Bare Life in the Digital Age: Homo Sacer, Necropolitics, and Algorithmic Control in the Selected Contemporary Fiction
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In the age of surveillance capitalism, distinctions between biological life and digital data have become profoundly blurred in ways that fundamentally reshape human agency and sovereignty. Whereas corporate algorithms and platform monopolies are influencing social and individual behaviour on an unprecedented scale, the conventional definitions of political exclusion need to be revisited. This article engages with this status quo by analysing Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro, 2021), Dave Eggers’s The Every (Eggers, 2021), and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (Egan, 2022) through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of Homo Sacer and "bare life." By synthesising Agamben's framework with Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Shoshana Zuboff’s critique of the digital economy, the study argues that these narratives depict a new “state of exception.” In this digital paradigm, sovereign power is outsourced to technological infrastructures, rendering human and non-human subjects into disposable data points. The analysis shows that these works move beyond dystopian speculation and expose how algorithmic governance and the “psychopolitics" of self-optimisation operate as contemporary biopolitical camps. In the end, the paper argues that these novels modulate bare life’s migration from a bodily camp to a digital code. Keywords: Algorithmic Governance; Digital Humanities; Necropolitics; Surveillance Capitalism; Kazuo Ishiguro DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3201-10
Institution: Payame Noor University
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $300
OpenAlex ID: W7138160076
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