Critical posthumanism: an overview

This initial overview maps critical posthumanism as a theoretical and self-reflective discourse that has been establishing itself over the last 20 years or so. While popular notions of posthumanism and the figure of the posthuman tend to focus on technology and its current dynamic of transforming the “human” into some “posthuman” or even “transhuman” state or species, critical posthumanism, in its attempt at a more rigorous and more “philosophical” undertaking, is concerned with what one might term the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism” and its premises: namely, humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism. Critical posthumanism and its various denominations and spin-offs are therefore informed by a postanthropocentric ethics, politics, and ecology, and look toward complex notions of embodiment and of material entanglement between humans and a “more-than-human” world. This overview chapter discusses those aspects while also providing an analysis of the complex temporality at work in posthumanism. It evaluates the posthuman in terms of its past, present, and projected or “constructed” futures, by foregrounding the genealogical dimension of critical posthumanism. In doing so, it provides an illustration of the various meanings of “critical” and “critique” that are at work within posthumanist discourse.