Joyce's reductionist discourse as a principle for forming reality in Viktor Pelevin's novel Transhumanism Inc

The article examines the patterns of transformation of the idea of personalism in the XX century, which led to the evolution of the philosophies of transhumanism and posthumanism in the XX and the XXI centuries. The subject of the study is the change of the social status of reality in the early XX century, at the time of James Joyce, into the intracerebral obsession of the person of the future, into “Homo overclocked”, as an episode of philosophical mindset, as well as the impact of this conception on the subsequent logic of reality in literature. The purpose of the article is to discuss the degree of influence of Joyce’s reductionist discourse on the formation of reality in Viktor Pelevin’s novel TRANSHUMANISM INC. To achieve the goal we solve the following tasks: 1) to use Joyce’s reception of Shakespeare and Pelevin’s processing of this reception in order to show how the problem of the crisis of humanism was perceived not just as a problem of a general cultural decline, but as a way to search for a new paradigm of human, not reducible to the previous humanistic paradigm; 2) to use Pelevin’s reception of Joyce’s specific reductionist discourse as an experimental one, reducing a person to functions, in order to prove that Joyce’s anthropology, in which the human personality is multiple and combined, turned into modern multiple reality, including virtual and programmable ones; 3) to show how Pelevin’s reduction of Joyce’s epiphany, its algorithmization in the framework of postmodern writing strategies, modifies alternative personalities into depersonalized subjects and “Homo overclocked”. The research methodology included the comparative method, the cultural historical contextualization, and discourse analysis, which allow us to prove Joyce’s reductionist discourse to be the key tool for forming Pelevin’s post-humanistic perspective of multiple subjectivity.