Caring, Dwelling, Being: The Phenomenology of Vulnerability in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

In spite of the ancillary role that Ishiguro claims to assign to genre as instrumental to emplotment, scholars have tended to prioritise the scientific and dystopian mould of Never Let Me Go, as a consequence of the urgent biosocial and bioethical issues the novel raises. Unsurprisingly, the biopolitical theories of Foucault, Agamben and Butler have appeared in these analyses as instruments for probing into Ishiguro’s sense of humanity and humaneness in a post-human world. The first objective of this essay is to further such investigations, by placing them within a wider phenomenological frame that may lead us to appreciate different dimensions of vulnerability in the novel. The second objective is to relate the question of vulnerability to the spaces the protagonists inhabit. In a phenomenological approach which conceives the subject as Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, and space as lived experience, the issue of spatial relations seems unavoidable and can help us clarify the seemingly contradictory quality of places which, like Hailsham, can be intimate and dehumanising at the same time. What should be made of such contradictions and complexities, and how they intertwine with the existential, the biopolitical and the ethical dimensions are the main problems under scrutiny in this essay.