The Predicament of Hybridity in The Body

This paper explores the both generative and mechanistic aspects of biotechnological advances in relation to the human body in Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Body, with particular reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptions of the body and assemblage. The protagonist Adam, in his mid-sixties, metamorphoses into a new body by transplanting his brain into a young and beautiful corpse. Adam’s transformation appears to enhance Adam’s power, by means of an assemblage of self and the Other. However, this hybrid instead repeats and intensifies a system of desire as a lack inherent in the principles of capitalism and colonialism in which those in positions of power consume the bodies of the Other. In spite of the negative vision of a hybrid pushed by advances in technology, Adam, as a new body, experiences the process of “becoming-other” and “aging” from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari. This should be distinguished from Homi Bhabha’s notion of “in-betweenness” which implies a space between self and the Other premised on “incommunitibility.” It is my central contention here that Deleuze’s assertions of “becoming-other” and “aging” provide us with interactive transformations between self and the Other, the body and the mind, the living and the dead over time, thus offering a site of the potential of the body which Bhabha’s approach does not allow.