Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction by Christina Lord (review)

Reviewed by: Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fictionby Christina Lord Tessa Sermet Human-Nonhuman Encounters in French Science Fiction. Christina Lord. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2023. 198 pp. 130 hc. Christina Lord is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fictionexamines French sf through the lenses of transhumanist and posthumanist theories. Lord shows how the interrelation between philosophical thought and storytelling in the French sf context proposes different ways to understand the place of the human and the nonhuman Other. To do so, she provides close readings of various sf novels and two films with a preliminary analysis of three novels by one of the fathers of French sf. In each chapter, Lord examines a specific interaction between humans and an archetypal nonhuman Other (aliens, the endangered orangutan, cyborgs, and posthuman women. ) In her introduction, Lord introduces the reader to posthumanist and transhumanist theories and explains how they have intersected with French End Page 318literary criticism and philosophical thought. Lord clarifies that while not all French sf has a philosophical component, she chose her corpus because of the presence of posthumanist and transhumanist tropes. Lord establishes a very interesting connection between French anti-humanist thoughts in the 1930s and 1950s, the political animal-rights movement of the 1960s, and posthumanism: she explains that the renewed interest in the biological world outside the realm of the Anthropos led to poststructuralism, and that Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault influenced many posthumanist, feminist, and decolonial thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Edward Saïd, Judith Butler, and Homi Bhabha. Yet when posthumanist theory came back to France in the 1990s and then in the 2020s, it was not reassimilated into literary criticism, as much of sf scholarship tends to be about literary history, genre formation, and reception theory. Acknowledging the complexity of usage, Lord notes that both transhumanism and posthumanism are used very differently and sometimes interchangeably, depending on who is trained as a philosopher, a literary scholar, or an author. In part one, "Evolutionary and Ecological Shifts, " Lord examines alien and animal encounters. The first chapter, "From Spears to Spaceships: Alien Encounters in the SF of J. H. Rosny aîné, " is dedicated to J. H. Rosny aîné, a French author of Belgian origin. This chapter situates Rosny as one of the "fathers of sf"—in company with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells—and argues that his work is already intrinsically posthuman. Lord explains how Verne's techno-optimism puts him closer to American sf, while Rosny and H. G. Wells were more interested in the social potential of the merveilleux scientifique (scientific-marvelous) and relied on science as a plot device to engage in a more philosophical exploration of sf's estrangement. Lord analyzes three of Rosny's novels: Les Xipéhuz The Xipehuz, 1887, which imagines a prehistoric human-alien encounter; Les Navigateurs de l'infini The Navigators of Space, 1925, which follows three astronauts sent to Mars, where they meet different species of aliens; and La Mort de la Terre The Death of the Earth, 1910, which narrates the extinction of the human species in the far future. Lord examines posthumanist and transhumanist tensions in Rosny's novellas "at different points in humanity's evolution within the Anthropocene" (27) and uses Levinas's Humanism of the Other (2006) to better understand how humans seethe Other. In her conclusion, Lord states that the "alien contact … forces the human protagonists to reevaluate their relationship with other species and their responsibility as citizens of planet Earth and of the solar system. In this regard, Rosny follows the French tradition of "the relativity of cultures" (61). While he emphasizes what could be described as transhumanist technology, his approach to the human-nonhuman encounter is fundamentally posthumanist. Lord's second chapter focuses on Éric Chevillard's Sans l'orang-outan Without the Orangutan, 2007; Chevillard's oeuvre is influenced by both Oulipo and the Theater of the Absurd. Lord starts by situating Chevillard. . .