https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i1.019
Cryonics, Posthuman Subjectivities and Postanimality in “Hypnojen”
ATIF ABDULLAH
Doctoral Researcher
Department of English
Aliah University, West Bengal, India
DR. SHARMISTHA CHATTERJEE
Professor
Department of English
Aliah University, West Bengal, India
Abstract: This article seeks to analyse the story, “Hypnojen”, employing critical and philosphical posthumanism to illustrate how its narrative depicts posthuman subjectivities. Satyajit Ray’s “Hypnojen” is a story in Professor Shonku series that revolves around the scientist Alexander Craig and the mysterious effects of the substance called hypnojen, which is a hypnotic invention, a gaseous element, that maneuvers human cognition. In addition, this analysis also focuses on how Ray envisages the concept of “cryonics” as an extension of posthuman agency. Cryonics is the idea that the preservation of bodies or brains at low temperatures can be revived in the near future with the development of scientific technology; Craig’s desire to get revived after death and dominate the world by utilizing hypnojen, delineates a technofied entanglement that resonates with Ray’s thematic concerns that dwell upon an ambivalence— to embrace technology or to animadvert it. The analysis further situates cryonics within the broader framework of necropolitics— a concept given by Achille Mbembe to refer to a kind of power-politics that determines who should live and who should not. This redefines traditional boundaries of life, death, and consciousness that invite rethinking regarding technology and its ethical implementation. This cryonic drive to extend life beyond nature-given limits reflects and reveals how (mis)use of technological in(ter)vention might lead to a new form of autocracy. The story also posits postanimality that repositions animal agency and its consciousness, placing animals into a non-hierarchical order defying anthropocentrism. The narrative terrain also exposes the disintegration and reconstitution of, to use Haraway’s term, “humanimal” that refers to the shared identity, where humans and animals (or machines) are intertwined. Such interplay exposes a contact zone that provides a critical site where human ethics, AI agency and “postanimality” intersect under posthuman conditions, where polemics regarding politicization of science and its nexus to “necropolitics” continues to evolve.
Keywords: critical posthumanism, philosophical posthumanism, necropolitics, AI agency, contact zone, humanimal, postanimality
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