BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRIC MESSIANISM: BRAIDOTTIAN POSTHUMANISM AND ETHICS OF HOPE IN DUNE, DUNE MESSIAH, AND CHILDREN OF DUNE

Abstract [English]

The Dune trilogy builds up a long-term argument against anthropocentric messianism, revealing the ways in which heroic exceptionalism and charismatic leadership are construed as tools of ecological and political subjugation instead of liberation. This paper builds on the concept of critical posthumanism, particularly the description by Rosi Braidotti of relational and embedded subjectivity and an affirmative ethics based on transversal horizons of hope, to re-read Paul Atreides and Leto II as experimental spaces of imagining non-anthropocentric futures. The analysis follows the progress of the shift in the trilogy, from the idea of a redemptive human messiah to more and more uncomfortable forms of posthuman rule, ecological entrapment, and group insecurity, by a comparative close reading of Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune. It suggests that even though the jihad of Paul dramatizes the disastrous results of investing planetary change upon a singular and unique subject, the spice, the long reign of Leto II reconfigures messiahhood as an ambivalent posthuman guardianship terminating human and nonhuman life into a precarious, coercive life of survival. Through this tragectory the trilogy slowly replaces anthropocentric salvation with the posthuman ethics of sustainability, a non-redemptive and a non-innocent hope. Here, futures now open not by a utopian fulfillment but by bargaining of common precarity. The article reframes Dune as a warning on the dangerousness of charismatic leaders but also as a future laboratory of posthuman imaginaries and political ecology in science fiction studies through foregrounding of these dynamics.