zizek

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.

On posthumanism potentially worthy of the name.

In the triad of Verso pamphlets on 9/11, Nick Spencer sees a convergence of postmodern critique (against the capitalist culture of postmodernity).

Cary Wolfe reviews Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order.

Early on in The New Ecological Order, French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and the danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is that it can call itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought… At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal (xx).

As we shall see, for Ferry – a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not Cartesian tradition – this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism.