The Posthuman Condition

Page 7 January–February 2009 proximity to Derrida’s more decisive inclinations toward animals. Lawlor’s exposition of Derrida’s critiques of Lacan and Levinas requires less invention than does the discussion of Heidegger. However, Derrida’s counterintuitive responses to Lacan’s famous account of “the mirror-phase” and Levinas’s signature formulation of “face-to-face” relations make for difficult teaching. I have only space enough to recommend Lawlor’s able instruction and to suggest that the presentation of Derrida’s reservations regarding Levinas should stop the common speculation that Derrida’s work since the 1980s has been marked by a retreat from the important criticisms of Levinas expressed in the 1963 essay “Violence and Metaphysics.” Readers familiar with Derrida’s thought will find that Lawlor’s text invites a dialogue; the tone and style reflect what must have been the hospitable quality of the lectures on which the book is based. Moreover, This Is Not Sufficient demonstrates an unstrained facility with the career of Derrida’s thinking , his philosophical references, and his various contemporaries who also emerged in France in the era of 1968. Having suggested that this text ought to appeal to passionate Derrideans, let me also say that an industrious newcomer to Derrida’s work could find This Is Not Sufficient to be a useful companion to her initial reading. The text is rich with conscientious instruction. For example, Lawlor’s discussion of the figure of the pharmakon from Derrida’s early essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” includes a lucid restatement of the original argument, which he uses to explain the double-logic of human and non-human animal difference implied in the term animot. There are worse ways to begin studying Derrida than to start with his late work on animals and then to track that interest backward into his earliest texts. That’s the trajectory of his first essay in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and Lawlor’s book bears witness to Derrida’s admission that the question of the animal has always indeed come first in his philosophy. James Zeigler is assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches American literature. He is currently completing a manuscript on public intellectuals and the political culture of the Cold War. Zeigler continued from previous page The Posthuman Condition Friederike von schwerin-high Sherryl Vint’s study Bodies of Tomorrow examines a large body of science-fiction writings from the last two decades, bringing to bear an array of current scientific, cultural, and ethical debates on her analysis. Championing an ethics of embodiment and an epistemology of the dynamic interconnectedness between mind and body, Vint argues that representations of cultural practices encountered in selected science-fiction writing can help audiences better evaluate the ethical challenges differently composed future bodies and communities might pose. Throughout the study, Vint’s analysis and critique draw on feminist and Marxist theories, particularly on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, the idea of an identity-constituting call of culture and ideology to each individual; on Judith Butler’s theories of identity performance, which posits a set of culturally sanctioned scripts for subject enactment but also a space for resistance and agency; on Donna J. Haraway’s focus on localized, situated knowledge; and on Elizabeth Grosz’s invocation of the Möbius strip, a metaphor for the body as a site and a sign of deep intertwinement between culture and nature. The introduction and first three chapters of Vint’s book each present an analysis of three texts by one prominent science-fiction writer. The introduction provides an analysis of three short stories by Greg Egan, all of which feature a protagonist whose brain physiology and chemistry have been artificially altered, sending him into an existentialist interrogation of the nature of self and subjectivity. In “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” the protagonist whose malfunctioning neurons have been replaced by a foam of micro-transmitters modeled on the neural connectors of four thousand individuals, tries to imagine that his consciousness can indeed be conglomerated out of these and still be unique, bounded as it is by a singular body. In “Learning to Be Me,” the protagonist experiences that the disembodied...