Posthuman Encounters: Technology, Embodiment and Gender in Recent Feminist Thought and in the Work of Marie Darrieussecq

Abstract

The dissolution of the boundaries of the human subject is a critical concern running through late twentieth-century French and European thought. From Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to Giorgio Agamben or Jean-Luc Nancy, thinkers have been concerned with destabilizing a deeply entrenched individualism and anthropocentrism in the history of Western civilization and philosophy. In the ten years preceding and succeeding the turn of the millennium, strands of thought that include philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies (and more often than not, crisscross between these disciplines) in both European and AngloAmerican contexts have drawn considerably on this focus in continental thought on the interrogation of the human subject. In so doing, they have begun to turn their attention towards a consideration of relations between humans and other forms of life, from plants and animals, to life forms that have been generated from new developments in bio-science and technology, such as the cybernetic organism. Such a ‘posthuman’ approach to understanding the universe and the place of humans within it is of increasing relevance to contemporary life, in all its aspects, and has resounding implications for notions of community, sustainability and ethics. The particular forms of posthuman existence that this article is interested in exploring involve these new developments in bio-science and technology, the extent to which they intervene in the formulation of human subjectivity, and dialogue with questions of gender. The article