도래한 미래 속 포스트휴먼의 몸부림과 역사의 메아리 - 왕진캉(王晉康)의 ｢아담회귀(亞當回歸)｣ 다시 읽기 = The Struggle of the Posthuman and the Echoes of History in an Arrived Future: Re-reading Wang Jinkang’s “Adam’s Return”

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines how early 1990s Chinese science fiction explored new value systems and modes of human existence through a close textual analysis of Wang Jinkang’s representative early work, Adam’s Return. It critically reassesses the limitations of previous scholarship, which has tended to interpret the text either as a work of root-seeking literature or exclusively through the lens of posthumanism, and instead proposes an integrated reading that foregrounds the intersections and tensions among Confucian ethics, historical consciousness, and posthuman discourse. To this end, Chen Renjie is interpreted as a “human” subject who resists technological civilization through an ethical commitment to humanity, Shirley as a “transhuman” figure embodying technological progress, and Wang Adam as a “posthuman” subject who bears the historical and emotional resonances that emerge between these two positions. Although Wang Adam becomes a New Human through the implantation of the Second Intelligence, he continues to resonate with the historical echoes of Xiaowu and Yiling, thereby persistently destabilizing the boundary between the human and the transhuman. This study further argues that Wang Adam’s emotional struggles can be productively understood in relation to N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of the embodied posthuman. In doing so, it demonstrates that Adam’s Return does not simply celebrate the irreversible advancement of technological civilization but rather reconfigures human emotions, ethics, and memory in new forms without abandoning them altogether. Furthermore, by proposing the possibility of reading the text as a cultural allegory of the rapid marketization and restructuring of values in 1990s China, this article elucidates how Chinese science fiction of the period reflected upon conflicts of value and the reconstruction of a distinctively Chinese cultural identity.