Posthumanism

Abstract

Posthumanism considers the possibility that historical phenomena (such as advances in technology or discoveries about animals) are leading to fundamental changes in the human species and its relationship with the world. It thus involves radically rethinking the dominant, familiar humanist account of who “we” are as human beings. According to the humanist model (a clear and influential example of which can be found in the seventeenth‐century writings of Rene Descartes), the figure of the human has a natural and eternal place at the very center of things, where it is clearly distinguished from machines and animals, where it shares with all other human beings a unique and universal essence, where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history, and where it acts according to something called “human nature.” For humanists, “Man,” to use the problematic gendered term often employed in accounts of “the human condition,” enjoys a position of automatic and unquestionable hegemony. “Man” is the measure of all things.

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