; “Posthuman” 2
intra-action 13, 66, 86–7, 93, 105–11, Marchesini, Roberto 105
113, 116, 123–8, 146–7, 158, 167, Margulis, Lynn 14, 146, 230
169, 171–2, 177–84, 235, 237–9, Marxism 31, 63, 233–4
241, 248 masculinity 38n14, 38n19, 198–200,
Iovino, Serenella 12, 114, 124, 126, 202, 211; hegemonic 199;
136 subjectivity 192; toxic 113; white
Istanbul 9, 13 193
Massumi, Brian 72–3
Jenner, Edward 9 material: agency 127, 236; creativity
A Journal of the Plague Year see 133; and discursive 3, 13, 88, 104,
Defoe, Daniel 107–8, 113, 127–30, 133, 136,
Journal of the Plague Years see 147, 170–1, 193, 200, 229, 241;
Spinrad, Norman ecocriticism 7–8, 12–13, 124–5,
Justinian Plague 13, 94, 128 136; entanglement 147; feminism 7,
12, 17n6, 230; forces 240; kinship
Kafer, Alison 75 131; and narrative structure 200;
Kramer, Larry: The Normal Heart 189 -semiotic 107, 109, 114–15; and
Kushner, Tony: Angels in America 189 textual 42; turn 116–17n10, 230
materiality 44, 71, 84, 92, 106, 115,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Turkish 124, 131, 133–4, 150–1, 153, 241
Embassy Letters 9 Matheson, Robert: I Am Legend
Lawrence, Francis: I Am Legend (1954) 1
(2007) 1 The Matrix 26; Agent Smith 26
LGBT 5, 8, 177–8, 237 mattertext 12, 115–16
life xiv, xvi, 2–4, 11, 23–4, 27, 29–36, Mbembe, Achille 3, 51, 89–91
43–4, 46–8, 50–4, 56–7n14, 65, medical humanities see humanities
69, 72–4, 77–8, 84, 89, 91–5, 103, medical posthumanities see humanities
107, 109, 111–3, 150, 152–4, meme 171–3, 174, 176
156–7, 159, 169–70, 208, 229–30, MERS 45; CoV 145
233, 235–40, 243, 247–8; absurd/ mimetic: desire 50; identification 242;
absurdity of 29; bare 28, 46, 50–1; tendencies 122
dark ontology of 11; and death 3, miniature painting xvii, 13, 122–37
12, 37, 42–4, 48, 52, 83, 90–1, 95, Moelling, Karin 11, 44–5, 47, 50
52
Index 255
Monnette, Paul: Borrowed Time 71 pathogen xvi-xvii, 1, 11–12, 14, 42,
A Mordida/The Bite see Neves 64–6, 70, 73, 75–8, 83, 86, 92,
Marques, Pedro 94–5, 104, 110, 197, 207–8, 211,
Morrall, Clare 53; When the Floods 217, 228, 242, 249
Came 53–4 pathogenesis xiv, xvii, 3–4, 7–8, 16,
Morton, Timothy 14, 47, 109, 123, 77, 155, 207–8, 215, 217, 227,
147, 150, 152, 159, 236, 238 231, 243, 247–8
Murphy, Ryan: Pose 189 pathogenic xiv, 11–12, 16, 54, 64–5,
Murris, Karin 116n10, 244 82, 86, 90, 104, 115, 154, 197,
mutation 14, 145, 148–50, 155, 213, 227–8, 242–4
157–8, 161, 239 Pennycook, Alastair 168–9
Mücerreb-nâme see Sabuncuoğlu, pharmakon 15, 52, 54, 207–19
Şerefeddin The Plague see Camus, Albert
Plague Inc. see Ndemic Creations
narrative agency 7, 12–13, 114 Plague Inc.: Evolved see Ndemic
narrative wreck 65, 74, 77 Creations
naturalcultural 16, 106, 123, 125, Plato 122, 208–9, 212
128, 130, 132, 147, 168–9, 170–2, Pope, Alexander 16, 228; The
177, 179, 241 Dunciad 16, 228
Nayar, Pramod K. 107, 109, 167, 230 Pose see Murphy, Ryan
Ndemic Creations: Plague Inc. 1; post-anthropocentrism see
Plague Inc.: Evolved 1 anthropocentrism
necropolitics 3, 89–90 post-apocalyptic 1, 6, 105, 232;
network ontologies 14, 145–61 narrative 6
Neves Marques, Pedro 5–6; A “Posthuman” see Manson, Marilyn
Mordida/The Bite 5, 8; Sex as posthuman xv, xvii, 1, 3, 10–11,
Care and Other Viral Poems 8; 15–16, 43–4, 47–8, 54–6, 76, 109,
“Epidemic” 8 115, 126, 160, 215, 218, 227, 229,
new materialism xvi, 12, 56–7n14, 234, 236–7, 241–2, 244; actor 3,
93–4, 116–17n10, 136 6, 228, 230; affect 145; agent 12,
New York Hospital 68 114; becomings 134, 159; body
Nietzsche, Friedrich 28, 31, 64 4; condition 116; ecologies 243;
non-anthropocentrism see entanglement xvii, 37, 76, 110,
anthropocentrism 145, 161, 244; ethical frame 114;
The Normal Heart see Kramer, existence 111; feminism 103, 111,
Larry 115; healing 247–50; interface 214;
life xv, 157; nature 145; paradigm
Oedipus Rex see Sophocles 167; pathogenesis 4, 7–8, 16, 207,
“On Being Ill” see Woolf, Virginia 231; self 107–8; spatiality xv; story
On the Origin of Species see Darwin, 127, 241; studies 116–17n10, 231,
Charles 248; subject 3, 7, 10, 13, 103, 113,
onto-epistemology 17n3, 107, 109, 217; subjectivity 3–4, 114–15, 207,
112, 134, 169, 183, 235 215, 242; temporality xv, 28, 32,
Ottoman 9, 127, 139n72; Empire 9, 36, 63–78, 190, 197, 202
132; environmentalism 131; troops posthumanism xiv-xv, 10, 16, 24,
129 27, 87, 115, 146, 171, 177, 180,
Our Tragic Universe see Thomas, 219, 230–1, 237–8, 240, 248–9;
Scarlett critical 28–31, 116–17n10, 219;
outbreak narratives 1 techno- 209
Oppermann, Serpil 12, 114, 124, 126, posthumanist xiv, 4, 12, 26, 93,
136 116–17n10, 145, 157, 161, 168,
overman 28 170, 183, 208, 221n28, 229, 233,
235; applied linguistics 13–14,
parasite 42–56, 126 167–8, 171, 177, 183; approach
parthenogenesis 105, 109 10, 71, 92, 95, 170, 227; discourse
6
5
2
256 Index
3, 229; narrative 128; ontology Soderbergh, Steven: Contagion 1, 181
169; perspective 3, 12, 37, 42, Sontag, Susan 236
70, 83, 87, 93, 157, 179–80, 229; Sophocles 235; Antigone 235;
pharmakon 207, 214, 218; theory Oedipus Rex 16, 228
13, 27, 66, 170, 227, 236; thought Spanish Flu 2
xv, 10, 17n6, 33, 123, 167, 170, speciesism 6
219, 230–1, 238–40, 242; topos 26; Spinrad, Norman: Journal of the
understanding 37, 87, 157, 171 Plague Years 1–2
posthumanities see humanities Splan, Laura 1; “Viral Artifacts” 1
PrEP 189–90, 199–201 stereotyping 171, 173, 181, 184, 191
prophylactic narrative 15, 189–203 Steven Universe 82
Stoker, Bram 207–19; Dracula 207–19
quarantine xv, 11, 65–6, 68, 71–3, storied matter 13, 124, 128, 130, 133,
76–7, 89, 238 136, 241
queer 6, 8, 69, 111; anti- sympoietic system 67
8; representation 82; studies xiv;
theory 72–3 Tan, Yen: 1985 189
temporality xv-xvi, 15, 63–78, 92,
racism 6, 14, 164n71, 175–8, 180, 108, 126, 148, 151, 157–8, 190,
182–3 197, 237, 239, 243; capitalist 65;
Ranke, Kurt 122, 136 cosmic 152; of disease 15, 71,
Reddit 167–84 74; humanist 64–7, 71–3, 75, 77,
relationality 9, 13, 110, 114, 160, 91, 108, 150–2, 197; linear 65,
167, 169, 238; entangled xvi; 74, 92; non-anthropocentric 190;
horizontal 13, 105, 111, 115; non-linear 92; non-capitalist 67;
multi-scalar 4, 7, 126, 169–70; spatio- 108; viral 11, 64, 66–8, 72,
rhizomatic 113 74, 77–8
representationalism 170, 176, 183 Thomas, Scarlett: Our Tragic Universe
retrovirus 42, 45, 56n7, 104, 110, 122, 136
145, 148–9, 153–5, 249; anti- 190 Timur 129
Rimbaud, Arthur 233 Tolkien, J. R. R.: The Lord of the
Rosenberg, Charles 91, 93 Rings 3
Rosenberg, Isaac: “Louse Hunting” transcorporeality xiv, 5
129 translingual 168, 181
Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter 3 transphobia 164n71
Ryman, Geoff: The Child Garden transversality 4, 7, 9–10, 111, 169,
54–5 217
Trump, Donald 178–9, 234
Sabuncuoğlu, Şerefeddin 13, 130–4, Tuana, Nancy 192, 231
135, 136; Cerrahiye-i İlhaniye 13; Turkey 8, 133, 234
Cerrahiyyetü’l Haniyye 131, 132, Turkish Embassy Letters see Lady
133, 133; Mücerreb-nâme 134 Mary Wortley Montagu
Saramago, José: Blindness 1 Twitter 178
SARS 2, 44–5; CoV-1 145; CoV-2 2, typhoid 74
8, 43, 126, 145, 172, 232, 238–9, Typhoid Mary 2, 17n4
244
Serres, Michael 11, 48–50, 55–6 UNAIDS 189
Sex as Care and Other Viral Poems United Kingdom 68
see Neves Marques, Pedro United States 63, 68, 71–2, 189, 197,
sexism 6, 164n71 219
Seyâhatnâme see Evliya Çelebi
Shafak, Elif 112–13 vaccination xiv, 9, 23, 44, 52, 94, 104
Shah, Bina 6–8; Before She Sleeps 6–7 valence 173, 176; negative 180;
Shilts, Randy 72 neutral 182; positive 177; semantic
smallpox 9, 241 14, 172, 176
7
5
2
Index 257
vampire 15–16, 71, 207–19, 220n8, Washington, Bryan: “Waugh” 15,
220n18 189–203
Victorian: faith in humanism 213; Wheeler, Wendy 116–17n10
literature 210; narratives 208; Wolfe, Cary 230
science and culture 210 Woods, Angela 65
“Viral Artifacts” see Splan, Woolf, Virginia 11, 74–6, 78;
Laura “On Being Ill” 11, 64, 68, 73–6
viscous porosity 55, 192–3, 236
volatile bodies 2, 17n6 xenophobia 236
“Waugh” see Washington, Bryan Zika: virus 6, 8; epidemic 5, 8

Wald, Priscilla 228 zombie 89, 208, 215, 229, 233
The Walking Dead 16, 229 zoonosis 45–6, 50, 94
8
5
2

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i

This multi-​ vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to

Başak Ağın, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English Literature at

Şafak Horzum, M.A., is Ph.D. candidate at Hacettepe University and

Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare

Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

To learn more about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​

Edited by Başak Ağın and

First published 2023

to all posthuman bodies of the world

An Implosive Introduction: Haunted Experiences,

1 Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times:

2 Viruses as Posthuman Biocultural Creatures: Parasites,

3 Viral Temporalities: Literatures of Disease and

4 Pathogenic Hugs and Ambiguous Times: The Joy

5 Symbiotic Adaptation in Posthuman Feminist

6 Power or Despair: Contagious Diseases in Turkish

7 Hyperobjects, Network Ontologies, and the Pandemic

8 Entangled Humans, Entangled Languages:

9 HIV, Dependency, and Prophylactic Narrative

10 The Vampire as Posthumanist Pharmakon:

CODA: Affirming the Pathogenesis 227

Afterword: Posthuman Healing and Revealing 247

6.1 Example (1) of cauterisation for the treatment of leprosy 132

8.1 Commentaries sampled under Figure 8.1 173

Başak Ağın is Associate Professor of English Literature at TED University,

xii List of Contributors

List of Contributors xiii

The school of thought called posthumanism has established itself, within

An Implosive Introduction

2 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

4 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

The control and militarization of gender portrayed in the mosquito

Those poetic suggestions by Neves Marques resonate with Haraway’s

6 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

8 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

10 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

12 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

14 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

16 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

18 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

20 Başak Ağın and Şafak Horzum

Discontents of the Human

In the middle of the global pandemic, in the course of 2020, while

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 25

[I]‌t may be worthwhile to consider how a pandemic could push

While these two visions, contracting pandemic and pandemonium, are

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 27

From absurdity to revolt

Camus’ ‘tragic humanism’ still seems to remain a tempting point of refer-

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 29

Camus and tragic humanism

In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis,21 I investigated ‘our’ ongoing love-​

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 31

First, there is the individual’s discovery of the part of himself which he

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 33

Camus’ divided reception bespeaks the singularity of Camus’ thought

Camus’ cry of revolt remains a “fundamental expression of the uni-

The Plague belongs to Camus’ second cycle of works which he named

In keeping with this cycle’s exploration of tragedy and revolt, La

Yearning for the Human in Posthuman Times 35

Summoned to give evidence regarding what was a sort of crime, he

This multi- vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to

To learn more about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

An Implosive Introduction

In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis,21 I investigated ‘our’ ongoing love-

The world’s problems –industrial pollution, environmental crisis,

What’s most terrifying about sickness is its fascist self-containment,