Posthumanism is the key to interpreting the twenty-first century and represents an international research program on the relationship with technology and the biosphere and new forms of citizenship and identity. This book clarifies the common denominators that differentiate posthumanism from other proposals.

As the most prominent initiative in the open education movement, the Massive Open Online Course is often claimed to disrupt established educational models through the use of innovative technologies that overcome geographic and economic barriers to higher education. However, this paper suggests that the MOOC project, as a typical example of initiatives in this field, fails to engage with a theory of the subject. As such, uncritical and problematic forms of humanism tend to be assumed in the promotion and delivery (...) of these courses: the expectation of rational and self-directing individuals, with a universal desire for education. This fundamental orthodoxy limits both the understanding of technology and the possibilities for a concept of ‘openness’ in education. Given the global scale of the MOOC, and its high-profile associations with elite universities, the need for critical alternatives is pressing. In this paper I draw on critical posthumanism—an umbrella term for a range of philosophical and theoretical positions—for two purposes. Firstly and principally as a perspective through which to critique the educational reliance on humanism that is maintained in the project of the MOOC, and secondly to suggest alternative frameworks for thinking about the intermingling of humans and technologies in education. Space and time are considered as the two principal sites with which technological change is realised, and the promotion of the MOOC is shown to mask spatial and temporal conditions through adherence to an underlying humanist framework. (shrink)

I argue that one of the centralaspects characterizing the philosophicalhorizon at the threshhold of the twentieth andtwenty-first centuries is the erosion of thehumanist idea, i.e. `posthumanism''. Russianreligious philosophy is pervaded byconsiderations of humanism and posthumanism(antihumanism). The latter ascribes centralsignificance to the category of `Godmanhood''with which the leading Russian philosophersopposed the Nietzschean category of theOverman. But all of Germany philosophy can bereproached for having forsaken man. The`posthumanist'' narrative about man and God isan extreme, indeed pathological symptom ofphilosophy waiting for (...) Embodiment. (shrink)

Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel technological developments for augmenting human bodies, we remain – fundamentally – persons. Humans, as persons, are constitutively embedded in and scaffolded by the material, social, semantic and cultural (...) niches they have constructed for themselves. An ‘ethopolitical’ response to our present that recognizes this fact not only requires us to engage with the consequences of making lives in the unequal niches that restrict and stunt the personhood of so many human beings at present, but also requires us to broaden the bandwidth of those who are recognized fully as persons. In our conclusion we briefly develop the theme that this emphasis on personhood can be seen as a vitalist – rather than a humanist – stance. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of (...) the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

This essay aims to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term “posthumanism” itself. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to render the face of the human unknowable to itself, then to what extent does the human that re-names itself “posthuman” (...) do so in order to lay claim once again to a dubious self-knowledge? The rhetoric of posthumanism, moreover, implies a progressive narrative that ironically mirrors the Enlightenment principles of perfectibility that it would oppose. Drawing from Derrida’s notion of the “democracy to come,” I argue that the advent of the posthuman must always remain deferred. Just as the promise of democracy remains unfulfilled, the posthuman must infinitely postdate its arrival in any present. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a posthumanist reading of knowledge in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan from four interconnected aspects. First, knowledge is inseparable from practice, as is exemplified in Lacan’s original rewriting of Zhuangzi’s ‘agreement between name and actuality’ as the dialectic relationship between Other and other. Then, knowledge leads us to explore the mysterious knowledge behind the surface, which resists linguistic expression and defies human agency. Furthermore, the importance of the mysterious knowledge compels us to figure out the accesses to reach (...) this unknown territory. Finally, the availability of the opaque knowledge, in a circular form, returns to the beginning question albeit on a more advanced level: the methods of putting the unknown knowledge into practice. Apart from these four logical aspects, the new perspective of posthumanism enables us to go beyond anthropocentric understanding of knowledge and bracket it within a broad framework of cross-species becoming. (shrink)

Posthumanism is one of the well-known and significant concepts in the present day. It impacted numerous contemporary fields like philosophy, literary theories, art, and culture for the last few decades. The movement has been concentrated around the technological development of present days due to industrial advancement in society and the current proliferated daily usage of technology. Posthumanism indicated a deconstruction of our radical conception of ‘human’, and it further shifts our societal value alignment system to a novel dimension. (...) The majority of our population is getting deeply involved in virtual reality in daily life. Sooner or later, we shall get a different conception of ‘biological human being’ through the advancement of artificial intelligence technology. If an automated artificial system could replace the human brain and repair any physical loss of our biological body, it will certainly become a journey towards immortality for scientists. However, we must analyze whether posthumanism will consider ‘hybrid human beings’ as moral agents, similar to biological humans. This is why, in the future, the relation between biological human beings and posthumans will play an active role in designing artificial moral agents. Whether the future posthumans would overpower biological humanity or both of them would work as peers to form a digital utopian society and create new dimensions of rationality is still a case of anticipation. Our aim in this paper is to critically analyze the authenticity of the posthuman cyborg as an agent, their relations with humans and the emergence of ‘AI ethics’. (shrink)

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.

One of the most influential recent developments in supposedly radical philosophy is ‘posthumanism’. This can be seen as the successor to ‘deconstructive postmodernism’. In each case, the claim of its proponents has been that cultures are oppressive by virtue of their elitism, and this elitism, fostered by the humanities, is being challenged. In each case, however, these philosophical ideas have served ruling elites by crippling opposition to their efforts to impose markets, concentrate wealth and power and treat everyone and (...) everything as mere instruments in a way that is not only undermining democracy and threatening economic, social and political stability through growing inequality, but is crippling efforts to deal with the global ecological crisis. Philosophers, Nietzsche claimed, are physicians of culture. Why should people claiming to be philosophers, or at least aligned with philosophers, subvert their own calling? In this paper I will suggest that with the expansion of education and the rise of neoliberalism, those involved in education and research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have been proletarianized, and most have accepted this proletarianization. They have been reduced to a fraction of the proletariat - wage-slaves without economic security and therefore dependent on the will of others on whom they are dependent. They are not ordinary wage-slaves, however, but wage-house-slaves, having salaries rather than wages. If, as Marx argued, social being determines consciousness, posthumanism can be understood as the expression of ressentiment of these house-slaves at their condition while simultaneously serving to affirm their superiority to field-slaves while serving their masters. Their work is supported because it provides ideological cover for their masters, the new transnational managerial class or corporatocracy as they expand their power through information technology, while absolving this corporatocracy from responsibility for the consequences of their growing power. In making this claim I will argue that the real target of deconstructionists and posthumanists, although this is now seldom appreciated, has been the humanism of the New Left, a revival of the Radical Enlightenment inspired by Renaissance civic humanism and the German Renaissance. (shrink)

In this article, we aimed to evaluate the utility of critical posthumanism for nurses interested in planetary health—a growing area of study that requires a decentering of the human, and environmental justice considerations. We used Chinn and colleagues' method to describe and critically reflect on critical posthumanism, extending the theory analysis method to include a wide range of academic and video sources. We found that critical posthumanism is like a double‐edged sword: It provides a lens through which (...) to transcend human‐centric approaches to healthcare but is marred by its lack of clarity and inaccessibility. We argue critical posthumanism can be adapted to enhance its potential at the intersection of nursing and planetary health. An analysis of critical posthumanism is followed by a discussion framed by five ways of knowing in nursing, highlighting real‐world examples of how critical posthumanism can aid nurses in dealing with planetary health concerns. By exploring the intersections of critical posthumanism with nursing knowledge, we demonstrate how critical posthumanism can enable nurses to comprehend and tackle environmental issues intricately linked to human health. (shrink)

What is posthumanism and why does it matter? This book offers an introduction to the ways in which humanism's belief in the natural supremacy of the Family of Man has been called into question at different moments and from different theoretical positions. What is the relationship between posthumanism and technology? Can posthumanism have a politics—postcolonial or feminist? Are postmodernism and poststructuralism posthumanist? What happens when critical theory meets Hollywood cinema? What links posthumanism to science fiction. (...) class='Hi'>Posthumanism addresses these and other questions in an attempt to come to terms with one of the most pressing issues facing contemporary society. (shrink)

Performed not only within the interdisciplinary field of gender studies, feminist pedagogy since the 1980s has drawn attention to the significance of power differentials (gender, race, class, etc.), one’s location, and diversity of personal experience as crucial factors weaved into the practices of teaching, education, and knowledge production in general. Contemporary feminist theory has put a special emphasis on the redefinition of matter as agential, non-inert, and always already entangled with meaning1 on the one hand, and on the importance of (...) doing away with the central position of the human subject while simultaneously focusing on the relations between human and nonhuman (both organic and inorganic), on the other. This repudiation of anthropocentrism constitutes one of the main premises of feminist posthumanism, where the emergence of subjects and objects is always already intertwined with meaning and knowledge production as well as their ethical implications.3 In this regard, it is worth asking what potentials may arise through thinking the course of life (implied in the idea of currere), the subject of which is not only nonhuman, but also forms the imploded knot of the living and non-living. Despite a great volume of feminist scholarship dealing with the question of non-anthropocentric ethics and the nonhuman, one may still be tempted to ask how all of this theorizing matters for nonhumans who are also “big like us” (Hird, 2009, p. 21); how it may affect the situation of actual nonhuman animals, the lives of whom, more often than not, appear today as “bare life” in the Agambenian sense? The inquiry is neither new nor easy to respond to. (shrink)

What is the relation between mimesis and posthumanism? And why should these seemingly antagonistic concepts be joined in a volume opening up a new branch of posthuman studies titled Mimetic Posthumanism? After the plurality of innovative qualifications that, since the twilight of the twentieth century, have been giving critical and creative specificity to the posthuman turn, rendering posthumanism "critical" and "speculative," "philosophical" and "ecological," among other future-oriented perspectives, adding "mimetic" to the list of qualifications may initially sound (...) disappointing. Skeptics might wonder: What now? Is the posthuman turn so deprived of originality that it now returns to the old humanistic notion of "mimesis," traditionally restricted to all-too-human forms of artistic representation? This first impression is partially justified. At first sight, what we group under the rubric of mimetic posthumanism appears to look in two diametrically opposed directions: the mimetic side looks back to the past origins of aesthetic and philosophical theories attentive to the ways humans are uniquely endowed with a capacity to copy, represent and, in this restricted sense, imitate the world; the posthuman side looks ahead to technological developments that go beyond the human and are characterized by posthumanist difference rather than humanistic sameness, innovation instead of repetition, creativity and originality rather than copying or imitation. Given the long shadow mimesis casts on the very idea of technological innovation that drives posthuman studies, mimetic posthumanism might thus not only seem deprived of originality, it may also appear to generate a performative contradiction that a genealogy of philosophers informing posthuman studies has long trained us to critique, unmask, and deconstruct. And yet, precisely if we adopt genealogical lenses, the opposition between mimesis and posthumanism reveals itself to be less stable than it appears to be, generating mirroring inversions of perspective that open up new possibilities for alternative reconstructions. Convoking the ancient philosophical and aesthetic concept of "mimēsis" should at least remind thinkers of the posthuman that first appearances tend to be deceiving. A second look, in fact, shows that if the two perspectives look in opposed directions, they can be joined to compose a Janus-faced conceptual figure. As we shall see, a plurality of posthuman figurations, configurations, or, better still, transfigurations open up creative, strikingly metamorphic, and even original directions of inquiry to further a "mimetic turn or re-turn to mimesis" in the twenty-first century. After all, the same genealogists that paved the way for the supplementary "post" that now destabilizes the anthropocentric concept of the "human," rendering it "posthuman," started by troubling the hierarchical metaphysical binaries on which humanism relied. Such binaries were often structured on much-iterated oppositions such as inside/outside, nature/culture, mind/body, self/other, male/female, dominant/subaltern, and human/nonhuman. They also rested on an idealist metaphysics that opposed the "copy" to the "original," the material "phenomenon" to the ideal "Form," the "imitation" to the "model." Despite their multiple iterations that traverse the history of western thought, ultimately, such binary oppositions rested on a dominant conception of mimesis that, at least since Plato, was predicated on the mirroring logic of the Same, a vertical mimetic logic that has long been deconstructed, overturned, and unmasked as a metaphysical fiction. In the wake of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, humans revealed themselves to be far removed from being mere debased imitations of a divine, transcendental, and ideal model posited in an imaginary world behind the world. Rather, the very idea of a divine model, ideal, or phantom turned out to be given form by all-too-human drives constitutive of our evolutionary history in general and modernist critiques of that history in particular. As a period characterized by technological innovations and accelerations, modernist thinkers were thus quick to diagnose a change in human character or subjectivity that turned the ego into a copy, simulacrum, or, to use Nietzsche's phrase, a "phantom of the ego." Over a century later, in the wake of recent developments in robotics and algorithmic reason, and especially the artificial intelligence (AI) revolutions that increasingly blur the frontier between human and artificial intelligence, it is thus tempting to repeat modernist claims on radical changes or transformations. (shrink)

This essay considers the divergent efforts of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek to arrive at a postmetaphysical conception of ethics that would sidestep the pitfalls of traditional Western humanism yet still possess universal applicability. Butler approaches this task through her ethics of precarity, which posits vulnerability as a foundation for a generalizable ethics of relationality in the Levinasian vein. Badiou and Žižek, in turn, work from a more Lacanian perspective, attempting to leap directly from the singular to the (...) universal by bypassing the particular. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, I propose that posthumanist theory needs to reconsider its resistance to a priori norms, for such norms do not need to be metaphysically grounded to be ethically compelling and politically useful. (shrink)

Towards a critical posthumanism -- Genealogy of posthumanism -- Our posthuman humanity and the multiplicity of its forms -- Posthumanism and science fiction -- Interdisciplinarity and the posthumanities -- Posthumanism, digitalization, and new media -- Posthumanity, subject, and system -- Other side of life.

This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants. Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and 'speciesist' politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution (...) with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism's roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of 'normalcy' in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself. As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper examines Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and The Sun through the lens of posthumanism. It uses the textual analysis method to analyze Ishiguro's text as a posthuman novel that depicts the posthuman society where the boundaries between what is human and the nonhuman is blurred. The basic argument is that the aim of Ishiguro's text is two-fold, while it clearly illustrates the inability of the humanoid robot to attain human consciousness, it attempts also to dismantle the anthropocentric view of (...) man. The findings show that Klara, the narrator-protagonist is used as a tool to raise certain questions such as, can humanoids act humanly? And/or can a 'humanoid machine' attain consciousness? More importantly, what it means to be human, in the first place. In doing so, the story attempts to showcase the ruptured boundaries between human and nonhuman and the changing ideas of humankind and its entanglement with the nonhuman world. Further, the interaction between Klara (AF) and other characters in the story is developed in such a way as to illustrate not only the shortcomings of humans regarding faith and affection but, more importantly, the limits of the nonhuman machine. It dismisses the current debate among technology experts that artificial intelligence would soon be able to develop a human-like robot that enjoys similar human emotional signals and reacts exactly like humans. The story simply puts it, despite the defects of humans, nothing can replace humans as those artificial friends (AI) fundamentally lack the kinds of experience that give rise to human-like affect and emotion. (shrink)

In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon goes beyond recent theoretical approaches to 'the posthuman' to argue for a concrete posthumanism, which arises as humans, animals and technology become entangled, in science, society and culture. Concrete posthumanism is rooted in cutting-edge advances in techno-science, and this book offers readers an exciting, fresh and innovative exploration of this undulating, and often unstable, terrain. With wide-ranging coverage, of cybernetics, information theory, medicine, genetics, machine learning, politics, science fiction, (...) philosophy and futurology, Mahon examines how posthumanism played-and continues to play-a crucial role in shaping how we understand our world. This analysis of posthumanism centers on human interactions with tools and technology, the centrality of science, as well as an understanding of techno-science as a pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both poison and cure. Mahon argues that posthumanism must be approached with an interdisciplinary attitude: a concrete posthumanism is only graspable through knowledge derived from science and the humanities. He concludes by sketching a 'post-humanities' to help us meet the challenges of posthumanism, challenges to which we all must rise.Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed provides a concise, detailed and coherent exploration of posthumanism, introducing key approaches, concepts and themes. It is ideal for readers of all stripes who are interested in a concrete posthumanism and require more than just a simple introduction. (shrink)

The posthumanist project proposes directing the evolution of human beings by promoting their improvement through technological means to create a variety of entities that will have few or no common...

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the “human.” This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of (...) humanism's most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called “humanists” of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human. (shrink)

This essay argues that a Christian incarnational response to posthumanism must recognize that what is at stake isn't just whether belief systems align. It seeks to relocate the interaction between the church and posthumanism to how the practices of posthumanism and Christianity perform the bodies, affections and dispositions of each. Posthuman practices seeks to habituate: (1) A preference for informational patterns over material instantiation; (2) that consciousness and the self are extended and displaced rather than discrete and (...) localized; (3) that the body is merely a tool, the original prosthesis we learn to manipulate and (4) that human life is organized such that it is seamless with intelligent machines. The Christian performance of embodied life, on the other hand, has Christ as template and, in the Eucharist, Christians are marked by offering, sacrifice and celebration in a community that affirms the integrity of our common incarnate life. (shrink)

Designed to bring the excitement of posthumanist discussions to the undergraduate classroom, this brief and accessible book makes an original argument about anthropology's legacy as a study of 'more than human.' Smart and Smart return to the holism of classic ethnographies where cattle, pigs, yams, and sorcerers were central to the lives that were narrated by anthropologists, but they extend the discussion to include contemporary issues such as microbiomes, the Anthropocene, and nano-machines, which take holism beyond locally bounded spaces. They (...) outline what a holism without boundaries could look like, and what anthropology could offer to the knowledge of more-than-human nature in the past, present, and future. (shrink)

This article argues for an alternative interpretation of the happy fish scene in The Zhuangzi: the fish are not happy. The fish undergo an unpleasant experience while the philosophers debate animatedly over the joy of the fish. The dramatization of the fish scene compels us to contemplate anthropocentrism and species communication. Moreover, the contrast between the fish-bird becoming and the subsequent human narrations reinforces the anthropocentric usurpation of nonhuman agency. To get away from anthropocentrism, Zhuangzi proposes a posthumanist approach to (...) deal with species communication in three interconnected stages: to acknowledge the limits of human cognition, to forget anthropocentric prejudice, and to de-obscure childlike innocence. (shrink)

Renaissance Posthumanism brings together two historical periods--"Renaissance" signifying a rebirth of the ancient and "Posthumanism" a death of the modern--to ponder each through the possibilities of the other. This collection rethinks the humanities under the auspices of the posthumanities of the posthumanities under the auspices of Renaissance humanism.

This article argues for a posthumanist reading of loss in Zhuangzi and Jacques Lacan. Language separates human beings from the primordial oneness and channels them into the procrustean bed of cultu...

In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality.

In recent years, calls for a new humanism have arisen from a variety of voices across the spectrum of philosophy, expressing frustration with outdated models of the human that cannot account for the richness of our social being. The postmodern deconstruction of the human now requires a reconstructive moment. In response, the author articulates a new and explicitly posthumanist humanism using the framework developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his later Marxist-Existentialist works. Sartre's unique dialectical and hermeneutical methods allow us to (...) reconceptualize the human beyond traditional dichotomies of individual/social and freedom/necessity. The author argues that the individual and the social should be understood as existing within a dynamic, co-constituting interrelation, and that individual autonomy is not at odds with, but rather fundamentally enabled by, the social. (shrink)

This paper centres the colonial pre-histories of ‘the digital’ to complicate posthumanist theorisations of subjectivity. Posthumanism helpfully undercuts human exceptionalism by presenting subjectivity as always-already co-constituted by technology. However, this paper argues that it insufficiently engages the human as the historico-political effect of negating the assumed non-technological colonial Other. Focusing on liberal humanism between the 16th and 19th centuries, the paper theorises the modern human as bound up in ‘technological onticide’. The presumed absence of technology became a (theo-centric, ratio-centric, (...) bio-centric) measure of the Other’s sub-humanity, at the same time as this Other was expected to be humanised through its technologisation. An emphasis on technological onticide complicates universalist theories of subjectivity that take it as always a matter of human-technology co-constitution. The paper argues that, to confront the legacies of ontological murder, conceptual room needs to be made for inhuman, counterhuman or unhuman theories of subjectivity. (shrink)

As an epistemological perspective, 'nomadism' is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in (...) this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, "Nomadic Assemblages," "Non-Oedipal Cartographies", and "Space-Time Montages", that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields. (shrink)

While Jacques Derrida’s influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger’s relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger’s writings not only influences but also has much to teach posthumanism, especially regarding the relationship between humanism and posthumanism. By first engaging with Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show (...) that, while rejecting Heidegger’s conclusions for being too humanist, posthumanism shares, and indeed is largely unreflectively defined by, Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic underpinning anthropocentric humanism. With this, posthumanism aims to go beyond Heidegger by overcoming all forms of humanist understanding, an attempt that brings us back to the relationship between humanism and posthumanism and Heidegger’s notion of trace. With this, I not only show that Heidegger influences posthumanism through his destruction of metaphysics, critique of anthropocentrism and notion of trace, but also point towards an understanding of posthumanism that distinguishes it from humanism and transhumanism. (shrink)

The term ‘posthumanism’ has not been promoted by many environmental philosophers, and it is not clear how the figures I discuss would react to be being characterized as posthumanist. It is more typical for advocates of the perspectives I discuss to characterize them with labels such as ‘non-anthropocentric,’ ‘ecocentric’, or ‘deep ecology.’ Yet, as I will argue, the ideas that have emerged in these lines of thought reflect philosophical commitments that could aptly be characterized as posthumanist.

Technology has developed to the point where a clear distinction between nature and culture seems to be dissolving. Against this background, a broad aspect of social research has emerged that considers an interdependence between the social and the material. So far, social-systems cybernetics as described by Luhmann has remained rather marginalized in these discussions. This article is intended to overcome this marginalization by developing the concept of meaning. Meaning can abstractly be defined as a ‘doing negativity’. Returning to systems theory, (...) it becomes obvious that verbalized meaning (expressed through language) is only one possible medium of meaning. Adopting some concepts from Helmuth Plessner, I introduce another medium of meaning – corporealized meaning (expressed in physical terms), which also operates meaningfully along the distinction between actuality and potentiality, and thus does negativity. I discuss consequences of observing the relationship between sociality and materiality from this perspective. (shrink)

Summary With the current discussion about posthumanism, the traditional concept of man has become questionable. This also poses severe challenges for theology. In addition to theological anthropology, Christology is particularly affected by this. When it is no longer possible to answer unequivocally what it means to be human, it becomes even more controversial than before how the figure of the Deus-homo should be interpreted. The paper at hand presents a thought experiment in order to check whether it is possible (...) to develop a Christology if one adopts central ideas of recent posthumanist scholarship. Taking Anselm’s famous remoto Christo argument as a model, the thought experiment avoids referring to the concept of man. After three major types of Christology haven been tested, the experiment yields the result that only a very abstract Christology is possible without resorting to explicitly anthropological assumptions. Rather, Christology can be seen as a reason why Christian theologians should reject posthumanism altogether. God has a human face, not a posthuman one. (shrink)

In this essay, I engage the foreseeable consequences for the future of humanity triggered by Emerging Technologies and their underpinning philosophy, transhumanism. The transhumanist stance is compared with the default view currently held in many academic institutions of higher education: posthumanism. It is maintained that the transhumanist view is less inimical to the fostering of human dignity than the posthuman one. After this is established, I suggest that the Catholic Church may find an ally in a transhumanist ethos in (...) a two-fold manner. On the one hand, by anchoring and promoting the defense of “the human” already present in transhumanism. On the other, rethinking the effectiveness of the delivery of sacraments in a humanity heavily altered by these technologies. (shrink)

In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era Luciano Floridi and his associates examine various aspects of the contemporary meaning of humanity. Yet, their insights give less thought to the political economy of techno-capitalism that in large measure creates ICTs and leads to their further innovation, development and commercialization. This article responses to Floridi’s work and examines political economy of the blurred distinction between human, machine and nature in the postdigital context. Taking lessons from early history of the (...) Internet across the Eastern and the Western Bloc, it examines ideological underpinnings of development of information and communication technologies. The paper points towards the postdigital challenge of the rising importance of biological sciences, their mutual connection with information sciences, and the society at large. It introduces the concept of bio-informational capitalism, and closely examines the relationships between biology and information... (shrink)

Prominent advocates of posthumanism such as Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil make the case that a drastic increase in the human lifespan would be intrinsically good. This question of the value of an extended lifespan has perhaps become more pressing as medical and scientific advances are seemingly bringing us closer and closer to being able to extend our lives in the way posthumanists envision. In this paper I intend to use Martin Heidegger’s work on death and freedom to develop (...) a potential objection to the claim that an indefinite healthspan is intrinsically desirable. The basic plan will be to make the case that the structure of human agency is such that truly free action is possible only on the basis of the essential finitude of our existence. Assuming that we take this sort freedom to be an important good, we would lose something of crucial importance if we were to radically extend the human healthspan. I am not claiming to present an entirely conclusive argument against posthumanism, or even enhancing the human healthspan to posthuman proportions, but rather, I see my argument here as adding another currently valued dimension of human existence that could very well be lost if we move decisively in the posthumanist direction. (shrink)

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of posthumanist feminist (...) theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender-focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species-based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture. (shrink)

In this text Hasse presents a new, inclusive, posthuman learning theory, designed to keep up with the transformations of human learning resulting from new technological experiences, as well as considering the expanding role of cyborg devices and robots in learning. This ground-breaking book draws on research from across psychology, education, and anthropology to present a truly interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between technology, learning and humanity. Posthumanism questions the self-evident status of human beings by exploring how technology is changing (...) what can be categorised as "human". In this book, the author applies a posthumanist lens to traditional learning theory, challenging conventional understanding of what a human learner is, and considering how technological advances are changing how we think about this question. Throughout the book Hasse uses vignettes of her own research and that of other prominent academics to exemplify what technology can tell us about how we learn and how this can be observed in real-life settings. Posthumanist Learning is essential reading for students and researchers of posthumanism and learning theory from a variety of backgrounds, including psychology, education, anthropology, robotics and philosophy. (shrink)

_Humanesis_ critically examines central strains of posthumanism, searching out biases in the ways that human–technology coupling is explained. Specifically, it interrogates three approaches taken by posthumanist discourse: scientific, humanist, and organismic. David Cecchetto’s investigations reveal how each perspective continues to hold on to elements of the humanist tradition that it is ostensibly mobilized against. His study frontally desublimates the previously unseen presumptions that underlie each of the three thought lines and offers incisive appraisals of the work of three prominent (...) thinkers: Ollivier Dyens, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen. To materially ground the problematic of posthumanism, _Humanesis_ interweaves its theoretical chapters with discussions of artworks. These highlight the topos of sound, demonstrating how aurality might produce new insights in a field that has been dominated by visualization. Cecchetto, a media artist, scrutinizes his own collaborative artistic practice in which he elucidates the variegated causal chains that compose human–technological coupling. _Humanesis_ advances the posthumanist conversation in several important ways. It proposes the term “technological posthumanism” to focus on the discourse as it relates to technology without neglecting its other disciplinary histories. It suggests that deconstruction remains relevant to the enterprise, especially with respect to the performative dimension of language. It analyzes artworks not yet considered in the light of posthumanism, with a particular emphasis on the role of aurality. And the form of the text introduces a reflexive component that exemplifies how the dialogue of posthumanism might progress without resorting to the types of unilateral narratives that the book critiques. (shrink)

This volume investigates the intersection of phenomenology and posthumanism by rethinking the human and nonhuman specifically with regard to boredom, isolation, loneliness, and solitude. By closely examining these concepts from phenomenological, philosophical, and literary perspectives, this diverse collection of essays offers insights into the human and nonhuman in the absence of the Other and within the postapocalyptic. Topics of interest include modalities of presence and absence with regard to body, time, beast, and things; the phenomenology of corporeity; ontopoiesis and (...) the sublime; alienation, absurdity, and phenomenology of existence; memory, posthistoricity, posthuman nihilism, and posthumanity; speculative cosmology, cosmic holism, and consciousness; ecophenomenology; and the philosophy of the aesthetic. These essays parse and probe distinct aspects of the posthuman condition and what it means to exist in a posthuman world, thereby furthering the vast, rich scope of phenomenological research and study. This text appeals to students and researchers working in these topics and fields. (shrink)

As a rejection and continuous reframing of theoretical humanism, critical posthumanism questions and imagines the human condition in the current context, aligning it with nonhuman and more than human entities, past and future. While this philosophical approach has been referenced in many academic disciplines since the 1990s, it has been gradually garnering interest among nursing scholars, leading to questions such as what it means to be human and what it means to be a nurse in the here and now. (...) As a deeply ethical and political project, posthumanism, which we associate with poststructuralist concepts of power and resistance, questions the formation of posthuman subjects who more accurately reflect complex times, characterized by capitalistic commodification of life—human and nonhuman. In this article, we aim to explore how the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical posthumanism, specifically through Rosi Braidotti's works, can be useful to understand a posthuman subjectivity that favors affirmative actions aimed at actualizing our world in becoming. Through examples in nursing practice, education, and research, we will explore not only how critical posthumanism allows us to frame transformations in the current situation that we are embedded in as nurses and more generally as beings but also how these examples allow us to move beyond critique to the actualization of affirmative actions that correspond to the creation of new worlds. (shrink)

Posthumanism has come to synthesize philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the pressures of technology, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice. Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an (...) unprecedented mapping of this intellectual and aesthetic shift in a global context. It extends across a broad range of fields such as art theory, media studies, continental philosophy, natural science, literary studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, social and political theory, and animal studies. The reader features a diverse sampling of major thinkers including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Marder, Karen Barad, Alexander Weheliye, Jay Prosser, Anna Tsing, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, acclaimed artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, Doo-sung Yoo, and Gavin Steingo. Their provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises. An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures. (shrink)

In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon gives his readers an overview of posthumanism, examining the intoxicating-and often troubling-entanglements of humans, animals and technology in science, society and culture that constitute its field. Mahon not only explores the key scientific advances in information technology and genetics have made us and society posthuman, but also how certain strands in art (such as science fiction and video games) and philosophy (for example, in the work of Andy Clarke and (...) Jacques Derrida) have played-and continue to play-a crucial role in shaping how we understand those advances. Central to Mahon's analysis of posthumanism is an understanding of technology as a pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both a poison and a cure. In the light of this analysis, Mahon considers our posthuman future, as envisioned by a range of futurists, from Ray Kurzweil to those at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. What seems clear is that this future will require massive shifts in how we think about ourselves as techno-biological entities, about the benefits and threats of intelligent technologies and about the roles consumerism and universal basic income will play in societies. Posthumanism is our present, our future and a challenge to which we must rise. The book provides a concise and coherent overview of Posthumanism, introducing all the key concepts and themes, and is ideal for undergraduates who require more than just a simple introduction to Posthumanist thought. (shrink)