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

摘要

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 post-humanism, 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. They tend to avoid transhumanist speculation on humanity's 'transformation to nonbiological experience' as a result of technology (see Kurzweil, p. 324). Neil Badmington's Posthumanism (2000), for example, typified this approach early.