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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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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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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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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The term “Anthropocene” designates the geological epoch in which the human (or anthropos) is seen as the primary driver of climactic, geological, and ecological change. This notion first emerges in the spring of 2000, when Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer publish a short entry in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere in which they make a brief but […]
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“[F]eminism is not a humanism”, states Rosi Braidotti in her article “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”.[1] The argument might seem obscure, when considering feminism’s claims for equality between differently gendered, racialised and classed people (to mention just a few variables of social division). Braidotti contends that ties between liberal and socialist feminism and Enlightenment-based humanism do appear, […]
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The term ‘speciesism’ first appeared in 1970 on a printed pamphlet made by psychologist Richard Ryder for a protest against animal experimentation [1] and refers to discrimination on the grounds of belonging to a certain species. Thus, speciesism includes the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals based solely on their species membership. […]
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As a form, comics and graphic narratives are particularly well-suited for enacting posthumanism: they often employ radical juxtaposition and assemblage as method, and delineate subjectivity as a process of becoming in relation to animate and inanimate objects as well as human and nonhuman others.[1] In this entry, I discuss David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite van […]
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Working through questions of human/nonhuman similarity and difference from a critical posthumanist perspective involves rethinking concepts of meaning. Meaningful experience is widespread throughout the nonhuman animal world, ranging far beyond its iterations in human thought and language. There are significant differences, however, among forms of meaning-making, and these differences have to be accounted for within […]
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“New materialism” is a term coined in the 1990s to describe a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions whose influences are present in much of cultural theory.[1] The discourses catalogued under new materialism(s) share an agenda with posthumanism in that they seek a repositioning of the human among nonhuman […]
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