On the Posthuman

Abstract

Why dedicate a thematic issue to the posthuman? Why make the posthuman a matter of concern nowdecades ater the publication of what are considered formative works in the ield of Science and Technology Studies: Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1984) and Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1988)?We would like to begin by saying that recent explorations into the posthuman andposthumanism have emerged as a response to the current economic, political, cultural, and ecological crises afecting us all. hey also point to the crisis of the notion of "the human" as an autonomous and rational being, as well as to the consequences of human actions on our planet. he posthuman enables a scrutiny of what it means to be human and what its limits are.In a time when concepts such agency, self,and "life" are being extended to include nonhuman others -animal, machines, and things -attention to the posthumanis urgent for manyreasons. First, asstated in the call for papers for this issue,the posthuman igure allows for alternative perspectives and positions from which to question, destabilize, and decenter the human, including modern binary categories. Second, a focus on the posthuman as a cultural coniguration requires a displacement of traditional disciplinary boundaries in favor of interdisciplinary approaches that involve literary and cultural studies, media studies, animal studies, and object-oriented philosophy, among other ields of critical practices. And, third, the posthuman can be understood as an umbrella term sheltering diferent but oten overlapping concerns, such as those of critical vitalism, new materialism, the ontological turn, non-(or post-) representational theory, speculative realism, and discourses about the Anthropocene.

Carnivalesque, Creativity, and the Becomings: A Critical Assessment of the Politics of Resistance in Batman: Arkham Asylum

“…In this current age of posthumanism, the body is often associated with ambiguous meanings and interpretations. Posthumanism is the belief that the next generation of human evolution involving the human body will move beyond the purely organic to a fusion of the organic with the technological and the synthetic (de Lima Costa et al, 2017). The concept was developed in the latter half of the 20th century.…”

(Re)creating possible futures or alternative presents through the arts

“…For a brief and clear account of the Anthropocene as a concept, see Crutzen (2002). For studies examining the interconnections between the notion of the Anthropocene, the arts and literatures, see the thematic issue of Ilha do Desterro "On Posthumanism" (Costa, Cavalcanti, and Haran, 2017), which anticipates some of the issues, and will be further discussed below; and Torres and Penteado (2021), who offer a glossary of concepts and relevant crossreferences. Such metaphors of alternative presents and of future-oriented figures act as the starting points for the reflections that we have brought together in this issue.…”

“…Still with regards to the Anthropocene, we would like to recommend to our readers Ilha do Desterro's v. 70, n. 2 (Costa, Cavalcanti, and Haran, 2017), entitled Posthumanism, which also features discussions about it, especially with regards to the role that language and representation have had in its construction. The issue also discusses the term in relation to its historical and cultural moment, understanding that it is a context marked by crises, as that of the idea of the human as an autonomous individual, whose actions, discourses, practices, beliefs, and ideologies are based on reason, as well as renewals, as the necessity to reconceptualize the human, in terms of its connectedness with nature and technology, and through different perspectives, as post-structuralism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, amongst others.…”