critical posthumanism

The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".

The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.

Comparative literature's changing conceptions of world literature have largely been informed by humanist thinking and the global paradigm, but as the climate crisis exposes the inextricable interconnectedness of globalisation and the anthropocene, 'natural' and 'cultural' histories, and species thinking and historical thinking (Chakrabarty 2009), wouldn't it be time to let theories of world literature and critical posthumanism converge? One route into this might be to extend Édouard Glissants poetics of relation to non-human actors, and to put Glissant into a conversation with Karen Barad's concept of agential realism. Working with texts by J.M. Coetzee, Olga Tokarczuk, and Richard Powers, I will show how they destabilise the binaries and demarcations targeted by a critical posthumanist agenda, how literature ultimately test the limits of object-oriented ontology and its anti-relational stance, and how geography still matters in all of this.

At the same time, the framework of posthumanist entanglement helps questioning the popular conception of literature as simply 'playing through' or modelling fctionalised versions of human experience, and to think about literature as an experiential space and as a relational ethics in its own right.

Literature and art forms contribute significantly to the discussion of epistemological concerns of posthumanism. Which is to say that, literature and art imagine, interrogate and nurture the subjective and embodied attributes of the nonhuman experience. It is through such exploration of the experiential aspects that sensitivity and other similar personal engagements can occur, which can augment our comprehension of nonhuman beings and entities, that in turn can lead to conspicuous epistemological and ethical consequences.

To consider critical posthumanism as established only within critical theory and philosophy, wherein the idea of the human has been the moot point, is to neglect the significant role of popular culture and literature in the revaluation of the concept of the human.

This paper while delineating critical posthumanist ideas in critical theory and discourses like animal and monster studies, techno scientific advancements, vital materialism and actor network theory, also concentrates on literary texts. Therefore, the rationale for conjoining the critical posthumanism with literary texts should be traced herewith.

This paper establishes that children’s literature is a fertile ground where philosophy and representation merge, providing a scope that children might think about their “being” and posits children’s literature as a resource to engage in complex philosophical explorations. The mutation of ontologies in children’s fiction challenges the ideological division between human, animal and the artificial. Since, children’s texts experiment with the idea of being, it puts forth ontological questions to their readers and invite readers to question who they are and what they might become.

This paper partakes in the timely debates discussing the possible ways in which posthumanism could operate in literary research by proving useful as an effective tool of analyzing literary texts for children. Posthumanism may, apparently, seem to be at odds with the traditional purpose of children’s literature to socialize and enculturate.

The essential humanist ideas of agency and selfhood conventionally portrayed in children’s literature are contrasted by the multiple and fluid forms of subjectivity as well as networked and assembled forms of selfhood as identified by posthumanist paradigm. However, posthumanism and children’s literature are connected by their shared interest in ethics. Innately preoccupied with the ethical subject formation, children’s literature provides for a ground ideal for interrogating the exclusionary practices that have historically led to creation of the humanist subject.

Moreover, the everyday state of the child or adolescent subjects as being in-between with respect to their relation with the adults and adult culture is analogous to the position that animals, machines and other nonhuman forms occupy in relation to the human subjects within the humanist scheme of things. In their ability to seek “pleasure in their confusion of boundaries” (Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 172) children emerge as being the ones who delight themselves in discarding absolute ontologies in favour of posthuman ways of thinking about ways of being.

The primary aim of the paper is to connect posthumanist concerns to children’s texts and thereby examine the ways in which these texts facilitate reconsidering and rethinking the ethical and political questions about the human, nonhuman and posthuman in various aesthetic contexts.

This paper explores the pervasive presence of literature, film, speculation, fabulation, and other genres of invention in the theoretical writings also known as “critical posthumanism.” Identifying a set of different appropriations of fictional discourse in theoretical work by, amongst others, Astrida Niemanis, Stacy Alaimo, Rebekah Sheldon, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett, the paper asks why theorists united by a common interest in “getting real”, to use Karen Barad’s phrase (1998), often turn to a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality. What, in other words, do genres and rhetorical devices that deliberately and explicitly make stuff up allow thinkers within critical posthumanism to do that traditional academic styles of writing do not?

To answer this question, the paper adopts key concepts from fictionality theory and utilize these in order to trace three distinct modes through which fictional discourse is put to use in the field of critical posthumanism. These modes are distinguished by inventing 1) non/human entanglements, 2) scientific knowledge, and 3) future societies respectively; yet all of them, the paper argues, fictionalize with the primary aim of imaginatively and affectively grasping phenomena that in principle reside beyond the limits of intelligibility.

In critical dialogue with Slavoj Žižek, who have accused this field for ignoring the question of epistemology, I will try to show that fictionality is adopted, here, precisely as an epistemological tool for envisioning that which cannot (yet) be perceived as “true.” On this basis, the paper intervenes in recent debates on the modes of theoretical argumentation in critical posthumanism, arguing that fictionality – in contrast to “literature”, “fabulation”, “speculation” or “wor(l)ding” – is a particularly attractive type of discourse for attempts to move beyond anthropocentric regimes of truth.