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.

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“…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.…”