Interuxa, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2001 Intertextual Bodies: Three Steps on the Ladder of Posthumanity C h r i s t i a n M o r a r u U n i v e r s i t y o f n o r t h C a r o l i n a , G r e e n s b o r o The following considerations purport to join in the increasingly sys¬ tematic effort to explore and theorize the “posthuman.” In fields as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, political science, theology, informatics, med¬ icine, and aesthetics, this endeavor has involved rethinking the notions of “the human” and “humanity,”' and, by the same token, modernity’s—as well as modernism’s—ideological legacy broadly conceived. Core concepts of the “universalist” narrative of the Enlightenment and therefore, as Donna Haraway has pointed out, “modernist figures” per se (86), the hu¬ man, humanism, humanity—not least the humanities, Imight add—are now undergoing deep-reaching reconceptualizations and displacements. Unavoidable as they are, such changes themselves need to be tackled crit¬ ically: to be sure, “post-human” physicality, sexuality, and sociality, their politics, genealogies, historical formations and present reformations ap¬ pear to be anything but predictable. Granted, much of contemporary theory revolving around various “posts” may be viewed as acollective attempt to understand the post¬ human before its glorious advent proper. Deleuze and Guattari’s disassem¬ bly of the “desiring-machines” in their momentous unseating of the Freud¬ ianparadigminAnti-Oedipus;Lacan’spsychoanalysisanditsdaringremap¬ ping of the ego; Lyotard’s take on humanism in The Inhuman; Derrida’s in¬ sistent analytic of subjectivity and sub-jection as major underlying drive of the larger enterprise called the deconstruction of Western logocentrism; late feminist, gay, lesbian, ethnicity- and race-based critiques of tradition¬ ally white, male or masculinist discourses of identity (Butler, Fuss, Hayles, Bordo, Delany, hooks, and, again, Haraway): albeit usually in conflicting ways, they have all attempted afull-fledged, “posthumanist” critique of the Cartesian subject undergirding modern (Western) representations of “hu¬ maneness.” Nonetheless, Iwould argue, the discussion of textually and culturally specific displacements of “the human” and humanist discourse at large is still at an incipient stage. In this view, it is important to stress, as Ju¬ dith Halberstam and Ira Livingston have in the Introduction to their re¬ cent anthology. Posthuman Bodies, that the posthuman does not act out, chronologically as well as teleologically, acompletion of the “human story.” Indeed, it does not simply finish up—or finish off—modernity’s number one grand narrative. It would make more sense, as Halberstam and Livingston insist in avery Lyotardian tone, to revisit and reconstruct the human as the posthuman “in the works.” They also point out that the post 4 6 Moraru—Intertextual Bodies Posthumanity 4 7 in the />ojrfiuman simultaneously shelters, tolerates, resists, and triggers the complex implications of the inter, infra, sub, trans, pre, and anti} It comes as no surprise, of course, that cyberculture, cyberpunk, and certain areas of postmodern literature, science fiction, popular culture, the “avant-pop,” and film have yielded some of the particularly thought-pro¬ voking occurrences in the newly emerged posthumanist “symptoma¬ tology.” It is in these zones of the contemporary imaginary that the most shockingly “posthuman” possibilities are being tried out, through various challenges to inherited descriptions of the human body and its multiple, culturally-historically established borders. As the essays in Posthuman Bodies show, the body unfolds a“site” wherein the human undergoes metonymically various transformations, struggles to become something else or, as suggested above, to reveal that such mutations have been under way for along time now. And, in doing so, the body cannot but renegotiate the dynamic and related hierarchies of reason and flesh, spirit and materiality. My intervention focuses on three literary models of “posthuman be¬ coming”—three models of transgression or metamorphosis of the human through what Iwould call “engendering” games. Iuse the term metamor¬ phosisadvisedly,formyfirstexample,PhilipRoth’s1972novella^The Breast, undertakes adaring rewriting—a textual “metamorphosis”—of Kafka’s own “Metamorphosis.”^ The second relevant instance will be Jo¬ seph McElroy’s 1976 novel. Plus, atext closer to the cultural form most posthumaninterrogationstendtoprivilege:sciencefiction,whetherinlit¬ erature,theory,orfilm—whereBladeRunner,theStarTrek,Aliens...
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Mar 1, 2002
Margarete Sandelowski 
