Posthumanist Approach Research Articles

Beyond the Humanist Imagination

Recent stirrings wihin the humanities and the social sciences, perhaps especially within feminist theory, have engendered new materialist, feminist materialist and posthumanist approaches to life w ...

Release the Moths: Critical Animal Studies and the Posthumanist Impulse

Posthumanism and critical animal studies are grounded in different theoretical frameworks and have different orientations and agendas. The present essay works through some dimensions of posthumanist thought together with critical animal studies by exploring ‘the edges’ in certain points of contact between the fields and their material and metaphorical problems and possibilities. My main objective is to begin to develop some of the most productive dimensions of posthumanism in relation to critical animal studies in a call for a critical posthumanist approach to the messy knowledge forms and politics emerging from human/animal relationships by asking the question: Under what conditions does cross-contamination take place between the two fields, and to what effects? The essay proposes two different responses to dealing with issues exposed by the juxtaposition of posthumanism and critical animal studies, and argues that this juxtaposition also accommodates a potential to instigate unexpected processes of knowledge development in both fields.

Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy

In what follows, I want to suggest that a good deal of confusion about studies has stemmed from our inability to locate question properly.1 More specifically, if philosophical work that takes moral status of non-human animals seriously is, in some obvious sense, posthumanist (i.e., challenging ontological and ethical divide between humans and non-humans that is a linchpin of philosophical humanism), such work may still be quite humanist on an internal theoretical and methodological level that recontains and even undermines an otherwise admirable philosophical project. My aim here is to map a kind of philosophical or theoretical spectrum that moves from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocentrism) to posthumanist approaches to posthumanism, moving from a cluster that includes Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian capabilities approach, Peter Singer's utilitarianism, and Tom Regan's post-Kantian animal rights philosophy at one end, through post-Wittgensteinian work of philosopher Cora Diamond (itself inflected by Stanley Cavell's writings on philosophical skepticism), to, finally, later work of Jacques Derrida on the question of animal. My point will not be to pursue a kind of more-posthumanist-than-thou sweepstakes, but rather to try to bring out how very admirable impulses behind any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (impulses that I respect wherever they may be found) demand a certain reconfiguration of what philosophy (or theory) is and how it can (and cannot) respond to challenge that all of these figures want to engage: challenge of sharing planet with non-human subjects. Such differences should not obscure a remarkable fact with which I'd like to begin: that figures as diverse as Nussbaum, Diamond, and Derrida all set out from same starting point that anchors our ethical response to non-human animals: namely, how our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude makes us, as Diamond will put it, fellow creatures in ways that subsume more traditional markers of ethical consideration, such as capacity for reason, ability to enter into

Radical Post-humanism

This article uses the work of Friedrich Kittler to address the ways in which media technologies underpin and structure the basis of ‘human’ existence and understanding. Kittler’s ‘media materialism’ is explored through four main influences: the information theory of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, the media analysis of Marshall McLuhan, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault’s work on power and discourse. These figures are used, in turn, to draw into question the materiality of information technology, and, following this, to develop a post-human approach to media analysis. The final section of this article considers the challenges such an approach poses to the humanistic bias of mainstream sociology and media studies.

Posthumane visioner: En postkønnet eller kvindelige cyberkultur?

The article is a discussion of two cyberfeminists, Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, and their innovative posthuman approaches to feminist decontruction of the masculine connotations of cyberculture. The author compares Haraway's cyborg-figure that represents a post-gender, post-origin and post-nature position to the alliance of women and machines, promoted by Plant, who, inspired by Luce Irigaray, attempts to inscribe an embodied feminine subject in cyberspace and trace a digital écriture féminine. In conclusion the article profiles the posthuman approaches of Haraway and Plant with the humanist critique of the social relations of gender, culture and technology, which is articulated in a "cyborg"-novel by Dorrit Willumsen "Programmeret til kærlighed" (Programmed to Love) (1981).

`Outing' Organizational Analysts: Some Reflections Upon Parker's Tantrum

Parker (1995a) asks a fundamental question begged by the postmodern suspicion of modernist metanarratives: `Critique in the Name of What?' His discussion of this issue, in which a self-consciously ethical commitment is advocated, is used in this paper as a springboard for further reflection upon the possibility of making the articulation and pursuit of ethico-political concerns central to the production of knowledge about organizing and organizations. Parker favours a humanist orientation, which respondents to his paper persuasively criticize for its voluntarism and subjectivism. In contrast, I commend a post-humanist (not anti-humanist) approach which suggests a way of retaining Parker's ethico-politico commitment without falling foul of the problems identified by his critics.

The Laugh of the Medusa

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old (la nouvelle de l'ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project. I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses