Abstract
This chapter studies the confusion of the protagonist in 1984 when he finds O’Brien at the Ministry of Love and the state of disbelief that prevents him from associating him with the pain he feels at the hands of his (tor)mentor. The revelation of the truth, as it unfolds during the interrogation process, is just as painful as it unveils a post-human dimension hitherto unsuspected by Winston. As questions and answers become blurred, the process drains the two characters of their humanity. This chapter analyzes the discursive and performative dehumanization of truth in 1984 against the backdrop of the ambivalent role of the intellectual in Oceanian society.
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Notes
- 1.
The phrase is borrowed from Slotkin 2017.
- 2.
- 3.
In his book Why I Write (2004), he wrote “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
- 4.
The American philosopher and biologist, Donna Haraway who approaches the posthuman condition from the standpoint of materialistic feminism entrenched in Anglo-Saxon culture, also bases her critique of traditional humanism on the latter’s residual essentialist traces which oppose an original human nature to an artificial environment (IA being a case in point) which is seen as being as destructive or at best corruptive. Similarly to Cary Wolfe she considers the human body as malleable, hybrid and subject to transformation. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality”, she writes (1991, 150).
- 5.
Amy Ratelle makes the following cogent point when she writes that: “By linking animal studies to systems theory, and proposing art as a way to change traditional conceptions, he paves the way to reimagining subjectivity as something not exclusively human. Wolfe ultimately answers ‘what is posthumanism?’ not by looking back at what it has been historically, but at what it could be if cultural artifacts were produced by those no longer invested in maintaining human superiority”.
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I am fully aware that my reference to Onfray’s work is likely to raise other issues that cannot be discussed within the framework of this article. One is his critical stance vis- a- vis theoretical constructs and his inclination toward empirical conclusions, and the second is his reticence to the Maastricht treaty, constitutive of the European Union.
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Bouhlila, S. (2021). The Evil Gaze of the State and the PostHuman Interrogator in 1984. In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_21
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