Desexualisation of the Species or Frankenstein and Possibility of an Island

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article attends to two key literary considerations of desexualisation, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the world’s first science fiction novel, and a significant contemporary rewriting of it, Michel Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island (2007). Literature, like other forms of art, often reflects fundamental discontents with sex in ‘civilisation’ and the various inflections of power that ripple through them – including knowledge and its role in forms of exploitation. Grounded in sex and death, literature is not only a reflection of and upon social power, but also an expression of our experience of the forces of nature we cannot control, those that remind us we are social animals. In this context, a close reading of Frankenstein’s depiction of failed sexuality and meaning is linked to Possibility’s narrative of transhumanism and its critique of technological solipsism.