YONI REI: CONSTRUCTION AND DESTRUCTION OF A POSTHUMAN BODY

Abstract

In his fiction, the Mexican writer Pepe Rojo presents the most anguished visions of a world that moves into the liquid modernity (Bauman, 2003), which also represent the implications of the posthuman bodies (Braidotti, 1996; Ferrando, 2014). Considering this, this paper will discuss “Conversaciones con Yoni Rei” [Conversations with Yoni Rei] (1998). There, Rojo develops the implications of a society in which have been transcended both the modern limitations and the ethical restrictions, as Bauman proposes as characteristics of a liquid modernity. In this text, the depiction of Yoni Rei starts in his embryonic stage, when he is sold to a big transnational corporation that modifies his body, producing a failed experimental cyborg. But also, the story presents the moment of success when the character becomes a monstrous celebrity; he is the target of a spectacularized society, à la Debord (1967), which has a high need for violence as entertainment. In this article, I hypothesize that Rojo´s fiction expresses the way in which the body becomes the intersection of generalized violence (technological, corporative, social violence, and self-infringed violence) in the posthuman world: he is a man who acts in alliance with science against his own body; while he tries to put in a crisis his identity; through his construction-deconstruction of his own posthuman body, paradoxically, he is humanized.