The subject of citizenship – Can there be a posthuman civil society?

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the notion of agency and its relationship to our understanding of acts of citizenship embedded in civil society. I focus particularly on the strain under which the idea of human agency has fallen in the context of posthumanist thinking. By building on critical interrogations of posthumanist thought, I shed light on the consequences of distributed agency on thinking about citizenship and civil society, and particularly the normative underpinnings of agency framed in these terms. In particular i show that the idea of responsibility should be further elaborated upon before we can meaningfully consider citizenship in (more than) posthumanist terms. I conclude by briefly outlining a possibility for overcoming the ontological contradiction between humanist and posthumanist thought as a promising move towards rethinking citizenship and civil society in a more-than-posthuman world.