https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.123
The Politics of Flesh: Mapping Somatic Individuality and Biopolitical Control in Alpha by T.D. Ramakrishnan
ANJITHA S KURUP
Research Scholar
Department of English
SSUS, Kalady, Kerala
Abstract: With ample theoretical interpretations and epistemological assumptions, the enigma of being a human remains elusive to unambiguous understanding. Though human beings have always been analysed as social and political organisms capable of actively producing, negotiating, and resisting relational configurations, the uniqueness of individuality has mostly been linked to psychological attributes, overlooking one of the most important entities that contribute to it: the corporeal dimension. Each individual has a distinctive bodily arrangement. The alignment of the skeletal system, generic features, composition of blood cells, visceral arrangement and diversity of neural systems contribute to the uniqueness of bodies, known as somatic individuality. In a rapidly biopoliticized world, somatic individuality is threatened by the governmental management of population by means of optimisation, standardisation, normalisation and control. The mere biological constitution of the body becomes a potential site of precarity and resistance. The proposed article is an inquisitive exploration of T.D. Ramakrishnan’s debut novel Alpha analyses how somatic individuality drives the extraction of biovalue in a scenario in which life is the central premise of an experiment. Designed as an Anthropological experiment, Project Alpha problematises the uniqueness of biological matter in a biopolitical setting where the rules of the experiment direct the experimenters. Furthermore, the article analyses the possibility of biopolitical resistance against these extractive designs.
Keywords: Biopolitics, Biovalue, Embodiment, Extraction, Somatic Individuality
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