Destiny of Empire : Biopolitical Empire in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine represents the biopower of the Victorian British empire and new perspective beyond the empire, shedding light on biopolitical transformation which becomes possible through the productivity of the immaterial values such as gender, sexuality, race, and family.
To understand the era of empire in Cloud Nine, this paper presents two kinds of empires. One empire in Act One is for being and identity and is to reproduce biopower. The other empire in Act Two is for becoming and singularity and is to resist biopower. The characters in Act One put themselves under Clive’s biopower without knowing they are oppressed. The oppressive power itself in the society of control brings crisis. As crisis is a journey of transformation, the population implements biopolitical transformation metamorphosing from paranoiac machines to the schizophrenic. Rupture and renewal bring the movement of biopolitics. In Act Two, more energy comes from the singularity. This new form of energy is divine and produces pleasure (potenza) of life. In Cloud Nine biopolitics is linked to an open/new gender network. The metamorphosis from identity to singularity is recognized as biopolitical transformation. Biopolitics should be what enriches the productivity of singularities. The destiny of empire is to make progress from identity toward singularity and from being toward becoming. Its destiny opens a new horizon for transformations in social ontology with the productivity of immaterial values.

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