The Concept of the Posthuman (original) (raw)

“The Concept of the Posthuman: Chain of Being or Conceptual Saltus?”

A central task in understanding the theme of the posthuman involves relating it to the concept of the human. For some, there is continuity between the concepts of the human and the posthuman. This approach can be understood in the tradition of the great chain of being. Another approach posits a conceptual, and perhaps ontological, saltus (µετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος). Here, the concept of the posthuman is taken to represent a radical departure from the realm of the human. After considering Lovejoy’s scheme of the great chain of being, Aristotle’s view of a conceptual saltus (µετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος), and their historical significance, I will suggest how we might distinguish various concepts of the posthuman from the human by applying Rudolph Carnap’s approach to defining multiple concepts of space. We can thus create a linguistic convention that will assist in constructing useful conceptions of the human and posthuman – these can clarify the prospects of a posthuman future.

The posthuman : philosophical posthumanism and its others

2013

As Rosi Braidotti in "Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming" (2002), puts it: Postmodernity is notoriously the age of proliferating differences. The devalued "others" which constituted the specular complement of the modern subjectwoman, the ethnic or racialized other and nature or 'earth-others'-return with a vengeance. They are the complement to the modern subject, who constructed himself as much through what he excluded. (174) Posthumanism may arise once the need for such a "vengeance" has been fulfilled, and the voices of subjectivities who have been historically reduced to the realm of the "Other", have been regained. Posthumanism is inextricably related to the Studies of the Differences, referring to the fields of research which developed out of the deconstruction of the "neutral subject" of Western onto-epistemologies 9. The deconstruction enacted, within the historical and philosophical frame of Postmodernism, by Feminist, Black, Gay and Lesbian, Postcolonial and Chicana theorists, together with differently abled activists and other outsiders, pointed out the partiality of the construction of the Discourse 10 , historically formulated by one specific subject, which finally appeared in its embodied vestiges, as: Western, white, male, heterosexual, propertied and abled, among other specific terms. In order to postulate a post-to the human, the differences which are constitutive to the human, and which have been historically erased by the self-claimed objectivity of hegemonic accounts, have to be taken into account. Posthumanism is indebted to the reflections developed out of the "margins" of such a centralized human subject, which emphasized the human as a process, more than as a given, inherently characterized by differences and shifting identities: Women's and Gender Studies, Gay 9 Such a genealogical location of the posthuman is already pointed out by William Spanos in his pioneer text "End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism", published in 1993. 10 Note that the notion of "Discourse" is intended here not only in the foucaultian use of the term as a way of constituting knowledge, social practices and power relations (Foucault 1976), but also as the phallogocentric logos (Irigaray 1974), and the symbolic order (Kristeva 1974).

Human and Posthuman. A Merleau-Pontian Perspective

Y.V. Burbulis et al. (ed.), Philosophy today: values, perspectives, meanings, Proceedings of the international scientific conference (Yekaterinburg, November 19-21, 2020), Ural University Publishing House, Yekaterinburg, 2021

This article discusses the concepts of humanism and posthumanism from a Merleau-Pontian perspective. The Phenomenology of Perception contains a humanistic point of view, since the world and other beings are seen from an egological and human perspective. Merleau Ponty’s later works, instead, show a posthuman point of view, because of the notion of “flesh”: my body is made of the same stuff of the other bodies, so that they constitute a common being. Taking inspiration from this concept and from the notions of reversibility and divergence, it is argued that Merleau-Ponty suggests a new way to conceive humanism.

Humanity at the Turning Point: Philosophical Anthro- pology and the Posthuman

2007

This essay aims to demonstrate that the philosophical anthropology of Michael Landmann provides important critical tools and resources for intervening in the debate over the posthuman and the turning point that humanity faces due to the advancing powers of technologies such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics. Landmann’s view of the human being, which emphasizes the correlative conditions of creativity and culturality, freedom and determinacy, and malleability and fixity, pro vides the grounds on which to critique the current structure of the debate over the posthuman and resituate it in terms of our historicity and self-images. The rhetorically charged trope of the posthuman, with its emphasis on a break or turning point, risks cutting us off from significant resources for understanding human nature, including the resources of philosophical anthropology, and does not advance our understanding of our current situation and the current dilemmas human being...

Is the Post- in Posthuman the Post- in Postmodern? Or, What Can the [Human] Be?

Critical Theory, 2020

In this article, I address the multiplicity of "posthumanisms" including posthumanism as a periodizing gesture, a description of what follows humanism; as a problematique or "predicament" ; and as a move that heralds something else-a "critical" posthumanism, a "techno-philic" or "animaphilic" decentering of the human into a networked entanglement of substances, or a "posthumous" post-posthumanism. Comparing posthumanism to previous "posts" including postmodern-ism, I argue that its nature as a "post" means that posthumanism cannot avoid the "postal system" described by Jacques Derrida, whereby discursively constituted goals fail to reach their intended destinations. Drawing upon a process-relational conception of the human (and of the cosmos), I argue that the human has never been human such that it can be overcome or transcended. Our humanity is always ever in process, which means that any posthumanity will always be unstable and always tied to the realm of "alternative humanisms." There is, however, one form of posthumanism that is worth conceiving as such: this is posthumanism, the "close encounter of the third kind" whereby we humans contend with our ultimate erasure, that of extinction.

The Parameters of the Posthuman

2012

Most posthuman approaches dismantle the idea of the environment as a conceptually neutral ground (or its corollary, nature as originary or pure) by demonstrating the constitutive role of technology in various aspects of the environment. One reasonably comprehensive articulation of this claim is that of Crutzen and Stoermer, who coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe the present geological era, one in which man (anthros) has become the most significant factor affecting global environmental change.1 Other efforts to qualify the posthuman continuum between human, technology and nature include White and Wilbert’s anthology Technonatures (2009), which translates the anthropocene concept from the geological and evolutionary to the ethnocultural level, describing how various human social groupings utilize technologies to construct their own versions of nature, which the authors term “social natures.”2 Architecture is undeniably implicated in such revisions of the term “nature,” as Davi...

ANDERS, SIMONDON AND THE BECOMING OF THE POSTHUMAN

Classical Literature and Posthumanism, 2019

It is said that we have entered the posthuman epoch. Humans are awoken from their own illusion of being at the centre of the world surrounded by beings such as animals, plants, objects and even phantoms. However, isn't this something that already happened at the very beginning of humanization since man is an existence without essence, without quality (Stiegler 1998)? And did the concept of the posthuman only become transparent with the emergence of a technological consciousness after modernity (Hui 2017)? We must start by contesting that the arrival of the 'posthuman' epoch is not simply out of an awakening by a brand-new ontology, but because humans are rendered obsolete by the technological artifacts produced by humans themselves. It is a dialectical movement partly compelled by the industrial revolutions, in which an internal negation is produced. Humans cease to be the centre of the world, and become just parts of gigantic technical systems, in which they are functions or mere operators. Given this fact, the question that follows is: what is meant by such a renunciation of the human? Like Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God, the question is less about the fact of the death of a transcendent being, but more about what it really means to live without God. It means the recognition of the fate of human beings, and the re-structuralization of all domains in order to create and maintain a new coherence. One can celebrate this outdatedness of the human under different names, posthuman or transhuman, European Prometheanism (Brassier 2014: 467-488) as well as accelerationism.