Nieśmiertelność i kapitalizm. Geo-logia symptomów Ziemi w marsjańskim biopolis Kima Stanleya Robinsona

In his narrative para-discourse, the author of the meta-fictional Mars trilogy problematizes the political sphere of the Martian experiment, but avoids ideological answers. He adopts an opportunist post-political strategy typical of the Western “society of risk.” This obscurantist camouflage is supported by a classical interpretation of F. Jameson’s cycle. The article argues with Jameson’s theses at every point in which the narration is explained by the postmodern mechanism of cultural logic stemming from late capitalism. Another key to the three novels might be the poetics of suspicion, seeking symptomatic traces carefully hidden in the structure, narration, parallelisms of cyclicality and word-formative lexis. Just to add – the traces of the ousted modernist politicalness. This quasi-political core of the text I call a metatextual “Geo-logical” utopia. With every rapid turn of events, Robinson eliminates the possibility of a communist occurrence with a narrative catastrophe. But by halting the world-creating emancipation, he schizophrenically criticizes the exploitative heritage of the Earth. History, however, repeats itself, and in the "first one hundred" of the colonists, Agambenian homo sacer finds a literary inversion of sacrity and curse. The definition of sovereignty is reformulated: an immortal man must be killed with impunity for the very reason that he is immortal.RAFAŁ SZCZERBAKIEWICZ – dr hab., magisterium z kina Stanleya Kubicka, doktorat z eseistyki Jana Kotta. Autor monografii o Janie Parandowskim. Pracuje w Zakładzie Literatury Współczesnej IFP UMCS w Lublinie. Kieruje polonistycznymi studiami doktoranckimi na UMCS. Publikował m.in. w „Tekstach drugich”, „Pamiętniku literackim”, w licznych monografiach. Interesują go gatunki pograniczne w literaturze XX-wieku, mit śródziemnomorski w kulturze nowoczesnej, literatura wobec ideologii, literatura i nowe media, literatura fantastyczna ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem science-fiction.20521