‘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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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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Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049 (2017), the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), explores many of the same topics, including the development of advanced biotechnology and the (in)ability to distinguish between humans and bioengineered replicants. Like Scott’s Blade Runner, Villeneuve’s 2049 considers how ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ identity is constructed. Because replicants’ physical appearances do […]
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‘Psychopower’ and ‘Eventology’ are two reworked extracts from the succinct genealogy of affect that Bernd Bösel provides in ‘Affect Disposition(ing)’. The article explains how affect is conceptualised by early Western (i.e. Greek) thought as the ‘by-product of being possessed by a god, a demon or another nonhuman’. This ‘demonological’ paradigm of affect involves certain practices of dealing with nonhuman […]
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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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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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