Dickens, “The Signalman,” and the Posthuman Subject

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Since its appearance in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster figure was deemed the human’s other that poses a threat to humanity. In 2013, in his award-winning novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, the Iraqi acclaimed writer, appropriated Shelly’s monster in the hybrid posthuman figure of Whatsitsname that shares with Shelly’s Frankenstein the same anxieties but within the context of Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. With the advent of the twenty first century, and emergence of new social realities due to the capitalist system, the changes associated with technology, war on terrorism and globalization led to the rise of the posthuman condition in which human and other-than-human entities are envisioned in a new light. What characterizes the posthuman condition is the reassessment of the dualistic thinking that governed the human thought and the rise of hybrids as posthuman subjects. In this respect, many traditional boundaries between nature/culture, human/other, and humanity/monstrosity were transgressed. This paper aims at exploring manifestations of posthuman subjectivity in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi in the light of critical posthumanism. It claims that the monstrous figure in the novel is a posthuman subject that presents an alternative vision, not a threatening entity. It will focus on decentering human identity as highlighted in Michel Foucault’s criticism of biopolitics, and exploring posthuman subjectivity as pursued by Rosi Braidotti and Ellen L. Graham. Keywords: Posthumanism, Monster, Subjectivity, Decentering, Frankenstein

Adopting a hybrid, creative-critical approach, this article explores how Rosi Braidotti’s notion of posthuman subjectivity based on a negotiation between humans, zoe (nonhumans), geo (earth) and techno (technologies) can be put into practice creatively. Against the background of the low-lying South Holland coast, where sandscapes based on human-nonhuman collaborations prevent coastal erosion, I trace the various voices in the landscape complementing and interrupting each other. Shifting from a human perspective into the perspectives of zoe, geo and techno, the narration of this piece finally coalesces to form a new ‘we’ which represents this posthuman subjectivity. Imagining alternate futures based on this inclusive ‘we,’ this piece explores what a collaboration based on a collective posthuman subjectivity can mean in practice.

Adopting a hybrid, creative-critical approach, this article explores how Rosi Braidotti’s notion of posthuman subjectivity based on a negotiation between humans, zoe (nonhumans), geo (earth) and techno (technologies) can be put into practice creatively. Against the background of the low-lying South Holland coast, where sandscapes based on human-nonhuman collaborations prevent coastal erosion, I trace the various voices in the landscape complementing and interrupting each other. Shifting from a human perspective into the perspectives of zoe, geo and techno, the narration of this piece finally coalesces to form a new ‘we’ which represents this posthuman subjectivity. Imagining alternate futures based on this inclusive ‘we,’ this piece explores what a collaboration based on a collective posthuman subjectivity can mean in practice. Moreover, it demonstrates the potential of experiments in form and style to make tangible theoretical insights from posthuman scholarship, introducing an innovative approach that bridges the gap between academic and creative writing.

With the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, much of the world has been experiencing isolation and quarantine. Digital technology, especially the internet, has become the essential method of communication when social distancing measures constrain physical contact. The global health crisis leads to a dynamically increasing reliance on digital equipment contributing to a posthuman world. The article will take Shanghai-based multimedia artist Lu Yang (1984–) as a representative example to explore an alternative posthumanism subjectivity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Built theoretically on Kathrine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism concepts of virtual bodies, this article will examine how Lu Yang’s work articulates the interactive relationships between humans and the material world to go beyond the conservative corporeality and contribute to a renewal of posthuman subjectivity. In Lu Yang’s recent projects created during the pandemic, such as Doku × The 1975 ‘Playing on My Mind’ (2020) and the live-streamed piece Delusional World (2020), the artist experiments with different strategies to break down social-cultural constraints and transcend established dualisms of gender binaries, life and death, human and non-human. With a close investigation of Lu Yang’s multidisciplinary artistic practices, this article intends to argue how a new subjectivity emerges in contemporary Chinese art and its roles in the current COVID-19 pandemic world.

In recent years, Rosi Braidotti has proposed to explore the “intersectionality” of natural, social and technological determinations in order to provide a non-dualistic theoretical framework for what she defines as the “critical posthumanities.” In this paper, I polemically engage with Braidotti’s theoretical project by reconstructing the methodological principle through which she endeavors to disentangle the dualisms presupposed by anthropocentrism and humanism. I will argue that the upshot of this methodological procedure is a hypostatization of subjective structures into reality which in turn facilitates an ontological transposition of the political concept of inclusiveness. In highlighting the formal procedure of inclusion by which the posthuman subject conceptualizes difference, this article provides a set of objections to Braidotti’s methodology by evaluating it in terms of the Marxian critique of speculative abstractions.

In this conversation, renowned critical posthuman scholar Rosi Braidotti offers insights regarding what the posthuman turn means for intimate scholarship and broader questions of subjectivity. She discusses the methodological challenge of post-anthropocentrism for the humanities and stresses the need to move to a process ontology, which entails a non-essentialistic understanding of subjects as in process and connected up to networks of human and non-human elements, yet simultaneously situated and accountable. While acknowledging the possibilities of “auto” forms of research for keeping subjects politically located, she emphasizes the importance of practicing an outward-facing intimate scholarship – one not focused on one’s own pain and ego, but rather, one connected up and out, an affirmative becoming-intimate with the world, with otherness and diversity. To do so, she suggests we must think differently by experimenting with non-linearity, associative thinking, and transdisciplinarity. We must nurture intergenerational connections both for continuity of important knowledge and to create alternatives, all while using theory as a tool for counter-knowledge production.

As a core concept in philosophy and critical theory, subjectivity holds fundamental importance in that it constitutes the cornerstone of an individual’s self-awareness, moral status, and existential significance. It also serves as the intrinsic basis for their entitlement to dignity and rights. With the development of cutting-edge technologies such as genetic engineering, biotechnology, and cognitive science, the issue of subjectivity has become a key topic in academic discussions within the posthuman context. <i>Never Let Me Go</i>,<i> </i>a novel by the Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, centers on a group of clones, vividly depicting their life trajectories and the tragic fate as organ donors for humans. From the perspective of the clone protagonist Kathy, the novel showcases the process in which the clone community resists against their given fate of sacrifice and strives to pursue and construct their own subjectivity. Based on Rosi Braidotti’s theory of posthuman subjectivity, this paper analyzes how the clones strive to escape from their fate as sacrifice caused by their assigned alienated identities and instrumentalized bodies, generate the pure life “Zoe” by means of deterritorializing nomadic resistance and establishing connections with other forms of life, and thereby demonstrate their posthuman nomadic subjectivity. By depicting the clones’ pursuit of their own subjectivity, Ishiguro in this novel expresses his contemplation on the tragic fate of the clones and the ethical problems caused by cloning technology. 主体性作为哲学与文化批判理论的核心概念之一，其重要性在于它是个体之自我认知和道德地位及其存在意义的根本基石，也是个体享有生命尊严与权利的内在依据。随着基因技术、生物技术、认知科学等前沿科技的发展，在后人类语境下，主体性问题再次成为学界讨论的重要话题。日裔英国作家石黑一雄创作的长篇小说《别让我走》以克隆人群体为叙事核心，深刻描绘了其生活轨迹及作为人类器官捐献者的悲惨宿命。小说透过克隆人主人公凯茜的视角，展示了克隆人群体抵抗被给定的牺牲者命运，努力追寻和建构自身主体性的过程。本文基于布拉伊多蒂的后人类主体性理论，分析小说中克隆人试图摆脱其被给定的异化身份和工具化身体所导向的牺牲者命运，并通过解辖域化的游牧抵抗以及与其他生命形式的关联而生成纯粹生命“佐伊”，从而呈现出其后人类游牧主体性。通过描写克隆人群体对自身主体性的追寻，石黑一雄在该作中表达了对克隆人的悲剧命运以及克隆技术所引发的科技伦理问题的思考。

Medieval studies is an excellent vantage point from which to complicate and elucidate current discussions of futurism, particularly around ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) and technology should inform constructions of future humanisms. Much of the recent work in post-humanist and ecocritical discussions critique and evaluate AI’s success in terms of its humanity, often focusing on how well machines can mirror or imitate human reactions, thus inadvertently privileging human emotions as better and more desirable than those of the planet’s other beings. This scholarship inadvertently creates and reproduces a hierarchy of the human through a politics of emotional exceptionalism. In contrast, my essay explores how reading with the medieval offers surprising resonances with concerns about power in the posthuman and reveals human privilege as constructed through political inequalities instantiated by the violation of emotional norms. Power in the medieval and in the post-Anthropocene is structured around emotional violation, through an erotics of grief that privileges human violence and transgression of the rights of other beings and fantasizes that some human emotions are more valid than those of other beings. Examining the extremes of privilege in medieval culture illuminates the relation between emotions and human privilege in current discourses around AI, technology, and the human. The essay considers how and why grief is eroticized in service of power in the medieval period (in texts such as Tristan et Yseut and Daphne and Apollo) and how emotional exceptionalism naturalizes elite human power in pop culture (as in the privileged human violence enacted over cyborgs in recent films such as Ex Machina and Her). In short, I explore how reading with the medieval questions the hypermodernist assumptions undergirding much of the thinking on cyborgs and power in work by Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Judith Halberstam.

This paper employs theories of childhood sexuality to frame an analysis of the posthuman politics in Octavia E. Butler's vampire novel Fledgling (2005). Throughout the novel, Shori, the child protagonist, discovers her posthuman identity through political and social discourses of her juvenile sexuality. Designed as a genetic experiment to breed sun-resistant melanin into the population of her vampire species, Shori's procreative potential forms one of the central conflicts of the novel. Childhood sexuality also serves a didactic role, helping both human and vampire characters create, accept, and learn about posthuman ways of being. I draw on Rosi Braidotti's conception of an embodied critical posthumanism and bring it into conversations with scholars of childhood sexuality—including Katheryn Bond Stockton, James Kincaid, Steven Bruhm, and Natasha Hurley—to interrogate the posthuman potential of the sexual child. It follows that I examine how Shori's juvenile sexuality marks a continuation of Butler's longstanding interests in discourses of race, agency, and symbiosis. The complexity of childhood sexuality in the novel challenges popular narratives of childhood innocence and establishes the child as a productive site of posthuman possibility.

Reviewed by: The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject by Irving Goh John Paul Ricco Irving Goh. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015. There is no better indication of the failure of the practice of critical theory than the extent to which those who claim to be theorists remain attached to “the subject” and “subjectivity.” Regardless of the ways and the extent to which poststructuralism and deconstruction have fundamentally put into question its status, the subject remains incredibly resilient to critique; it is central to queer and affect theory, as well as to disability, gender, and race studies; and it is present in the work of the most revered and cited of contemporary thinkers. In The Reject, Irving Goh not only traces the persistent presence of the subject in the work of Badiou (“the faithful subject of the event”), Rancière (“the uncounted subject”), Balibar (“the citizen-subject”), Rosi Braidotti (“the critical post-human subject”), and Katherine Hayles (“the flickering post-human subject”), he also provides clear and reasonable arguments as to why this presence poses serious problems for their respective attempts to think community, democracy, religion, love, friendship, the post-secular, and the post-human in wholly new ways. More important, through his brilliant theoretical conceptualization of “the reject,” Goh offers one of the most rigorous and carefully articulated responses to the question “who comes after the subject.” Jean-Luc Nancy posed that question thirty years ago in a letter to fellow continental philosophers. Their responses were published two years later in the journal Topoi, and subsequently in Who Comes After the Subject? (1991). Over the past 25 years, I have been struck by how little known this book has become. Thus we owe Goh a debt of gratitude for returning us to this groundbreaking volume and the seismic critical theoretical question it inaugurated. Goh structures his discussion according to three distinct valences or “turns” of the reject, which can be defined as follows: “passive rejects” are those who are rejected (e.g. refugees, sex workers, black bodies, the indigenous, et al.); “active rejects” are those who reject others; and “auto-rejects” are those who ‘self-reject,’ by rejecting the a priori subjective autonomous and hypostatized self. While the first two rejects will be familiar to any reader, the originality of Goh’s argument—and hence the potential un-familiarity of its figure or image—lies in his conceptualization of the auto-reject. Not to be confused with any form of auto-critique, de-subjectivation or the nihilism of the abject, the auto-reject is predicated upon the a priori abandonment that is the originary force of existence. Singularities are born out of this abandonment of being to existence, thereby becoming the rejects that they are in relation to others. In its rejection of self, the auto-reject sustains this infinite abandonment, perhaps right up to the point at which neither the auto- nor the reject can be sustained. Without being immune to being a passive or active reject, according to Goh, the auto-reject breaks their dialectical cycle by “keeping in mind that there is always the possibility that one is a reject in the eyes of others” (8), and thus in doing so, at times “sidestep[s] to an adjacent space” as a way to abandon any asserted self-positioning and effectively ‘get over itself.’ However, lest this be confused with some liberal acquiescence toward the other, Goh further specifies that this “shift or sidestepping to an adjacent space further requires that the auto-reject respect the other’s desire to not fill the space left by the auto-reject.” Thus Goh has outlined what might be described as a non-imperative ethics, one that is without demand (or obligation, responsibility, mutuality), or even an ethics conceived as infinitely demanding. For one of his scenes, Goh turns to contemporary digital-network technologies and social media platforms in order to underline the extent to which the reject is the exact opposite of the subjective self or “selfie” produced by Instagram, Facebook, and the like. As he notes, the selfie subject as inward-solipsistic-me is the subject...

The term posthuman reminds agencies like robots or transhumans that will possibly steal the central role of human beings by defeating the humanities. As technology is linked to posthumanism, smart cities are usually interpreted as posthuman architecture and urban structures. However, what posthuman subjects and actors mean in terms of the architectural and urban realm is not clear yet since it is a pretty new term for architecture. This paper takes Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman approach to define and discuss the meaning of posthuman in terms of architecture and cities while developing new alternative meanings.

This article discusses a materialist approach to dramaturgy framed as a dramaturgy of assemblage. It is inspired by posthuman thinking and draws on theory from new materialism (Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett, Elaine Gan, and Anna Tsing). The dramaturgical approach is developed through artistic research, and the article refers to the performances Childism (2015) and Jeg vill høre havet (2017), which serve as examples of this practice. I articulate the movement from dramaturgy as a collective practice to exploring a collective which includes more-than-human collaborators. Rosi Bradotti’s work on the nomadic subject (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) has inspired the notion of the nomadic dramaturge. In her book Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti discusses what “we” are in the posthuman and post-anthropocentric condition, suggesting that the posthuman subject is (part of) a collective. Following Braidotti, I introduce the concept of dramaturgy of assemblages as a place for this collective subjectivity. A dramaturgy of assemblages responds in practice to the question of how a posthuman framework affects theatre and performance-making. What is presented in this article is all about shifting perspectives. When we think differently, we act differently, and different things are formed.

The Life of Puppets (2023) reinterprets Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio set in a dystopian future where most of humanity has disappeared. Victor Lawson is a 19-year-old human who lives peacefully with his unconventional family of non-human machines. Their tranquil life in an isolated wood is shattered when Victor finds and repairs an android, Hap, and unintentionally reveals the family’s location to the dangerous robots from the City of Electric Dreams. This paper discusses The Life of Puppets through the lenses of posthumanism, Affect theory, and Gothic fiction. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s view that posthuman subjects are relational entities defined by connections with both human and nonhuman agents, the story challenges the traditional boundaries of identity. Affect theory emphasizes the fluidity of relationships and emotions, challenging notions of human superiority and suggesting that emotions can transcend human experience. The novel’s connection to Gothic fiction’s exploration of societal anxieties further develops this analysis. Through its depiction of fears related to biotechnological advancement, The Life of Puppets reflects contemporary concerns about identity and agency in a machine-dominated world. Ultimately, the novel offers a profound commentary on what it means to be human in an increasingly posthuman landscape.

Impasses are often understood as blockages, as preventing something from moving along a desired trajectory. Thinking with Lauren Berlant’s conception of the impasse in the historical present and Rosi Braidotti’s writing on exhaustion in the posthuman subject, we wonder how we might move forward in/with the overwhelmingness of the present, impasses in and always exceeding the qualitative inquiry classroom. We inquire: How does the impasse inspire a posthuman pedagogical practice? How do we teach (inquiry) in exhaustive times? To explore these questions, we turn to our classrooms as spaces conducive to impasses, discussing two examples, before opening our discussion to the posthuman pedagogical possibilities that impasses make possible. We then zigzag to the present, where a disturbance, a pandemic impasse, invokes exhaustion, uncertain pedagogical a/effects; however, we continue to seek the affirmative. Throughout, we circle in and around the impasse. Exhausted yet somehow (in)exhaustible.