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The Posthuman William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was very much a product of, and his work a commentary on, his time, even if as a cultural Outsider. However, his vision of a dystopian future, his discourse of repetitions, his stochastic materiality, his critiques of the politics of drugs and surveillance, his foregrounding of what we today call queer theory, his […]

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Romantic Self and Posthumanism

The Romantic period develops a particular construction of the self, a self with a privileged interiority. Posthumanist criticism flattens this interiority, pushing our critical attention away from the artist’s expression of internal feelings to material relations between bodies in landscapes.  Such a posthumanist approach follows several threads of posthumanism. It draws from what Object Oriented […]

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Xenotransplantation, Form-of-Life and Literary Fiction

Identity questions over the borders of the human are complicated in novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Ninni Holmquist’s The Unit (2006) and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series (2007–2014), which explore the role of new biology, and new life forms, in future societies.[1] In these texts, the survival of the human depends […]

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Bio art and the end of philosophy (Feuerstein & Hegel)

In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. Art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past’.[1] For Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy: to disclose meaning and truth. Art revealed meaning and truth within the world of appearances by creating sensuous existents, rather than elevating thought […]

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High-Tech Orientalism (Cyberpunk & Race)

‘The human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like and not quite human […]’. These words, lifted from the extract of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay ‘Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race’ below, point to the habitually unexamined racialised and colonial structures of […]

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Technological and Posthuman Zones

Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings.  To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use, and thus under human control, they have largely been seen in positive, utopian terms. When technologies have, on the other hand, been seen as […]

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Baudrillard, Jean

On the pretext of immortality, we’re moving towards slow extermination…Human beings can’t bear themselves, they can’t bear their otherness, this duality…They can’t bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them…It’s now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology. Welcome to the future primitive society of the digital. – Jean […]

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Sustainability

No being today escapes being confronted with the fallout of human-induced environmental change, from ice capes melting in the Arctic, to Californian megafires, to reefs bleaching in Australia, disappearing habitats, and accelerated rates of extinction of myriad species of plants and animals. In the face of the uncertain future that unfolds in front of us, […]

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Posthuman Times

Humanist and technoscientific notions of progress have been (mis)used to classify human and nonhuman life forms into hierarchical categories, thereby reducing the complexities of life stories into a linear account of development and innovation. At the same time, critical reflections on key concepts of modernist, Eurocentric and industry-driven concepts of time and historicity and, more […]

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