The Posthuman as a Hopeful Monster: “Geneticizing” the Fly-Human Hybrid in David Cronenberg’s The Fly

Even though posthuman themes abound in fiction, they often rely on representational practices tied to humanist worldviews, perpetuating assumptions about the meaning of being human and humankind’s relationship with its environment. This article discusses the artist’s book Not-Human, Not-Fly (NHNF), which reconsiders David Cronenberg’s The Fly from a critical posthumanist perspective. Tied to horror conventions, the film reduces the posthuman to a condition threatening human life and well-being. NHNF employs tools from molecular genetics, designing a fictional database of the creature’s genes based on human and housefly genetic information. The hybrid genetic material rewrites the film’s narrative, revealing the “postfly” condition of the “posthuman” character and bringing its posthuman content to the fore by disentangling it from humanist representational conventions. This transdisciplinary approach challenges the film’s hierarchies of being, its portrayal of the housefly as a contaminant of the human genome’s purity, and unsettles assumptions concerning the ontological separation of humans, nonhumans, and posthumans. Thus, this work delineates one possible formal approach to representation of the posthuman via reframing through genetics. Moreover, it identifies connections between contemporary genetics and posthumanist thinking that validate posthumanism’s decentralization from the human, providing a nonanthropocentric interpretation of human and nonhuman subjects and subjectivities.