Identity questions over the borders of the human are complicated in novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Ninni Holmquist’s The Unit (2006) and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series (2007–2014), which explore the role of new biology, and new life forms, in future societies.[1] In these texts, the survival of the human depends […]
Continue Reading
In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared the end of art. Art is ‘on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past’.[1] For Hegel, art satisfied the same spiritual needs as philosophy: to disclose meaning and truth. Art revealed meaning and truth within the world of appearances by creating sensuous existents, rather than elevating thought […]
Continue Reading
‘The human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like and not quite human […]’. These words, lifted from the extract of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay ‘Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race’ below, point to the habitually unexamined racialised and colonial structures of […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
The interdisciplinary field of animal studies has grown in tandem with, but often in opposition to, popular and technophilic conceptions of posthumanism and the posthuman. The idea that ‘the human’ as we know it might be made increasingly obsolete by artificial intelligence has been around since the 1970s, when the literary critic Ihan Hassan […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
As many current children’s films, immersed as they are in digital culture, fetishise an old book in an attic or a fairytale tome whose old illustrations come strangely to life, books as objects have begun to take on cultural freight as fossil traces of the human, even as we are still here, coining terms like […]
Continue Reading
As the story of a living being created not by conventional reproductive means but by scientific endeavour, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus (first published in 1818) stands as one of the classic representations of the fears and hopes engendered by humanity’s harnessing of technological power, and the ambivalence occasioned by the prospect of […]
Continue Reading