This entry considers memory in the context of critical posthumanism, which might be perceived as the philosophical antidote to the more familiar transhumanist tendency that extends the humanist legacy by privileging the (white, masculine, heterosexual, Western) human subject as a universal category to be augmented, enhanced or transformed by means of various technologies. In this […]
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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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Humanist and technoscientific notions of progress have been (mis)used to classify human and nonhuman life forms into hierarchical categories, thereby reducing the complexities of life stories into a linear account of development and innovation. At the same time, critical reflections on key concepts of modernist, Eurocentric and industry-driven concepts of time and historicity and, more […]
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The term “Anthropocene” designates the geological epoch in which the human (or anthropos) is seen as the primary driver of climactic, geological, and ecological change. This notion first emerges in the spring of 2000, when Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer publish a short entry in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere in which they make a brief but […]
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“[F]eminism is not a humanism”, states Rosi Braidotti in her article “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism”.[1] The argument might seem obscure, when considering feminism’s claims for equality between differently gendered, racialised and classed people (to mention just a few variables of social division). Braidotti contends that ties between liberal and socialist feminism and Enlightenment-based humanism do appear, […]
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This entry originally appeared in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, eds., Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Reproduced with permission. Critical posthumanism is a theoretical approach which maps and engages with the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism”.[1] It differentiates between the figure of the ‘posthuman’ (and its present, past and projected avatars, like cyborgs, monsters, […]
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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 […]
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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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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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