The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism

480 Pages·2020·3.585 MB·English

by  Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (editor), Jacob Wamberg (editor)

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF
POSTHUMANISM
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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF
POSTHUMANISM
Edited by
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg
CONTENTS
L F
IST OF IGURES
C
ONTRIBUTORS
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg
Part One Paradigms and Transformations
1 Humanism
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
2 The Self and Subjectivity: Why the Enlightenment Is Relevant for Posthumanism
Karin Kukkonen
3 Transhumanism
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner
4 The Non-Human, Systems, and New Materialism
Rick Dolphijn
5 The Anthropocene
Pieter Vermeulen
6 The Ahuman
Patricia MacCormack
7 Posthumanism: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic
David Roden
8 Rising Negentropy, Evolutionary Reboots, and Gaia as Attractor: Toward a Map
of Contemporaneous Posthumanist Positions
Jacob Wamberg
Part Two Ethics
9 Environmentalisms and Posthumanisms
Ursula K. Heise
10 Nonhuman Politics and Its Practices
Iwona Janicka
11 Posthuman Feminist Ethics: Unveiling Ontological Radical Healing
Francesca Ferrando
12 Race, Technology, and Posthumanism
Holly Flint Jones and Nicholaos Jones
13 The Unity of Humanity
Steve Fuller
14 Toward Posthuman Human Rights?
Upendra Baxi
15 Disability, Neo-Materialism, and the Biopolitics of the Project of Western Man:
Toward a Posthumanist Disability Theory
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
16 Therapy, Enhancement, and the Posthuman
Sarah Chan
Part Three Technology
17 What Can We Learn from Eugenics?
Nicholas Agar
18 The Medicalization of the Posthuman Transformation Trajectory
Søren Holm
19 Life Extension and the Pursuit of Immortality
Andy Miah
20 Sport, Technoscience, and Posthumanist Athletics
Rayvon D. Fouché
21 Data and Information in the Posthuman Sensorium
David Chandler
22 Robots and Artificial Intelligence: Posthumanism as Robophilosophy
Johanna Seibt
23 Posthumanist Learning and Education
Cathrine Hasse
Part Four Aesthetics
24 What Aesthetics Tells Us about Posthumans
Alexander Wilson
25 Literature’s Humanist Posthumanism
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen
26 Posthuman Temporalities in Science and Bioart
Pernille Leth-Espensen
27 Music
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner
28 Posthumanism in Film and Television
Ivan Callus
29 Digital Comics and Unstable Interfaces
Edward King
30 Anime’s Situated Posthumanism: Representation, Mediality, Performance
Jaqueline Berndt
31 Ready Player Two: The Digital Avatar as Extension of Self
Kelly I. Aliano
32 Precarious Lives in the Age of Biocapitalism
Pramod K. Nayar
I
NDEX
LIST OF FIGURES
8.1 Preliminary (fissionist) map of posthumanist positions. Diagram by author; graphic design
by Carl Zakrisson
8.2 Map correlating negentropic tendencies of biological evolution and its cultural
recapitulation. Diagram by author; graphic design by Carl Zakrisson
8.3 Syncretic map correlating posthumanist positions (space) with cultural and posthuman
evolution (time). Diagram by author; graphic design by Carl Zakrisson
26.1 Svenja J. Kratz. The Absence of Alice: Fragments of a Body in the Process of Becoming
Other. Exhibited at Queensland University of Technology, 2008
26.2 Svenja J. Kratz. In the foreground: The Absence of Alice: Death Masks #3—Alice Ants.
Vacuum formed molds of the face of a young girl, containing a mixture of living ants, soil,
sugar, and Saos-2 cell line. In the background: The Absence of Alice: Death Masks: Mutable
Death Masks, seven masks made of slow recovery polyurethane foam containing Saos-2 cell
line. Exhibited at Queensland University of Technology, 2008
26.3 Svenja J. Kratz. The Absence of Alice: Death Masks—Alice Becoming, 2008. A series of
death masks in degrading plaster. Exhibited at Queensland University of Technology, 2008
26.4 Guy Ben-Ary, Boryana Rossa, and Oleg Mavromatti. Snowflake. Guy Ben-Ary in the
laboratory preparing to stimulate the neural networks with the image of a snowflake
26.5 Guy Ben-Ary, Boryana Rossa, and Oleg Mavromatti. Snowflake. Vial of frozen cells being
removed from container with liquid nitrogen
26.6 Guy Ben-Ary, Boryana Rossa, and Oleg Mavromatti. Snowflake. Installation of the artwork:
Container with liquid nitrogen, a snowflake sign in neon, and photographs and a video
describing the work
CONTRIBUTORS
Nicholas Agar is a New Zealand philosopher at Victoria University of Wellington. He has
written books on the ethics of human enhancement, including Liberal Eugenics (Blackwell,
2004), Humanity’s End (MIT Press, 2010), and on the meaning of technological progress
—The Sceptical Optimist (Oxford University Press, 2015). His latest book, How to Be
Human in the Digital Economy (MIT Press, 2019), addresses the human consequences of the
digital revolution.
Kelly I. Aliano received her PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
She is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History, published by McFarland in
2018. She has presented at numerous conferences in the field of video game studies. She
regularly collaborates with Dongshin Chang from CUNY Hunter about writing pedagogy in
theater courses; they published a chapter in New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts (2018)
on the subject. She currently teaches at Long Island University’s Post Campus in the
Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management.
Upendra Baxi is a legal scholar. He has been Professor of law in development at the
University of Warwick, UK, since 1996. He has been the vice-chancellor of the University of
Delhi (1990–4), prior to which he held the position of professor of law at the same university
for twenty-three years (1973–96). He has also served as the vice-chancellor of the University
of South Gujarat, Surat, India (1982–5). ​Books published by Baxi include Human Rights in a
Posthuman World (Oxford University Press, 2007) and The Future of Human Rights (Oxford
University Press, 2020, 3rd edition, forthcoming).
Jaqueline Berndt is Professor in Japanese Culture at Stockholm University. From 1991 to
2016, she worked at Japanese universities, teaching visual culture and popular media.
Holding a first degree in Japanese Studies (1987) and a PhD in Aesthetics/Art Theory from
Humboldt University Berlin (1991), she has been engaged in the emergent academic fields of
comics studies and anime research. For publications, see https://jberndt.net.
Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the University of Malta, where he teaches courses in
contemporary fiction and literary theory. In the field of posthumanism, his research includes
Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges (Bucknell
University Press, 2009) and Posthumanist Shakespeares (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), both of
which were co-edited with Stefan Herbrechter, as well as special issues co-edited for the
journals Subjectivity and European Journal of English Studies. In addition, he has published
various book chapters and articles on the same theme, the latter in journals like Angelaki,
Comparative Critical Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Parallax, Subject
Matters, and Word and Text. He is one of the founding directors of the Critical Posthumanism
Network (criticalposthumanism.net) and the founding co-editor of the journal CounterText,
launched with Edinburgh University Press in 2015.
Sarah Chan is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Usher Institute for Population Health Sciences
and Informatics, University of Edinburgh. She graduated from the University of Melbourne
with the degrees of LLB and BSc (Hons) and spent some years as a laboratory scientist in the
field of molecular biology before moving to work in science policy and bioethics. She
received an MA in Health Care Ethics and Law and a PhD in Bioethics from the University
of Manchester, where she was a Research Fellow in Bioethics from 2005 to 2015, first at the
Centre for Social Ethics and Policy and from 2008 at the Institute for Science Ethics and
Innovation, where she was Deputy Director. Sarah joined the University of Edinburgh in
August 2015. Her research interests and publications cover areas including the ethics of stem
cell and embryo research and reproductive medicine, gene therapy and genetic modification,
human enhancement, animal ethics, and research ethics.
David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster. His
recent books include Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing
and Hacking (Routledge, 2018), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and
Vulnerability (with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and Resilience: The
Governance of Complexity (Routledge, 2014).
Rick Dolphijn is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, and
an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on theories of
art and culture. His recent books include New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies
(with Iris van der Tuin (Open Humanities Press, 2012)), Philosophy after Nature (2015
edited, with Rosi Braidotti), and Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary (2019
edited). He is a PI in the HERA project FOOD2GATHER (2019–22).
Francesca Ferrando is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU-Liberal Studies,
New York University, USA. A leading voice in the field of Posthuman Studies and founder of
the NY Posthuman Research Group, she has been the recipient of numerous honors and
recognitions, including the Sainati prize with the acknowledgment of the president of Italy.
Her monograph Philosophical Posthumanism (Bloomsbury) was released in 2019. In the
history of TED talks, she was the first speaker to give a talk on the topic of the posthuman.
US magazine Origins named her among the 100 people making change in the world. More
info: www.theposthuman.org.
Rayvon D. Fouché is the Director of the American Studies Program and Professor in the
School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University. His work explores the multiple
intersections between cultural representation, racial identification, and technological design.
He has authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power
(University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the
fourth edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and