“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 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 […]
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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 […]
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The novels of Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), often referred to as the “Grand Dame of Science Fiction”, exemplify Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s famous claim that “SF has ceased to be a genre of fiction per se, becoming instead a mode of awareness about the world”.[1] Butler’s rather grim view of humanity as flawed by a […]
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Lady Gaga’s work demonstrates an intriguing mix of elements from within posthumanism, as her work seems to destabilise a number of humanist, binary categories including human and machine, human and animal, subject and object, self and other and male and female. In some ways, Gaga embodies what we might consider the figures of the posthuman […]
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This post is part three of a three part series. Read parts one and two here. In an essay on the Democritian or Epicurean stoikheion, a seminal word ‘at once designating the graphic element as well as the mark, the letter, the trait, or the point’, Derrida recalled that his adoption of the more general […]
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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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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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William Golding’s novels are famous for their bleak depiction of the human condition in which violence, dark urges, and primordial egotism prevail. The author, however, made it clear in his Nobel Lecture that he is ‘a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist’,[1] and while his opinion of the human as such might not be a […]
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‘… they imitated humanity so abhominably.’ (III.2.34)[1] The affinity between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and some of the existential questions raised by contemporary posthumanism, despite the four centuries that lie between them, is striking. From the beginning of the play, the question of identity, and of the identity of the human more specifically, is the main […]
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