| Summary: | 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.
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