Posthumanism: A Fickle Philosophy?

Defining posthumanism as a single, well-oriented philosophy is a difficult if not impossible endeavour. Part of the reason for this difficulty is accounted by posthumanism’s illusive origins and its perpetually changing hermeneutics. This short paper gives a brief account of the ecological trend in contemporary posthumanism and provides a short prescription for the future of posthumanist literature and potential research avenue

Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights by Alan Smart and Josephine Smart

Review of Alan Smart and Josephine Smart’s Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights

Posthumanist Education

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Transhumanism and/as Whiteness

Transhumanism is interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to establishing its ‘algorithmic’ relationship to historical processes of race formation (or racialization) within Euro-American historical experience. Although the Transhumanist project is overdetermined vis-à-vis its raison-d’être, it is argued that a useful way of thinking about this project is in terms of its relationship to the shifting phenomenon of ‘whiteness’. It is suggested that Transhumanism constitutes a techno-scientific response to the phenomenon of ‘White Crisis’ at least partly prompted by ‘critical’ posthumanist contestation of Eurocentrically-universal humanism

The unbearable trauma of being : death, hope, and (in)humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy

For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this paper seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this paper, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”peer-reviewe

The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous by Erin E. Edwards

Review of Erin E. Edwards\u27 The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous

(The Impossibility of) Acting upon a Story That We Can Believe

The historical sensibility of Western modernity is best captured by the phrase “acting upon a story that we can believe.” Whereas the most famous stories of historians facilitated nation-building processes, philosophers of history told the largest possible story to act upon: history itself. When the rise of an overwhelming postwar skepticism about the modern idea of history discredited the entire enterprise, the historical sensibility of “acting upon a story that we can believe” fell apart to its constituents: action, story form, and belief in a feasible future outcome. Its constituent parts are nevertheless still hold, either separately or in paired arrangements. First, believable stories are still told, but without an equally believable future outcome to facilitate. Second, in the shape of what I call the prospect of unprecedented change, there still is a feasible vision of a future (in prospects of technology and the Anthropocene), but it defies story form. And third, it is even possible to upon that feasible future, but such action aims at avoiding worst case scenarios instead of facilitating best outcomes. These are, I believe, features of an emerging postwar historical sensibility that the theory and philosophy of history is yet to understand

From human rights to person rights : legal reflections on posthumanism and human enhancement

In the intersection between law, science and technology lies the debate on the overcoming of the boundaries of the biological structure of the human being and its implications on the idea of human rights, on the concept of person and on the conception of equality – being the latter a fundamental tenet of a democracy. Posthumanism assumes a biological inadequacy of the human body regarding the quantity, complexity and quality of information which it can muster. The same occurs with the needs of accuracy, speed or strength demanded by the contemporary environment. Under such perspective, the body is considered to be an inefficient structure, with a short lifespan, easy to break and hard to fix. The body, always seen as the locus for the definition of human, emerges as the object of a commodification process that seeks to exonerate men from their burden - by declination towards a virtual existence, totally free and rational - or to enhance them with bionic devices or drugs. This issue has already been the subject of attention by many scholars like Savulescu, Rodotà, Broston, Fukuyama and even Habermas. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to seek, by criticism and revision of the positions on the foreseen problems of this process, an adequate theoretical approach on issues like the concept of person and its connection with the idea of human rights in order to promote the fundamental statement that all men are equal without disregard to the values of diversity and personal identity

[Book review] Populism, Media and Education: Challenging discrimination in contemporary digital societies

Published in January 2016, this book is based on a recent cross-European research project, ‘e-Engagement Against Violence’ (e-EAV), which ran from 2012 to 2014 and included research partners from seven EU member states. The project comprised two separate research strands, which are reflected in the structure of the book. First, a discursive approach known as Critical Frame Analysis was used in order to analyse populist communicative strategies online. For clarity, Ranieri sets out the definition of populism as used by the project as “an explorative concept to systematically analyse the ‘discursive strategies’ of ‘othering’ through which right-wing organisations construct and locate the ‘others’ ‘out of the people’ by making them objects of discrimination and exclusion” (Ranieri, 2016, p. 2). In contrast, the second part of the project involved an action research-based approach to design, implement and evaluate media literacy education practices, to improve young peoples’ awareness of the issues online and enhance civic engagement

Manifestations of the post-secular emerging within discourses of posthumanism

This paper discusses the concepts of posthuman and post-secular in critical theory