Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?: October 2018

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Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?
Article · October 2018

DOI: 10.28984/ct.v2i1.279
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Posthumanism: Current State and Future Research

Introduction
The special issue of Con Texte entitled “Posthumanism: Current State and Future Research” was
sparked by the recent visits of Dr. Alex Levant and Dr. Christine Daigle at Laurentian University.
Both gave presentations on issues related to the growing field of posthumanism. The lecture by Alex
Levant (November 23, 2017), which was co-sponsored by the International Centre for Interdisciplinary
Research in the Human Sciences (ICIRHS) and part of the “Thought and Culture” series, was entitled
“Smart Matter and the Thinking Body: Concepts for the Anthropocene.” The lecture by Christine
Daigle (March 8, 2018), which was part of ICIRHS’ “Posthuman Day” and sponsored by
Laurentian’s Interdisciplinary Humanities MA program’s Speakers’ Series, was entitled “Our
Posthuman Vulnerability.” We are proud to have articles from both presenters included in this
special issue. This special issue has been realized in partnership with the International Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research in the Human Sciences (ICIRHS).
The article by Dr. Alex Levant (Wilfrid Laurier University), entitled “The Future has Already
Happened,” discusses the emergence of posthuman thinking machines and seeks to account for
their agency in a way that has escaped posthuman theory thus far.
In “Vulner-abilité posthumaine,” Dr. Christine Daigle (Brock University) explores various forms of
vulnerability in the posthuman context (biological, sociopolitical, affective), which leads to the
promotion of a new conception of “transjectivity.”
In “Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight,” Martin Boucher (Laurentian University) explores the
role of technology for an individual with a disability and for the interplanetary astronaut, which
brings him to consider both as posthuman subjects.
“‘By Means Other Than Life:’ Literature as Posthuman Memory,” by Charles Parker Krieg
(University of Helsinki), draws on Bernard Stiegler and cultural memory studies to show that
literature can be understood as a posthuman form of memory.
Finally, Steven Umbrello (York University) in his article “Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?”
presents the current state of scholarship on posthumanism and gives indications about the direction
of posthumanist scholarship.
The contributors of this special issue are specialists in posthumanism. They suggest new ways of
conducting research in posthumanism by problematizing the anthropocentric paradigm. We asked
the authors to present their thoughts in a relatively short and rather unusual article format, which
required from them a fair amount of polishing in order to clearly and succinctly summarize some of
their current research. Together, the articles suggest an open cluster of concepts that is able to create
resonances and generate new ideas. We hope that this special issue will contribute to sensitizing the
readers of Con Texte to the richness of the type of questioning raised from the posthumanist
perspective.
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This issue of Con Texte also includes a piece by Douglas Ord in which he presents his most recent
publication: A Schizo-Philosopher’s Colouring Book (Guernica Editions, 2018). Douglas graduated from
the MA Humanities program at Laurentian in 2014. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program
“Theory and Criticism” at Western University.
Con Texte is housed within Laurentian University’s Centre for Humanities Research and Creativity (CHRC)
and is published by the Laurentian University Library and Archives. We take this opportunity to
invite scholars at all career levels to submit their work in either French or English.
Enjoy the reading!
Caitlin Heppner, PhD student in Philosophy at U. Ottawa

Martin Boucher, PhD candidate in Human Studies at Laurentian
Alain Beaulieu, Professor at Laurentian’s Philosophy Department
Posthumanisme: état actuel et recherches futures

Introduction
Ce numéro spécial de Con Texte consacré à « Posthumanisme : état actuel et recherches futures » a
été initié suite aux visites de Dr Alex Levant et de Dre Christine Daigle à l’Université Laurentienne.
Les deux conférenciers ont offert des présentations sur des thèmes liés au domaine des études
posthumanistes. La présentation d’Alex Levant (23 novembre 2017), qui a été co-organisée par le
Centre international de recherche interdisciplinaire en sciences humaines (CIRISH) et faisait partie des
séminaires « Pensée et Culture », s’intitulait « Smart Matter and the Thinking Body : Concepts for the
Anthropocene ». La présentation de Christine Daigle (8 mars 2018), qui était incluse dans la
« Journée Posthumaniste » du CIRISH, en plus d’être organisée dans le cadre de la Série de
conférences de la Maîtrise interdisciplinaire en humanités, s’intitulait « Our Posthuman
Vulnerability ». Nous sommes très heureux de publier dans ce numéro spécial des articles de ces
deux auteurs. Ce numéro spécial a été réalisé en partenariat avec le Centre international de recherche
interdisciplinaire en sciences humaines (CIRISH).
L’article de Dr Alex Levant (Université Wilfrid Laurier) intitulé « The Future has Already
Happened » discute de l’émergence de la pensée des machines posthumanistes en tentant de rendre
compte de leur caractère d’agent d’une manière qui a échappée jusqu’ici à la théorie posthumaniste.

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Dans « Vulner-abilité posthumaine », Dre Christine Daigle (Université Brock) explore diverses
formes de vulnérabilités en contexte posthumaniste (biologique, sociopolitique, affevtive), ce qui
l’amène à proposer une conception nouvelle de «transjectivité».
Dans « Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight », Martin Boucher (Université Laurentienne) analyse
le rôle de la technologie à la fois pour l’individu aux prises avec un handicap et pour l’astronaute
interplanétaire, tous deux considérés comme sujets posthumains.
« ‘By Means Other Than Life:’ Literature as Posthuman Memory », de Charles Parker Krieg
(Université de Helsinki), s’inspire de Bernard Stiegler et des études en mémoire culturelle pour
montrer que la littérature peut être comprise comme une forme posthumaine de mémoire.
Enfin, Steven Umbrello (Université York), dans son article « Posthumanism : A Fickle
Philosophy? », présente un état actuel des recherches posthumanistes et donne des indications quant
à certaines directions futures.
Les auteur.e.s de ce numéro spécial sont tous des spécialistes des questions posthumanistes. Ils
proposent à la fois de nouvelles façons de mener des recherches dans le domaine du
posthumanisme, et aussi de nouvelles manières de problématiser le paradigme anthropocentrique.
Nous avons demandé aux auteurs de présenter leur pensée dans des textes relativement brefs, ce qui
a exigé de leur part un bon travail de « polissage » pour résumer clairement et succinctement
quelques-unes de leurs recherches en cours. Ensemble, ces articles proposent des réseaux ouverts de
concepts en mesure de créer des résonances et d’engendrer de nouvelles idées. Nous espérons que
ce numéro spécial puisse contribuer à sensibiliser les lectrices et lecteurs de Con Texte à la richesse
des questionnements qui émergent de la perspective posthumaniste.
Ce numéro de Con Texte inclut également un texte de Douglas Ord qui présente son plus récent
ouvrage : A Schizo-Philosopher’s Colouring Book (Guernica Editions, 2018). Douglas a obtenu sa
maîtrise du programme de Maîtrise en Humanités de l’Université Laurentienne en 2014. Il poursuit
présentement des études doctorales dans le programms « Theory and Criticism » à l’Université
Western.
La revue Con Texte est affiliée au Centre de recherche et de créativité en humanités (CRCH) de l'Université
laurentienne et est publié par Bibliothèque et archives de l’Université Laurentienne. Nous profitons
de l’occasion pour inviter les spécialistes de tous les niveaux universitaires à soumettre des projets
d’articles, en français et en anglais.
Bonne lecture!
Caitlin Heppner, Doctorante en philosophie, Université d’Ottawa

Martin Boucher, Candidat au doctorat en sciences humaines, Université Laurentienne
Alain Beaulieu, Professeur au département de philosophie, Université Laurentienne

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The Future Has Already Happened

Alex Levant
Correspondence: alevant@wlu.ca
Alex Levant is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University
in Waterloo, Canada. He specializes in critical media theory and emerging/future technologies. His work has
appeared in various journals, including Historical Materialism, Critique, Stasis, Educational Review, among
others. He is editor (with Vesa Oittinen) of Dialectics of the Ideal (Brill, 2014).
Abstract: This article interrogates current conceptions of thinking machines of the future. In
contrast to dystopian visions of the future, where humans become dominated by machines of their
own making, I argue that this future already happened some time ago, and that we are, in fact,
already living in the future that we dread might come to pass.
Keywords: posthuman theory, artificial intelligence, capital, subjectivity
The impending emergence of thinking machines has become a commonplace in contemporary

popular culture. If one were to judge on the basis of a spate of recent TV shows, such as Westworld
(HBO), Humans (AMC), Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix), as well as films, such as Chappi, Blade
Runner 2049, among others, it appears that it is just a matter of time before we find ourselves living
amidst machines that, to varying degrees, will be able to think, feel, and even enter into relationships
with us.
This article invites us to reflect on the nature of this imaginary by considering the thinking
machine of the future not as a technological phenomenon, but as a socio-historical one. It suggests
that the ‘thinking machine’ appears as a reasonable expectation of the future because of particular
ways of understanding subjectivity that are current in popular culture, which typically reproduce the
Cartesian mind/body dualism. Trends in contemporary posthuman theory challenge these dualist
views; however, as I argue, they nevertheless tend to confirm this imaginary by reconceptualising
matter itself as possessing a type of agency.
In contrast, the present analysis seeks to account for the agency of future machines in ways
that posthuman theory does not. I want to suggest that we imagine smart machines of the future
because today’s machines already possess a ‘phantom subjectivity’. This subjectivity, I contend, is
unrelated to their technological capacities to replicate human subjectivity, but instead is a product of
their commodification. Today’s machines are animated not by technology, but by capital. In this
piece, I interrogate current conceptions of thinking machines of the future, which I argue tend to
obscure the present reality that today’s machines already possess agency as commodities, and
dominate us as we busy ourselves trying to ward off an impending doom that is always deferred. In a
certain sense, the future is not here; rather, the future has already happened.
i. Thinking Machines of the Future in Popular Culture
In contemporary popular culture, the near-future tends to be imagined as including technologically
advanced machines with human-like abilities and aspirations. However, such a future is far from
certain, as it presupposes a particular understanding of subjectivity that posits the human mind as a
Levant / The Future Has Already Happened 4

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spontaneous product of the brain, itself understood as a very fast computer. Consequently, one
could imagine oneself as information that could be copied and transposed into another brain or into
another computer that performs the functions of a brain. This view is an iteration of Descartes’
mind/body dualism, where the mind appears as something immaterial that is housed in a material
body. What was once seen as the soul is now seen as information—very different views with striking
similarities, both rooted in a dualist approach.
In contrast, recent posthuman theory problematizes this dualism. For instance, Robert
Pepperell (2009) in The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain argues that the brain
necessarily exists in a body and that a body exists in an environment—all of which are necessary for
the mind to exist. Such critiques are plentiful and persuasive, and in fact, one may wonder why we
have so readily accepted the modelling of mind as information and brain as machine?
ii. Posthuman Theory and the Agency of Machines

While there is a substantial diversity of perspectives within posthuman theory, there appears to be a
common rejection of Cartesian dualism. The mind/body dichotomy tends to be reconsidered, and
the question of agency posed in new ways. Rethinking the relationship between human and
nonhuman, and reimagining the nonhuman as possessing agency has been a recurring theme in
recent theory. Machines have come to be understood as not only things humans use to achieve their
objectives, but as having a part in shaping objectives. For instance, Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
notes how technologies can prescribe certain behaviour. Bruno Latour refers to this as a
‘prescription’ written into technologies, which he defines as “the behavior imposed back onto the
human by nonhuman” (Latour, “Missing Masses,” 232). ANT attributes agency and even
responsibility to these technologies. As Latour responds to the infamous NRA slogan ‘Guns don’t
kill people. People kill people’: “It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must
be shared among the various actants” (Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 179-180).
This trend appears to be part of a larger theoretical shift, known as the ‘material turn’
(Levant). Following the ‘linguistic turn’ of the late 20th century, which focused on the limits of
human knowledge and challenged universal truth claims, in recent years, several theoretical
approaches, which appeared separately, have sought to re-examine the enduring importance of
matter (e.g. agential realism, new materialism, actor-network theory, postphenomenology, among
others).
A particularly interesting example of a recent trend in posthuman theory is ‘new
materialism’, which attributes not only agency to matter, as we saw with ANT, but also ‘thought’.
Rosi Braidotti describes ‘new materialism’ as follows: “A post-secular approach, posited on firm
anti-humanist grounds… rests on the idea that matter, including the specific slice of matter that is
human embodiment, is intelligent and self-organizing” (Braidotti 35). In posthuman theory, not only
the machine, but matter itself appears already intelligent.
These theoretical trends are quite critical of the simplistic and dualist conceptions of
subjectivity found in contemporary popular culture; however, they nevertheless confirm the
imagined future where humans live alongside thinking machines. In posthuman theory, the issue
tends to be rearticulated by ascribing agency to matter itself. Dualism is ‘overcome’ by subjectifying
the object world (Levant). Machines appear to have agency not because of their ability to replicate

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the processing power of human neural networks, as in popular culture, but because matter naturally
has agency. Similar to Braidotti, who attributes intelligence and self-organization to matter, for
Latour matter also always already possesses agency; i.e. it does (Latour, “Missing Masses,” 229).
Rather than critically analysing how dualist perspectives maintain a mystical understanding of
mind (as a spontaneous product of the brain, for instance), trends in posthuman theory that ascribe
mind to matter appear to further this mystification. In both cases, mind is simply just there, as a
property of matter, or of a specific material object – quite consistent with the notion of intelligent
machines. In contrast, I want to invite us to consider the smart machine of the future not as a matter
of technological development, but a matter of political practice. What I am suggesting is that there is
something about our ‘ways of doing’ that cultivates world views that make it quite reasonable to
understand mind as a matter of computing.
iii. Animated by Capital
Evald Ilyenkov’s work is useful for understanding how our practices shape our views. Ilyenkov
eschews the mind/body split by advancing the concept of the thinking body:
There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation—body and
thought—but only one single object, which is the thinking body [which] does not consist of two
Cartesian halves—‘thought lacking a body’ and a ‘body lacking thought’ […] It is not a special ‘soul,’
installed by God in the human body as in a temporary residence, that thinks, but the body of man
[sic] itself (Ilyenkov, Dialectical Logic, 18–19).
Drawing on Spinoza and Marx, Ilyenkov’s thinking body refers not to the physical body of
the individual, but to our collective or social body, of which the individual is a part. The thought of
the social body is expressed in the ideal – a “special reality” (Ilyenkov, “Dial’ektika ideal’nogo,” 14)
comprised of immaterial phenomena, such as knowledge, mathematical truths, customs, tastes, etc.
For Ilyenkov matter is idealized in the form of human activities that are codified in laws, cultural
norms, and similar artifacts. These practices, inherited from the past, into which we are born, have a
“peculiar objectivity”1, and confront us as objective social forces with which we must reckon no less
than with the objective force of material objects.
Together, these practices constitute what Marx called a mode of production, which refers
not only to an economic system, but to a way of doing, or a way of life. The organization of human
activity under capitalism fosters an understanding of thought that reflects the logic of capital
accumulation. When maximising profit becomes valued as the highest form of thought, then it
becomes rational to value the instrumental reason of a thinking machine above all else, and to judge
human abilities against this standard. In this regard, machines no longer appear as imperfect
humans; rather, humans appear as imperfect machines.
This inversion between human and machine differs from the inversion imagined in popular
culture, as machines are animated not by advanced technology, but by those very humans they
dominate. Forgetting this reality is the essence of what Georg Lukacs called reification—the process
by which social relations assume the appearance of things. He described it as follows: “Its basis is
that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom

1
See Ilyenkov, 2012.

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objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace
of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (Lukacs 83). When something is
commodified, it acquires a new set of meanings that reflect the social relations in which this
commodity moves. “It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it
is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears” (Lukacs 94). As objects, in the form of commodities,
acquire new powers, they also shed their previous meanings—anything that does not contribute to
capital accumulation becomes extraneous and hence beyond the horizon of rational thought. The
process of reification transforms social relations into things, and a living, mysterious world becomes
encrusted in a second nature—a world in which things “acquire a new objectivity” (Lukacs 92)—where
commodities attain magical powers, and where a magical, living world appears disenchanted and
dead.
In this context, the commodified machine is something entirely different from a machine.
Under capitalism, commodities become cells of capital, bearers of value (Marx). Their material
properties become immaterial in this regard, although their value tends to appear as a product of
these properties rather than as congealed human activity. As cells of capital, their ‘objective’ is to
augment their value—which is the logic of their animation, or rather the objective of the investor
seeking a return on their investment, which at the end of the day is capital, irrespective of what
specific commodity it assumes at a given moment. But the source of their animation is human
activity, itself commodified and directed by the force of the market. The commodified machine is
first a commodity—a fact that transforms it from an ordinary object into one with a “phantom
objectivity” that eclipses its material objectivity. But as the commodity form becomes ubiquitous, it
becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between things and commodities, and things
increasingly appear as naturally possessing value. Similarly, with the agency of machines.
The agency of machines as commodities is not taken up by posthuman theory, which
focuses on the material properties of objects rather than their peculiar objectivity as commodities.
Failing to distinguish between objects and commodities, such approaches tend to mistake
commodities for objects and hence contribute to ascribing agency to the object rather than the
commodity. For instance, Latour writes, “every time you want to know what a nonhuman does,
simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this nonhuman not
present” (Latour, “Missing Masses”, 229). To this, we would want to add that if you want to know
what the nonhuman does, examine what other humans or nonhumans would be able to do were this
nonhuman not a commodity. This question points beyond the horizon afforded by our present way of
doing, namely capitalism.
iv. The Future Has Already Happened

An analysis of the agency of machines as commodities raises the question that perhaps the
attribution of agency to matter in posthuman theory is related to the actual empowerment of matter
today in the form of capital? The ongoing commodification of matter involves practices that
cultivate conceptions of thinking machines as both rational and natural. It appears that the
expectation that we are on the precipice of the emergence of new forms of nonhuman intelligence
may, in fact, occlude the reality that these nonhuman agents already exist as commodities—the cells
of capital.

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Works Cited
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Ilyenkov, Evald. Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory. Translated by H. Campbell
Creighton, Progress, 1977[1974].
———. “Dialectics of the Ideal” [2009]. Trans. Alex Levant. Historical Materialism, vol. 20, no. 2,
2012, pp. 149–93.
———. “Dial’ektika ideal’nogo” [Dialectics of the ideal]. Logos, vol. 69, no.1, 2009, pp. 6–62.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard University Press, 1999.
———. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” Shaping
Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John
Law, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–58.
Levant, Alex. “Smart Matter and the Thinking Body: Activity Theory and the Turn to Matter in
Contemporary Philosophy,” Stasis, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 248-264.
Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness, The Merlin Press, 1971.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Marxist.org, 1887[1867].
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm.
Pepperell, Robert. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, Intellect Books, 2009.

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Vulner-abilité posthumaine
Christine Diagle
Correspondance: cdaigle@brocku.ca
Christine Daigle est professeure de philosophie, directrice du Posthumanism Research Institute et du
Posthumanism Research Network, ainsi que Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence à l’université Brock
(St. Catharines, Ontario). Elle a beaucoup travaillé la pensée de Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, et
Jean-Paul Sartre et a publié des articles et ouvrages sur divers aspects de leur philosophie. Sa recherche porte
maintenant principalement sur la théorie posthumaniste, le féminisme matérialiste et la théorie des affects.
Résumé: Je propose de concevoir l’être humain comme transjectif : à la fois transsubjectif et

transobjectif. Cela suppose de prendre en considération les enchevêtrements matériels dans lesquels
nous existons. En prenant également en considération les concepts de transcorporéité et de créature
bioculturelle offerts par Stacy Alaimo et Samantha Frost respectivement, nous sommes en mesure
de bien comprendre les mécanismes qui sont au fondement de notre vulnérabilité. Puisque le
féminisme matérialiste et la théorie des affects démontrent que notre relationalité est essentielle à
notre devenir, je propose d’adopter le terme « affect—abilité » plutôt que « vulnérabilité » afin de
nous éloigner des connotations négatives de ce dernier et de faciliter la reconnaissance et
l’acceptation du sujet exposé, imprégné et imprégnant, que nous sommes.
Mots clés: Posthumanisme—Féminisme matérialiste—Vulnérabilité—Affects—Transcorporéité
Le posthumanisme critique, tel qu’articulé dans les travaux des féministes matérialistes, rejette la
conception humaniste de l’être humain fondée sur deux dualismes : conscience/corps et
humain/non-humain. En contrepartie, l’emphase est mise sur l’inextricable enchevêtrement de
toutes créatures et sur l’inséparabilité de la conscience et du corps. Cela contribue à contrer
l’exceptionnalisme humain et le point de vue anthropocentriste de l’humanisme. Le posthumanisme
critique des féministes matérialistes tend à adopter une ontologie plate, dans laquelle il n’y a pas de
hiérarchie. Rosi Braidotti, par exemple, nomme cela le « zoé-égalitarisme. »1 Ma notion de
transjectivité s’inscrit dans ce courant et est en accord avec les concepts de transcorporéité,
développé par Stacy Alaimo, et de créature bioculturelle, offerte par Samantha Frost. Je commence
cet article par une brève discussion de ces concepts afin de lancer mon analyse de la vulnérabilité.
J’argumenterai que celle-ci est potentiellement positive et générative et qu’il faut la reconcevoir
comme un élément essentiel à notre épanouissement.
Je propose de concevoir l’être humain, ainsi que tous les autres êtres vivants, comme des êtres
transjectifs : à la fois transsubjectifs et transobjectifs, enchevêtrés dans leurs expériences subjectives
et dans leur matérialité. Il y a mouvement et enchevêtrement continu du subjectif à l’objectif, au
matériel, à tel point que distinguer une pure subjectivité ou une pure objectivité devient impossible.2
Pour sa part, Stacy Alaimo adopte le terme de transcorporéité. Elle explique que nos corps sont faits
de limites perméables—les muqueuses, la peau, les orifices—et que nous sommes littéralement des
êtres poreux constitués par la matière qui nous entoure, nous habite, et passe en transit dans notre
corps tout comme nous nous écoulons sans cesse dans cette matière, le transit allant dans les deux

1
Voir son ouvrage The Posthuman.
2J’ai commencé à développer ce concept dans l’essai « Trans-subjectivity/Trans-objectivity, » Feminist Phenomenology Futures. Un essai à paraître
développe plus avant la notion de transjectivité et la fonde dans un spinozisme deleuzien.
Daigle / Vulner-abilité posthumaine 9

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sens. Nous sommes ainsi des êtres toxiques et exposés: « always already penetrated by substances
and forces that can never be properly accounted for » (Alaimo 5). Cela l’amène à dire que nous
devons adopter un posthumanisme environnemental qui prenne en compte notre enchevêtrement
matériel et corporel.
Comme l’être humain, et tous les êtres, sont en fluctuation constante de par leur exposition à
la matière qui les traverse mais aussi dû à leurs interactions transsubjectives, il devient difficile
d’établir un fondement pour l’agentivité. Cela est un problème important pour les féministes
matérialistes pour qui un agent à qui on peut attribuer une responsabilité éthique et politique est
nécessaire.3 L’ouvrage récent de Samantha Frost explore les mécanismes biochimiques qui nous
régulent afin d’expliquer comment il est possible d’établir une agentivité sur les bases de ceux-ci,
même si cet agent demeure un agent minimaliste. Elle explique que l’organisme est pénétré par son
habitat et que celui-ci dépend de la circulation des atomes, molécules et cellules à travers ses
nombreuses membranes pour sa subsistance, afin que la vie se poursuive et soit florissante. Elle dit
que l’organisme « composes and recomposes itself continuously in response to and through
engagement with its habitat. » (Frost 145). Parler d’un « dehors » ou d’un « dedans » des corps est
futile. Il n’y a pas de telle distinction.
L’individu qui ressort de ceci est en fait un dividu en devenir constant. Nous sommes
imprégnés du monde dans lequel nous sommes tout autant que nous l’imprégnons. Tous les êtres
sont enchevêtrés et tous les êtres sont vulnérables. C’est la perméabilité des êtres qui les rend
vulnérables. Toutes les expériences vécues par l’être transjectif sont transformatives, que ce soit avec
des humains, des non-humains, des êtres animés ou pas, le monde dans son ensemble, les concepts,
la culture, etc. Cette perméabilité nous rend vulnérables mais cela ne doit pas être compris de
manière négative. Cette vulnérabilité peut générer un nouveau type de responsabilité éthique qui
peut mener à un foisonnement de la vie sous toutes ses formes.4 En fait, cette vulnérabilité est
nécessaire et doit être célébrée.
Judith Butler a beaucoup écrit sur la notion de vulnérabilité et la question de savoir qui
compte moralement et qui « mérite d’être pleuré. »5 C’est une question politique importante par
exemple lorsque l’on pose la question des migrants : est-ce que les migrants font partie de notre
cercle de préoccupation morale? Doit-on en prendre soin? Notre soin, notre compassion, notre
action leur sont-ils dûs? Les gens les plus vulnérables sont souvent exclus de notre champ de
considération morale ce qui les rend encore plus vulnérables. Butler examine ces questions et dit «
the ontology of the body serves as a point of departure for … a rethinking of responsibility
… precisely because, in its surface and its depth, the body is a social phenomenon; it is exposed to
others, vulnerable by definition. » (Butler, Frames of War, 33). Mais l’être transjectif est encore plus
vulnérable que ce que suggère Butler parce que sa perméabilité réside en son cœur biochimique: un
être dont la survie et la vie florissante dépend du transit d’autres êtres à travers son être. La
vulnérabilité posthumaine est non seulement potentiellement positive mais, plus encore, essentielle.

3 Cela est particulièrement le cas chez les posthumanistes féministes qui adoptent cette philosophie en partie afin de se libérer des structures
d’oppression qui émergent de l’humanisme exceptionnaliste. En lutte contre les systèmes d’oppression quant au sexe, à la race, à l’orientation sexuelle,
etc. celles-ci ont besoin d’un agent qui puisse être visé comme responsable mais aussi d’un agent qui puisse lutter pour ses droits. Ce problème est
complexe et des penseurs comme Braidotti proposent un essentialisme stratégique pour s’y attaquer, ce qui n’est pas sans susciter la controverse.
4 Il n’y a pas place ici pour élaborer sur la responsabilité éthique et quelle forme celle-ci pourrait prendre. Cela devra faire l’objet de futurs travaux. Je
peux toutefois indiquer qu’au fondement de cette responsabilité se trouve le désir de voir les êtres mener une vie enchevêtrée florissante.
5 Elle pose la question « Whose life is grievable? » dans Frames of War et Precarious Life.
Boucher / Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight 10

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Comment doit-on comprendre cela? Le latin « vulner » signifie « blesser », « affecter », plus
souvent de façon négative. Le sens commun que l’on donne au terme « vulnérabilité » est celui d’être
susceptible d’être blessé physiquement ou émotionnellement. Cette susceptibilité génère un devoir
pour les autres agents de ne pas abuser de cette vulnérabilité, voire même de protéger l’être
vulnérable. Mais cette façon de concevoir la vulnérabilité présuppose que l’on considère le corps
comme étant bien délimité et que l’on considère aussi qu’il faille maintenir et protéger ces limites.
Toutefois, comme on l’a vu, on ne peut appliquer cela à l’être transjectif qui est un être
transcorporel, exposé et perméable. Il faut plutôt prendre le terme de vulner—abilité de façon
différente. L’être transjectif est vulner—able, ou plutôt vulner—apte, puisque c’est un corps qui fait
et défait ce avec quoi il interagit. C’est un être qui est apte à « blesser », à affecter. Mais en étant
empêtré dans l’enchevêtrement matériel dont on a parlé, l’être transjectif est à la fois apte à blesser et
à être blessé. Jane Bennett dit que « in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the
web may very well be to harm oneself. » (Bennett 13). Blesser, c’est se blesser et, se blesser, c’est
aussi blesser. Nous ne sommes pas des êtres fermés sur soi qui interagissent les uns avec les autres.
Toute interaction est un transit, un enchevêtrement, une constitution et une destruction du « soi ».
L’« abilité » dont il est question ici, l’aptitude à blesser, n’est toutefois pas l’expression d’une
agentivité intentionnelle forte. Cette aptitude est celle d’un être qui est lui-même le fruit d’un
enchevêtrement de relations et d’êtres qui le traversent. Notre aptitude à blesser est donc souvent
une direction sans intention, c’est à dire un acte d’agentivité mais sans intentionalité directe ou forte.6
Nous cherchons, la plupart du temps, à nous protéger et à réduire notre vulnérabilité. Or,
c’est mal comprendre le type de créature que nous sommes. Simone Drichel dit quelque chose de
très intéressant à cet égard: « In seeking to defend ourselves, we—perversely—come to violate
ourselves, or, to put this differently, what we preserve in ‘self-preservation’ is what makes the self
‘inhuman’ rather than human » (Drichel 22). En faisant l’effort de nous protéger et de nous rendre
invulnérables, nous nous faisons violence et nous nous dés-humanisons. Il serait préférable
d’accepter notre vulner—abilité et de chercher à vivre une multitude d’expériences tout en
reconnaissant que certaines d’entre elles seront peut-être transformatives de façon inconfortable ou
carrément destructive. L’important est de cesser de se concevoir comme tout-puissants ou, en tout
cas, d’essayer de l’être en nous rendant invulnérables. Cette tentative est futile de toute façon et,
comme le dit Claire Colebrook, il s’agit d’un reste de pensée humaniste qui conçoit l’humain comme
omnipotent.7 Reconnaître notre être transjectif et sa vulner—abilité fondamentale, reconnaître que
nous dépendons de cette vulnérabilité sociale, matérielle et subjective afin de mener une vie
florissante nécessite que nous abandonnions les idéaux humanistes dont nous avons souffert trop
longtemps, nous et tous les autres êtres avec qui nous partageons le monde. Si toute expérience n’est
pas bonne en soi, toute expérience constitue l’être transjectif.
On peut comprendre et choisir de maintenir cette vulner—abilité si nous comprenons qu’il y
a plusieurs dimensions à notre relationalité et notre enchevêtrement. Comprendre cela, c’est aussi
comprendre que nous n’avons jamais été l’humain de la pensée humaniste. C’est comprendre que les
philosophies qui ont misé sur la raison, les dichotomies sujet/objet, pensée/corps et humain/nature,

6 La notion de direction sans intention est amenée par Frost pour distinguer l’agentivité à l’œuvre dans les processus biochimiques de l’agentivité d’une
personne, l’intentionalité telle qu’on la conçoit communément, qui est par ailleurs aussi animée par la multitude de directions sans intention qui la
construit. Voir Biocultural Creatures. Il faut comprendre que même si elles sont distinctes ces deux types d’agentivité, la direction sans intention et
l’agentivité intentionelle forte, sont toujours interreliées.
7 Voir Colebrook 2014, 13.

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ont introduit des distinctions et des limites qui, en fait, n’existent pas. Comprendre tout cela nous
permet de redevenir le posthumain que nous avons toujours été–un ante-humain, soit l’humain
d’avant l’humanisme. Cela nous permet aussi de vaincre l’exceptionnalisme humain si dommageable.
Comprendre notre vulner—abilité comme étant le fondement de la vie florissante signifie que nous
pouvons embrasser cette vulnérabilité et la chérir. Mais cela entraîne aussi des prises de position
éthiques nécessaires.
Redécouvrir l’être posthumain que nous avons toujours été, l’être transjectif et sa
constitution matérielle, nous offre une meilleure compréhension des multiples dimensions de la
relationalité avec les êtres avec lesquels nous sommes toujours enchevêtrés. Nous pouvons aussi
penser la vulner—abilité en termes génératifs. Stacy Alaimo nous invite à concrétiser notre
exposition : nous sommes exposés et devons chercher à l’être. Elle veut que nous embrassions notre
perméabilité. Elle dit :
… exposure entails the intuitive sense or the philosophical conviction that the impermeable
Western human subject is no longer tenable. Performing exposure as an ethical and political
act means … to grapple with the particular entanglements of vulnerability and complicity
that radiate from disasters and their terribly disjunctive connection to everyday life in the
industrialized world. To occupy exposure as insurgent vulnerability is to perform material
rather than abstract alliances (Alaimo 5).
Reconnaître et accepter le sujet exposé qui est toujours imprégné et imprégnant implique un
changement radical dans notre vision du monde, un devenir posthumain. Le terme vulner—abilité
est peut-être inapproprié. Il possède un trop plein de bagage négatif qui nous porte instinctivement à
nous en garder. Peut-être doit-on conserver ce terme seulement pour l’exposition négative. Ce n’est
pas tant la blessure (vulner) qui est nécessaire mais l’affectivité (afficere). Cette capacité d’un être à en
affecter un autre est à la fois positive et négative et est en fait nécessaire au développement de
chacun.8 Remplacer vulner—abilité par affect—abilité est en quelque sorte un retour à Spinoza et sa
philosophie des affects dont on ne peut se garder puisqu’ils sont l’essence de ce que nous sommes et
de nos relations. C’est un mouvement nécessaire pour nous guérir de l’humanisme.

8 Il est important de noter que les dimensions de la vulner—abilité dont j’ai parlées sont interreliées et agissent les unes sur les autres.

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Bibliographie
Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times. University of Minnesota
Press, 2016.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
————. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, 2006.
Colebrook, Claire. Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction I. Open Humanities Press, 2014.
Daigle, Christine. « Trans-subjectivity/Trans-objectivity. » Feminist Phenomenology Futures. Edited by
Helen Fielding and Dorothea Olkowskim. Indiana University Press, 2017, 183-199.
Drichel, Simone. « Reframing Vulnerability: ‘so obviously the problem…’? » SubStance, vol. 42, no. 3,
2013, pp. 3-27.
Frost, Samantha. Biocultural Creatures. Toward a New Theory of the Human. Duke University Press, 2016.

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Prostheticity, Disability, and Spaceflight
Martin Boucher
Correspondance: mx6_boucher@laurentian.ca
Martin Boucher is a PhD Candidate in Human Studies at Laurentian University. His work is primarily situated
in disability studies and posthumanism, but he maintains an interest in the philosophy of social science and
the history of ideas. He also works in, and coordinates research on, peer support and community mental
health.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their
thoughtful comments. He would also like to thank the editor, Caitlin Heppner, for her attention to detail and
thoughtful revision of this work. The paper has been made much clearer and stronger thanks to their efforts.
Abstract: In this short work, the author will reflect on how we might understand the technology-
subject relationship in a way that equally captures the position of the individual with a disability and
that of the interplanetary astronaut. The works of Tamar Sharon in mediated posthumanism and
Dan Goodley in critical disability studies will be consulted. This cursory exploration will conclude
that both the astronaut and the individual with a disability are congruent posthuman subjects insofar
as their relationship to technology challenges the idea of a transhumanist overcoming of human
limits. Exploring this relationship can tell us something about how posthuman subjects may be
understood more generally.
Keywords: Critical Disability Studies, Mediated Posthumanism, Mediation, Reflexivity, Originary
Prostheticity, Tamar Sharon, Dan Goodley, Rosi Braidotti
Posthumanist theory is beginning to make a considerable impact on the theoretical foundations of

Critical Disability Studies. To a certain extent there has been engagement with cyborg theory in this
field for over a decade;1 however, more recently, work influenced by Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman
has been gaining momentum.2 Given that the goal of this issue of Con Texte is to provide short
reflections on posthuman topics, I will not summarize or explore these literatures in great detail.
Instead, I will reflect on a question that came to me recently while watching the launch of Falcon
Heavy, and will do it from the perspective of this latter stream of posthumanism in disability studies.
The question I asked myself was: within the eventual goal—spearheaded by SpaceX and its CEO
Elon Musk—of colonizing Mars, how do we interpret the astronaut from a posthuman critical
disability perspective? What can we learn from disability about this futurist superhuman event and
vice versa?
It seems to be the consensus in the space technology field that future Mars astronauts (or
colonists) are already born. As I write this, the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF) is conducting an
isolated Mars analogue mission on the Arabian Peninsula (Austrian Space Forum). At least for

1 See for e.g. Quinlan and Bates 2014; Kafer 2013; Reeve 2012; Goodley 2011; Moser 2000, 2005.
2 See for e.g. Roets and Braidotti, 2012; Goodley 2014; Goodley et al. 2014; Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2016; Goodley et al. 2018.

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optimists, interplanetary travel is crossing from science fiction to science proper. Of the plethora of
questions this raises, I will limit myself quite narrowly to a reflection on how we might modify our
framework of understanding to capture the interaction with technology from both the perspective of
the individual with a disability and that of the interplanetary astronaut.
In a sense, this paper has nothing to do with space travel. It is interested in the way we
interpret the protagonist of such an adventure. For the transhumanist, technological advancement
has endowed the human with the means to surpass himself towards a new and unrecognizable
future—epitomized in the cosmo-colonist. The question of disability seems to be at the other
extreme of the spectrum. Technology is not enhancement but correction towards the normal range
of human limitations. In both cases, the difference is contingent on the acceptance of a foundational
humanness with concrete limits. Critical posthumanism and critical posthuman disability studies
challenges this foundation. As result, I will conclude that both the astronaut and the individual with
a disability are congruent posthuman subjects insofar as a) their differentiation is contingent on a
shaky natural-able human category, and b) they share the same originary and reflexive relationship
with technology. Exploring this relationship can tell us something about how posthuman subjects
may be understood more generally. However, within the limits of this special issue, this paper can
only point us in the direction of a complete analysis. I will therefore focus primarily on a few works
by Tamar Sharon and Dan Goodley and on the narrow questions of the congruency of the subjects
mentioned above and the model of technology that can make sense of this relationship. However, it
is important to recognize that exhausting the question posed here would require a much more
detailed engagement with the work of these two authors among others.
1. What is an Astronaut?
One undeniable fact is that the astronaut’s survival and success is contingent on their relationship to
a whole array of highly sophisticated technological machinery. Furthermore, the interplanetary
astronaut depends on a large network of support staff, training infrastructure, political and social
human investment, and tremendous economic wealth in order to eventually carry out their mission.
The complex technological and human networks that exist to support one individual, on an
International Space Station (ISS) spacewalk for example, lead us to think of these individuals as
somehow surpassing the natural limits of the human animal. It is this idea of surpassing itself (i.e.
going beyond nature) and the what that we are surpassing (i.e. natural human limits) that is at issue.
The paradigm of critical posthumanism recognizes that (a) there is no fixed natural ‘human’ and so
no natural limits to be surpassed, (b) all beings are interconnected and depend on networks of
human, non-human, and inorganic entities—they are never stand alone agents, and (c) the novelty of
survival in space, for example, is not a change in kind from other achievements, but a continued
expression of the possibilities of life. This does give rise to new subjectivities, but not contradictory
ones. Outside of such a posthumanism, the ‘disabled body’ is interpreted as the antithesis of the
highly techno-enhanced interplanetary astronaut. They are both new and protean posthuman
subjects, but one does not represent the overcoming of the other.
The prevailing idea of the natural human and its fixed limits and abilities has been
intrinsically challenged from the critical disability perspective, because that subject—the individual
with a disability—was not considered truly ‘human’ to begin with. This population has been subject
to dehumanization through a collection of historical events such as freak shows, institutionalization,

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segregation in education, medical experimentations etc., because they represent the ‘other’ of the
able-human and embody a problem to be solved. Prosthetics, surgical/pharmaceutical treatments,
rehabilitation programs, service animals, social support workers, and community organizations are
examples of technologies and networks that allows individuals living with a disability to attain the
theoretical ‘natural ability’ of the human being. Although Critical Disability Studies challenges this
latter idea of natural ability, it remains the prevailing interpretation outside of it. Alternatively,
“disability has always demanded to be recognized not as lack but possibility”; moreover, we should
“be careful not to be seduced by shiny technology when, on a more mundane level, we are already
potentially enhancing our humanity through a myriad of inter-relationships” (Goodley, Lawthom,
and Runswick-Cole 352). A critical understanding means a re-evaluation of how we interpret those
technologies and relationships mentioned above.
We want to avoid a simplistic interpretation where individuals with disabilities are seen as
lacking something and must be brought back to some kind of normalcy, and where the astronaut is
someone who attained this normalcy and becomes exceptional by surpassing him or herself while
leaving normalcy in their wake. From the perspective of lack (or suffering), the cold world of
ableism is as frigid as the emptiness of space, and technology allows for the overcoming of these
limiting factors. Alternatively, a positive view of disability sees these new ways of being as
transgressing those limits with transformative results. We consider neither as lacking or
exceptional—they are both typical posthuman subjects. Critical Posthumanism centres on the
productive ambiguity that we ‘do not yet know what bodies can do.’3 Technology and new ways of
interacting with each other lead to an expansion of possibilities and a substantive change in how
people experience and relate to the world. This is equally true for the individual living with a
disability and the astronaut depending on complex equipment to survive in space.
Generally speaking, these insights emerge out of what Tamar Sharon calls Radical
Posthumanism. Though there are many models of posthumanism, we will be relying on Sharon’s
analysis here because it will allow us—within the parameters of this short work—to discuss three
important orienting concepts: reflexivity, mediation, and prostheticity.
2. Posthumanism’s Axes
Sharon’s goal in proposing a new model of posthumanism is to synthesize two non-humanist
posthumanisms; namely, the methodological and radical models. It is her contention that these two
forms are compatible and have insights about technology that are useful for a more complete
understanding. Before I get into these insights, I will mention some of the dimensions she uses in
her taxonomy (Sharon 17-56) to distinguish the different models and why it may be useful for our
purposes. She organizes her taxonomy on three axes; I will look at them one at a time.
On the first axis, Sharon identifies pessimism on one end and optimism on the other. On
the pessimistic end of the spectrum we see models of dystopic posthumanism—those that see
technology in a negative or dangerous light—and on the other end, those posthumanisms that are
optimistic about technology or try to find affirmative ways to use and develop new technologies.
These posthumanisms are not yet differentiated on the question of why technologies may be

3This is a reference to Spinoza interpreted by Deleuze and often used by Braidotti and other posthuman thinkers. I identify it as productive here, but it
has been criticized elsewhere for being an empty or sliding reference with little connection to its source (see Abrams 89-94).

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liberating, but they all share this optimism. A posthumanism that has a positive and affirmative view
of technology would be welcome in Disability Studies because technology has been historically
problematic (and continues to be so) because it is mostly corrective. As suggested by Goodley,
“Disabled people’s relationships with technology are not always desired, chosen nor productive”
(Goodley 152), but on the other hand, technologies can be integrated in affirmative and desired
ways. A balance ought to be struck between affirming new possibilities and proliferating old
oppressive practices and norms. At that point the relationship is no longer affirmative, but
disciplinary and limiting (an expression of potestas). Through its embodiment of living the body
differently, “dis/ability promotes a conversation with technology, cyborgs and just as importantly
(though perhaps not as marketable) extended senses of self and competence. Technology enhances
humanity—not simply in the ways lauded by the transhumanists—but also on the level of the
everyday” (Goodley 107).
The typical image of the Mars colonist is in the realm of sci-fi fantasy and transhumanist
futures. It is the image of an enhanced, super-human body that renders other beings
inadequate/lacking, and represents an event that casts our historical present in a primitive light. This
is the very perspective that is damaging for disability, but the problems with it are not as apparent
for the astronaut because their relationship to technology has not been historically problematic—it
has been central. The problem with integrating them into the same framework is that their
humanness has not been challenged in the same way, so technology can be seen as pure
enhancement or unfettered hubris. There is no apparent need to complicate this relationship, making
it easy to descend into an uncritical liberal optimism or equally uncritical dystopian pessimism.
Whether influenced by the excitement of technological novelty or by historical caution and fear,
both the astronaut and the person with disabilities ought to have a common ground on which to
judge the affirmative possibilities of technology. A suitable critical perspective should be able to
account for both cases.
On the second axis is historical-materialism and philosophical-ontological thought. The only
posthumanism identified as ontological-philosophical is radical posthumanism. This perspective
does not deny the historical-material condition that gives rise to the posthuman or its historico-
material contingency; however, its rethinking of the historical relationship between technology, the
material world, and the interacting subjects necessitates a new ontology. Radical posthumanism is
influenced by the so called “ontological turn” which we can describe as resistance to the humanist
ontology that gives a privileged place to the ‘human’ in relation to all other ‘things.’ This traditional
ontology cannot capture the relationships between life as a vital force, living matter, the material
world, and the emergence of contingent and fluid subjectivities (Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical
Theory,” 22ff). The critical perspectives that are emerging from recent thought about disability are
“almost emblematic of the posthuman predicament” because they do not only criticize the old
humanist order of things, but also represent “the advocacy of new, creative models of embodiment”
(Braidotti 146). As interplanetary spaceflight and colonization becomes a possibility, we should
equally examine the astronaut in light of the new embodiments it represents. And we should do this
as a challenge to the established modernist ontology and not as a simple historical development
from, or overcoming of, its central figure: the human.
This brings us to the final axis: humanist vs non-humanist posthumanisms. Though

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methodological posthumanism does not directly or radically challenge ontology, it shares anti-
humanist roots and interprets the world of objects/technology in a way that is consistent with
radical posthumanism. Both see beings as relational subjects that are constituted and emerge within
(and never outside) the networks that surround them. For Sharon, their non-humanist foundation is
the most important aspect differentiating these approaches from all other contemporary
posthumanisms. It also opens the possibility of a synthesis between methodological and radical
posthumanisms discussed above. I will not explore how she makes the synthesis here, but I will
discuss two major insights she has gained by working it through; namely, reflexivity and mediation.
3. Reflexivity, Mediation and Prostheticity
The term reflexivity has a rich history in sociology and social studies. In its many iterations, it usually
denotes a circular relationship between two or more things, where neither is the definitive cause and
the other the effect. In terms of Sharon’s discussion of radical posthumanism, reflexivity exists
between technology and the context within which it emerges (including ourselves). Technology itself
is not following a fatalistic sprint towards destruction or liberation; conversely, if we do play a role
we do not get to choose whether or not we are affected or changed by technology. Technology and
society, technologies and subjects, prostheses and persons are always intertwined.
This differentiates it on many planes, as Sharon reminds us “technology is both substantive
and non-essentialist, constitutive and non-deterministic. A reflexive understanding of technology
allows for its emergence from within social, political, and economic contexts and maintains that our
technologies shape our engagement with the world” (Sharon 89). In liberal posthumanism,
technology is simply instrumental. It has use-value and we control it by force of will as we would
with any other object in the world. This relationship is supported by traditional modernist
philosophies that separate the subject from the world of objects—the inside from the outside. On
the other hand, dystopic posthumanisms have a substantive view of technology. They imbue
technology with some kind of inherent value (usually negative) or alternatively some independent
self-propulsion that usually challenges the essential characteristics or values of the human (e.g.
dignity or autonomy). In mediated posthumanism our relationship is a bit more complex. As she put
it, “The reflexive view shares traits with both instrumentalism and substantivism: it agrees with
instrumentalism that technology is in some sense controllable, and it agrees with substantivism that
technology is value-laden” (Sharon 89); however, it differentiates itself because it does not believe
that technologies have essential destructive or liberating properties, and the social and political
values that technologies embody are not inherent and predetermined—both of these can always be
shaped and ‘negotiated’. The idea that technology is imbricated or in a reflexive relationship with the
posthuman accepts that it radically changes the nature of our existence, but that it is not
deterministic because we reshape and change its ends as we navigate the novelty it introduces. As
mentioned in the previous section, this is an essential step for disability studies to begin to form
some affirmative perspective on technology that is able to resist either the transhumanist or liberal
posthumanist type relationship (which sees disability or typical-ability as a problem for which
technology is the solution), and the dystopic posthumanism type (which draws a strict and negative
distinction between prosthetic-normalizing technologies and enhancement-violation dichotomy).
The concept of mediation easily follows reflexivity and tries to explain its various relational
mechanisms. Sharon uses Bruno Latour and Don Ihde’s work to explore this. To summarize what is

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a complex and useful argument, technology mediates (in specific ways) the experience between
person and world. Ihde for example identifies four types of relationships that are mediated by
technology: embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations.
Embodiment relations represent the technological means of access or contact with the world.
This includes traditional prosthetics and other technologies that metaphorically ‘place themselves in
between’ the person and its world, such as artificial limbs, hearing devices, and life support systems.
Hermeneutic relations are those in which the world is somehow translated or represented for
interpretation as in medical testing/imaging, battery health indicators, and audible pedestrian signals.
Alterity relations are those where individuals interact with the technologies themselves such as in
robotics and artificial intelligence, and in the research and development of new technologies. Lastly,
background relations constitute relations that are so integrated in our everyday experience that we are
no longer conscious of them. That is, until they break down and we need to reestablish a different
relationship to them. Examples of the latter would be adequate sidewalks and streets, lifts and
ramps, lights, and Internet access. For the astronaut, these relations are sometimes different, but are
all present. For both subjects, these four types of relations represent a different form of mediation
between person-technology-world.
Mediation provides us with a practical means with which to explore the role of technology as
they are encountered in the world. What is especially relevant here are embodiment relations and
background relations as individuals with disabilities are most often aware of how technologies can
be experienced in these relations. As Goodley et al. put it, “the tied togetherness between the guide
dog and human; or personal assistant and employer, demands us to think again about old humanist
notions of agency, responsibility and subjectivity” (352). Additionally, background relations become
conscious only when they break down. In the marginal experience of individuals with disabilities,
this happens more often than those whose ways of navigating the world has become the standard
(e.g. no adequate curb, inaccessible classroom/building/organization/business, inaccessible
information/instructions/expectations in various settings etc.). The astronaut’s experience is limiting
in different ways, but these two types of relations remain important: for example, in the extension of
one’s body through the spacesuit (i.e. embodiment) and in the essential systems that constantly go
from background (in normal conditions) to foreground (when they need to be maintained or
monitored) as they support and maintain life in space.
Finally, I will present one more concept to explain where our relationship with technology
comes from, and why it might support a posthuman understanding. Originary prostheticity is the
idea that technology is not external and additive in relation to the human, but rather it considers “the
body and self as already including prostheses as an integral part of its organization” (Sharon 98).
Sharon recounts the work of Bernard Stiegler who argued that prosthesis is not an extension of the
body, but rather constitutes the body as a human body. This contrasts with the supplemental view of
prosthesis where technology is to be used for some purpose or is to be resisted or promoted for its
effect on the human (Sharon 98-101). The supplemental view assumes that something remains
untouched and unpenetrated by technology: a human nature or core substance. Rather, originary
prostheticity claims that there is no such essential human nature on which technology acts and that,
moreover, the co-constitution of the human and technology throughout history has made it
impossible to isolate one from the other. At the very core of ourselves is a “mutual imbrication”—to

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use Braidotti’s words (qtd. in Sharon 101)—of technology and self. Originary prostheticity offers a
more accurate representation of the nature of technology and prosthesis in the network-process of
posthuman embodiment. Both in the case of the astronaut and the individual with a disability, we
colloquially see their devices as additive. The space suit allows the individual, untouched by the void
of space, to walk on unknown worlds—but it is still one giant leap for man. In the case of the
individual with a disability, unhampered by their inadequate body, the white cane allows the individual
to navigate the world. In both cases, we are using a supplemental view. We ought to recognize that
the astronaut’s suit is not an expensive jacket, but one aspect of the network that constitutes the
astronaut as a different (and complete) posthuman subject, which is equally true of the white cane.
4. Conclusion, the Disabled Astronaut
The astronaut does not represent the overcoming of the limitations of human life on earth, its
support systems are not a means to overcome the limitations of the human body, and the
interplanetary event is not a fatalist result of human techno-history and evolution—they represent
the tendency of life to extend towards affirmative possibilities, and technology’s ever-present role in
this process. Nothing that existed before has been surpassed or overcome; only the limits that we
thought were natural or technically unfathomable have been shown not to be so. The exclusively
positive value placed on the astronaut (and the relatively negative one placed on the ‘disabled body’)
is destabilized by the disappearance of the natural-able body reference category. For the liberal and
dystopic posthumanisms, these two embodied selves—the individual living with a disability and the
inter-planetary astronaut—represent two incongruent human extremes. What I have proposed is
that a more critical perspective—using reflexivity, mediation, and originary prostheticity—brings
them together as two congruent posthumans. It would benefit Critical Disability Studies and critical
posthumanism to further develop such a model of technology-person relations. Lastly, though I
have focused here on a model of congruency for these two subjects, I would suggest—following
Goodley’s distinction between Critical Disability Studies and critical ableist studies4—that their
mirroring relationship to technology still necessitates different forms of engagement with things like
social history, policy, and economics (among others). I did not explore this question here.

4 See chapter 2 of Goodley’s Dis/ability Theory, 2014.

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Works Cited
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Sciences, vol. 30, no. 5, 2017, pp. 86-103.
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net.eu/Documents/A18_AO_May2017_V2RELEASE.pdf
Braidotti, Rosi. “Cyberfeminism with a Difference.” University of Utrecht Women’s Studies, 1996.
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Debashish Banerji and Makarand Paranjape. Springer, 2016, pp. 13-32.
———. The Posthuman, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2013.
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and critical disability studies.” Disability & Society, vol. 33, no. 2, 2018, pp.197-217.
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Disability and their Interferences.” Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 667-700.
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Leonard Davis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 91-111.
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2014.

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‘By Means Other Than Life’: Literature as Posthuman Memory
C. Parker Krieg
Correspondance: parker.krieg@helsinki.fi
C. Parker Krieg is a postdoctoral fellow in environmental humanities at the University of Helsinki, affiliated
with the Humanities Programme in the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science.
His article, “Energy Futures: John Updike’s Petrofiction,” appears in the spring issue of Studies in American
Fiction.
Abstract: This essay argues that literature can help us understand posthuman dimensions of
memory. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical anthropology of technics, and from the field
of cultural memory studies, this new materialist approach challenges the conception of
posthumanism that describes contemporary technologies as “transcending” the human. Rather, I
maintain that an immanent perspective situates the human as already existing outside of itself, “by
means other than life,” as Stiegler puts it. I illustrate this with two examples from postcolonial
literature that model an affirmational approach to traumatic material history by way of texts. Instead
of posing as detachment or transcendence, these metafictional references foreground present
continuities with the past, recovering that which has been forgotten or repressed.
Keywords: Bernard Stiegler, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Literary Fiction, Memory
Studies, Posthumanism
In the close of his 2004 novel The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh depicts an exchange between
traditional ecological knowledge and the technological infrastructures of contemporary capitalism.
The environmental memory of Fokir, an illiterate fisherman of the Sundarbans, becomes rewritten
as a series of GPS satellite data. His patterns of movement allow the marine biologist Piya to store
his memory as information about endangered dolphins. Fokir’s movements through the complex
waterways of the Sundarbans are translated into traces and metadata points on a digital map.
Readers of Ghosh will know that Fokir ends up giving not only his knowledge but his life to save
Piya. His environmental and cultural memory lives on as a digital ghost, but what is lost are the
multiple generations of lived fishing experience in the waterways that Fokir practices.
I begin with this example because Fokir’s sacrifice allegorizes the process that philosopher
Bernard Stiegler calls proletarianisation, in which the subject is stripped of knowledge as their memory
becomes exteriorised through the technics of inscription in the digital economy. For many theorists
of technology and culture, these new developments promise (or threaten) to transcend the limits of
the human as imagined by enlightenment liberalism. However, in Stiegler’s conception of technics
and the human, this process of exteriorisation is constitutive of the autonomous interiority that has
been associated with the self since Plato. In other words, the human as we know it has become
through exteriorisation. From language and the lithic tool to algorithms and cloud storage, the
anthropos is sustained by means that remain outside our selves, and outside life. For Stiegler, then,
Fokir’s sacrifice represents not the obsolescence of the human, but rather the recognition that the
human is always composing itself by way of technics, through a “grammatisation” process of
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collective memory making. Like Ghosh, Stiegler asks us to interrogate the political nature of this
inscription. Reconceptualizing literature as posthuman memory, I argue, enables scholars and critics
to reconnect living memory with its nonhuman genealogies, and resist the process of
proletarianisation that is made possible by the tendency to separate the human from its worldly
attachments.
In works like the multi-volume Technics and Time series, and more recently, For a New Critique
of Political Economy, Stiegler builds a materialist account of the industrialisation of memory. His
philosophical anthropology combines the paleo-archaeology of André Leroi-Gourhan with
continental phenomenology, and extends Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry
into the Deleuzian economy of contribution (and control). However, Stiegler identifies Plato as “the
first thinker of proletarianisation” in the Phaedrus, and he considers the Greek distinctions between
anamnesis and hypomnesis central in the contemporary politics of industrial life (35). Plato warns that in
writing we risk the loss of a living and active recall (anamnesis) in the process of exteriorizing
subjectivity through writing as dead memory or simply “knowledge” (hypomnesis). Stiegler maintains
that Plato’s metaphysical oppositions make him unable to appreciate the magnitude of his own
argument. It is precisely because our memory is prosthetic, and because the relative autonomy of our
individual and social experience is produced through technics like writing, that we must take care of
this relation. This is what Stiegler means when he argues that “technics is the pursuit of life by
means other than life” (Technics and Time 17). When the means of pursuing life are precisely the
means of its endangerment, as in the condition of the Anthropocene, we must think the
pharmacological relation—the relation of both poison and remedy—that links the industrialization of
the planet with the industrial organization of memory.
This perspective differs from varieties of “historical posthumanism” that maintain we were
properly human until some particular technology (or event) came along that turned us into
something “post.” A “historical posthumanism” with such a linear trajectory should be answered by
a “posthuman historiography” that aims to transform accounts of historical becoming through a
more-than-human genealogy. Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto, for instance, is often interpreted
as the former, as a claim that post-war information technology makes us all hybrids. However,
Haraway's later engagements with animality lead her to conclude that “we have never been human”
(2). Her twist on Bruno Latour's assertion that “we have never been modern” invites readers to
situate practices of ontological separation, questioning the distinctions between relations and objects
that have always been mixed or unfinished. A prosthetic history of this sort rethinks the human
immanently, as a figure made possible through its composition along with the nonhuman.
Domestication, for instance, is an incorporation of “life” as organized death into the temporal
economies of human societies. Where once seasonal harvests and gestational periods of livestock set
cultural rhythms, now genetic science intervenes to manipulate life so as to meet global market
demands. What is the CAFO or Monsanto operation, if not a means of abolishing time and re-
inscribing biological exchange on a planetary scale for the purposes of accumulation (i.e., storage)? It
is this double sense of history as both material accumulation and the extraction of cultural memory
from workers by means of industrial proletarianisation (alienation), that famously concerned Marx.
For Stiegler, this tension shapes the genealogy of the anthropos itself. It is a struggle over and with the
prostheses through which knowledge of how to be human (intergenerational memory) is both
maintained and transformed across environments and diverse social milieus. As a materialist political

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project this requires apprehending the technical means through which temporality is produced in the
present, rescuing it from the biopolitical and attention economies of contemporary capitalism.
To explain how anamnesis can get a grip on hypomnesis, Stiegler builds on Edmund Husserl’s
temporal phenomenology of primary and secondary retention by introducing a third dimension:
tertiary retention. Whereas primary retention refers to the recent past contained in the present
instant, secondary retention is the ability to recall the primary in a new context. Tertiary retention,
on the other hand, is the material support that enables this interplay between the primary and
secondary. It is exteriorised memory supported by technical objects that we don’t think of as
memory precisely because it constitutes our ordinary experience. Put simply, if anamnesis can get a
grip on tertiary retention, it can achieve a relative autonomy from hypomnesis. By foregrounding the
technical nature of tertiary retention, Stiegler offers a history of what Derrida, in his own reading of
Plato, identifies as “the logic of the supplement.” Consequently, histories of supposed ruptures and
revolutionary breaks are now seen as hiding the continuities that make such becomings possible.
This inversion is transforming the way scholars conceptualize the archive and literature's relation to
it. In a recent roundtable on “Memory Studies in the Anthropocene,” Claire Colebrook argues:
[F]orms of explicitly external memory, such as writing, do not create a break or rupture with
‘natural’ human memory nor with inscription in general. Rather, something akin to writing—a
system of dispersed traces that maintains itself [or decays] through time—is what makes the flow of
conscious time and memory possible. (10)
Literary texts not only depict the workings of memory at the individual and collective level,
they also serve as storage for cultural memory, carrying it from one generation to the next (Erll 151).
Simultaneously transmitted and actively received, literature thus offers a means to challenge official
memory in that it enables living memory to apprehend the dead (or zombie, ghostly, angelic)
memory contained in the form. To illustrate this, I turn to a 2012 novel by Trinidadian-British
author Monique Roffey. Archipelago is the story of a multi-ethnic, middle-class, Trinidadian family
recovering from a tropical storm where a catastrophic flood destroys their house and kills their
infant son. The main character Gavin looks to restore meaning in his life, and takes his daughter and
their dog on a voyage to the Galapagos Islands in his small boat. On the way, the characters
confront their personal trauma as they travel through the anthropogenic environmental history of
the Caribbean. In this double confrontation with the past, Roffey connects personal encounter with
climate change to collective historical suffering. More than simply “cli fi,” Roffey writes this
encounter with climate change into the broader cultural memory of western humanism from a
postcolonial perspective. This textual short-circuit raises the political question of which human is
referred to in the Anthropocene, and the philosophical question of which description of the human are
“we” post?
Roffey follows in the Caribbean tradition of rewriting Homeric epics in a postcolonial
context. Archipelago combines an Odyssean desire to feel at home again in the world with a post-
traumatic quest to repair the disjuncture with a Nature that is wondrous as it is dangerous. The
father and daughter routinely compare their voyage to Moby-Dick, although decidedly from the
critical perspective of Starbuck (175). Roffey offers a different kind of epic hero, a different social
unit, and geocultural space, as well as miraculous beings that remind the characters how “unnatural”
nature can be. By including the dog as a character whose perspective and emotional states are

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worthy of narrative attention, the novel expands the emotional universe typically limited to the
human protagonist. Likewise, encounters with nonhumans do not serve as plot devices for the hero
to transcend or sacrificially outwit, but are rather moments of shared animal vulnerability. Yet the
most miraculous moment occurs when an albino whale emerges and watches them, as if to confirm
the characters’ interpretation of their voyage as an inversion of Ahab’s revenge (318).
This whale is a figure of oil which seeps through the novel. The omnipresent infrastructure
of Dutch refineries and extraction sites are a material legacy of earlier waves of colonization. Yet this
infrastructure is currently leased by Venezuela, whose industry proves no less destructive. If
Venezuela is a narrative repetition, or secondary retention, of Dutch oil imperialism, we must
consider the kind of memory work the white whale is doing. Whale oil was the first transnational oil
industry in the hemisphere, and the white whale its most famous literary figure. When this figure
resurfaces to “save” the characters at a key turning point, readers must ask what it means to be saved
by this figure from a literary past whose appearance connects the present crisis within a longer
industrial history. To encounter “oil” as a living subject, and to be watched by this living memory (or
perhaps a ghost) of the energy past, is an encounter with tertiary retention. The bodies (and brains)
of these beings fueled the later development of petroleum in the Americas. Roffey uses this
intertextual figure to reinscribe the forgotten material history of the present climate crisis back into
living memory. She takes what many might see as a dead infrastructure of narrative tropes, clichéd
experiences, and textual references—in other words, hypomnemata—and gives it over to an anamnesis
awakened by the urgent questioning of climate change. Not only are the characters able to locate
their family trauma within its genealogy, but readers are as well.
Roffey maps a different cultural memory of the Caribbean that connects climate change to
earlier waves of colonial inscription. The characters refuse the memory constructed by “global”
media networks of the north that present their own condition to them through disjointed images of
natural disasters without history. Instead, Archipelago’s characters model a kind of anamnesis by
adopting elements of the past as their own, elements which, like the whale, enable the characters to
recognize themselves as later moments within an immanent material history. The pink slave houses
of Bonaire, Sea Empress cruise liner, and a tidal wave unleashed by the earthquake that hits
Fukushima, enable a new organization of retention and a new connection with that archive. This
vision of the human is not the subject of a world-historical break or transcendence of an old
“Nature” as in some conceptions of the posthuman or the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a human that
is individuated through its worldly attachments. “I thought I was separate,” Gavin tells his wife, “Me
against the world. I wanted to escape that house, everything. But really, I’m part of it all, the earth,
the sea. I can’t get away” (356).
As a metafictional text, Archipelago illustrates the posthuman workings of memory. More
importantly, it may serve as memory support for future generations as it consciously inscribes itself
into, and thus re-inscribes the archive of “the human” in the era of climate change. It is a
posthumanism that recognizes the composition of the human with earthly life, through technics and
narrative, and recognizes that it is precisely these continuities which enable iterations of the new.
This perspective supports the work of environmental humanists to rethink the periodization of the
literary archive according to “the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power,
and Other Energy Sources” (Yaeger et al. 2011). The image of the posthuman as a break or

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liberation from the past, the planet, or from the body, conceals a will to forget. At its worst, it
becomes a fetish for the operations that extract living knowledge, traditional and otherwise, into
storage banks—mausoleums or pyramids—to await reanimation by speculative capital. Because
literature can make the material archive of its own narrative conscious, it can enable the kind of
anamnesis Stiegler's posthumanism prescribes so that, if the future is to be haunted by ghosts, they
may, like the white whale, come to our rescue.

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Works Cited
Craps, Stef et al. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies, vol. 11,
no. 4, 2018, forthcoming in print, published online 10 Oct. 2017.
Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara Young, Palgrave Macmillon, 2011.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. 2004. Mariner, 2006.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota, 2008.
Roffey, Monique. Archipelago: A Novel. Penguin, 2012.
Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Polity, 2010.
———. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth, Stanford
University Press, 1998.
Yaeger, Patricia et al. “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic
Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, pp. 305-326.

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Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?

Steven Umbrello
Correspondance: steve@ieet.org
Steven Umbrello is the Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a
researcher at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute with research interests in explorative nanophilosophy, the
design psychology of emerging technologies and the general philosophy of science and technology.
Acknowledgments: Any errors are the authors’ alone. The views in the paper are the authors’ alone and not
the views of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Abstract: Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not

impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive
origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the
ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of
posthumanist literature and potential research avenues.
Keywords: Prometheus, posthumanism, transhumanism, Sisyphus, myths
1. Introduction
Posthumanism is a fickle philosophy, mostly due to its illusive origins and more so as a result of its
multiple instantiations and interpretations (Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism,
Antihumanism”). In general, it can be diluted to the decentering of the ‘human’ from the privileged
place that classical theology and the long philosophical history handed down from Plato has
traditionally positioned it (Sorgner, “Pedigrees”; Sapp, Genesis).
This paper, however, does not seek to explicate exactly what posthumanism is, what
characterizes its many interpretations, or how and why it has emerged. There have been a great
many scholars who have already undertaken this task and have consequentially provided thorough,
albeit sometimes obtuse, studies. In staying with the theme of this journals special issue this short
paper instead seeks to look at what the current state of scholarship actually is, with the hopes of
showing the reader some initial indications of where posthumanist scholarship is trending towards,
and perhaps even give a normative account of where scholarship should go.
2. Where We Have Been and Where We Are
Nailing down precisely what posthumanism is a difficult, if not foolhardy endeavour. Because the
term has been appropriated by various fields including critical studies, philosophy, anthropology and
sociology—among others—the various instantiations for which the term has been used similarly
differs. Not only this, but it has and still does change over time. As such, proponents of the term, as
well as detractors (Fuller “Preparing for Life”), have disseminated its various meanings by providing
genealogical accounts of its origin,1 adjudications of its theoretical strength,2 applications to various

1 See Wolfe 2009; Sorgner 2014; Franssen 2014.
2 See Ferrando 2013; Herbrechter 2013; Hook 2004.
Umbrello / Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy? 28

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fields,3 and themes and means by which it can be bolstered against attack.4
As such, the majority of these works are explicative, aiming to clarify its meaning and usually
providing an initial attempt to illustrate the societal, cultural, technological, etc. implications that the
adoption of a posthumanist philosophy can entail. The structure of these works take similar strides
in that they typically begin with a critique of humanism and the influence post-Kantian philosophy
with particular emphasis to explicate the concept of ‘correlationism’ that was coined by Quentin
Meillassoux in his ground-breaking, and highly critiqued treatise After Finitude: an Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency (Meillassoux). Unlike these topical texts, I will detract and not provide the typical
account of correlationism and instead allow the reader to explore the topic on their own.
The theoretical foundation of posthumanism—particularly that of contemporary
posthumanism—although confusing and clouded in jargon and obscurantism entails what has been
called ‘ecological thinking’ and the ground-breaking philosophical move of flattening ontology
(Morton Humankind; Morton The Ecological Though; Latour Facing Gaia; Latour We Have Never Been
Postmodern; Haraway Staying with the Trouble). What exactly does this mean? It means that ‘humanity’ as
such is a fragile concept—or even one that is illusory—built upon false notions of the necessity of
human cognitive superiority. When humanity is decentered, both from the universe’s centre (as
Copernicus suggested) and from the biosphere (as Darwin argued) then the special place that
humanity endowed itself becomes tender and easy to bruise (Caffo Fragile Umanità).
Ecological thinking becomes the natural consequence of this decentring, this movement
towards the fringes of thought. Nonhuman animals and other forms of life come into the fold on an
equal ontological basis as a consequence of the removal of the human ontological pedestal.
Speciesism becomes nothing other than a tool of economy that drives the humanistic conceits
embedded in the hypocritical infrastructures and techniques, and is thus an ethical choice. The
inconvenient truths that there no longer exist any good reasons to massacre millions of animals
becomes apparent and imminent. As such, the most authentic starting point for ontology is a
flattened one, one in which animality is equal for all life forms, not one that begins with human
superiority. Thus, what it entails is the reclamation of animality, not the creation of it.
3. Living on the Edge Together
Otherness and strangeness become the norm in this philosophical revision. As the anthropocentric
organization of space and being-centre is abandoned, because of it is a priori non-existence, then the
ontology of everything exists in a de-centred and peripheral way. This feeling of estrangement
becomes the foundation for contemporary posthumanism. The centre is necessarily empty, and the
periphery, the edge, becomes crowded with a multitude of life and phenomenologies.
It is here, on the fringes that the ecological thought is born, one where the understanding
and assembly of non-anthropocentric space can be undertaken, one with biodiversity as a central
tenet. This peripheral-being is one that is necessarily connected and enmeshed in ecosystems that are
greater than the whole (Morton Dark Ecology). This means that the current trend towards
posthumanism in the ecological thought is one of a story of rebirth, a rebirth in which the human
form itself changes as a necessary step of moving from the inside of the circle to the outside, it is the

3 See Welsch 2017; Bendle 2002; Gray 2001.
4 See Sorgner 2014; Umbrello 2018.

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only way to survive the self-induced ecological crisis.

We as humans can change our substantial forms; we do not have a particular relation to being
nor does being belong to us. This means that humanity must abandon Western absolutism in favour
of a new role, a role among many, one in the fringe; it is here where humans can continuously change
their role. As such, temptations to create a new circle in the fringes must be abated in exchange for
an understanding of the infinite connections among peripheral beings (Haraway, "Manifesto").
Anthropocentric morality must likewise be abandoned. Out new habitat on the fringes is one
with clear sight of a damaged planet, one in ecological crises. This truth becomes remarkably
apparent when a species (humans in this case) radically destabilize its own survival. This crisis
provides a fermentation ground for the posthumanist to be birthed. Body-Oriented ethics becomes
the most obvious here, one in which the subject does not exceed the limits and rights of the body of
other, without consent, except when this excessiveness is necessary (i.e., self-preservation).
Similar to the philosophies of Singer and Deleuze, the body becomes the boundary of
inviolability of moral actions (Singer The Expanding Circle; Singer On Comparing the Value; Deleuze
Spinoza). The environment that houses humans is in crisis as a result of an ethics that is blind to the
bodies of others. A posthumanist understanding of this does not discriminate sex, ethnicity, or the
preference of the individual. Being-in-the-world naturally, and always, potentially implicates a certain
level of violence. As such, this implicates all life-forms as a part of a single painting; an assemblage
of systems and nodes.
A body-oriented ethics then is the adaptive mechanisms (to use evolutionary terminology)
that posthumanism levies to be-in-the-world with other forms of life and to heal a damaged planet.
Other life is incommensurable!
4. Where do we go from here?
This ‘opening up’ of animality and the ontological continuity with animals and nature, and the
‘closing down’ of anthropocentrism and human superiority is the pinnacle of current posthumanist
scholarship. Strong philosophical, sociological and anthropological arguments are being forwarded
and developed to dethrone human superiority from its once privileged place. The implications of
this are both critical and vast, but not widely adopted. We have begun to understand the truth of our
place, our misguided effects on nonhuman animals and the environment and the self-started road to
self-destruction. Yet, we nonetheless continue to traverse this course; we live in a time of self-
indulgent hypocrisy.
Posthumanist works are undoubtedly crucial given their foundational nature, but what is also
unquestionable is their failure to disseminate these ideas to a popular audience. Posthumanist
notions of repair and harmonization are founded on universal struggles towards these desirable
futures and away from those that have and are causing devastation. These essential works remain
burdened by their overuse of metaphor, narrative and lack of clear and actionable ethics.
The future paradigms of posthumanist research are explicit: how do we make
posthumanism, its writings, ideas and implications clear and operable to as many people as possible
outside of academe and learned readers? I do not attempt to give an answer about how such an
endeavour should be undertaken, that is the goal of further research projects.

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Bendle, Mervyn F. “Teleportation, Cyborgs and the Posthuman Ideology.” Social Semiotics, vol. 12,
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Caffo, Leonardo. Fragile Umanità. Giulio Einaudi editore, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Books, 1988.
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———. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism and New Materialisms.
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edited by Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Peter Lang, 2014.
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Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” New York, 1991, p. 150.
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Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity, 2017.
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Posthumanism: Current State and Future Research

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Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?

Abstract: Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not

Umbrello / Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy? 28

Umbrello / Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy? 29

only way to survive the self-induced ecological crisis.

Umbrello / Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy? 30