Posthumanism: Critical Speculative Biomorphic

The speculative posthumanism (SP) developed in Posthuman Life consists of an austere epistemology (Anthropological Unbounded Humanism - AUP) on the one hand and an ontology of posthuman difference on the other (See Roden 2012; 2014, Ch4-5). AUP I argue should be the core commitment of any posthumanism. It voids any posthumanist ethics/aesthetics, implying rather that we have a minimal grip on the space of possible minds or agents. However, this raises a problem 1) of intelligibility for the ontology of SP and 2) of interest. How can even negative claims about the posthuman possibility be intelligible; why should this epistemic/semantic void preoccupy or entice us? Both questions can be reframed by considering how actual social/technological conditions imply the speculative field of the posthuman. “Philosophical Catastrophism” addresses this by reading key texts of contemporary posthumanism and inhumanism (including Crash, Videodrome and Nihil Unbound). I argue that the works of J G Ballard, R. Scott Bakker, Ray Brassier and David Cronenberg tell us something about the febrile affective relationship to technical systems which vastly exceed our capacity to understand them (Roden 2014, Ch7). These destabilising affects testify to their power to erase and re-write our worlds. This paper explores the role of catastrophe in exemplary works by Ballard (Crash, “The Terminal Beach”) Brassier (Nihil Unbound) and Cronenberg (Videodrome), relating these to the themes of correlationism, realism and speculative posthumanism. It uses Ballard and Cronenberg’s ontological catastrophes as a foil for Brassier's interpretation of reason as contrary to life, favouring an interpretation of the will-to-knowledge as self-shattering rather than purely self-annulling. This aesthetic of violence, I claim, constitutes a tenuous but real relation to the inhuman void of the future.

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructuralist philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, I show that the cyborg perspective is consistent with both cyborg humanism and a modified speculative posthumanism. This modified account treats the alterity of the posthuman as a historically emergent feature of human and posthuman multiplicities that must be understood through their technical or imaginative synthesis, not in relation to a transcendental conception of the human.

Subjectivity, 2012

Posthumanism is now well installed within the humanities and the social sciences as a critical discourse (see Wolfe, 2010) influenced by the wider technological condition (see Scharff and Dusek, 2003), the technological unconscious and non-conscious (see Thrift, 2004; Hayles, 2006) and by the academy growing increasingly inured to 'switching codes' of thought (see Bartscherer and Coover, 2011). It seems that the overriding task for posthumanism, as a critical discourse, is reflection on how the effects on and of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology force through a rethinking of the integrities and identities of the human: not forgetting, either, those of its non-human others, many of them of humanity's own making and remaking-gods, monsters, animals, machines, systems (see, for instance,

Radical Philosophy Review, 2023

In recent years, Rosi Braidotti has proposed to explore the “intersectionality” of natural, social and technological determinations in order to provide a non-dualistic theoretical framework for what she defines as the “critical posthumanities”. In this paper, I polemically engage with Braidotti’s theoretical project by reconstructing the methodological principle through which she endeavors to disentangle the dualisms presupposed in anthropocentrism and humanism. I will argue that the upshot of this methodological procedure is a hypostatization of subjective structures into reality which in turn facilitates ºan ontological transposition of the political concept of inclusiveness. In highlighting the formal procedure of addition and inclusion presupposed by the specific mode in which the posthuman subject conceptualizes difference, the article provides a set of objections to Braidotti’s methodology by examining it in terms of the Marxian critique of speculative abstractions.

Springer eBooks, 2021

The notion of "posthumanism" I intend to use throughout this paper encompasses both the assemblages of human and nonhuman components and the critical tool that posthumanism can be. Indeed, posthumanism addresses two problematic situations facing humanism as well as the humanities today. On the one hand, historically, humanism has often identified itself with imperialism-the universal Human as a norm shaped according to the image of the Western, white, Christian, heterosexual, upper-middle-class male. On the other hand, the development of biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, as well as the development of systemic and environmental modes of thought-all types of knowledge that lead to thinking in terms of life milieus rather than of isolated individuals-have made obsolete the possibility of studying humankind as a species separated from other life forms, whether they are organic or artificial (see for instance Haraway 2004; Braidotti 2013; Nayar 2014). If "posthuman" figures, because of their important place in our contemporary societies, affect numerous propositions elaborated upon within the performance arts, I am particularly interested in the way they affect the postdramatic stage. What can the stage, that space which

Symposia Melitensia

Speculative posthumanism (SP) conceives posthumans as agents made inhuman by a technological disconnection or “withdrawal” from human social systems (The disconnection thesis – DT). DT understands becoming nonhuman in terms of agential independence. An artefact like a robot is a “wide human” so long as it depends on its human-related functions to exist. But what is an agent? SP forecloses a purely conceptual response to this question because it rejects transcendental accounts of subjectivity founded in human experience or social practice (Unbounded Posthumanism – UP). UP renders this question illegitimate because it denies there is any theory of agency that could apply to all agents. Not only does DT not tell us what posthumans are like, it has no criteria for determining when disconnection occurs. It follows that understanding the posthuman (if possible) must proceed without criteria. The content of unbounded posthumanism is produced by disconnection rather than by the schematic theoretical content of DT. I will argue that this implies an intimate relationship between the understanding and practice in posthumanism that allows us to draw fertile analogies between UP and two other ‘philosophies of the limit’ Derrida’s Deconstruction and Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy.

2016

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms. I claim that this transcendence can be viewed as analogous to that of the thing-in-itself in Kantian and post-Kantian European philosophy. This schema implies an impasse for transhumanism because, while the radically non-human or posthuman would elude evaluation according to transhumanist principles such as personal autonomy or liberal freedom, it is morally unacceptable for transhumanists to discount the possible outcomes of their favoured policies. I then consider whether the insights of critical posthumanists, who employ a cyborg perspective on human-technology couplings, can dissolve this impasse by “deconstructing” the opposition between the human and its prospective posthuman successors. By exhibiting its logical basis in the postructural...

European Journal of English Studies, 2014

JSRNC, 2021

What makes Philosophical Posthumanism a generous and creative work is Francesca Ferrando's 'appreciation of the paradoxical structure of the posthuman condition itself', as put by Rosi Braidotti (p. xi). The book attempts to explain this paradoxical structure around three main questions, corresponding to the three parts: '(1) What is Philosophical Posthumanism? (2) Of which "human" is the posthuman a "post"? (3) Have humans always been posthuman?' (p. 1). Ferrando then lists 237 guiding questions (but the reader can nd more in the text) and addresses them throughout the following 30 dense chapters. To position philosophical posthumanism within other 'isms' utilizing the concept of 'human', Ferrando deals with a range of themes from transhumanism and antihumanism to arti cial intelligence, bioengineering, and ecology. Considering that religion and nature scholars have also been addressing similar questions for the last couple of decades, I believe this book may help to better integrate posthuman aspirations with the nexus of religion, nature, and culture. At the very beginning of the book, Ferrando de nes philosophical posthumanism as 'an onto-epistemological approach, as well as an ethical one, manifesting as a philosophy of mediation, which discharges any confrontational dualisms and hierarchical legacies; this is why it can be approached as a post-humanism, a postanthropocentrism, and a post-dualism' (p. 22). The very emphasis on approaching philosophical posthumanism as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism, and a post-dualism continues throughout the book. Underlying the importance of an 'awareness of the limits of previous humanistic, anthropocentric, and dualistic assumptions: from epistemology to ontology, from bioethics to an existential inquiry' (p. 55), the author deconstructs these assumptions. While the rst part of the book primarily focuses on the dimensions of post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism, the third part gives priority to post-anthropocentrism and post-dualism. The second part bridges these two through a questioning of the sociopolitical, economic, and symbolic construction of the 'human' and the 'scienti c' framing of the Homo sapiens. The rst part traces the genealogy of posthumanism, paying attention to its connections with postmodernism, transhumanism, and antihumanism. The reader learns that the literature around the concepts of posthuman and posthumanism has been accumulating since Ihab Hassan's postmodern critique titled 'Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Critique?' that was published in 1977 (p. 25). By classifying Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (1999) as an example of critical posthumanism, and Donna Haraway's 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs' (1985) as a