‘Human Unhumans’. Ageing, Dying and the Body Nostalgic in Kazuo Ishiguro and Hanif Kureishi

Abstract

In one of his Treatises on Government, John Locke stated that «every Man has a Property in his own Person». The complex articulation of this apparently matter-of-fact argument has haunted the Western cultural imaginary, and has been transformed into numerous literary texts and figures. Ever since Mary Shelley started investigating an ante-litteram Foucauldian «unfolding» of life, the issues related to the «immortalization of the flesh and the amortization of the body» have become growingly relevant. In this paper, I shall aim at investigating the literary versions of the biopolitics of owning and disowning bodies, of ageing and dying offered by Kazuo Ishiguro, namely in his celebrated Never Let Me Go, and by Hanif Kureishi, who dedicated his novella “The Body” to an interrogation of the marketable value of human bodies and body parts.