Abstract
The chapter explores the little robotic bee of science/fiction as a figuration of uncannimedia (Botting in Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics. Routledge, New York, pp. 17–34, 2015), which in our digital age accentuates the phenomenon of haunting, as well as channels the Anthropocene anxieties, as it questions politics between humans, other animals, and the environment. The uncanniness of the robotic bee, from Ernst Jünger’s The Glass Bees (1957) to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2016), manifests not simply as an ambiguity between life and death, organism and machine, but inflects towards biopolitical decisions on life and death, in Foucault’s sense of making distinctions between lives that should be ‘made live’ and those that can be ‘let die’ (2003). In this biopolitical inflection, the robotic bee registers a haunting by its organic counterpart that will have been extinct in the future due to human mismanagement, as well as a capture of the swarm affects for the purpose of drone thanatopolitics.
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Cettl, F. (2020). ‘Encircled by Minute, Evilly-Intentioned Airplanes’: The Uncanny Biopolitics of Robotic Bees. In: Heholt, R., Edmundson, M. (eds) Gothic Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_12
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