Bioengineering, AI spirituality, and environmental crisis: Ishiguro's posthuman humanism

Abstract

We argue that Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun (2021), articulates an “ustopia” (Margaret Atwood), a near-future vision that exists in a dialectical tension between utopian and dystopian premises. Klara and the Sun is narrated in the first person by Klara, a childlike robot endowed with affective, cognitive, and learning capacities, who experiences a world marked by climate emergency, genetic engineering, and the AI revolution. Ishiguro’s novel builds on familiar sci-fi dystopian motifs, conveying a humanistic anxiety about both new forms of inequality generated by genetic enhancement and identity issues arising from the possibility that humanoid robots replicate and substitute real humans. However, Ishiguro also articulates a forward-looking posthuman humanism. In Ishiguro’s vision, humanoid robots like Klara capable of creativity, curiosity, and selfless care—open the possibility of a logic of différance (Jacques Derrida) and thus a novel form of posthuman humanism. This envisions a community of singularities made of humans and human-like robots and new types of belief that could counteract the environmental degradation and the alienation from nature.