Posthumanism

Posthumanism is an umbrella term for a cluster of related ontological, epistemological, and theoreticomethodological developments across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. These are linked by a commitment variously to problematise, critique, deconstruct, reject, or supersede the entrenched intellectual legacy of humanist discourse and the Enlightenment conception of the human being as an autonomous, exceptional, and rational agent at the organising centre of the world. Posthumanist scholars have pointed out that this paradigmatic modern and occidental vision of the human as a transcendent and self-knowing sovereign actor simultaneously inscribes the nonhuman world as a relatively passive context or stage for human thought and action. This way of thinking has in turn been linked to the current global ecological crisis, which posthumanists have read as material ...