In this paper, I discuss the problem of human ascendance over animals. The issue is particularly important and often addressed in contemporary intellectual current referred to as posthumanism. In this framework, the interest in humanity is not abandoned, but one departs from the anthropocentric approach. The prefix “post” denotes a shift of focus, from problems and intellectual positions which underline the privileged status of the human to non-anthropocentric attitudes. These are non-anthropocentric humanities, although the designation itself is paradoxical, and undermines the legitimacy of the humanities in general, since anthropos is the principal subject of research of the discipline and the humanistic approach. For those reasons, “non-anthropocentric humanities” and other ones as well, such as “non-humanist anthropology”, “anthropology of objects”, “anthropology of cyborgs” or finally “posthumanities” provoke reservations. Still, this is a problem which always appears when appropriate words are lacking to describe a set of new tendencies, directions of research or intellectual approaches which have not yet developed a suitable terminology. The prefix “post” suggests that new phenomena cannot be rendered by means of the former notions and categories; new methods which make it possible have to be sought. In the case of notions such as “non-anthropocentric humanities” and “posthumanities”, the important thing is that they forecast as change of the dominant in the tendencies, directions and methods of (post)humanistic studies. They do not draw upon humanism as a specific approach to the world in whose centre one finds the human being, but to the non-essentialist and non-hierarchically oriented posthumanism.
The article is an attempt to consider a place for a subject in perspective of post-anthropocentric point of view. Post-anthropocentrism is a heavyweight issue of the posthumanism, a critical theory, which is based on rejection of human domination over the world and which considers human as a part of life-itself. However, is human capable of rejecting the anthropocentric point of view? Is overstepping the Anthropos even possible? What we can do to not allow the post-anthropocentrism become one of anthropocentric instruments of power? Author tries to answer these questions referring to feminist critical theories - Adrienne Rich's politics of location and Donna Haraway's situated knowledge. It seems that, the proper question is rather, could human beings become a part of life-itself, remaining themselves in the same time.
Human dreams of a long and healthy life are becoming increasingly real. The advancement of medical technology allows to modify the genome or personalised therapy in order to avoid troublesome side effects. This process also leads to the blurring of boundaries between humans and animals. Rats with induced human diseases are used for testing drugs for incurable illness; humanised pigs can donate organs that are compatible with the genome and immune system of the recipient. A brave new human is approaching, and new “human” animals are making this possible. The main objective of the article is to show the differences between the refinement of people and other animals and to analyse this phenomenon from an ethical point of view.
The author analyses the theoretical and empirical convergence between posthumanist studies and disability studies. She begins with an explanation of the philosophy and tasks that researchers on posthuman disability set themselves. She discusses this issue using the example of the movie Orchids. My Intersex Adventure by the Australian director Phoebe Hart and her autobiographical texts. In the last part of the article, the author focuses on the concept of hybrid theories based on intersectionality.
The article concerns the idea of the subject’s evolution in the poetry of Ewa Lipska. The article presents the unexplored path of subjectivity’s development in selected poems by this Cracovian poet. The main research concept regards the interpretation of particular poems from the perspective of current philosophical problems, connected with posthumanism, which is understood here as the ability to go beyond the bounds of humanism, a revision of previous humanistic assumptions. The essential change of direction in the reception of Ewa Lipska’s writings could be perceived as a result of the interpretation contained in this article.
I contend that, at its core, Stephen Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts is an allegory of reading that illustrates how composite realities exist in the increasingly electronically-dominated world of posthumanism. Hall succinctly identifies how words act upon readers intellectually and psychologically. Readers take the written words from the page and turn them into actual people, places, things, and events within their minds, bringing their own past narratives to create their versions of the text’s pseudoreality. However, the text’s main character, Eric, is disabled by his repeated episodes of complete amnesia – his reality is constantly being erased and rewritten, just like computer memory, leaving Eric with no past narrative to inform his present and future. Hall, very much aware of the conflict between reality and pseudoreality, conflates the worlds of written and digital text, and of human and computer memory in ways that both celebrate their coexistence and warn of one’s potential to eliminate the other. Thus, the allegory of reading exemplifies the potential destruction of reading and the end of electronic posthumanism. As digital text and the mainframe threaten to destroy the act of reading in the twenty-first century, the death of the reader looms large.
The paper proposes to appreciate the play’s butcheries as an incision into the unstable character of the category of the human. The vividness of the “strange images of death” is thus analysed with reference to the cultural poetics of Elizabethan theatre including its multifarious proximity to the bear-baiting arenas and execution scaffolds. The cluster of period’s cross-currents is subsequently expanded to incorporate the London shambles and its presumed resonance for the reception of Macbeth. Themes explored in the article magnify the relatedness between human and animals, underscore the porosity of the soon to turn modern paradigms and reflect upon the way Shakespeare might have played on their malleability in order to enhance the theatrical experience of the early 17th century. Finally, the questionable authority of Galenic anatomy in the pre- Cartesian era serves as a supplementary and highly speculative thread meant to suggest further research venues.
One of the issues that emerges with regard to radical human enhancement is the destruction of the intergenerational connections. It is variously envisioned in science fiction, and we can speak of many possible plateaus on which the human continuity, which entails solidarity, can be contested. Contemporary young adult dystopias, such as Shusterman’s Unwind Dystology (2007-15) and The Arc of a Scythe (2016-) cycles, Beckett’s Genesis (2010), Patterson’s Maximum Ride (2005-15) or Wells’s Partials (2009-14), very often conjoin the intergenerational issues typical of juvenile fiction with bioethical concerns in the posthuman and transhuman world. I look at the speculative futures of intergenerational solidarity from the point of view of the biological continuity, the subjective continuity and postgenerationality in an immortal society. In the majority of cases it may be observed how the child-adultdichotomy, with the superimposed adult normativity prejudice, threatens the coexistence of trans- and posthumans with their “parents,” leading to the redefinition of altruism in the wake of the homicidal ALife apocalypse. The relatively broad spectrum of the cases and perspectives I have selected yields a fairly comprehensive picture of contemporary projections of intergenerational solidarity “after the genome” (Herrick 2013).
The issue stated in the title is an attempt to understand the profound changes that have taken place in the culture of ethical education related to the relationship between humans and nature. The subject of analysis is linked to the need to promote interpersonal and interspecies humanitarianism. The author refers here to the educational activities aimed at shaping attitudes of respect for all living beings. The theoretical plane covers the ideas developed within the framework of the trend known as post-humanism. In this paper, the stance is that upbringing in humanitarianism is a great capacity that must be developed in children and adults. This is an ethical capacity for a community-oriented and respectful coexistence.
Based on an interpretation of selected texts concerning ambient technology (AmI) the article critically discusses the relationship between technology, culture and nature. A posthumanistic approach to the analysis is adopted, allowing for the unveiling of the ruptures and splits related to such issues as subjectivity, culture-nature dichotomy and technological development.
The purpose of my paper is to look at the dislocated world in Hamlet, the identity crisis of the title character, to accompany the anthropocentric Hamlet as he searches for ‘himself’ and attempts to reduce the dislocated joints and fractures in male anthropocentric subjectivity. In this paper, I advance the thesis that the plot of Hamlet is driven by a cultural fantasy of achieving organic unity and a state of homeostasis. To prove the thesis statement, I use the motif of out-of-jointness present in the drama and the graveyard scene in which I ‘look’ inside Yorick’s skull together with Hamlet in search of posthumanist masculinity. Looking at the skull and talking to it, the anthropocene Hamlet has a chance to discover several dimensions in it. Although head dissection will not be necessary for this, it will become necessary to dissect the masculine identity, being in humanist terms, a socio-cultural construct and a linguistic construction. The posthumanist vision of masculinity confronts the disembodied subject, the one that the humanist Hamlet should cope with and ‘embody’ according to the humanist pattern of masculinity. The impairment of its pillars is evident in Hamlet’s statements, provided one hears his holistic and organic vision of masculinity. The deconstruction of the anthropocentric order is a prerequisite for Hamlet’s identity crisis to be overcome, for him to reassemble himself and find his own place in the ‘broken’ skeleton of the world.
The author presents the theatre of Gisèle Vienne, a French-Austrian director and choreographer, as a laboratory exploiting darkness being a place for the becoming of the subject, for experiencing disturbed reality, for abolishing the opposition between the living and the dead. Exploring twilight, the director touches upon phenomena that violate the norms that in the general perception belong to the field of negativity, reveals that which is covered, that which activates the imagination. Darkness becomes a space for an intimate narration of hidden human dispositions. This article is an analysis of the performance Crowd (2017), in particular the three components that determine its structure and dramaturgy, i.e. time, light and space. The author engaged in a process of overt participant observation; she followed the rehearsals for the performance from 2016 to 2017 and created her own archive of the research process.
In this article, I suggest that the challenge of the Anthropocene is an ontological challenge arising from modern humans’ abstraction from our environment, rooted in the substance ontology of Euro-Cartesian metaphysics. By comparative philosophical analysis of the cosmological foundations of the San Bushmen’s ontology in southern Africa, this article suggests that being rooted in hunter-gatherer metaphysics is a key component of our species’ ability to symbiotically adapt by fostering the relational practice of ontological ambiguity, fluidity, and mutability that facilitates a process of transspecies becoming. Through both animistic and European philosophical perspectives, I suggest that the posthumanist practice of becoming by process of ontological flux reinforces an Earth-centered epistemology that can assist postmodern humans in transitioning from an ontological impasse that has resulted in environmental fragmentation to a relational ontology that re-establishes an ecological web of transspecies kinship.
The possible future of mankind features prominently among SF topics. Despite a long record of failures, like unsuccessful grappling with the scourge of war, present day humanity has come a long way to assume a degree of unity it has never enjoyed before. The process of globalization has its anti-globalist opponents, but its idealistic aim is a better world without racial, social, economic and in some areas even national barriers separating people. This picture of multiracial, multicultural but otherwise ontologically uniform humanity amounts to a vision of a sentient species that is close to achieving its mature form. However, what may look like the final stop of our journey is treated by both the advocates (e.g. Ray Kurzweil) and critics (e.g. Fukuyama) of humanity’s trans/posthuman development as the beginning of a new stage of our existence. A question arises if the new paths of evolution involve a danger that humans will fall victim to a policy of metaphysical laissez faire that will put the race’s unity and continuity in jeopardy. Will the old walls of racial prejudice and social inequality between people that we have striven to break down be replaced by new ones? The objective of this paper is to use Bruce Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist universe as a literary illustration of the new barriers that the prospective trans/posthumanity may have to face and seek to surmount or leave behind.
The article seeks to explore the theme of nature’s revenge in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009, translated into English in 2018). The book may be classified as Anthropocene fiction or eco-fiction Tokarczuk’s treatment of vengeful nature in Drive Your Plow… manifests as a literary representation of a physiology of an ecosystem in disequilibrium, pervaded by images of blood in a snowy landscape. The author renders her female protagonist, Janina Duszejko, a proponent and practitioner of a theory proposing that nature wreaks revenge on humans. Tokarczuk presents new ways of imagining agency beyond anthropocentrism. Drive Your Plow may serve as an example of literary fiction from which posthumanist reflections may spring, while simultaneously it oftentime (even if unintentionally) draws on posthumanist philosophy and ethics. I also refer to Olga Tokarczuk biography and views in search of her environmental concerns and solutions.
When Lady Anne accuses Richard of cruelty in the wooing scene of act one in Richard III, she claims that even the fiercest beast will demonstrate some degree of pity. Her attempt to categorize Richard as somehow both less than human and less than a beast, however, leaves her vulnerable to Richard’s pithy retort that he knows no pity “and therefore [is] no beast” (1:2:71-2). The dialogue swiftly moves on, but the relation between the emotional phenomenon known as pity or compassion and the nonhuman, briefly raised in these two lines, remains unresolved. Recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern studies, historical animal studies and posthumanism has demonstrated ways in which the human-animal binary is often less than clearly articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Building on such work, and adding perspectives from the history of the emotions, I look closely at the exchange between Anne and Richard as characteristic of pre-Cartesian confusion about the emotional disposition-in particular compassion-of animals. I argue that such confusion can in fact be traced throughout Richard III and elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon and that paying attention to it unsettles the more familiar notion of compassion as a human species distinction and offers a new way to read the early modern nonhuman.
The following article is to introduce the reader into a cultural and intellectual movement whose aim is to identify the need for improvement in human life in the sphere of physicality as well as mentality with the aid of modern technologies – transhumanism. With the dramatic change in the perception of technology, transhumanist welcome the opportunity to improve cognitive skills, help to perpetuate human happiness, or increase longevity. Although the opponents of the transhumanist thought dismiss it as “the world’s most dangerous idea,” the adversaries advocate that the alternation of human form is both practical and reasonable. With the use of modern technology, enthusiasts of transhumanism try to prove that the human body needs to be re-invented in order to transcend the natural limitations. In my work I will try to tackle the problem of human body being currently subject to gradual transition from Homo Sapiens to Robo Sapiens, the process of ‘becoming’ a cyborg. By incorporating bodily augmentation, contemporary artists such as Stelarc or Neil Harbisson cast a light on the change of physical form, as well as the definition of being human. Evoking much controversy, transhumanism brings a completely new dimension to the understanding of the current human condition.
Teresa Żółkowska, Karolina Kaliszewska, The selected premises for the reconfigura-tion of the disability model. The posthu-manist perspective. Interdisciplinary Contexts of Special Pedagogy, no. 25, Poznań 2019. Pp. 55-81. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300-391X. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14746/ikps.2019.25.03 In the contemporary special pedagogy, it is clearly seen, that we are dealing with a situation of passing over scholarly programmes that refer, i.a. to the medical and social model of disability. We remain in a inter-paradigmatic transition period, in which new views on disability are appearing. One of the most popular scholarly approaches is the posthumanism, the characteristics of which are, i.a.: the critique of humanism, the departure from anthropocentrism, the appearance of a new materialism, the direction of research towards objects, animals, as well as, the relations of people and non-people. The example of such posthumanist approach, that may constitute the context for the creation of new models of disability, is the Actor-Network theory developed by Bruno Latour and his associates.
The article is an attempt to review the ecological discourse in the light of posthuman philosophy. The main concept addressed by the author is the Anthropocene: the name of the new geological epoch, which betokens growing influence of human practices on the condition of Earth. Analyzing the concept of the Anthropocene, the author outlines its history, to date critique and related controversies (within natural sciences and humanities). The author also observes that the Anthropocene functions as an ambivalent philosophical metaphor, which underlies contemporary ecological discourse. In an attempt to challenge Anthropocene-tric thought, the author advances a new concept which, in his opinion, could replace ecology. The concept is called eco-logics, and may be defined as ‘thinking through home’.
PL
The article is an attempt to review the ecological discourse in the light of posthuman philosophy. The main concept addressed by the author is the Anthropocene; the author observes that the Anthropocene functions as an ambivalent philosophical metaphor, which underlies contemporary ecological discourse. The author advances a new concept which, in his opinion, could replace ecology. The concept is called eco-logics, and may be defined as ‘thinking through home’.
The author presents the thesis that fantastic literature and film, especially in the science fiction variant, is a privileged form of expression in posthumanist discourse. The themes, motifs and protagonists of science fiction are invoked in various contexts by Donna J. Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Luciana Parisi, and Pramod K. Nayar. The author analyzes various areas of the involvement and usage of science fiction in posthumanist discourse: on the ontological, axiological and epistemological levels.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.