As the era preceding the articulation of what has come to be known as humanism, the European Middle Ages offer a variety of vantage points from which to trouble present certainties, complicate contemporary narratives of what the human means, and set new trajectories for the future of posthumanist thought. The medieval period does not […]
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An enduring question about the human condition concerns the riddle of embodiment, or how to comprehend the very meat of our existence. Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, captures the quandary. It is 1632 in Holland and we are witness to the dissection of a criminal hanged earlier in the day. […]
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Bellmer and Virtual Assemblages The disturbing, uncanny works of the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) include drawings, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and poetic writings. Although the writings, due to their highly enigmatic style, are susceptible to multiple interpretations, they do offer several insights into the overall approach of this controversial artist to his work. Perhaps most […]
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Donna Haraway famously pronounced, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” in her influential A Cyborg Manifesto.[1] This statement epitomises the myriad connections between the genre and posthumanism: entwined discourses that ask similar questions about what it means to be human and whether the ‘human’ should be the limit of […]
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There is an assumption that posthumanism, springing from advanced science and technology, will be far removed from the concerns of religion. Certainly there is a strong affinity between modern technoscience and a broadly secular, rationalist perspective in which religion and science, belief and scepticism, theism and atheism are regarded as incompatible. Despite this, there […]
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The relationship between Heidegger and posthumanism can be understood as taking at least two basic forms, each of which corresponds to different understandings of posthumanism itself. The first is inherent within Heidegger’s goal of replacing dualistic Cartesianism with Dasein[i] and being-in-the-world. In offering this Being-centric ontology, Heidegger first removes the human subject from its central […]
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William Gibson (1948-) is an American author who has been resident in Canada throughout his writing career. He is best known for his 1984 novel Neuromancer which has had an important impact on posthumanism, both philosophically and culturally. Gibson’s novel depicts a future in which subjectivity is not confined to the “human” and is […]
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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 ReadingAs 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 […]
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As a key component of compulsory becoming-human,[1] education has been viewed as a humanist project par excellence; often connected to a general idea of education as something inherently ‘good’, that can somehow make us become better human beings. While education policy, practice and theory have been preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the […]
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