Our standard accounts associate modernism with the new, the now, the punctual. This chapter reckons with a countervailing type of modernist temporality: moments when the contemporary is perforated, displaced, or haunted by deep time. Such moments can look back on the present from a time to come, or they can peer back from the present into pre-modern or pre-historic times. After tracing an array of literary modernist engagements with deep time, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s novels, the chapter turns to the work of O. G. S. Crawford, the British archaeologist and former RAF observer who used aerial photographic techniques honed during World War I to discover and study Neolithic sites during the 1920s and 1930s. In Crawford’s crossing of cutting-edge flying and seeing technologies with long human and pre-human timelines, we encounter an invitation that Woolf and other modernists accepted: to close the gap between punctual and longitudinal time.

“Race and the Limitations of the Human” analyzes the racial dimensions of a process of humanization linked to imperial conquest. Rather than seeing in the violence committed against diverse peoples during the colonization of the Americas a force of dehumanization, this chapter reads this violence as part and parcel of the liberal western humanist order that continues to be experimentally and pedagogically worked out in colonial and nation-building projects. The chapter tracks this humanizing process through debates about Indigenous and Black humanity in conversation with critiques of posthumanist theory as an extension of the western enlightenment project. The question posed is whether—rather than understanding the “post-“ to refer to either an after to the humanizing project or a return to its initiatory moments as critical gesture—it might be better to view it as a suspension or refusal of the western colonial project and its racialized, humanized order.

Poststructuralism is one of the most important theoretical precursors of contemporary posthumanism. There is, for example, a close affinity between the poststructuralist topos of the “end of man” (Foucault, Derrida) and current posthumanist or postanthropocentric thinking about a time “after the human”. The “afterness” or belatedness that characterizes all post-isms creates a critical space for rethinking the human, or for thinking the human otherwise. In this sense, what poststructuralism reminds posthumanism of is the continued need for theorizing. The practice of (poststructuralist) theorizing thus survives in the work of many thinkers that have been instrumental in the development of a critical posthumanism (Haraway, Hayles, Braidotti, Butler, Agamben, Stiegler, Colebrook, Barad, Kirby, Esposito, Wolfe etc.). What poststructuralism brings to current thinking “after the human” is a critical instinct that understands the posthuman and the nonhuman as an otherness that continues to haunt any notion of human identity.

Embedded in psychological ethics is the principle of nonmaleficence – psychologists should endeavor to “do no harm.” Consistent with fundamental human rights, psychologists aim to protect integrity and dignity; secure development and fulfillment of lives; and ensure the well-being of individuals, groups, and communities. Psychological science and practice contains knowledge and insights that can be used to promote these aims. Unfortunately, this knowledge too often has been used to obstruct human integrity, destroy mental capacity and psychological health, and diminish the well-being and security of both persons and peoples. This chapter focuses on ways in which psychologists and psychological knowledge in different ways and at different levels may become part of an abusive culture that both violates human rights and fosters social injustice. In this chapter, we discuss psychologists’ involvement in torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment across a range of settings. Through a case example, we highlight the interplay between direct and structural forms of violence and the path to harm created by ethical decision making devoid of human rights analyses. The need for a clear ethical and human rights–based approach in psychology is argued, including ways of dealing with violations and claiming accountability for crimes against humanity.