Abstract

This chapter recasts Karel Čapek's 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), as the foundational biopunk text, as it reveals a profound intimacy between capitalism and the life sciences, though the play is better known for introducing the term ‘robot’ into SF (derived from the Czech robotá, meaning hard or enforced labour). The play dramatises the simulacral, autonomised organs of the working class, bodies in pieces that (mis)identify with the specular imago of the productivist ego, only to rebel against their bourgeois human creators. This chapter thus situates R.U.R. within the discourse of biopolitics, and explores how its technoscientific inventions make possible a contagious and revolutionary — though ambivalent in denouement — line of flight, thus making it an antecedent to biocapitalism and the bioeconomy.

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