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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The focus of the high-concept television show Westworld is deceptive: we’re meant to believe that the series revolves entirely around the robotic hosts, who struggle to attain sentience and break free of their cognitive loops to become what Blade Runner termed “more human than human”. But by the second season, the focus shifts back to […]
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Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use, and thus under human control, they have largely been seen in positive, utopian terms. When technologies have, on the other hand, been seen as […]
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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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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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Posthuman suffering, as presented in Anthony Miccoli’s Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace[1] is an affective state characterised by a perceived feeling of inadequacy, alienation, or lack of agency or efficacy in relation to technological artefacts or systems of use. The term can also be used to describe the general sense that the biological […]
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If one accepts the widely-used definition of electronic literature as literature that is ‘born digital’, one can immediately sense the ways in which electronic literature may be thought of as a literature, if there is any, of the posthuman, or at least, literature which problematises its own relationship with the human. Katherine Hayles takes this […]
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“We are born obsolete: Günther Anders’s (Post)humanism” Günther Anders (né Stern 1902-1992), a former student of Husserl and Heidegger, is only just beginning to be discovered by Anglophone scholarship.[1] Anders’s main body of work, the two substantial and highly original collections of essays Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Vol. 1 & 2 (The Obsolescence of Human […]
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