This chapter addresses discourses of self-optimization and especially pharmo-chemical reconfigurations of life. Drawing on anthropological critiques of clinical drug trials and the economic hegemony of chemical corporations that Kaushik Sunder Rajan calls pharmocracy, this chapter thinks through how health and profit intersect in these industries, and what this nexus means for concepts of sociality and governance. It reads three speculative texts: Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous makes visible the ongoing production of inequality through the uneven distribution of pharmaceuticals, for both treatment and for enhancement; Sue Burke’s Semiosis envisions a new kind of society made possible through a posthumanist ethos that engages other species, including plants, through rubrics of collaborative survival instead of accumulative appropriation; and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle contrasts Western and Indigenous epistemologies and scientific practices in a tale about a biochemical company and a catastrophic chemical spill. Each suggest ways to optimize the social vitality of life rather than its economic productivity, and the hopeful communities they propose demonstrate how a posthumanist dispositif of personhood enables this new orientation toward life and the living.

This chapter thinks through the transnational market in organ transplantation, an industry that has many economic and geographic parallels with the fertility industry. I demonstrate how it, too, is implicated in a racialized production of the human and the channeling of vitality toward lives deemed more valuable in a global organ economy. The chapter analyzes two recent novels that extend this precarious condition more widely, to argue that this generalized vulnerability to becoming commodified is central to why the liberal humanist dispositif is not only historically compromised but also contemporarily ineffective. Both Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit are premised on an expansion of the category of disposable life that is at root an economic assessment of the contribution that life can make. These novels reiterate and draw our attention to how the real subsumption of life by capital, as shaped by the transplantation industry, is rewriting how we value life in contexts that extend far beyond the lives of organ donors and recipients.

This chapter shows how the pervasive commodification of living tissue in biomedicine intensifies a neoliberal hegemony that encourages us to value all life in strictly economic metrics. Drawing on Hannah Landecker’s work on how cell cultures enabled the separation of living tissues from organisms, this chapter examines texts that narrate the experience of those whose bodies are targeted for extraction of vitality. Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves are both set in a future in which disenfranchised people have nothing beyond their biology to bring to market. Dibbell’s novel concerns clones and it deconstructs reactionary discourse that valorize the “natural,” showing how a fixed and unchanging notion of proper humanity reinscribes racialized divisions into valued and dispossessed classes of people. Dimaline’s novel literalizes the extraction of vitality in a grim future where the settler colonial state harvests bone marrow from indigenous peoples. Finally, Claire North’s 84K envisions a future UK in which all governance has been replaced by actuarial metrics, entirely displacing ethical and legal systems that adjudicate questions of justice with an accounting of financial gains and losses.

The Introduction explains how and why our contemporary context prompts the reinvention of life as conceptualized by Western metaphysics. It theorizes why biopolitical governance should be understood as the real subsumption of life by capital and argues for the importance of speculative fiction as a cultural mode that reflects upon and responds to how biotechnology is remaking life, conceptually and materially. The Introduction argues that we need a new dispositif of personhood that must necessarily be attentive to issues of colonialism and race. Taking up work by Sylvia Wynter, the chapter connects it to Foucault’s discussions of Homo economicus. It concludes by suggesting that the contemporary world can be characterized as a condition of epivitality, the prefix signifying “over, around, and outside of” and thus signaling the blurring of living beings with objectified things in biotechnology and practices of dehumanizing labor.