Download or read book Solidarities with the Non Human or Posthumanism in Literature written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-11-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of the theoretical movement of critical posthumanism. The readings of literary texts gathered here, from Shakespeare, Keats, Camus, Vittorini, Kundera, Haushofer, Atwood, Eagleman, Crace and DeLillo, focus on ‘posthumanist moments’ in which questions of postanthropocentrism and the nonhuman become prominent, are negotiated and ultimately foreclosed. They show how a deconstructively-minded way of reading humanistically-motivated texts can help making these texts relevant for our so-called ‘posthuman times’. In doing so, these critical posthumanist readings demonstrate that literature remains one of the privileged cultural institutions and practices from which solidarities both with and between the human and nonhuman can be formed and negotiated.

Download or read book Humankind written by Timothy Morton and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical call for solidarity between humans and non-humans What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Acclaimed object-oriented philosopher Timothy Morton invites us to consider this philosophical issue as eminently political. In our relationship with nonhumans, we decide the fate of our humanity. Becoming human, claims Morton, actually means creating a network of kindness and solidarity with nonhuman beings, in the name of a broader understanding of reality that both includes and overcomes the notion of species. Negotiating the politics of humanity is the first crucial step in reclaiming the upper scales of ecological coexistence and resisting corporations like Monsanto and the technophilic billionaires who would rob us of our kinship with people beyond our species.

Download or read book The Posthuman written by Rosi Braidotti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

Download or read book Posthuman Pathogenesis written by Başak Ağın and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to contagions provides insights into the companionship of posthumanities, environmental humanities, and medical humanities to shed light on how we deal with complex issues like communicable diseases in contemporary times. Examining imaginary and real contagions, ranging from Jeep and SHEVA to plague, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, Posthuman Pathogenesis discusses the inextricable links between nature and culture, matter and meaning-making practices, and the human and the nonhuman. Dissecting pathogenic nonhuman bodies in their interactions with their human counterparts and the environment, the authors of this volume raise their diverse voices with two primary aims: to analyse how contagions trigger a drive to survival, and chaotic, liberating, and captivating impulses, and to focus on the viral interpolations in socio-political and environmental systems as a meeting point of science, technology, and fiction, blending social reality and myth. Following the premises of the post-qualitative turn and presenting a differentiated experience of contagion, this ‘rhizomatic’ compilation thus offers a non-hierarchised array of essays, composed of a multiplicity of genders, geographies, and generations.

Download or read book Human All Too Post Human written by Jennifer Cotter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indifferent to the difference between the “other”’s life and other lives. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism argues that the Nietzschean tendencies that provide the philosophical boundaries of post-humanism do not undo humanism but reform it, constructing a parallel discourse that saves humanism from itself. Grounded in materialist analysis of social life, Human, All Too (Post)Human argues that humanism and post-humanism are cultural discourses that normalize different stages of capitalism—analog and digital capitalism. They are different orders of property relations. The question, the writers argue, is not humanism or post-humanism, namely cultural representations, but the material relations of production that are centered on wage labor. Language, free will, or human rights are not the issues since “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” The question that shapes all questions, in Human, All Too (Post)Human is freedom from (wage) labor.

Download or read book Posthuman Glossary written by Rosi Braidotti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If art, science, and the humanities have shared one thing, it was their common engagement with constructions and representations of the human. Under the pressure of new contemporary concerns, however, we are experiencing a “posthuman condition”; the combination of new developments-such as the neoliberal economics of global capitalism, migration, technological advances, environmental destruction on a mass scale, the perpetual war on terror and extensive security systems- with a troublesome reiteration of old, unresolved problems that mean the concept of the human as we had previously known it has undergone dramatic transformations. The Posthuman Glossary is a volume providing an outline of the critical terms of posthumanity in present-day artistic and intellectual work. It builds on the broad thematic topics of Anthropocene/Capitalocene, eco-sophies, digital activism, algorithmic cultures and security and the inhuman. It outlines potential artistic, intellectual, and activist itineraries of working through the complex reality of the 'posthuman condition', and creates an understanding of the altered meanings of art vis-à-vis critical present-day developments. It bridges missing links across disciplines, terminologies, constituencies and critical communities. This original work will unlock the terms of the posthuman for students and researchers alike.

Download or read book The Green Mister Rogers written by Sara Lindey and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-03-25 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fred Rogers was an international celebrity. He was a pioneer in children’s television, an advocate for families, and a multimedia artist and performer. He wrote the television scripts and music, performed puppetry, sang, hosted, and directed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for more than thirty years. In his almost nine hundred episodes, Rogers pursued dramatic topics: divorce, death, war, sibling rivalry, disabilities, racism. Rogers’ direct, slow, gentle, and empathic approach is supported by his superior emotional strength, his intellectual and creative courage, and his joyful spiritual confidence. The Green Mister Rogers: Environmentalism in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” centers on the show’s environmentalism, primarily expressed through his themed week “Caring for the Environment,” produced in 1990 in coordination with the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. Unfolding against a trash catastrophe in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Rogers advances an environmentalism for children that secures children in their family homes while extending their perspective to faraway places, from the local recycling center to Florida’s coral reef. Rogers depicts animal wisdom and uses puppets to voice anxiety and hope and shows an interconnected world where each part of creation is valued, and love is circulated in networks of care. Ultimately, Rogers cultivates a practical wisdom that provides a way for children to confront the environmental crisis through action and hope and, in doing so, develop into adults who possess greater care for the environment and a capacious imagination for solving the ecological problems we face.

Download or read book Posthumanism written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Polity. This book was released on 2014 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants. Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and ‘speciesist’ politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism’s roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of ‘normalcy’ in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself. As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.

Download or read book Philosophical Posthumanism written by Francesca Ferrando and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of 'the human' is in need of urgent redefinition. At a time of radical bio-technological developments, and in light of the political and environmental imperatives of our age, the term 'posthuman' provides an alternative. The philosophical landscape which has developed as a response to the crisis of the human, includes several movements, such as: Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism and Object Oriented Ontology. This book explains the similarities and differences between these currents and offers a detailed examination of a number of topics that fall under the “posthuman” umbrella, including the anthropocene, artificial intelligence and the deconstruction of the human. Francesca Ferrando affords particular focus to Philosophical Posthumanism, defined as a philosophy of mediation which addresses the meaning of humanity not in separation, but in relation to technology and ecology. The posthuman shift thus emerges in the global call for social change, responsible science and multispecies coexistence.

Download or read book Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-28 with total page 1233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Download or read book Writing Posthumanism Posthuman Writing written by Sidney I. Dobrin and published by Parlor Press LLC. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing is designed to spark conversation. It is intended to highlight the growing importance of posthumanist approaches to writing studies, and, in doing so, works to solidify the importance of such work to the future of writing studies. Its organizational structure, length, and approach serve this agenda, working as much to encourage a growing conversation as it does to provide substantial, original work from which such conversations might emerge. The thirteen original essays that comprise Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing are organized to provide a progression from articles that introduce theoretical concepts regarding the intersections of posthumanism and writing to works that examine specific contexts as vehicles for developing posthumanist theories.

Download or read book The Ironic Spectator written by Lilie Chouliaraki and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Download or read book Un Learning to Be Human written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-23 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical posthumanism is a theory paradigm that has become hugely influential across the humanities and social sciences in the last twenty years. This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of this movement. Originally a reaction to accelerated technological and media change that challenges traditional notions of what it means to be human, posthumanism (as opposed to transhumanism) has developed into a general critique and reappraisal of life after humanism and anthropocentrism. The essays collected here are dealing with aspects of education, technology, politics, media and art, and share a focus on how to critique and unlearn traditional understandings of humanness and (re)learn what it means to be human differently.

Download or read book Bioethics and the Posthumanities written by Danielle Sands and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume explores how posthumanist approaches can illuminate current issues in bioethics and considers the relevance of these issues for the humanities, including questions of autonomy and authorship, and notions of ethical and juridical responsibility in the context of a changing understanding of subjectivity. With contributions from a variety of areas, including literature, philosophy, media, and policy-making, the book outlines the historical and philosophical development of posthumanism, and current key questions in bioethics. It generates a dialogue between bioethical approaches and the posthumanities, identifying ways in which posthumanist scholarship might be used to inform bioethical policy. The book also looks more speculatively at the future, and the potential implications of technological developments which are only beginning to emerge. It uses posthumanism to look critically at the humanism underpinning de-extinction science, considers the ways in which technology is re-framing our social and political imaginaries, and asks about the identification of future posthumans.

Download or read book Zombie Futures in Literature Media and Culture written by Simon Bacon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of 'old' and 'new' normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.

Download or read book Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care written by Amelia DeFalco and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.

Download or read book Before Humanity written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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”?