Melancholy is an inward withdrawal from worldly relations that paradoxically exposes the self to the horizon of dreaded mortality through temporal distortions and the paralyzing horrors of existence, while simultaneously and paradoxically yearning for solace in the unconscious oblivion of death. It warps temporal coherence and reduces speech to the muteness of asymbolia. In antiquity, […]
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The spectre of “the elements” currently haunts the environmental humanities: this quasi-intuitive idea seems well on its way to replace Raymond Williams’ lamented word “Nature”.[1] Indeed, if “Nature” problematically relies on an essentialist dualist framework,[2] and even “environment” arguably seems to refer to that what surrounds the human, one of the allures of the turn […]
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“Diego Rivera, Water, Origin of Life, 1951” © Joaquín Martínez 2012 Flickr under CC BY 2.0 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.[1] At the time it was written, the assertion of the universal equality of man found in the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) reflected the emancipatory spirit of a […]
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In his essay ‘Butterfly Crossings’, anthropologist Anand Pandian observes how the monarch butterfly, Danaus Plexippus, gradually became a symbol in the protests in North America for the rights of undocumented migrants who try to cross the border between Mexico and the United States: ‘Monarchs are celebrated for their migration. But it isn’t simply how far […]
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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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