William S. Burroughs was very much a product of, and his work a commentary on, his time, even if as a cultural Outsider. However, his vision of a dystopian future, his discourse of repetitions, his stochastic materiality, his critiques of the politics of drugs and surveillance, his foregrounding of what we today call queer theory, his […]
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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 […]
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On the pretext of immortality, we’re moving towards slow extermination…Human beings can’t bear themselves, they can’t bear their otherness, this duality…They can’t bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them…It’s now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology. Welcome to the future primitive society of the digital. – Jean […]
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Materialism without Matter: Deleuze If there is a commonplace among philosophies of nature, it’s that the physical world is unthinking: incapable, that is, of thinking its own eventual becoming. Not only in its everyday sense but also in the clichés of “high” theory, sense is bracketed from sensation, psyche from soma. Sense, the story goes, […]
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From Joyce to Beckett: The Fiction of the Almost ‘Posthuman’[1] When Samuel Beckett took James Joyce as his role model, Joyce had completed Ulysses and was immerged in the composition of Finnegans Wake. This ‘work in progress’ had a particular structure that followed a principle discovered at the end of Ulysses. The ending of the […]
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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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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 […]
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Traditional notions of the humanist subject have been challenged in contemporary discourse by a growing awareness of what has been termed, following the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, the ‘originary technicity’ of the human. Recognising technicity as inherent to and inseparable from the human as such, contemporary theorists may be said to be […]
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