Troubled Distinctions: The Soul in Posthumanist Perspective

Abstract

In discussions about what it means to be human, concepts of the soul play a significant role. In European tradition, understandings of the soul and of consciousness have often been used to differentiate the human being from other animals and from the natural world. European philosophy and religion deemed nonhuman others “inanimate” (derived from the Latin word for soul, anima) and claimed that only the human being was endowed with a fully developed soul. The chapter reconstructs the genealogy of these demarcations from ancient, medieval, and early modern discussions to their new arrangements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While philosophical speciesism has been a central characteristic of these demarcations, the chapter shows that discourses on the soul and consciousness have also generated alternatives to these hegemonic orders of knowledge. Particularly the “undisciplining” of the soul in the twentieth century – along with a reassessment of animism and other-than-human agency – has opened up new avenues for critical posthumanist thinking. It turns out that concepts of the soul are multifaceted figurations of the posthuman.