No Way Out: The (Im)possibility of Posthumanism in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

Abstract

This article traces two opposed tendencies in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island with respect to the contemporary discourse surrounding posthumanism. On the one hand, the text continuously hints at the emergence of an immersive mode of being which does justice to exteriority, while on the other it subverts the potential for such a being’s actualization. While most of the criticism surrounding McCarthy’s novel has optimistically emphasized the former intimation of a posthuman engagement with materiality, the present reading centralizes the latter tendency, attempting to show that the novel lucidly rejects such an optimistic view. Ultimately, I will attempt to show that McCarthy’s Satin Island critiques a naïve contemporary ‘choice’ to be posthuman.