Stefan Herbrechter

The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Posthumanism and Ancestrality

Before Humanity

Ivan Callus

Has theory become resistible? Has it betrayed its promise, and sold out on its practice? Should theory, after having become a discipline, still lay claims on the radical, or should it embrace its establishment within the university? What future(s) could theory have if there is (dis)agreement about its present(s) and its past(s), and what and how should it from now proceed to read?

The (ir)resistibility of Theory

Discipline and Practice

What does it mean to be human today? The answer to this question, which is as old as the human species itself, is becoming less and less certain. Current technological developments increasingly erode our traditional humanist reflexes: consciousness, emotion, language, intelligence, morality, humour, mortality - all these no longer demonstrate the unique character and value of human existence. Instead, the spectre of the 'posthuman' is now being widely invoked as the 'inevitable' next evolutionary stage that humans are facing. Who comes after the human? This is the question that posthumanists are taking as their starting point. This critical introduction understands posthumanism as a discourse, which, in principle, includes everything that has been and is being said about the figure of the 'posthuman'. It outlines the genealogy of the various posthuman 'scenarios' in circulation and engages with their theoretical and philosophical assumptions and social and political implications. It does so by connecting the philosophical debate about the future of humanity with a range of texts, including examples from new media, popular culture, science and the media.

A Critical Analysis

Posthumanism

Manuela Rossini

In literary studies and beyond, ‘theory’ and its aftermaths have arguably been over-influenced by US- and UK-based institutions, publishers, journals, and academics. Yet the influence of theory in its Anglo-American forms has remained reliant on Continental European ideas. Similar patterns can be discerned within the latest theoretical paradigm – posthumanism. European ideas influence posthumanism’s challenge to established understandings of humanism, anthropomorphism, and anthropocentrism, which is characterised by the increased urgency and proliferation of questions such as ‘What does it mean to be human?’ and ‘What is the relationship between humans and their nonhuman others (machines, animals, plants, the inorganic, gods, systems, and various figures of liminality, from ghosts to angels, from cyborgs to zombies)?’ European Posthumanism examines the histories and geographies of posthumanism and looks at the genealogies which have been at work in the rise of posthumanist thought and culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

European Posthumanism

This book is of interest for any reader wishing to explore the interface between literature, and critical and cultural theory. It investigates the notions of alterity which underlie the work of Lawrence Durrell and postmodernist theory. Grass (Irmgard Elsner Hunt).

Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity

Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz

The Matrix trilogy continues to split opinions widely, polarising the downright dismissive and the wildly enthusiastic. Nevertheless, it has been fully embraced as a rich source of theoretical and cultural references. The contributions in this volume probe the effects the Matrix trilogy continues to provoke and evaluate how or to what extent they coincide with certain developments within critical and cultural theory. Is the enthusiastic philosophising and theorising spurred by theMatrix a sign of the desperate state theory is in, in the sense of “see how low theory (or 'post-theory') has sunk”? Or could the Matrix be one of the “master texts” for something like a renewal for theory as now being mainly concerned with new and changing relations between science, technology, posthumanist culture, art, politics, ethics and the media? The present volume is unashamedly but not dogmatically theoretical even though there is not much agreement about what kind of theory is best suited to confront “post-theoretical” times. But it is probably fair to say that there is agreement about one thing, namely that if theory appears to be “like” the Matrix today it does so because the culture around it and which “made” it itself seems to be captured in some kind of Matrix. The only way out of this is through more and renewed, refreshed theorising, not less.

The Matrix in Theory

"Cy-Borges provides radically new, "posthumanist" readings of such established Borgesian fictions as "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," "Funes the Memorious," "The Garden of Forking Paths," and "The Circular Ruins." They will be equally illuminating to readers of Hispanic and world literature, as to students of critical and cultural theory, and anybody who is fascinated with the idea of the "posthuman" and "posthumanism.""--BOOK JACKET.

Stefan Herbrechter

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