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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Transhumanism is a philosophy which advocates for the radical enhancement of human capacities using science and technology, that is, self-directed human evolution. There are many varieties of transhumanism, with no consensus on what the evolution should or will consist of. For example, some transhumanists envision a fusion with the digital, either in the form of […]
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This entry considers memory in the context of critical posthumanism, which might be perceived as the philosophical antidote to the more familiar transhumanist tendency that extends the humanist legacy by privileging the (white, masculine, heterosexual, Western) human subject as a universal category to be augmented, enhanced or transformed by means of various technologies. In this […]
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A line is simultaneously a colour, a texture, and a tone: it is the abutting edge of positive and negative, the breaking up and adjoining of two planes, the touching point of autonomous bodies. To see form[1] as relational, is an undoing of the human—no longer at the centre, or with a centre, from which […]
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It can neither be overstated nor stated too often that the covert sleight of hand upon which humanist and vitalist ideologies depend is the very same dissimulation that makes possible unfettered instrumentalization on a truly grand scale. Put simply, it is only once we cease to draw lines of exclusion dividing life from its absence […]
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In “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept”, Karma Chavez critically examines how rhetoric historically privileges certain abstract bodies, i.e. white, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual males, while invisibilising actual ones based on gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation. By introducing the concept of the “textual stare”,[1] Chavez provides a lens through which the rhetorical field […]
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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 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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(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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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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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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