Reimagining the Body Without Organs Through Exchange Value in Never Let Me Go

Abstract

Abstract Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs (BwO) is one of their most abstruse, yet it remains integral to their larger project of experimentation. While the BwO has previously been described by contemporary posthuman theorists as a force of desire, in the context of the organ harvesting scheme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, clones are raised until they are mature enough to donate their organs and eventually ‘complete’ as literal bodies without organs. However, while narrator Kathy H. exists as a BwO, she is also forced to integrate into systems such as the art exchanges which occur in the novel’s primary setting of Hailsham, and the broader neoliberal marketplace of organ donation for which she was engineered. The BwO can also be read as a metonymic strategy by which to understand Speculative Posthumanism and its ethical concerns regarding the problematics of cloning. Despite the novel’s bleak reality, Kathy H. becomes a model posthuman by recording her qualitative lived intensities autopoietically. In a world increasingly obsessed with technoscience and its quantitative outputs, using the concept of the BwO to reconsider what it means to be posthuman can help us rethink what and how we value.