Sleeves of Death: Thanatopolitics and Disposable Bodies in Altered Carbon

This paper explores a critical examination of thanatopolitics, necropolitics and posthumanism in Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002), especially the devaluation and disposal of bodies in a highly technologically advanced yet morally rendered society. In the novel, consciousness is made digital and stored in stacks and bodies, often referred to as “sleeves” that turned into replaceable commodities. This extreme separation of oneself from the body produces a new kind of biopolitical control through which capital and social class determine access to immortality. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's theory of Necropolitics, this research examines how the state and corporate elites exert control over death, thereby leveraging the bodies of the disenfranchised as scenes of violence, labour and surveillance. Through characters like Takeshi Kovacs- death-row inmate and Elizabeth Elliot, the novel reveals a dystopia where the poor are trapped in endless resurrection and exploitation while the wealthy transcend corporeal mortality. The paper uses theories to examine how digital immortality reiterates neoliberal hierarchies and intensifies the reach of surveillance capitalism. Transformation revealing the inevitable intersection of technology, power and death in the posthuman world, Altered Carbon comes to be a speculative critique of techno-utopian hope. The political and ethical frameworks of digital disembodiment are questioned in this research alongside a paradigm of physical disposability in contemporary life and speculative fiction.