Microbial Subjects and Commanded Waste

Xenopoem, 2025

In posthuman literature, writing functions as an act of plastic formation, crafting texts that are adaptable and capable of transformation. Malabou describes plasticity as “the possibility of explosion and resistance,” a notion that aligns with the dynamic and often disruptive nature of posthuman writing. Authors, like sculptors, mold language into forms that are not fixed but remain open to reinterpretation and evolution. Xenopoem's approach mirrors Malabou’s idea that “creation is not the finalization of a form but the opening of a field of possibilities.”

IJELS, 2022

Posthuman" does not mean after human or beyond human. It is only a reconfiguration of what it means to be human in the rapidly changing technological scenario. Though the Enlightenment concept of the human as autonomous, as a rational creature who by the use of the faculty of reason, can give any shape to the self as s/he wishes, has been discredited by Darwin's theory of evolution, Marx's dialectical materialism, and Freud's psychoanalysis, yet the biological and the technological world had not infringed upon the human, thereby reducing all claims of autonomy to sarcasm, as they do in the present era. The posthuman denotes, Cary Wolfe says, "the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being is not just its biological but also its technological world (Qtd Seldon etal 284). N. Katherine Haylesin How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodie in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) contends that normal human beings become post-human by using prosthetic body parts adopting computer technologies. Donna Haraway has indeed conceived of the humans as cyborgs who are part human and part machine, the machine being a prosthetic extension of the human. In this age of Information Technology and social media, a natural corollary of the posthuman condition is Digital Humanities: This essay explores how the post human condition and digital humanities impact the interactive composition and interpretation of the literary text.

Journal of Posthuman Studies

2013

As Rosi Braidotti in "Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming" (2002), puts it: Postmodernity is notoriously the age of proliferating differences. The devalued "others" which constituted the specular complement of the modern subjectwoman, the ethnic or racialized other and nature or 'earth-others'-return with a vengeance. They are the complement to the modern subject, who constructed himself as much through what he excluded. (174) Posthumanism may arise once the need for such a "vengeance" has been fulfilled, and the voices of subjectivities who have been historically reduced to the realm of the "Other", have been regained. Posthumanism is inextricably related to the Studies of the Differences, referring to the fields of research which developed out of the deconstruction of the "neutral subject" of Western onto-epistemologies 9. The deconstruction enacted, within the historical and philosophical frame of Postmodernism, by Feminist, Black, Gay and Lesbian, Postcolonial and Chicana theorists, together with differently abled activists and other outsiders, pointed out the partiality of the construction of the Discourse 10 , historically formulated by one specific subject, which finally appeared in its embodied vestiges, as: Western, white, male, heterosexual, propertied and abled, among other specific terms. In order to postulate a post-to the human, the differences which are constitutive to the human, and which have been historically erased by the self-claimed objectivity of hegemonic accounts, have to be taken into account. Posthumanism is indebted to the reflections developed out of the "margins" of such a centralized human subject, which emphasized the human as a process, more than as a given, inherently characterized by differences and shifting identities: Women's and Gender Studies, Gay 9 Such a genealogical location of the posthuman is already pointed out by William Spanos in his pioneer text "End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism", published in 1993. 10 Note that the notion of "Discourse" is intended here not only in the foucaultian use of the term as a way of constituting knowledge, social practices and power relations (Foucault 1976), but also as the phallogocentric logos (Irigaray 1974), and the symbolic order (Kristeva 1974).

Journal of Posthumanism, 2021

Posthumanism and its core ideas have been spreading in different parts of the world and in various areas of human interest as a response to the multi-faceted problems human and morethan-human worlds are facing. While scholars such as Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Bradoitti, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, and Cary Wolfe led Posthumanism as a distinct literary and philosophical movement in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is rooted in postmodern thinking and its criticism of modernity and humanism, as seen in Ihab Hassan's work. The human-centric subjectivity of modernity and its logocentricity found its climax in the Enlightenment, which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution in the following century. Through colonialism, modernity and its ideals have become global phenomena, as indigenous cultures have been subsumed under modernity's principles, and some have gradually disappeared as a consequence. Those who have survived became exotic objects for the modern gaze.

Angelaki, 2008

Science Fiction Studies, 2018

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BMCR, 2020

If it is indeed incumbent upon us all "to make the anthropocene as short/thin as possible,"[1] as Donna Haraway avers, where, exactly, does that leave the humanist? And if (as Haraway herself notes, along with other theorists like Jason Moore and Kathryn Yusoff) seeing beyond the anthropocene requires the recognition that even the epochal descriptor itself flattens the distinction between ἀνθρώποι who are the authors of our current global catastrophe and those who are set to suffer most gravely by it, where does that leave the Classicist, when Greco-Roman antiquity has

Introduction to the first volume (4.1/2016) of the double issue of Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism on "Past the Human: Narrative Ontologies and Ontological Stories", guest-edited by Serenella Iovino, Roberto Marchesini and Eleonora Adorni. 4.1. features articles by Serpil Oppermann, Heather Sullivan, Margarita Carretero González, Deborah Amberson & Elena Past, Diana Villanueva Romero.