This chapter argues for the importance of posthumanist thought to remaking subjectivity and agency in ways that can respond to the crisis of the real subsumption of life by capital. It takes up the figure of the immortal vessel in a new way. It considers texts that reorient the ideal of immorality to express a surplus of vitality rather than just the extension of life, rooted in life’s capacity to exceed how capital engineers and constrains life. Drawing on the posthumanist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook, and especially on the materialist political theory of Samantha Frost, it shows how these texts demonstrate posthuman possibilities for renewal. Rather than lamenting the precarity of life in a context in which the dispositif of liberal humanism is no longer sufficient shield against capital, these works offer in its place another imaginary of life and of multispecies personhood. Anne Charnock’s A Calculated Life shows that even engineered, synthetic life has a vitality beyond what is designed. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy reorients how we understand massive ecological change, changing a tale of disastrous ending into one of emergent beginning.

Humans are the first species to be conscious of their own transforming of the Earth system. This has entailed a paradoxical doubling of the human into anthropos (humanity as a blind geological force) and homo (humans as self-conscious, rational actors). Anthropocene stories pivot on anagnorisis – moments of self-recognition in which homo and anthropos become identified with each other. In most Anthropocene stories, humans attempt to resolve this paradox either by wielding geological power consciously or by renouncing mastery and receding into earthly forces. This chapter examines how Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy seeks to keep the underlying paradox in suspension. Humans are confronted with an alien entity which embodies the geological force of anthropos, but they seek, nonetheless, to make sense of their fate. The novels thus reflect on a central task of literary writing in the Anthropocene: how to (re-)compose the human.