Disciplining Biopolitical Subjectivity through Prosthetic Affective Memory in Never Let Me Go

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go depicts the tragic fate of clones in a dystopian society and can be read as a political novel exploring power and oppression through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory and Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective politics, this study examines how memory and emotion function as tools of control and discipline that manage clone lives and deprive them of autonomy. Pain and love, instead of helping them understand or challenge their fate, are manufactured emotional bonds among clones; implanted memories thus become tools that soften the reality of their exploitation. This mechanism not only legitimizes oppression but also masks its inhumanity through sentiment and aesthetics, allowing biopolitical violence to operate covertly and deepening the clones’ self-alienation under bare life.

Keywords

• Never Let Me Go
• Prosthetic Memory
• Affective Politics
• Biopolitics
• Alienation

References

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