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 […]
Continue Reading
(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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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, […]
Continue Reading