MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things

This essay considers the ethical dimensions of Atwood’s recent speculative fiction, the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–14), alongside a framework that Nikolas Rose, Sunder Rajan, and others term as biocapitalism. The trilogy imagines the social, cultural, affective, and ecological implications of the convergence of capitalism and biotechnology. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the fantasy of human independence and invulnerability central to neoliberalism and biocapitalism is depicted at its devastating endgame, in which the unbridled commodification of life has resulted in its near annihilation. Atwood’s novels suggest that we ignore interdependence, affectivity, and responsibility to our peril, evoking a posthumanist perspective in the dramatization of a catastrophic anthropocentrism that regards organic matter – the world’s flora and fauna, the human body’s cellular data – as marketable, utilitarian objects.