Being Human in a More-Than-Human World [in progress]
Collected Essays on Critical Posthumanism V
Planned content:
1. Strategic Misanthropy – Impersonality, Negative Capability and Objective Correlative
2. Ontogeny – On Becoming and Ceasing to Be Human
3. Posthumanism and Literature: From Frankenstein to Frankissstein?
4. Art Without Humans – Humans without Art?
Short extract:
Even though posthumanists also concern themselves with questions of technology and science, science fiction and futurity, they tend to deploy a longer term view of “how we became human” and to what extent we might or should understand ourselves as “posthuman” today. As opposed to transhumanists they stress our biological and microbiological entanglement with nonhumans – something that biotechnology has both made “visible” and “available” for human intervention. And, again as opposed to transhumanism, posthumanists promote an ecological and geopolitical (deep
historical) understanding of the place and meaning of the human within the history of the planet, life and evolution, which explains their radical critique of human exceptionalism and speciesism in the face of anthropogenic climate change (cf. Anthropocene) and the challenges and extinction threats this poses to human and nonhuman life alike.
What one might call a posthumanist aesthetic is therefore thinking about art “outside” traditional (humanist) human exceptionalism. How to think and display a world in which the human is no longer at the “centre” of representation even while the effects of human “extraction” of planetary resources have never been more painfully felt. Posthumanism holds the human (or to be more precise, some humans) responsible, while searching for alternative, more ecological, more just and also more accurate models of cohabitation in a world of finite resources and multispecies entanglement, under technological conditions that are, to say the least, ambivalent, maybe even uncontrollable.
5. Carnivorous Plant Studies
6. Dogs R Us
7. Yearning for the Human, or, What’s Wrong with Humanism?
8. Loss of Hearing
9. Posthuman Music
10. Because we all live longer now… Death, Age and Posthumousness
11. Stoner and the Posthumanities
12. Afterword: Oceanic Feeling, or, Posthumanism at Sea
