ALGORITHMIC WARFARE: A POSTHUMAN NECROPOLITICAL READING OF NADEEM ASLAM’S THE BLIND MAN’S GARDEN

Abstract

This study explores how sovereignty transcends human actors to include ecological landscapes, technological infrastructures, and textual representations as control mechanisms by analyzing posthuman necropolitical techniques in Nadeem Aslam’s (2013) The Blind Man’s Garden.This study contends that modern warfare is conducted by a dispersed network of human and non-human technologies that together produce and maintain what Mbembe (2003) refers to as “death-worlds.” This study makes the case that Aslam’s fiction depicts a posthuman necropolitical order, where governance operates in nonhuman assemblages that exclude, discipline, and eliminate subjects rather than being limited to human decision-making. This connects Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics with Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism. The article’s conclusion states that mapping the horrifying porosity between life and death in contemporary combat zones is Aslam’s literary endeavor. The Blind Man’s Garden is a critical literary intervention for comprehending the operational and ethical complexities of warfare in the twenty-first century because it challenges purely anthropocentric understandings of war by demonstrating how necropower is enacted through ecological, technological, and discursive systems.