The Emergent Posthuman Landscape in Ying Chen’s La rive est loin

The last novel of what has been termed Ying Chen’s “série fantôme,” La rive est loin (2013), draws us further into a posthuman existence that has been consistently gestured towards since the publication of Immobile (1998) and concludes with a reconfiguration of space, place, and subjectivity that is inextricably intertwined with nature. This article proposes a metaphorical reading of the husband’s brain tumor and the disintegration of the house inhabited by Chen’s recurring couple as the gradual deconstruction of a monolithic human order in favor of a deeper eco-philosophical way of being in the world that is squarely aligned with Rosi Braidotti’s theory of the posthuman.