Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Ecological distress and climate anxiety can transform an integrated anthropocentric identity into a decentered fragmented sense of self by calling into question the dualist model of hegemony grounded in human (agentic subject)/ and nature (non-agentic object) paradigm. Moreover, in the age of technoscientific development, the boundary between the material agency of humans and that of the nonhumans (robots, artificial intelligence) becomes blurred through human-nonhuman hybrid configurations, which include human bodily/material and cognitive enmeshments in the nonhumans. In this context, this research analyses the implications of hybrid formations of humans and machines, resulting in human complete dependence on robots/machines, as represented in J.L. Morin’s science fiction “Nature’s Confession” (2015). Drawing upon posthuman material ecocritical perception of human-nonhuman bodily entanglement, as proposed by Oppermann, Alaimo, and Herbrechter, the research emphasizes the way the posthuman materiality, shaped by the spontaneity of nonhuman elements such as intelligent machines and robots that can exhibit agency and have a similar appearance to humans, problematizes the conceptualization of humans as a distinct species as expressed in human-humanoid interrelations in Morin’s narrative. Such reimagining of a human-machine hybrid enmeshment in the age of privatization of nature, as the study will further argue, can alleviate climate anxiety by registering an eco-consciousness expressed through ethical climate actions. Also, it is this understanding of human corporeality as occurring through human-nonhuman interactions that can decenter anthropocentric dualist paradigm in reconfiguring a posthuman porous identity.