Introduction : posthumanist subjectivities, or, coming after the subject...

Abstract

Posthumanism is now well installed within the humanities and the social sciences as a critical discourse (see Wolfe, 2010) influenced by the wider technological condition (see Scharff and Dusek, 2003), the technological unconscious and non-conscious (see Thrift, 2004; Hayles, 2006) and by the academy growing increasingly inured to ‘switching codes’ of thought (see Bartscherer and Coover, 2011). It seems that the overriding task for posthumanism, as a critical discourse, is reflection on how the effects on and of contemporary technoculture and biotechnology force through a rethinking of the integrities and identities of the human: not forgetting, either, those of its non-human others, many of them of humanity’s own making and remaking – gods, monsters, animals, machines, systems (see, for instance, Graham, 2002; Derrida, 2008; Haraway, 2008). Critical narratives of ‘posthuman metamorphoses’ (Clarke, 2008) or of the ‘posthumanities’ (to use the term of a landmark series in the field, published by the University of Minnesota Press under the editorship of Cary Wolfe) all dwell on those themes. [excerpt]