Antebellum Posthuman

Ellis, Cristin

doi:10.2307/j.ctt1xzh0z9

Cited by 60 publications

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“…If González-Ruibal's (2019) work demonstrates that this is indeed possible in archaeology, here I want to unsettle the notion that social justice, radical politics and new materialism are philosophically incompatible. A growing body of object-oriented feminism, feminist materialism and anti-slavery materialism suggests otherwise, recognising both the tensions between object orientation and emancipatory theory/praxis, while also discovering resonances and cultivating common ground (Barad 2007;Frost 2011;Behar 2016;Ellis 2018). Post-humanism certainly has its blind spots, including its neglect of race and Indigenous epistemes (Sunberg 2013;Jackson 2015;Todd 2016;Ellis 2018), and its failure to recognise that certain humans have long been rendered objects (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

False dilemmas? Or what COVID-19 can teach us about material theory, responsibility and ‘hard power’

Khatchadourian¹

2020

Antiquity

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If there are any lingering doubts about the ability of non-humans to cause incalculable suffering by their own capacities, we need look no further than COVID-19, that microscopic, semiliving, spiky sphere of protein and RNA that has changed the world as we know it. By the same token, if there are any doubts about the locus of responsibility for harm in which nonhumans play a leading role, we need look no further than the 2020 public health crisis in the USA, in which moral outrage over the mishandling of the pandemic has been aimed directly at human (if inhumane) leaders. Why has the virus not been subject to moral judgement? Despite its irrefutable capacity to inflict harm, and thus the pandemic's distributed causality, there is no confusion regarding where accountability for preventable suffering resides. Nevertheless, we have taken this non-human object extremely seriously. And in so doing, we have heightened our attunement to 'hard power'-to the racism and injustices of health inequities that have left Black, Latinx and Indigenous bodies particularly vulnerable to morbidity and death. In their debate piece on the pitfalls of the 'new materialism', Fernández-Götz et al. (2020) advance two critiques of this disparate body of theory as it has been deployed in studies of Roman expansion. First, they proffer that the turn to 'things' absolves humans of responsibility for harm, including the damages inflicted by Roman conquest and subjection. Second, they submit that an undue focus on objects at the expense of humans works to marginalise 'hard power' and obscure inequality (in the Roman Empire and elsewhere), thereby undermining archaeology as a force for social change. Such critiques are, by now, familiar (Hodder 2014; Rekret 2016; Boysen 2018; Van Dyke in press). Yet the coronavirus crisis helps us to see that theoretical acrobatics may not be required to hold causation apart from culpability. It also teaches us that non-humans can, in fact, make injustice acutely manifest. In other words, the authors present us with two compelling dilemmas-but are they truly dilemmas? Before turning to this question, a historiographic observation is required. It is difficult to accept that the failure to confront dispossession, subjection, inequality and the predations of Roman conquest has much to do with the 'new materialism'. After all, Roman archaeology's 'postcolonial turn' of the 1990s emerged from similar critiques, and likewise foregrounded the infringements of imperial sovereignty, back when things were still fully passive and representational. Let us return to the coronavirus. Laidlaw (2010) and Krause (2011) can help us through the problem of responsibility. Both authors allow for a dimension of agency as distributed in the causal sense (in line with actor-network theory). But their formulations of agency bear differently upon questions of blame. For Laidlaw, the relational quality of agency is key to

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confidence: 99%

False dilemmas? Or what COVID-19 can teach us about material theory, responsibility and ‘hard power’

Khatchadourian¹

2020

Antiquity

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Romanticism and Critical Posthumanism

Effinger

2022

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

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Troubled Distinctions: The Soul in Posthumanist Perspective

Stuckrad

2022

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism

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In discussions about what it means to be human, concepts of the soul play a significant role. In European tradition, understandings of the soul and of consciousness have often been used to differentiate the human being from other animals and from the natural world. European philosophy and religion deemed nonhuman others "inanimate" (derived from the Latin word for soul, anima) and claimed that only the human being was endowed with a fully developed soul. The chapter reconstructs the genealogy of these demarcations from ancient, medieval, and early modern discussions to their new arrangements in the twentieth and

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Antebellum Posthuman

Cited by 60 publications

References 0 publications

False dilemmas? Or what COVID-19 can teach us about material theory, responsibility and ‘hard power’

False dilemmas? Or what COVID-19 can teach us about material theory, responsibility and ‘hard power’

Romanticism and Critical Posthumanism

Troubled Distinctions: The Soul in Posthumanist Perspective

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