Abstract: Manuela Draeger is one of Antoine Volodine’s heteronyms, to whom are attributed a series of post-capitalist apocalyptic children’s fables in the form of detective stories. Draeger’s world is one of decay and dilapidation, a city in ruins. Despite this general atmosphere of decomposition, animacy (in the sense given to it by Mel Chen in the book on this concept) is distributed widely in a way that the critical literature has often described as posthuman(ist); animals talk and other characteristics of life emerge out of inanimate matter in a way that causes no astonishment in the human characters. Eggs, the moon, and bubbles (among others) have the possibility to become sentient and communicative beings. Food items come to life and address the characters meant to be eating them. Besides the comic value created by these interactions, this redistribution of animacy literalizes questions of the right to consume something or someone else in a literal or figurative sense. It questions how the redistribution of animacy affects the ethical stakes and consequences for that consumption. By exploring the function of the children’s stories within Draeger’s work and the post-exotic at large, we can both understand the pedagogical function of the tales and the challenge that they constitute for posthumanist egalitarian or non-hierarchical models of morality.
Gina Stamm (Wed,) studied this question.