Resumen de Grieving for the Subhuman in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
In Never Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro engages with the unequal distribution of grievability brought to light by Judith Butler (2004), in the context of a dystopian society divided into two classes of human beings, clones and non-clones, the former providing vital organs for the latter. The chapter argues that this system of exploitation rests on the frame of the subhuman that is forced upon the precarious clones to legitimise their commodification and lawful murders. The frame produces invisibility and a derealisation of loss which makes the clones’ deaths ungrievable. However, Kathy H.’s elegiac narrative works towards a restoration of grievability by reinstating the reality of irreversible loss and by singularising those who are regarded as disposable and substitutable commodities. Kathy’s narrative makes the clones recognisably human by rescuing them from a materialist conception of substitutability and by immersing them in an ethical form of substitutability that proclaims their singularity within the common frame of the recognisably human. Their eviscerated bodies thus become the quintessence of human grievable vulnerability.
