After the shadow and the phantom, the twin and the double, the ancient problematic of what the ancients called, enigmatically, ‘mimēsis’, is returning under different masks and conceptual personae to animate and reanimate posthuman subjects in the digital age. Reloaded by new technologies and media, algorithms and AI simulations, emerging forms of posthuman mimesis do […]
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It is challenging to disengage our human-centredness and commit to being co-habitants of the world. In the face of this challenge, there are three hopeful shoots I would like to nurture in becoming a critical posthuman. Situated within three particular artmaking processes, this Genealogy entry touches on the body of artmaking experience becoming a material, […]
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‘There are countless forms of narrative in the world’, begins an influential essay by structuralist narrative theorist Roland Barthes.[1] But, for all their multiplicity, these forms—like the languages they are transmitted in—bear the unmistakable signature of human experience, including our bodily make-up, our mortality, our web of attachments and ambitions of social standing. Throughout the […]
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We have to start from where we are.[1] Normally, when we speak of solidarity, we mean “human solidarity” or “solidarity between humans”, ideally all humans, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, or anything in between or intersecting these, in short, despite all differences. There’s no doubt that this kind of solidarity is […]
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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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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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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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The capitalised definite article in the title above is in brackets because it wants to connect two things: it refers to the title of Don DeLillo’s latest novella – The Silence,[1] but also echoes some more general claims regarding literature, posthumanism and silence by using DeLillo as an “example”. In doing so, it follows up […]
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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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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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