Critical Posthumanisms - Böcker

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.

It is tempting to affirm that on and about November 2022 (post)human character changed. The revolution in A.I. simulations certainly calls for an update of the ancient realization that humans are imitative animals, or homo mimeticus. But the mimetic turn in posthuman studies is not limited to A.I.: from simulation to identification, affective contagion to viral mimesis, robotics to hypermimesis, the essays collected in this volume articulate the multiple facets of homo mimeticus 2.0. Challenging rationalist accounts of autonomous originality internal to the history of Homo sapiens, this volume argues from different—artistic, philosophical, technological—perspectives that the all too human tendency to imitate is, paradoxically, central to our ongoing process of becoming posthuman.

One of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others.On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.

This volume collects essays written over the last decade by one of the founders and leading figures of the theoretical movement of critical posthumanism. The readings of literary texts gathered here, from Shakespeare, Keats, Camus, Vittorini, Kundera, Haushofer, Atwood, Eagleman, Crace and DeLillo, focus on ‘posthumanist moments’ in which questions of postanthropocentrism and the nonhuman become prominent, are negotiated and ultimately foreclosed. They show how a deconstructively-minded way of reading humanistically-motivated texts can help making these texts relevant for our so-called ‘posthuman times’. In doing so, these critical posthumanist readings demonstrate that literature remains one of the privileged cultural institutions and practices from which solidarities both with and between the human and nonhuman can be formed and negotiated.