Collapse of human sovereignty in Laszlo Kransznahorkai’s novel war and war

Abstract

This study examines the collapse of human sovereignty due to human dependency on machines in Kransznahorkai’s novel War and War. This paper claims the degeneration of anthropocentrism and the rise of machine-controlled sovereignty due to the influences of externally cloud-stored information. Designed on the qualitative research approach, it applies Nancy Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway’s posthumanism to analyze and interpret the way the world is shifting from anthropocentric values to digital influence. The analysis deduces that experiences of war and disorder are recurrent. An AI-ruled social and psychological environment generates its human mental collapse. Linguistic fragmentation, temporal collision, and a dehumanizing world discover a manuscript which the main character plans to transcribe into the archive. The ultimate mission is to save the manuscript. So, he imagines his movement to New York as a center in which to transcribe the work in the archive for immortality. The craving of the main character Gyorgi Korin’s to save the manuscript to cloud space is to let the public know that war, disorder, and moral crisis are recurrent in the world. Thus, this study infers the shifting value of humans oscillating from a human-centric world to a machine-ruled world Reliance on machines weakens human intelligence and ultimately takes control over them.