Materialism without Matter: Deleuze If there is a commonplace among philosophies of nature, it’s that the physical world is unthinking: incapable, that is, of thinking its own eventual becoming. Not only in its everyday sense but also in the clichés of “high” theory, sense is bracketed from sensation, psyche from soma. Sense, the story goes, […]
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In Plant Studies, especially its critical branch, the most recent empirical evidence is used to show the sophisticated ways that plants go about their lives. Challenging traditional zoocentric perceptions of plants as passive objects, such research reveals that plants are dynamic and sentient beings capable of responding to environmental stimuli such as touch, temperature, […]
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The pairing of modernism and posthumanism highlights a constitutive paradox of new modernist studies. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult not to think about “modernism” as a historical term, yet from its early days of intense critical and aesthetic self-consciousness, modernism has existed, indeed has aggressively positioned itself, and defined itself, in conflict […]
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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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Suppose that critical posthumanism invites us to say goodbye to ‘literature’ and to welcome it back in the same moment. So, “for centuries”, observes Jonathan Franzen, “ink in the form of printed novels has fixed discrete, subjective individuals within significant narratives”.[1] Humanist subjectivity and exceptionalism were instantiated in the ink and print cultures of ‘letters’, continuous […]
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From Joyce to Beckett: The Fiction of the Almost ‘Posthuman’[1] When Samuel Beckett took James Joyce as his role model, Joyce had completed Ulysses and was immerged in the composition of Finnegans Wake. This ‘work in progress’ had a particular structure that followed a principle discovered at the end of Ulysses. The ending of the […]
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The digital turn in filmmaking provides the potential to communicate a posthuman perspective on the interrelationship between human and nonhuman realities. The fluid sense of interconnection that defines this expanded subject position has been defined variously by scholars of the posthuman. In her landmark 1999 work How We Became Posthuman, Katherine N. Hayles describes the […]
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Posthuman topology refers to posthumanism in a phenomenological mode. It is the study of how the experience of technological artefacts and technic environments – the environments of their development and use – shapes the manner in which the individual thinks and occupies his or her lifeworld, beyond a simple psychological affect. Posthuman topology maintains that […]
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Posthuman suffering, as presented in Anthony Miccoli’s Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace[1] is an affective state characterised by a perceived feeling of inadequacy, alienation, or lack of agency or efficacy in relation to technological artefacts or systems of use. The term can also be used to describe the general sense that the biological […]
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If one accepts the widely-used definition of electronic literature as literature that is ‘born digital’, one can immediately sense the ways in which electronic literature may be thought of as a literature, if there is any, of the posthuman, or at least, literature which problematises its own relationship with the human. Katherine Hayles takes this […]
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