Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature

Notes

notes 179 Notes to Introduction 1 Begun circa 1519, the sculpture was part of a series of forty figures commissioned for the tomb of Julius II. The plan was never completed , however, and many figures, including the “slaves,” “prisoners ,” or “captives” (of which the Blockhead is one), did not make it into the final design. See Ascanio Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, 2nd ed., trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Helmutt Wohl (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999); Charles De Tolnay, The Tomb of Julius II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), vol. 4 of Michelangelo; and William Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For the metaphysical context of the sculptor’s work, see Michelangelo Buonarroti, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, ed. Robert Linscott (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); Robert J. Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1961); and Tammy Smithers, “Michelangelo’s Artistic Captivity as Mirrored in His Neoplatonic Captives,” in Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts, ed. Liana De Girolami Cheney and John Hendrix, 211–26 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 2 Edith Balas, in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel: A New Interpretation (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995), discusses the era’s religious anthropocentrism, where man “is the representative of the universe and the essence of all its powers” (153). 3 Cameron’s quotation comes from “‘Avatar Friday’: Fans Will Be Shown Preview of James Cameron’s 3-D Film,” The Telegraph, August 18, 2009. For an overview of the controversy that Avatar depicts a “white hero once again saving the primitive natives,” see Jesse Washington, “‘Avatar’ Critics See Racist Theme,” Huffington Post, January 11, 2010. 4 For studies that situate posthumanism transhistorically, see Caroline 180    notes to introduction Bynum Walker, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 5 For definitions of transhumanism, see Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14, no. 1 (2005), http://jetpress.org/volume14/bostrom.html; Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2006); and the World Transhumanist Association homepage, http://www.transhumanism.org/. For humanist critiques of transhumanism , see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2002), andJürgenHabermas,TheFutureofHumanNature(Cambridge:Blackwell , 2003). 6 See Cameron’s statement on the Home Tree Initiative website: “Today we find ourselves facing the greatest challenge of our time: saving our natural world from ourselves. . . . The time has come to stand up and be warriors for the Earth.” http://www.avatarmovie.com/hometree/. 7 I draw here from Neil Badmington’s “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 10–27, which returns to Derrida’s emphasis on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of getting “outside” of humanism. For other critiques of the vestiges of humanism in much popular posthumanism, see N. Katherine Hayles’s essential How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Eugene Thacker, “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 72–97; and Daniel T. O’Hara’s observations about posthumanism’s very human “will-to-will” in “Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the ‘Post/Human’ Imagination,” boundary 2 30, no. 3 (2003): 121. 8 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287. In this light, the film disturbingly uses Jake’s disability as a symbol of human dysfunction. 9 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” http:// www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/120-COMPO_MANIFESTO.pdf. notes to introduction    181 10 For two versions of Adorno’s quotation, see Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003), 40, and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1983), 126. 11 This differentiation between popular and critical posthumanisms borrows...