英文摘要 |
In Houellebecq’s most recent novel The Possibility of an Island, he once again plays with his ambivalence toward life by exposing the futility of love/ sex and for that matter death, thereby adumbrating a prolonged doomsday through a dystopic rendering of the cult of technology. But two other novels, Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, an Iranian American writer, and Hotel Western Xia by Yi-jun Luo, a Taiwanese writer, help modify this vision by laying bare what is lacking in its foundation: an impossibility to feel the Real (as defined by Lacan) or Life (as defined by Deleuze). Apocalyptical though they both seem, these two novels present dark visions with hints of potential redemption. In approximating the doomsday prophecy even further because of their having had direct contact with the Real or Life, that raw force which underlies human existence, they both have arrived at the realization of the need to re-negotiate the Symbolic and the Real, the human and the nonhuman. Only an active engagement with the Real or Life can lead us away from a thorough nihilism or for that matter complete destruction of the world we have been living in, imperfect as it is. |