Critical posthumanism or, the inventio of a posthumanism without technology

Abstract

Our purpose in this essay is to suggest why it might be critical to envisage a posthumanism without technology. The idea will seem desperately misconceived. To speak of a posthumanism without technology is tantamount to speaking of humanism without humanity. One might as well consider language without articulatio, science without measurement, art without creativity, or any act of extreme and absolute divestiture that compels contemplation of denaturing itself, seeing that what is in question is taking what is most integral to a discourse or practice and discounting it so completely that one would be left only with unthinkability. This remainder would be more radical than a counter-discourse, with the undoing implied being far more comprehensive than what might be undertaken within, for instance, deconstructive engagement. It would involve us in the willingness to retain the names of discourses or epistemes but not their intuitions, memory, history, protocols, perceptions, ( dis)positions, repertoire - or boundaries. It forces what has been attached to an 'ism' to be formulated anew, with its stakes and wagers re-negotiated in the very open modes of the unthought and the unbroached, the untried and the forgotten.