Abstract
The posthumanist critique of the conviction that “the human” can be regarded as representing a distinct and privileged ontological category has had far-reaching implications in a number of disciplines. My goal here, however, is not to pursue and elaborate these implications but rather to explore and comment upon some instincts and problems that predate and even motivate the posthumanist critique, and to propose that we can discern their stirring in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. I propose that posthumanist scholarship reprises a move that Stanley Cavell sees as impelling “the motive to philosophy.” To read Spenser, and indeed posthumanist scholarship, in this light is not to see them as cooperatively engaged in a critique of humanity’s blind spots concerning its place in the world. Rather, it is to see each as living with and also working through the instincts that both constitute the human and spawn the philosophical enterprise.
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