Posthuman Fantasies

“Posthuman” discourse remains hotly contested within the Euro-U.S. academy, affirming that we are far from “post” the posthuman. While some of the grounding critical texts in the field of the posthumanities emerged in the eighties, the nineties and the aughts saw a swell of scholarly production around what it might—and does—mean to inhabit bodies, spaces, and spheres that can no longer be clearly defined or conceptually grasped as unproblematically “human.” Crucial rejoinders to this line of inquiry have, accordingly, questioned the theoretical efficacy (not to mention the liberatory potential) of the posthuman formulation for subjects never accorded full humanity within a racist, heterosexist, and otherwise phobic and discriminatory humanistic frame. Like postmodernism, the notion of the posthuman always invokes a temporal paradox: how can one be “post” something one may never have been in the first place? Relatedly, what, and indeed who, is elided by the flash-forward into “post”-ness?

In The Posthuman Rosi Braidotti seeks to provide a unified and coherent assessment of the posthuman condition, one that addresses the above concerns while forcefully arguing that historical and structural elisions from the category of the human give those excluded all the more reason to embrace the radical potentiality of what she refers to as “life beyond” the human. Using her own gendered subject position to make this point, Braidotti writes, “The becoming-posthuman speaks to my feminist self, partly because my sex, historically speaking, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable and never to be taken for granted” (81). Repeatedly championing an “affirmative” reconceptualization of posthumanity—“my favourite term: affirmative,” she quips (54)—Braidotti is unabashedly exuberant at the prospect of throwing humanity under the bus. “My deep-seated anti-humanist leanings show in the glee with which I welcome the displacement of anthropos,” she writes (75), challenging even the most skeptical of readers not to crack a smile.

Braidotti’s affirmative reading of the posthuman condition hinges on her conviction that the “horrors of our times” need not eclipse the “excitement” that accompanies the contemporary moment (186–87). Opting for a Bergsonian-Deleuzian sense of transformative “becoming”¹ rather than upholding a static notion of “being,” Braidotti aims to give the reader a glimpse into the possibilities present in the expansion of our circumscribed understanding of “life” to include “Life Beyond the Self” (chapter 1), “Life Beyond the Species” (chapter 2), “Life Beyond Death” (chapter 3), and “Life Beyond Theory” (chapter 4). What happens, she provocatively asks, when we begin to conceive of life as exceeding the bounds of the now classical frames of selfhood, Man, mortality, and the academic humanities? In other words, what happens when we begin to think with zoe, or life itself, rather than with bios, or the life of the individual (and yes, neoliberal) subject? For Braidotti, zoe is a profoundly unifying force. Zoe, she writes, is “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself … [that] stands for generative vitality. It is the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains” (60). There is a certain planarity to thinking with zoe in Braidotti’s analysis—the hopeful fantasy of a kind of level playing field.

But before she describes the “zoe-egalitarianism” that for her constitutes an affirmative posthuman future (71), Braidotti begins The Posthuman with four vignettes that illustrate the most sinister dimensions of the posthuman predicament. These chilling slices of life chronicle the havoc wreaked by a nihilistic Finnish mass shooter brandishing the slogan “Humanity is overrated,” the emergence of mad cow disease from the cannibalism forcibly engendered by biotechnology, the drone-bombing of Gaddafi’s convoy before his assassination by rebel forces, and, (relatively less chillingly) an argument for the defunding of the humanities recently leveled by a Dutch cognitive science professor. Human self-annihilation, human-animal violence resulting in the threat of mutual annihilation, the human killing of other humans by nonhuman intermediaries, and persistent scientific justifications for the destruction of humanism, all point toward humanity’s deep-seated inhumanity. The only way...