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Posthumanism and the Question of Race; or: Posthumanisation in the Colonial Anthropocene

I. Whose Posthumanism? Race critical perspectives have repeatedly and persistently flagged the uncanny crossovers between posthumanism and colonial discourse in a variety of (inter-)disciplinary settings. The controversial notion of the Anthropocene is a pertinent example: commonly understood as that period of planetary development during which the impact of human practice begins to affect environments on […]

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Ecohauntology

In November 2020, thousands of mink rose from their shallow mass grave on Western Jutland, Denmark. Having been labelled ‘mutant mink’, that is, carriers of a mutation of Covid-19 that can transfer between mink and humans, the mink had been put down and buried, only to rise again as the gasses from their decomposing bodies […]

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Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Writing Nature Between Orphism and Prometheanism in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian Judge Holden, to cite W. Oliver Baker, easily ranks amongst the ‘the most engrossing and violent characters of American literature’.[1] A central character in Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West, Judge Holden accompanies the Glanton gang—a group […]

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Critique

Are “we” living in postcritical times? And if so, is this a problem for a posthumanism that calls itself “critical” and is thus heavily invested in critique? Teachers in schools and universities all over the world have been complaining that their students are becoming more and more uncritical in their thinking.[1] How are we “to […]

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Deep-Sea Mining

From countering the idea that “nothing could live in the deep sea” to exploration of the deepest parts of all of the world’s oceans, deep-sea mining (DSM) is the latest technological evolution in deep-ocean exploration. In this brief immersion into DSM, I discuss how a posthumanist new materialism provides a relational lens through which to […]

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Animality and Blackness

In an interview published in 2015, Sylvia Wynter concludes her discussion of the history of Western humanism with the suggestion that “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis”.[1] This idea of humanness (and non-humanness) as praxis is one that critical posthumanism has embraced on multiple fronts, attempting to deconstruct liberal humanism’s […]

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Derrida and Posthumanism (II): The Animality of the Trace

This post is part two of a three part series. Read part one here. Jacques Derrida’s marathon lecture on ‘L’animal que donc je suis’ for the décade (ten-day conference) on ‘L’animal autobiographique’ at Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1997[1] can be seen retrospectively to have marked the ‘official’ entry of his work into posthumanism, within which it […]

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Derrida and Posthumanism (I): From Sign to Trace

If one of the aims of posthumanism is to re-elaborate critically, without falling back on exceptionalist constructions, the nature of what humanity means, from its problematic inception to its uncertain, constant becoming, then Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of what constitutes (the inscription of) a trace is highly relevant. From some of his earliest texts the French […]

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Microbial Life

The science and philosophy writer Dorion Sagan, son of Lynn Margulis,[1] began his 2011 lecture in the Anthropological Society’s series The Human is More than Human[2] by quoting from Claire Folsome’s entry for ‘Microbes’ in the 1985 book The Biosphere Catalogue. Folsome describes a thought experiment in which an alien drops down through the ceiling and […]

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