Donna Haraway famously pronounced, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” in her influential A Cyborg Manifesto.[1] This statement epitomises the myriad connections between the genre and posthumanism: entwined discourses that ask similar questions about what it means to be human and whether the ‘human’ should be the limit of […]
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There is an assumption that posthumanism, springing from advanced science and technology, will be far removed from the concerns of religion. Certainly there is a strong affinity between modern technoscience and a broadly secular, rationalist perspective in which religion and science, belief and scepticism, theism and atheism are regarded as incompatible. Despite this, there […]
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The relationship between Heidegger and posthumanism can be understood as taking at least two basic forms, each of which corresponds to different understandings of posthumanism itself. The first is inherent within Heidegger’s goal of replacing dualistic Cartesianism with Dasein[i] and being-in-the-world. In offering this Being-centric ontology, Heidegger first removes the human subject from its central […]
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William Gibson (1948-) is an American author who has been resident in Canada throughout his writing career. He is best known for his 1984 novel Neuromancer which has had an important impact on posthumanism, both philosophically and culturally. Gibson’s novel depicts a future in which subjectivity is not confined to the “human” and is […]
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As the story of a living being created not by conventional reproductive means but by scientific endeavour, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (first published in 1818) stands as one of the classic representations of the fears and hopes engendered by humanity’s harnessing of technological power, and the ambivalence occasioned by the prospect of […]
Continue ReadingAs the story of a living being created not by conventional reproductive means but by scientific endeavour, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (first published in 1818) stands as one of the classic representations of the fears and hopes engendered by humanity’s harnessing of technological power, and the ambivalence occasioned by the prospect of […]
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As a key component of compulsory becoming-human,[1] education has been viewed as a humanist project par excellence; often connected to a general idea of education as something inherently ‘good’, that can somehow make us become better human beings. While education policy, practice and theory have been preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the […]
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Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction which explores posthuman identities primarily through the representation of close relationships between human subjectivity and artificial intelligence or computer hardware.[1] Its influences are wide-ranging with echoes of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick among others. The New Wave of science fiction which included Ursula K. Le […]
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Traditional notions of the humanist subject have been challenged in contemporary discourse by a growing awareness of what has been termed, following the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, the ‘originary technicity’ of the human. Recognising technicity as inherent to and inseparable from the human as such, contemporary theorists may be said to be […]
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“We are born obsolete: Günther Anders’s (Post)humanism” Günther Anders (né Stern 1902-1992), a former student of Husserl and Heidegger, is only just beginning to be discovered by Anglophone scholarship.[1] Anders’s main body of work, the two substantial and highly original collections of essays Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Vol. 1 & 2 (The Obsolescence of Human […]
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