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Critical Posthumanism

  This entry originally appeared in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, eds., Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Reproduced with permission. Critical posthumanism is a theoretical approach which maps and engages with the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism”.[1] It differentiates between the figure of the ‘posthuman’ (and its present, past and projected avatars, like cyborgs, monsters, […]

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Vulner-ability

Living in a world of multiple crises makes human and nonhuman vulnerability salient, defining and remedying the consequent vulnerability integral to many social and political agendas. My concept of vulner—ability is of a different nature. I come to it through a posthumanist material feminist conceptualisation of the human and nonhuman that also offers a rethinking […]

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Rhetoric and Posthumanism

Rhetoric and Posthumanism Mehdi Mohammadi “Posthumanism first appears as antithetical, nearly impossible, for rhetoric”,[1] as the former ventures beyond anthropocentric narratives, yet the latter, as Diane Davis and Michelle Ballif point out, “has been defined as the study of human symbol use which posits at the centre of ‘the rhetorical situation’ a knowing subject who […]

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Critical Memory Studies for the Posthumanist Age

(Image: Alicia Milesi-Ionescu) Critical Memory Studies for the Posthumanist Age Arleen Ionescu, Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter As direct witnesses of last century’s major historical events, such as World War II, began disappearing, new memorial paradigms, together with a more pliable, creative understanding of memory itself, started flourishing to compensate for the irreversible loss of […]

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Nietzsche

In Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, Stefan Herbrechter suggests that it ‘would indeed be difficult to overestimate the Nietzschean influence on posthumanism’.[1] Certainly, posthumanists of different stripes like to reference and quote Nietzsche, and some even claim him as one of their own. Yet, his reception is as varied as the motley group of schools of […]

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Freud and Posthumanism: From Sexual Instinct to the Death of Death

Even today, the importance or otherwise of Freud’s contribution to the history of thought in the West remains a deeply polarising subject. This division is most obvious in the differing receptions generally accorded to Freud from within the Anglo-American analytic tradition on one hand, and from the Continental tradition on the other. To better understand […]

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Translation and Critical Posthumanism

It is intriguing that the ubiquitous phenomenon of translation does not seem to feature in posthumanist thinking. It is peculiar, too, that there is so little debate on the inescapability of translational processes in the intellectual battles that aim to reenergise philosophy’s ontologies and its epistemological pathways. Bruno Latour once remarked that actor-network-theory, designed to […]

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Posthuman Mimesis

After the shadow and the phantom, the twin and the double, the ancient problematic of what the ancients called, enigmatically, ‘mimēsis’, is returning under different masks and conceptual personae to animate and reanimate posthuman subjects in the digital age. Reloaded by new technologies and media, algorithms and AI simulations, emerging forms of posthuman mimesis do […]

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Unknowing: New Materialism in the Light of In-the-Dark Artmaking Methods

It is challenging to disengage our human-centredness and commit to being co-habitants of the world. In the face of this challenge, there are three hopeful shoots I would like to nurture in becoming a critical posthuman. Situated within three particular artmaking processes, this Genealogy entry touches on the body of artmaking experience becoming a material, […]

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Narrative

‘There are countless forms of narrative in the world’, begins an influential essay by structuralist narrative theorist Roland Barthes.[1] But, for all their multiplicity, these forms—like the languages they are transmitted in—bear the unmistakable signature of human experience, including our bodily make-up, our mortality, our web of attachments and ambitions of social standing. Throughout the […]

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Solidarity

We have to start from where we are.[1] Normally, when we speak of solidarity, we mean “human solidarity” or “solidarity between humans”, ideally all humans, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, or anything in between or intersecting these, in short, despite all differences. There’s no doubt that this kind of solidarity is […]

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