Book contents
- After the Human
- After Series
- After the Human
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I After Humanism
- Chapter 1 Historicizing Posthumanism
- Chapter 2 Poststructuralism and the End(s) of Humanism
- Chapter 3 Postmodernism
- Chapter 4 Embodiment and Affect
- Chapter 5 Requiem for a Digital Humanist
- Part II New Objects of Enquiry
- Part III Posthumanities
- Collective Works Cited
- Index
Chapter 1 - Historicizing Posthumanism
from Part I - After Humanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 November 2020
- After the Human
- After Series
- After the Human
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I After Humanism
- Chapter 1 Historicizing Posthumanism
- Chapter 2 Poststructuralism and the End(s) of Humanism
- Chapter 3 Postmodernism
- Chapter 4 Embodiment and Affect
- Chapter 5 Requiem for a Digital Humanist
- Part II New Objects of Enquiry
- Part III Posthumanities
- Collective Works Cited
- Index
Summary
This chapter outlines some of the intellectual currents that have led to the development of contemporary critical posthumanism(s). Critical posthumanist thought aims to abandon the essentialisms of humanism and to theorize a human subject constituted not by self-sameness but by difference, not fixed but in process, and entangled in human, non-human, and technological relations. I trace some of the challenges to humanism posed by the antihumanisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then offer an overview of some recent and positive philosophical and cultural responses to these challenges, including new ways to think about embodiment and materiality, about our embeddedness in and dependence on the non-human world, and about our simultaneous and globalized entanglement in the cultures of technology. If nothing else, the imminent threat of the climate crisis demonstrates the pressing need to rethink ourselves in/and the world.
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- After the HumanCulture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century, pp. 15 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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