In the following essay I would like to go back and reconnect a few things that may have become disjointed in sketches of posthumanist theory. In particular, the points to revisit are: the poststructuralist critique of the subject, the postmodernist approach to autobiography and the notion of the posthuman itself. I will briefly return to the work of Haraway and Hayles, before setting out the relationship between the often proclaimed 'death of the subject', postmodern autobiography, and a few examples of what might be termed 'posthuman auto-biographies'.
Post-human-ismAs the posthuman gets a life, it will be fascinating to observe and engage adaptations of narrative lives routed through an imaginary of surfaces, networks, assemblages, prosthetics, and avatars. (Smith, 2011, p. 571) It's probably fair to say that the official (auto)biography of posthumanism runs something like this:Traces of proto-posthumanist philosophy can be easily found in Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Heidegger and their attacks on various ideologemes of humanism. This critique was then taken further by the (in)famous antihumanism of the so-called '(French) poststructuralists' (Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida y), who were translated, 'homogenized', received and institutionalized in the English-speaking r