Animal/Human/Pandemic in Oryx and Crake

This essay critically analyzes Margaret Atwood's novel, Otyx and Crake, employing a lens of critical posthumanism, with a specific focus on the blurred boundary between humanity and the animal world. Critical posthumanism, in recent discourse, has underscored the constraints of defining humanity in isolation and has censured anthropological machine that exploit a binary system of categorizing individuals as either animal or human. This binary has been wielded to dehumanize certain groups in society, perpetuating brutality against both marginalized humans and animals―manifesting, for instance, in the mass culling of animals under the guise of pandemic control measures. Historically, human dominance over animals has persisted, dating back to Aristotle and continuing through Western philosophical ideas, including the Kantian subject and Heidegger's Dasein. Jacques Derrida emerges as a prominent critic of this dual process of animalizing humans and humanizing animals, elucidating the ethico-ontological implications. Derrida further delves into the emotive response of shame when confronted with animals. The essay proceeds to conduct a comprehensive analysis of Oryx and Crake within the framework of bio-politics and its apparatuses. As a work of speculative fiction, the novel portrays a post-apocalyptic world following the extinction of Homo sapiens. The protagonist, Jimmy, known as Snowman, assumes a leadership role over the Crakers, a genetically engineered hybrid of humans and animals. The conclusion of the essay synthesizes the analysis by exploring the historical inplications of apocalypse, drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of history. (Kangwon National University)