Bodies in Space: Intensity, Representation, and the Posthuman in Tom McCarthy’s "The Making of Incarnation"

Abstract

The present paper aims to problematize the issues of representation and accessing reality in The Making of Incarnation, the latest novel by Tom McCarthy, a prominent contemporary British writer. An engagement with 
contemporary theoretical discourses is made through the lenses of both posthumanism and poststructuralism. Through an analysis of Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard’s post-structuralist philosophy, I aim to present the manner in which reality can be accessed precisely through representation and artificiality, and not by inventing manners of bypassing the latter. This feat is possible, as the aforementioned authors’ theory states, owing to the particular nature of representation which entails intensity and energy as a potential of encountering the real. 
Additionally, by bringing into discussion Land’s more contemporary notion of accelerationism, this paper argues that representation and intensity are only available in a posthuman environment which sidelines the primacy of the human subject. At the core of this essay lies the argument that 
all of the previous theoretical aspects can be shown to be quintessential in McCarthy’s novel. The latter, I will argue, initially presents the struggles of encountering unmediated reality, to then gradually affirm the potential of representation in and of itself, and then finally to reach the powerful and tantalizing conclusion that the only possible environment which may facilitate such an access of noumenal reality is one which precludes the human altogether, centralizing instead the machinic and technological.