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Stefan Herbrechter · Ivan Callus
Manuela Rossini · Marija Grech
Megen de Bruin-Molé
Christopher John Müller
Editors
Palgrave
Handbook of
Critical
Posthumanism
Palgrave Handbook of Critical
Posthumanism
Stefan Herbrechter • Ivan Callus •
Manuela Rossini • Marija Grech •
Megen de Bruin-Molé •
Christopher John Müller
Editors
Palgrave Handbook of
Critical Posthumanism
With 36 Figures and 3 Tables

Editors
Stefan Herbrechter Ivan Callus
Heidelberg University Department of English
Heidelberg, Germany Faculty of Arts
University of Malta
Msida, Malta
Manuela Rossini Marija Grech

Basel, Switzerland University of Malta
Msida, Malta
Megen de Bruin-Molé Christopher John Müller

University of Southampton Macquarie University
Winchester, UK Sydney, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-031-04957-6 ISBN 978-3-031-04958-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3
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Preface
The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism assembles critical interventions

on the discourse of posthumanism and the posthuman. Posthumanism is a paradigm
emerging from the challenges to humanism and notions of humanity posed by the
erosion of traditional demarcations between who/what counts as human and non-
human. It problematizes anthropocentrism, speciesism, and biopolitics and informs
new creative practices from bioart to electronic literature. It impacts institutional
changes across the life sciences, new media, and the theoretical humanities and
reflects the ways in which lifeworlds are reshaped in the embracing of digitalization,
globalization, virtualization, prosthesization, and enhancement. The technological,
economic, and ecological challenges of our time and the uncertainty about human,
nonhuman, and planetary futures these processes spell out call for alternative ways
of thinking about humanity and its others.
In surveying as well as commenting on the emerging posthumanist paradigm
within the academy but also within culture more generally, this Handbook focuses
on work that engages critically and creatively with the challenges and affordances
that posthumanism provides. It investigates and contextualizes the transformative
potential of current developments and relates them to past and existing traditions,
ideas, and practices, as well as to speculations on alternative or emergent scenarios of
the human, nonhuman, posthuman, inhuman, ahuman . . . as well as their entangle-
ments and socialities.
The Handbook focuses on figurations and prefigurations of the posthuman,
posthumanist practices and methodologies, as well as processes of institutional
and disciplinary transformations. It upholds new inter- and transdisciplinary encoun-
ters between the humanities and the sciences that have led to collaborative practices
and greater political and ethical awareness of the place of the human, the nonhuman,
and their environments, especially in connection with pressing issues like climate
change, the depletion of natural resources, the loss of biodiversity, global migration
flows, terrorism, insecurity, biopolitics, and extinction, as well as the problematic
legacies of colonialism and eurocentrism. It recognizes too the importance of
rethinking the relationship between human agency, the role of technology, and the
nature-culture divide.
We thank all the authors for their commitment during these challenging times of a
global pandemic, war, climate change, and migration that have been overwhelming
v
vi Preface
for all – individually, emotionally, ethically, economically, and socially. At a time

when political and conceptual goal posts once again seem to have been shifted, our
initial call to contributors in Spring 2020 to be part of this Handbook has not lost any
of its relevance. If (critical) posthumanism is the kind of theoretical discourse that
promises to take the notion of postanthropocentrism seriously, then it should be well
placed to argue against both a resurgence of humanism and an accelerated
(bio)technological human obsolescence. As editors, we are humbled and grateful
to have received so many thoughtful chapters that show not only great theoretical
astuteness but also great care for the human and nonhuman in these “posthuman”
times.
The Critical Posthumanism Network (http://criticalposthumanism.net)
Heidelberg, Germany Stefan Herbrechter

Msida, Malta Ivan Callus
Basel, Switzerland Manuela Rossini
Msida, Malta Marija Grech
Winchester, UK Megen de Bruin-Molé
Sydney, Australia Christopher John Müller
November 2022
Contents
Volume 1
Part I Introduction ....................................... 1
1 Critical Posthumanism: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Marija Grech,
Christopher John Müller, and Manuela Rossini
Part II Posthumanism Across the Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2 Posthumanism and Deep Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Stefan Herbrechter
3 Classical Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Giulia Maria Chesi
4 Early Modern Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Karen Raber
5 Medieval Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Alan S. Montroso
6 Posthumanism and the Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Edgar Landgraf
7 Romanticism and Critical Posthumanism ................... 145
Elizabeth Effinger
8 Victorian Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Wietske Smeele
9 Modernism and Posthumanism ........................... 187
Peter Adkins
10 Postmodernism and Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Jonathan Boulter
vii
viii Contents
11 Posthumanism and Speculative Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Sherryl Vint
Part III Technologies and Figurations of the Posthuman ....... 247
12 The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

Donna McCormack
13 Critical Posthumanism and the Uncanny in Ian McEwan’s
Machines Like Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Pramod K. Nayar
14 Colonial Humanism, Alter-humanism and Ex-colonialism ...... 295
Simone Bignall
15 Cute, Otaku, and Posthuman Aesthetics .................... 317
Charlie Gere
16 Aesthetics, Autopoiesis, and Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Carsten Strathausen
17 Digitized and Datafied Embodiment: A More-than-Human
Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Deborah Lupton, Marianne Clark, and Clare Southerton
18 Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical
Posthumanism: Ontologies in the Critical Zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
Casper Bruun Jensen and Euan Auld
19 Troubled Distinctions: The Soul in Posthumanist Perspective . . . . 407
Kocku von Stuckrad
20 Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
Debra Benita Shaw
21 The Ahuman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
A. Patricia MacCormack
Part IV Posthumanist Practices and Methodologies ........... 467
22 An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469

Thomas Laurien, Li Jönsson, Petra Lilja, Kristina Lindström,
Erik Sandelin, and Åsa Ståhl
23 Critical Posthumanist Practices from Within the Museum . . . . . . 493
Deborah Lawler-Dormer
24 Sound and Critical Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519
Mickey Vallee
Contents ix
25 The Incommensurability of Decolonizing Critical

Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537
Myra J. Hird, Hillary Predko, and Micky Renders
26 Accelerationism: Adventures in Speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557
Benjamin Noys
27 Posthumanism and Digital Gaming ........................ 575
Laurent Milesi
28 Posthumanist Perturbations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Peta Hinton
29 Critical Posthumanism, Justice, and Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 629
Jannice Käll
30 Affective Extractivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651
Bernd Bösel
Volume 2
Part V Posthumanist Transformations ...................... 671
31 Literature and Posthumanism ............................ 673

Ivan Callus
32 Posthumanism and Drama: From Shakespeare to Climate
Change Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 703
Julia Hoydis
33 Posthumanism and Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725
Christopher A. Howard and Wendelin M. Küpers
34 Geography and Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 749
Mara Miele and Christopher Bear
35 Posthumanism and Psychoanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 773
Judith Roof
36 Posthumanist Disability Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793
Dan Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard, Katherine Runswick-Cole,
Lucy Watts, Sally Whitney, Hannah Dobbin, and Craig Moss
37 Human-Animal Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 823
Susan McHugh
38 Posthumanism and Plant Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 841
Vanessa Lemm
39 Digital Humanities and Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 859
Matt Hayler
x Contents
40 Environmental Posthumanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881

Christine Daigle
41 Energy Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 901
Lynn Badia
42 Medical Humanities .................................... 927
Anna McFarlane
43 Blue Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 949
Steve Mentz
Part VI Posthumanist In(ter)ventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 969
44 Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 971
Vicki Kirby
45 Post-Vital Prajnaparamita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 995
Richard Doyle and Trey Conner
46 Posthumanism and the Ends of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1021
Richard Iveson
47 Entropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1045
Louis Armand
48 Posthumanism and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1073
Janina Loh
49 Narrative and Posthumanism/Posthumanist Narratives . . . . . . . . 1097
Marco Caracciolo
50 Posthumanism and Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1119
Sonia Baelo-Allué
51 Apocalypse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1139
Florian Mussgnug
52 Posthumanism and the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1159
Hannes Bergthaller and Eva Horn
53 Animal Friendship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1179
Nicole Anderson
54 Ethics for Cognitive Assemblages: Who’s in Charge Here? . . . . . . 1195
N. Katherine Hayles
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1225
About the Editors
Dr. Stefan Herbrechter is Privatdozent at the English

Department of the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
He has published widely on English and comparative
literature, cultural theory, and media studies. He is the
author of Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis (2013)
and Before Humanity (2021), as well as director of the
Critical Posthumanism Network (criticalposthumanism.
net/) and general editor of the Critical Posthumanisms
series (brill.com/view/serial/CPH). For more informa-
tion, see his homepage (stefanherbrechter.com).
Prof. Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the Uni-

versity of Malta. He has published and edited widely in
the areas of posthumanism, contemporary fiction, and
comparative literature. He is the founding co-editor of
CounTerText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Liter-
ary, published with Edinburgh University Press, as
well as of the Genealogy of the Posthuman
(criticalposthumanism.net) and of the book series Crit-
ical Posthumanisms, published with Brill.
xi
xii About the Editors
Dr. Manuela Rossini is an independent researcher,

with a PhD in English Literature and Culture from the
University of Basel, Switzerland. She also acts as Exec-
utive Director of the European Society for Literature,
Science and the Arts (slsa-eu.org). She co-edited The
Routledge Companion to Literature and Science as well
as The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the
Posthuman and is one of the founding curators of the
Critical Posthumanism Network as well as the Brill
series Experimental Practices: Technoscience, Litera-
ture, Art, Philosophy (brill.com/view/serial/EXP). Her
publications in the field of critical posthumanism,
including feminist new materialism and animal studies,
are available on academia.edu and ResearchGate.
Dr. Marija Grech is a Lecturer in English Literature at

the University of Malta and a Visiting Research Fellow at
the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney.
She is the author of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the
Anthropocene (2022) and her work has appeared in The
Journal of Modern Literature, New Formations, and
CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary.
She is one of the editors of the Genealogy of the Post-
human at criticalposthumanism.net.
Dr. Megen de Bruin-Molé (@MegenJM, she/her) is a

Lecturer in Digital Media Practice with the University of
Southampton. Her book Gothic Remixed (Bloomsbury
2020) examines remix culture through the lens of mon-
ster studies, and her co-edited collection Embodying
Contagion (UWP/Open Access 2021) explores how
fantastical metaphors of contagion have infiltrated the
way news media, policymakers, and the general public
view the real world and the people within it. Megen is
also an editor of the Genealogy of the Posthuman, an
Open Access initiative curated by the Critical Post-
humanism Network. Read more about her work on her
blog: frankenfiction.com.
About the Editors xiii
Dr. Christopher John Müller is a senior lecturer in

Cultural Studies & Media at Macquarie University, Syd-
ney. His work focuses on the intersection of technology,
social constellations of power, and the deceptive “imme-
diacy” of feeling. He is the author of Prometheanism:
Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and his articles, trans-
lations, and reviews have appeared in Parallax, Thesis
Eleven, CounterText, TrippleC, Textual Praxis, Founda-
tions of Science, and Modernism/modernity. Since 2017,
Chris also co-edits the Genealogy of the Posthuman on
http://criticalposthumanism.net.
Contributors
Peter Adkins University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Nicole Anderson Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Louis Armand Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Charles University, Prague,
Czech Republic
Euan Auld The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Lynn Badia Department of English, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO,
USA
Sonia Baelo-Allué University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Christopher Bear Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Hannes Bergthaller National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan
Simone Bignall Jumbunna Indigenous Nations and Collaborative Futures, Univer-
sity of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Bernd Bösel University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Jonathan Boulter Western University, London, Canada
Ivan Callus Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Msida,
Malta
Marco Caracciolo Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Giulia Maria Chesi Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Marianne Clark Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health, Social Policy
Centre, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, UNSW, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Trey Conner University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, USA
Christine Daigle Department of Philosophy, Posthumanism Research Institute,
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada
xv
xvi Contributors
Megen de Bruin-Molé University of Southampton, Winchester, UK

Hannah Dobbin Scope, London, UK
Richard Doyle Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA
Elizabeth Effinger University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada
Charlie Gere Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University,
Lancaster, UK
Dan Goodley iHuman, School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Marija Grech University of Malta, Msida, Malta
Matt Hayler University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
N. Katherine Hayles University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Stefan Herbrechter Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Peta Hinton Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
Myra J. Hird School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston,
Canada
Eva Horn Universität Wien, Wien, Austria
Christopher A. Howard Behavioral Sciences, Chaminade University, Honolulu,
HI, USA
Julia Hoydis Department of English II, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
Richard Iveson London, UK
Casper Bruun Jensen University of Nottingham, Institute of Science and Society,
Nottingham, UK
Li Jönsson School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Malmö,
Sweden
Jannice Käll Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
Vicki Kirby The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Wendelin M. Küpers Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe,
Germany
ICN Artem, Nancy, France
Edgar Landgraf Department of World Languages and Cultures, Bowling Green
State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA
Thomas Laurien HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, University of
Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Contributors xvii
Deborah Lawler-Dormer Curatorial, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

(Powerhouse Museum), Sydney, NSW, Australia
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW,
Australia
Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre (EPICentre), University of New South
Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Vanessa Lemm Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Kirsty Liddiard iHuman, School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield,
UK
Petra Lilja Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design & KTH Royal Institute
of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Kristina Lindström School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University,
Malmö, Sweden
Janina Loh Stiftung Liebenau, Meckenbeuren, Germany
Deborah Lupton Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health, Social
Policy Centre, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated
Decision-Making and Society, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, UNSW,
Sydney, NSW, Australia
A. Patricia MacCormack Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK
Donna McCormack School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow,
Scotland
Anna McFarlane University of Leeds, Glasgow, Scotland
Susan McHugh University of New England, Biddeford, ME, USA
Steve Mentz St. John’s University, New York, NY, USA
Mara Miele Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Laurent Milesi Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Alan S. Montroso University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Craig Moss Scope, London, UK
Christopher John Müller Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Florian Mussgnug Comparative Literature, University College London, London,
UK
Pramod K. Nayar University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Benjamin Noys Bishop Otter Campus, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
xviii Contributors
Hillary Predko School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston,

Canada
Karen Raber University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, USA
Micky Renders School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston,
Canada
Judith Roof Delaware, OH, USA
Manuela Rossini Basel, Switzerland
Katherine Runswick-Cole iHuman, School of Education, University of Sheffield,
Sheffield, UK
Erik Sandelin Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design & KTH Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Debra Benita Shaw University of East London, London, UK
Wietske Smeele Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
Clare Southerton Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health, Social
Policy Centre, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, UNSW, Sydney, NSW,
Australia
Åsa Ståhl Department of Design, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
Carsten Strathausen University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
Mickey Vallee Athabasca University, Calgary, AB, Canada
Sherryl Vint University of California, Riverside, CA, USA
Kocku von Stuckrad Religious Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen,
The Netherlands
Lucy Watts iHuman, School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Sally Whitney iHuman, School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield,
UK
Part I
Introduction
Critical Posthumanism: An Overview
1
Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus, Megen de Bruin-Molé,
Marija Grech, Christopher John Müller, and Manuela Rossini
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Critical Posthumanism: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Abstract
This initial overview maps critical posthumanism as a theoretical and self-
reflective discourse that has been establishing itself over the last 20 years or
so. While popular notions of posthumanism and the figure of the posthuman tend
to focus on technology and its current dynamic of transforming the “human” into
some “posthuman” or even “transhuman” state or species, critical posthumanism,
S. Herbrechter (*)
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: stefan.herbrechter@as.uni-heidelberg.de
I. Callus
Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Msida, Malta
e-mail: ivan.callus@um.edu.mt
M. de Bruin-Molé
University of Southampton, Winchester, UK
e-mail: M.J.De-Bruin-Mole@soton.ac.uk
M. Grech
University of Malta, Msida, Malta
e-mail: marija.g.grech@um.edu.mt
C. J. Müller
Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: chris.muller@mq.edu.au
M. Rossini
Basel, Switzerland
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 3

S. Herbrechter et al. (eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_66
4 S. Herbrechter et al.
in its attempt at a more rigorous and more “philosophical” undertaking, is

concerned with what one might term the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism”
and its premises: namely, humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exception-
alism, and speciesism. Critical posthumanism and its various denominations and
spin-offs are therefore informed by a postanthropocentric ethics, politics, and
ecology, and look toward complex notions of embodiment and of material
entanglement between humans and a “more-than-human” world. This overview
chapter discusses those aspects while also providing an analysis of the complex
temporality at work in posthumanism. It evaluates the posthuman in terms of its
past, present, and projected or “constructed” futures, by foregrounding the gene-
alogical dimension of critical posthumanism. In doing so, it provides an illustra-
tion of the various meanings of “critical” and “critique” that are at work within
posthumanist discourse.
Keywords
Critique · Embodiment · More-than-human · Postanthropocentrism · Technology
Introduction
In 2013, one of the first comprehensive introductions to the emerging theoretical

paradigm of critical posthumanism offered the following preliminary definition:
[Posthumanism] is the cultural malaise or euphoria that is caused by the feeling that arises
once you start taking the idea of ‘postanthropocentrism’ seriously. To be able to think the
‘end of the human’ without giving in to apocalyptic mysticism or to new forms of spirituality
and transcendence – this would correspond to the attitude that the phrase ‘critical post-
humanism’ wishes to describe. The word ‘critical’ here has a double function: it combines,
on the one hand, openness to the radical nature of technocultural change, and, on the other
hand, it emphasizes a certain continuity with traditions of thought that have critically
engaged with humanism, and which, in part, have evolved out of the humanist tradition
itself. The task is, therefore, to re-evaluate established forms of antihumanist critique, to
adapt them to the current, changed conditions, and, where possible, to radicalize them.
(Herbrechter, 2013, p. 3; emphases added)
At the time, that volume and its definition provided a critical analysis of the first
20 years of posthumanism as an emergent theoretical discourse and academic field of
inquiry. Concurrently and perhaps more notably, it offered a description of “our”
human condition as observed in the late 1970s already by literary scholar Ihab Hassan:
We need first to understand that the human form – including human desire and all its external
representations – may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to
understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism
transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism. (Hassan, 1977,
p. 843)
1 Critical Posthumanism: An Overview 5
Today, one can certainly claim that posthumanism is no longer emergent but
established. The focus of this overview thus falls on what posthumanism and its
critique have become and what they are evolving into.
The definition quoted above and the positioning of critical posthumanism as a
reflective theoretical discourse on the notion of postanthropocentrism will be serving
as a starting point for an evaluation of the last 10 years or so (cf. Herbrechter, 2009).
It is worth insisting on the italicized aspects of the definition. Critical posthumanism
is prompted but not determined or exhausted by “technocultural change” (mostly
digitalization, biotechnology, artificial intelligence). Indeed, by referring to the
technocultural aspect of the changes it addresses, critical posthumanism stresses
the case against technological autonomy (or “technological determinism”), even
while accepting and promoting the idea of a co-evolution of technics and culture.
The “critical” angle of critical posthumanism thereby arises out of a positioning, an
“attitude” or indeed an affective state vis-à-vis familiar ambiguities related to well-
established binaries – namely, of apocalypse and transcendence, end and beginning,
utopian and dystopian visions of (technocultural) progress, as well as of continuity
and discontinuity, and humanism and antihumanism. Most importantly, however, it
characterizes an ethical and political stance that promises to take seriously the
problem of anthropocentrism and its deconstruction. This stance also has the capac-
ity to expose and shift the intersectional relations of power that converge in the term
“human.” In doing so it is mindful, too, of an irreducible plurality that Western
humanism has often neglected or even, on occasion, suppressed, sometimes
violently.
Even though the definition is still largely valid, the 10 years since its publica-
tion (cf. also Wolfe 2010) have seen some important new dynamics and perspectives,
as well as a greater variety of theoretical strands relating to and developing out of the
discourse of posthumanism and the figure of the posthuman. This chapter is there-
fore designed to be at once an overview, a consolidation, an extension, an account of
diversification of posthumanist thought. Indeed, it is also, by implication, itself a
critique of critical posthumanism and of the first 20 years or so of this theoretical
paradigm. There is thus both a retrospective and a synchronic mapping, as well as a
more speculative forward-looking element, to this overview. In this regard, it is
important to stress that critical posthumanism involves both an engagement with the
present (and its future projections) and a rereading of traditional Western ways of
making sense of the world and “our” place in it – even though it is precisely the
collective nature of the pronoun “us” and the possessive “our” that have been and
continue to be challenged by critical posthumanism. The janus-faced challenge that
this positioning poses (looking backward and forward at the same time) is that
critical posthumanism is itself very much implicated in the paradigm change and
the emerging new worldviews it describes. In this interventionist sense, it is very
much “political.”
It is worth stressing, here, that what is in play in that dynamic is a general feature
of critique. Critique begins with an analysis of the perceived state of affairs. It asks
how this came about and what implications this might have for the current and future
decision-making process. The fact that any critique has to go through these steps
(and this is where critique becomes almost synonymous with how European philos-
ophy has conceptualized thought as such) does not mean that critique should not
itself be submitted to critique. In fact, one of the major developments around critical
posthumanism is that it is having to engage precisely with such a “critique of
critique,” especially following Bruno Latour’s provocative and controversial claim
that critique “has run out of steam” (Latour, 2004; taken up by Felski, 2015 and
many others). This serves as a strong reminder that any critique is situated in a
specific analysis of its time (and place) and cannot therefore form a last or definitive
judgment. Another way of putting this is that critical analysis is co-implicated and to
some extent also co-constitutive of the discourse it sets out to analyze.
This is why it is vital for thinking and critique to start with differentiations or
conceptual operations to make sense of what it “finds” itself “called upon” to
analyze. The differentiation between thinking and its “object” remains questionable,
as questionable as the mystical authority (or self-legitimation) that hides behind the
“finding” and being “called upon” ploy on which it relies. No doubt this calls for
vigilance and, thus, even more critique (and self-critique). Even the most justified
and trenchant critiques of critique, however, cannot help but repeat at least some of
critique’s foundational gestures. The question is how problematic this really is. This
is a question that this chapter will return to at the end, in another installment of a
“self-critical” outlook. However, before one can get to any “postcritical” stance
regarding critical posthumanism, it is necessary to understand what exactly is being
critiqued by it. One might then, in turn, see its limitations: limitations which are also
always openings, extensions, radicalizations, and so on that nevertheless only
become visible once a critical analysis has run its course. This overview therefore
proceeds along this chronological dynamic that critique presupposes as the “time of
critique,” while bearing in mind that consensus can neither be its starting point, nor
can or should it be its ultimate outcome. In that sense, it functions as the building of a
“platform” or a “jetty” (cf. Derrida, 1990), from which to jump into the different
areas that critical posthumanism covers, the issues it raises, and the transformations
it produces.
In view of the above, there is considerable scope for diversity and difference,
sometimes even contradiction and divergence to be found in the field of “posthuman
studies.” However, to achieve some (preliminary) sense of “orientation,” one might
seek to identify a likely common denominator for the various accounts, narratives,
and attempts to make sense of “our posthuman times” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 1) that the
phrase “critical posthumanism” covers and also helps to “map.” That denominator
might be a shared critique of humanism’s anthropocentrism and the white, Western,
colonial, patriarchal structures that underpin it. It is also this critique of humanism –
still by far the most dominant value system in the traditional humanities and social
sciences as well as more generally – which requires the large number of “scare
quotes” that have been appearing and will continue to do so in this overview. These
diacritical signs are indeed intended to visually indicate that all of the terms they
highlight have a long and problematic critical history that haunts them every time
they are used. Language and thinking are minefields, but there is of course no viable
alternative for them. They are the very “tools” needed in an ongoing critique of them,
which means that they are so much more than just tools. They are the fundamental
“technologies” that are supposed to make us “human” – only, they are not uniquely
human (other forms of agency use language and thinking, so much “we” now know).
“We” also cannot assume any consensus on what “human” means (because language
and thinking themselves are not about consensus, otherwise they would hardly be so
central). With these cautionary comments, we are already in the midst of critical
posthumanism’s raison d’être, one might say.
Critical Posthumanism: An Overview
The standard narrative of posthumanism and its rise goes something like this:
“posthumanism” is a term that has been in use within academia from the early
1990s and has infiltrated a wide range of disciplines – from cultural studies, to
geography, science studies, gender studies, theology and media studies
(Badmington, 2006, p. 240), philosophy, literary studies, theoretical sociology and
communication studies (Bolter, 2016, p. 1), and animal studies (Ginn, 2018, p. 413).
As a paradigm of thought and a form of “knowledge” (Braidotti, 2019), it can now be
said to be influencing virtually all traditional disciplines, sciences, and “studies”
formations (from cultural studies to women’s studies, posthuman studies or extinc-
tion studies), all the while transforming them into new interdisciplinary formations
grouped under the label “posthumanities” (Wolfe, n.d.; Braidotti, 2019). As Ursula
Heise explains:
Since the mid-1990s . . . new paradigms have manifested themselves through interdisciplin-
ary research labelled ‘x studies’ or ‘y humanities’: disability studies, critical animal studies,
and food studies, for instance, or medical humanities, digital humanities, and environmental
humanities. Instead of shared philosophical foundations or clearly defined political aspira-
tions, these new fields focus on clusters of problems and questions . . . (Heise, 2016, p. 21)
Posthumanism, with its renewed insistence on the question of what it means to be

human, certainly forms a central aspect of the “clusters of problems and questions”
in these new fields. It also has purchase beyond academia, manifest in a truly
transdisciplinary manner by involving non-academic stakeholders and practitioners
in the production of systems, targeting and transforming knowledge, as well as
tackling real-life problems (Hirsch Hadorn et al., 2008, pp. 4–5).
What posthumanism does in each case is that it calls into question humanist or
anthropocentric understandings of what humans are (Badmington, 2006, p. 240). It
questions what could be called, after Lyotard (1984), the humanist metanarrative:
idea that humans share a universal “nature” or a species identity (an essential
“humanity”); that they are “exceptional” and radically different from (other) animals,
on the one hand, and from machines, on the other; and that they are ultimately “free”
subjects who can determine their own history above (the rest of) nature. It looks
closely at the idea that something like “nature” can be clearly distinguished from
“culture” or “society,” that a “self” and “identity” might be separated from the effects
of “otherness” and “difference,” that a “body” might be extracted from its “environ-
ment,” or that there might be a strict dividing line between “subject” and “object.”
As Sylvia Wynter writes, “the human is, meta-Darwinianly, a hybrid being, both bios
and logos (or, as I have recently come to redefine it, bios and mythoi). Or, as Fanon
says, phylogeny, ontogeny, and sociogeny, together, define what it is to be human”
(Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 23). As it deconstructs traditional knowledge
formations based on these binary or radical, mutually exclusive, and inherently
gendered and racialized oppositions and their built-in hierarchies, critical post-
humanism seeks to promote new ways of knowing that focus on aspects of entan-
glement, co-implication, hybridity, and interdependence – or, more appropriately
and in analogy to Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” (Barad, 2007), “intra-
dependence” – instead of on distinction and division.
In this strategic move, posthumanism builds on various precursors, most impor-
tantly on the work of “poststructuralist” thinkers like Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva,
Barthes, Irigaray, Althusser, Derrida, Cixous, Deleuze, and Guattari, by radicalizing
and extending their antihumanist stance. The poststructuralists, in turn, were reacting
against structuralism and its attempt to produce “objective” and “scientific” knowl-
edge of humans and their cultures. They did so by promoting a “hermeneutics of
suspicion” (Ricoeur, 1970), based on the idea that the task of critical reading and
interpretation is to debunk “myths” (Barthes, 1993) or “naturalized” and thus
unquestionable beliefs and their ideological motivations. This suspicion follows a
genealogy of subversive thinking that goes back to Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud and the respective humiliations of human “narcissism” (or “narcissistic
wounds”), as well as the humanist self-understanding of “man.” In the case of
Darwinian evolution, “man” is confronted with his biological state as one primate
among many; Marxism invalidates the notion that “men” make their own histories
and do so as free individuals; Nietzsche stands for a relativization of truth and
“man’s” will to power; and Freudian psychoanalysis denies that the conscious ego
is in control of its “own” thoughts, dreams, and actions. In “posthuman times,” many
other narcissistic wounds have been added (e.g., the challenges that deep time, big
data, and artificial intelligence pose to the idea of autonomous human agency). In
many ways, posthumanism draws logical and ecological conclusions from this
critical genealogy. It accordingly turns its attention to the “nonhuman,” privileges
a holistic and inclusive approach to life (by seeing ontology as “flat” or
non-hierarchical) and, in doing so, as the definition above mentions, is bent on
taking the notion of postanthropocentrism and its implications seriously.
That said, the link between posthumanism and poststructuralism is not seamless.
There are, indeed, many other “parallel genealogies of thought that have anticipated,
constituted, and disrupted these fields’ categories of analysis” (Jackson, 2013,
p. 670). While the Venn diagram of postcolonial discourses, feminism, and post-
humanism is by no means a cohesive figure, these traditions of thought speak to and
alongside each other in productive ways. Referencing Alexander Weheliye, Cristin
Ellis notes that “black feminists like Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers began
calling for revisionary ‘genres’ or conceptions of the human long before
contemporary posthumanism picked up this refrain” (Ellis, 2018, p. 136). There are,
to be sure, certain differences in perspective here. According to Ellis, “antiracist and
antisexist movements speak up for the equality of what they construe as
dehumanized humans,” whereas posthumanism’s “‘flat ontology’ makes the case
for the ethical and political standing of nonhuman being, human or otherwise” (Ellis,
2018, p. 136). But the way forward is less an either – or than a both – and: “taken
together, these theories spur each other to live up to the transformative potential of
their epistemic challenge to liberal humanism’s construction of ‘Man’” (Ellis, 2018,
p. 138).
Other voices within a white, Western feminist tradition also sought to vocifer-
ously challenge humanism’s universalist claims. Worth mentioning here are Donna
Haraway and her work on cyborgs, companion species, and multispecies kinship
(Haraway, 1991, 2008 and 2016); N. Katherine Hayles and her rereading of the
history of cybernetics through the lens of gender and embodiment, distributed
cognition and symbiosis in and with new and digital media and “code” (Hayles,
1999, 2005 and 2012); and Rosi Braidotti and her feminist neomaterialism that seeks
a new politics based on a “posthuman” affirmation of life in all its forms (Braidotti,
2002, 2006 and 2013), to name but the most obvious and influential ones. What
explains the importance of this feminist lineage within posthumanism is that it was
feminism that challenged humanism’s track record in terms of gender (and racial)
equality, countering its claim of a universal reach (i.e., an essential “humanity” based
on globally shared values). The ideal subject of humanism, “man” or “anthropos,”
was always a device based on presupposed and often unexamined patriarchal,
Eurocentric, white, liberal political norms. Aspects of that humanism arguably
continues to underpin contemporary institutions like “human rights” organizations,
which to some perspectives makes them susceptible to critique as (neo)colonial and
(post)imperialist instruments effectuating the continuation of a Western or Eurocen-
tric supremacy (Fassin, 2012).
Posthumanism of course does not itself go uncontested. As a political project, it
defines itself against two ideological foes: what we might refer to as “neo-
humanisms” and “transhumanisms.” Let us start from the (not at all unproblematic
assumption) that there is a shared geohistorical position from which all of these -isms
start: namely, an agreement about “where we are now,” or what situation this
imaginary planetary “we” finds itself in today (there will be less of an agreement
about the second part of the question, namely, “how we got here”). In Braidotti’s
words, one could say, the “posthuman condition” is “positioned between the Fourth
Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 2). In other
words, (post)humanity finds itself at an important juncture within the history of late
modernity or indeed post-modernity, asking itself: where do we go from here? This
sets out a (provisional) endpoint and two alternative future trajectories. This end
point or latest stage within Western “modernity,” after the history of industrializa-
tion, colonial exploitation, and geological extraction (of oil – in a carbon-based
economy and culture), has led to what an increasing number of geologists and
climate scientists refer to as the “Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene is a period in
which human beings and their actions are having an indelible and irrevocable impact
on the earth system and on the formation of geological strata, with all the potential
implications of this for humans, nonhumans, and planetary life in general (Hamilton
et al., 2015). The human-induced “sixth extinction” (Kolbert, 2014) is the latest in a
series of planetary catastrophes and upheavals that have led to fundamental changes
in the composition of (biological) life on planet Earth. Each time, this has led to a
mass extinction of life forms and thus a complete reshuffling of the evolutionary
cards. In the fifth extinction event (believed to be caused by the impact of a giant
meteorite and the dramatic changes to the global climate this brought about), the
dinosaurs went extinct, which, arguably, paved the way for the rise of mammals and
primates. The sixth extinction, it seems, is being announced by the current dramatic
loss of biodiversity, which is caused by human-induced climate change. It threatens
to be an extinction event that also poses a serious threat to human survival.
Meanwhile the beginning and promise of a “fourth phase” of modernity, facing
the Anthropocene as a planetary challenge, reinvigorates calls for a supposedly
unified and universalized “human” or “Anthropos” (Chakrabarty, 2009; Hamilton,
2017). It encourages the idea that technological progress is our best hope of survival
(whatever that form of survival might actually look like and whoever might ulti-
mately benefit from it). Despite the fundamental differences and injustices that these
enormous challenges expose – only a minority of humans have been directly
responsible for anthropogenic climate change (mainly wealthy, Western nations
largely governed by socially privileged white males, or “man,” and their “extraction”
practices) and the effects of environmental destruction and degradation are dispro-
portionately felt by already-marginalized groups – the crossroads mentioned above
seems to imply that in the face of such global threats “we” might need a new
humanism (not a posthumanism). Such a new humanism would, at last, deliver on
the promise of human equality. The main objection to this idea of “making humans
great again,” however, lies in the uncertainty of how such a new humanism could
possibly avoid once more excluding (and thus constructing for itself ) nonhuman
others. Thus far, humanism has always in effect meant: “humans first” (a certain
analogy with recent US politics and a general antidemocratic populism is not
unintended in these formulations). But perhaps as Wynter’s work suggests, what is
needed is “an alternative, yet no less secular, version of humanness imagined outside
liberal monohumanism [. . .] a counterhumanism—one now ecumenically ‘made to
the measure of the world’” (Césaire, 2000: 73, in Wynter & McKittrick, 2015, p. 11).
While, as will be clear from the above, the principal bone of contention between
posthumanisms and neohumanisms remains the very notion of the “human” and its
meaning, the main argument between posthumanism and transhumanism is about
the role and nature of “technology.” As already mentioned, from the perspective of
critical posthumanism, posthumanism should not be equated with the rise of techno-
culture (Badmington, 2006, p. 241). (Critical) posthumanists (even though not
everybody writing about posthumanism and the posthuman would necessarily or
unproblematically identify with these labels) do not belittle the impact technology,
and especially digitalization, has had and is having on every aspect of human and
nonhuman (co)existence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How-
ever, posthumanists refuse a simplistic (and predominantly utilitarian) notion of
technology, which tends to see it as an almost “fated” instrument of human devel-

opment and “progress.” This is what clearly distinguishes them from trans-
humanists, who see technological progress as the predominant or even only
driving force of history. Within that history, the present moment is then seen as an
evolutionary turning point at which humans find themselves in the process of
evolving with, or into, their successor species. What causes some confusion is the
fact that transhumanists often refer to this utopian successor species as “posthuman,”
while for posthumanists the notion of the posthuman remains a very much contested
“figure” that calls for critical and genealogical analysis. Transhumans – those
entities, subjects, or forms of agency, who have undergone radical technological
“enhancement” or some form of “transubstantiation” (e.g., by downloading their
mind into a computer) – have thus either become a form of superintelligence or,
indeed, have been superseded by some further evolved form of AI. In this trans-
humanist sense, posthumans are in fact the apotheosis of a certain understanding of
humanism that remains informed by Christian eschatological motifs. One might thus
call it a spiritual or pseudo-religious, technognostic hyperhumanism (Davis, 2015).
Transhumanist visions or fantasies of disembodiment are the logical consequence of
a dualist mode of (Christian, neoplatonic, Cartesian) thinking that distinguishes
between body and mind, mortal flesh, and immortal soul and believes in their
separability. They see posthumanization, or the transformation and eventual tran-
scendence of the human into a new posthuman species, as a technologically desir-
able (or indeed inevitable) outcome of history, often referred to by mystical terms
like the “singularity” (cf. More and Vita More 2013). The transhumanist techno-
euphoria forms the endpoint of the trajectory of human perfectibility that goes hand
in hand with a rejection of current “meatworld” (enfleshed, “wetware,” biological or
“carbon-based”) materialism. Instead, it can be said to whole-heartedly embrace
“techno-utopianism” and “techno-idealism.” In this view, following a tradition that
runs from early Gnosticism to late cyberpunk science fiction, it seems that it is
simply human “destiny” to transcend “nature,” “biology,” and “death” and to seek
immortality and perfection in a new technological (ideally “immaterial”) medium.
Critical posthumanism, by contrast, is much more ambivalent about technology, its
origins, its ends, and our relationship to it. It directly critiques the belief in human
exceptionalism and perfectibility that underlies much transhumanist thought
(Zylinska, 2018).
Posthumanism’s relationship with science fiction is interesting in this respect.
Science fiction narratives make for an evocative record of the human imaginary’s
and human desire’s construction of various themes and tropes and speculative
resolutions (or lack thereof) that congregate around the issues that are being
discussed here. Even though science fiction is an important reference point for
many posthumanists, more recent, ecologically informed and minded post-
humanisms in particular are in fact not so focused on a (technological) future.
There has always been a way of reading science fiction not as a discourse focused
on the future but as a critique of the present (and its extrapolations in the form of
thought experiments and speculation). In fact, posthumanism interrogates (often
playfully, creatively, and subversively) the ambient and deliberate erasure of the
boundary between science fiction and science fact, or “science faction”

(cf. Herbrechter, 2013), on which many transhumanist scenarios are actually
based. Technology is not seen by critical posthumanism as an autonomous force of
history – it is always the product of a specific time, context, and selection process.
Nor does critical posthumanism perceive humans as sovereign subjects vis-à-vis
technological development or objects. Instead, the human relationship to technology
is co-constitutional or “originary” (Plessner, 1928; Anders, 1956; Heidegger,
1977; Stiegler, 2008–2011; Bradley, 2011) and “prosthetic” (Wills, 1995), or
“entangled” (Hansen, 2000; Barad, 2007). This does not mean that there is cause
for another form of exceptionalism (nonhuman animals use technologies, too;
technology is neither “natural” nor “cultural”). One might even say there are
posthumanisms that might function “without” technology (Callus & Herbrechter,
2007), not in the sense that they are technophobic or that they repress the impact of
technology, but in the sense that they use a non-teleological notion of technics. There
is nothing deterministic or inevitable about technology, despite its undeniable
transformative social and environmental impact. In this sense, posthumanism is
not an exclusively future-oriented discourse but should be understood as a
questioning of the humanist concept of the “human” and the “ongoing deconstruc-
tion of humanism” (cf. Badmington, 2003).
Accordingly the best way to understand posthumanism, as with most -isms
(feminism, Marxism, liberalism, materialism, and so on), is to attend to how it
describes, explains, regulates, and produces knowledge about that to which it is a
qualifying suffix. Feminism is about the contested ground of what it means, socially
and politically, to be “woman”; Marxism is the debate around how best to interpret
the writings of Marx; liberalism addresses the political argument about what consti-
tutes freedom; materialism interrogates matter and its ontological significance
(Coole & Frost, 2010); and so on. Adding the prefix “post-” to these discourses,
first of all, merely signals that they are no longer quite capable of defining their
object. The consensus they seem to presuppose or to secure is no longer viable.
Posthumanism, in this sense, speculates about what it means to be no longer (quite)
human (at least in a Western humanist, anthropocentric sense). All these -isms, in
short, represent (social) discourses (Parker, 1992; Herbrechter, 2013, pp. 36ff): the
entirety of the statements and practices that relate to an “object,” which in the case of
posthumanism is the “posthuman,” as well as its derivations “posthumanity” and
“posthumanization.” This object is constituted “discursively,” which means through
describing it as a social reality. The most basic level of this discursive construction or
formation says: there is such a thing as the “posthuman,” so what is to be done
about it? What does it mean? In this sense, what starts off as a positioning – “after the
human” or “no longer humanist” – requires a continued rereading or reinterpretation
of an existing perceived state of affairs, world view, or “reality,” followed by an
alternative, more accurate, more “realistic” understanding that harnesses change and
is more “comprehensive” and more “persuasive” in its representation of “where we
are.” A better map for future orientation might thereby be devised. The important
thing to remember is, then, that discourses both describe and intervene in and to an
extent also produce what they posit as their “reality,” which they present as such to
their “subjects.” Discourses, as Althusser puts it, want to recruit people. They
address or interpellate them accordingly (Althusser, 1971). In short, they are emi-
nently political and by definition, therefore, also partial and questionable. This
means that they are contested both from within and from without: namely, by
other discourses. They are subject to power struggles over who has the most
pragmatically effective and most readily adopted explanations, who makes the
most resonant and opportune truth claims (or in academic and scientific contexts,
“funding claims”).
And so, to build on the above: the conceptual object around which posthumanism
is constructed – the “posthuman” – is basically a metonymy. It functions like a
“figure,” as in a rhetorical figure, or a powerful image (Haraway, 1991, pp. 8–11).
Posthumanism “finds” this figure and turns it into the central aspect of the reality it
helps constitute. The posthuman thus becomes at once the most fundamental
anchoring device as well as the most “mysterious,” “mythical,” and contested
concept. It helps, for example, to track figurations or indeed prefigurations of the
posthuman “across the ages” (from angels to zombies, and chimerae to cyborgs). It
helps also to “discover” protoposthumanisms in every period within the “history of
ideas,” from classical antiquity to postmodernism, and, arguably, even within “deep
time.” The process exposes the iterative limits of the cultural imaginary and brings it
into contact with figurations of the human that at once resist and reiterate aspects of
the purported obviousness of what it means to be human.
A curious consequence of all the above is that if posthumanism had a clear idea
about the (post)human and what it really was and meant, then the argument would
probably come to an end. People would lose interest and move on. If this sounds like
a strong reason for rejecting posthumanism out of hand, it is worth remembering that
all discourses function like that. That includes the very humanism posthumanism is
grafted upon, and which has never really been able to explain and establish any
general agreement about what its most coveted and mysterious figure or concept, i.e.,
the “human,” meant or “really” was. This drifting state of the human is in fact one of
the main points of criticism and motivations for a posthumanist critique in the first
place. “We” have no idea who we “really” are. The one constant in humanist
attempts to carve out an “exceptional” position for the human in this world is, on
the one hand, to emphasize the differences between humans and their others (i.e.,
humans can do this, machines and animals cannot . . . even though all of these
differences that traditionally characterized as “radical” have had to be substantially
relativized) and, on the other hand, to reify difference by saying that the human is
that which always defers from itself that which cannot be pinned down. Humans are
those creatures who are constantly reinventing themselves, because they are notori-
ously “underdetermined” – which is one of the founding gestures of Renaissance
humanism (Pico della Mirandola, 2016). Seen from this angle, one can certainly
claim that “we have never been human” (Wolfe, 2007, p. xi).
Whether the posthuman actually exists, whether it is a figure that remains
fundamentally, ontologically, “futural,” as something that humans are becoming or
will become, or whether it is something that humans have always been – which
prompts a genealogical search that will find similar figures in human and prehuman
history – is an essential aspect of the legitimation of posthumanism as a discourse.

The more discussion emerges, the more established and the more “real” the post-
human becomes. It has the power to shape disciplines of study and institutional
realities and processes, sustain or undermine academic careers, generate visions and
imaginaries that influence political-decision making, and determine the direction of
technological innovation (it can hence bring about the reality it envisions, albeit not
in a simple prescriptive form). This is not a cynical or nihilistic claim that implies
that any way of making sense of the world is as good as any other. It merely means
that reality, including scientific claims about it, is always contested and cannot or
should not form the end point of any discussion. Crucially, this is not to be
misconstrued as an attack on science. Nobody will deny the universal truth of
gravity, to take the example that is usually referred to in this context (cf. the
so-called science wars; Latour, 2005). Rather, what is in focus is an investigation
into the truth-finding processes of science and the privileged role they play within
social discourses that help secure the power of institutions and their politics.
It is in this discursive sense that the posthuman and posthumanism have managed
to capture the attention of the academy and increasingly the wider “public” (e.g.,
through popular science magazines, science fiction films, docufiction, social media,
and so on). There is an “ambient” posthumanism promoted by powerful corporations
like Google, pioneer figures like Elon Musk, and institutions like the Singularity
University that are increasingly called upon to advise government administrations
and which are promoting a clearly transhumanist version of posthumanism based on
the idea that increased technological progress can only be a good thing and consti-
tutes the “natural” next step to becoming (more) “posthuman” (see Dupuy, 2007).
There is, however, also a posthumanism that questions this belief. It provides
alternative, more “sustainable,” more ethico-ecological interpretations of the post-
human – which is precisely what the “critical” in critical posthumanism stands for
(e.g., Morton, 2017). In many ways, critical posthumanism in fact brackets the
question of whether the posthuman is a “good” or a “bad” thing. It is self-reflexive,
wanting to keep the figure of the posthuman open but also seeking to contextualize,
historicize, and politicize it. In this sense, it is a specific discursive strain within the
discursive field or formation around the posthuman, aimed at constructing a critical
observer position, even though it is fully aware that this cannot be an independent or
disinterested remove. In this sense, there is no “metahumanism,” just like there has
never been a “metalanguage,” or some vantage point “outside” from which to
evaluate the question “disinterestedly.”
Critical posthumanism therefore does not deny the transformative potential of the
posthuman. But it investigates the presumption of the undeniability of that potential.
It does so, first of all, by looking at some of the discursive gestures or practices and
methodologies that are being employed within and that constitute posthumanist
discourses, and it also speculates about the need for new, more “creative” and
more inclusive – more-than-human – forms of knowledge production. It is precisely
in this context that the positioning (or “posting”) of the prefix “post-” has to be seen
in all its problematic ambivalence. What one should have learnt from the discussion
around postmodernism and the postmodern (Lyotard, 1992) is that this prefix and
what it aims to do to or to perform on what it “posts” comes with its very own
aporetic dynamic. The claim that something is reaching or has reached its end
(or should finally do so) is not a claim like any other, and especially not where
such a well-established discursive formation as humanism is at stake. This is even
more complex, since humanism also upholds the notion of an “essence” or the
“truth” of our species, which is supposed to lie in “our” shared humanity based on
human “nature”: a nature quickly presumed but still to be defined. There is no
question, however, that the notion of humanity itself has a concrete history and
that, in fact, it is the effect of a combination of humanism as an ideological discourse
and modernity as a socio-historical formation. Humanism and humanist tradition
(which dates back at least to Neoplatonic Christianity and the Renaissance with its
rediscovery of Greek and Roman Antiquity) has had a quasi-monopoly as far as the
question “what is (hu)man?” is concerned. To position oneself “after” such a
powerful tradition – post + humanism – means to embrace a conscious ambiguity
that translates into two possible forms of accentuation: the undeniable experience
that a certain humanism has reached its end (i.e., posthumanism); and the certainty
that this humanism, because of its own plurality, shapeshifting force, and slipperi-
ness cannot just be classified without remainders and repressions but instead needs to
be “worked through” in a critical and deconstructive sense (hence the other form of
accentuation: posthumanism). In both cases a simple supersession of humanism and
its legacy is formally impossible. That is because posthumanism necessarily
“repeats” humanism in its posting gesture. In this sense, the critical detachment
that the prefix “post-” promises is complicated by the fact that its root and thus its
category is and remains “*humanism” and “*human.” Posthumanism cannot be a
simple negation of humanism or a simple supersession and annihilation of it – an
“overcoming.” Even when it presents itself as such, it is a reworking, critique,
deconstruction, and rewriting of its roots of which it is a “graft.” This is only a
problem, however, for those who think the history of ideas should work in radical
“breaks.” While this certainly does not preempt any possibility of an eventual,
“real,” break, it is aware of the fact that even the idea of “discontinuity”
(or “disruption”) still depends on (or “repeats”) to some extent the idea of “conti-
nuity.” Making sense of time (and change or transformation) thus necessarily
depends on comparing and contrasting, on extrapolation, including reverse teleol-
ogies (i.e., the idea that with hindsight, this was bound to be the outcome) and
narrative techniques like flashforward and flashback and the like. In short, reading
and critique are always oriented toward coherence, even where there may not be any
and while one may be looking for discontinuity and breaks.
Critical posthumanism – this narrative that tries to provide a critical commentary
on the transformations that the discourse of posthumanism and the figure of the
posthuman promote – is no exception to this. At one further (critical) remove, critical
posthumanism is nevertheless in the business of making sense, of negotiating claims,
of analyzing presuppositions and implications, of projecting scenarios into the future
by extrapolating from the past. It is ultimately a model of sedimentation and
residues. It is, in short, a “geological” and “genealogical” project. What critical
posthumanism thus combines in its thinking (or that which constitutes its critical
continuity) is the technologically induced process of posthumanization it tracks (i.e.,

the process of humans becoming “other”). Clearly that process needs to be taken
seriously, and radically thought through with all its implications, its potential, and its
dangers. At the same time, however, critical posthumanism also engages creatively
and speculatively in conceiving entirely other forms of posthumanization (among
them, importantly, those that downplay the role of technology, or a posthumanism
“without” technology), or “posthumanisms” that are much “older” but maybe just as
radical, and which need to be (re)articulated by focusing on more general and more
underdetermined notions like that of the “nonhuman” or the “inhuman,” as the initial
crisis within humanism itself and the precedence of nonhuman others (Lyotard,
1991). Critical posthumanism is thus “parasitical” in its relation to the various
humanisms it deconstructively grafts itself on.
As Neil Badmington (2000) explains, the ambiguity built into the notion of
posthumanism is already in fact at work in the radical plurality of meanings of
humanism itself. While the “antihumanism” dominating the second half of the
twentieth century portrayed humanism as a conservative and old-fashioned ideology
of Western “common sense,” there is also a humanism associated with secular and
scientific traditions that is seen, not without some justification, as progressive. It is
therefore no surprise that in scientific contexts, which developed a critical under-
standing of humanism centuries ago, there would be some reserve regarding the idea
of a posthumanism. On the other hand, in pro-humanist secularist circles, there is
strong moral opposition to the very idea of a posthumanism, understood as an
(unwanted) break with a humanist cultural tradition that is itself seen as progressive
and radical and for which any kind of posthumanism can only constitute an attack or
backlash against hard-won values like freedom from premodern irrationalism or a
regression in terms of Enlightenment ideals of progress and reason. Critical post-
humanism attempts to be aware of this complex dynamic. On the one hand, it needs
to show that humanism, despite all its accompanying undeniable cultural progress as
an ideology, has always been (and today is more and more openly so) criticized for
its merely apparent and superficial claims toward universality, hiding the underlying
specificity of its (Western, liberal, bourgeois, capitalist) normativity. One might say
therefore that humanism was never as progressive as it made itself out to be or itself
thought it was. As has become clearer at least since WWII and the ongoing process
of decolonization and the gradual weakening of Western imperialism, it is now
increasingly met with opposition and resistance in a globalized, multipolar world
(Davies, 2008). On the other hand, if one really is to break with a centuries-old
tradition like humanism, which still enjoys considerable sway, one has to make sure
to protect and if possible appropriate and continue to make accessible the transfor-
mative potential that already exists within this tradition and avoid giving in to
naïvely utopian claims and promises of “revolutionary” change. This means that a
critical posthumanism requires an intricate political and ethical positioning, namely,
one which signals to the techno-prophets that their attitude, despite all apparent
utopian radicalism, has a long history that needs to be remembered and worked
through. It requires too a position that reminds the skeptics that humanism never was
as humanist as it claimed to be and that the current technological challenge merely
represents the logical outcome of a process of posthumanization with which human-

ism has always been complicit and which it itself helped to create.
As a first summary, then, one might say that critical posthumanism is a theoretical
approach within the humanities and social sciences as they find themselves, argu-
ably, on their way to becoming “posthumanities.” It maps and actively engages with
the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism.” It differentiates between the figure of
the posthuman and its present, past, and projected avatars, like cyborgs (Gray,
1995), but also monsters, zombies, ghosts, or angels (Graham, 2002) and their
“posthuman bodies” (Halberstam & Livingston, 1995). It is also a social discourse
(a material network of texts, practices, values, identities) which negotiates the
pressing question of what it means to be human under the current conditions of
globalization, technoscience, late capitalism, and climate change. The prefix
“post- ” (in analogy with the discussion of the postmodern and postmodernism)
thereby has a double meaning. On the one hand, it signifies a desire or indeed a
need to somehow go beyond humanism (or the human), which calls for some
skepticism. On the other hand, meanwhile, since the post- also necessarily repeats
what it prefixes, it signals awareness that neither humanism nor the human can in
fact be overcome in any straightforward dialectical or historical fashion (e.g., in
the sense: after the human, the posthuman). The qualifying term “critical” in the
phrase “critical posthumanism” gestures toward a more complicated and
non-dialectical relationship between the human and the posthuman, as well as
their respective connection with the nonhuman (Grusin, 2015) and the inhuman
(Brewster et al., 2000). Posthumanism in this critical sense functions more like an
anamnesis and a rewriting of the human and humanism, a process of “rewriting
humanity,” in analogy with Lyotard’s notion of the postmodern project of “rewrit-
ing modernity” (Lyotard, 1991). In this process, critical posthumanism asks a
number of questions that address the complications which arise out of this critical
rewriting: how did we come to think of ourselves as human? Or, what exactly does
it mean to be human (especially at a time when some humans are apparently quite
enthusiastically embracing and promoting the idea that we are becoming or might
already to some extent have become posthuman (e.g., most transhumanists))?
What are the motivations for this posthumanizing desire, when did it start and
where does it come from? What are its implications for the future relationships
and interdependence with nonhuman others (e.g., the environment, nonhuman
animals, machines or technology, but also any form of spiritualism)?
The adjective “critical” in “critical posthumanism” can thus be said to signify a
number of things. It refers to the difference between a more or less uncritical or
popular posthumanism (e.g., in many science fiction movies or popular science
magazines) and a philosophical, reflective, or “theoretical” approach (which is
nevertheless inseparable from some of the transformative creative and technological
practices the posthuman inspires) and which investigates the current forms of “our”
postanthropocentric desires – the yearning for the inhuman, the other, or for self-
transformation. This desire articulates itself, on the one hand, in the form of an
anticipated transcendence of the human condition, often imagined in various sce-
narios of disembodiment and metamorphosis (Clarke, 2008). On the other hand, it
finds its expression in a more “ecological” rather than simply “technological” (so,
maybe an “ecotechnical”) form where this desire can imply a (rather suspicious)
attempt by humans to “argue themselves out of the picture,” precisely at a time when
climate change caused by the impact of human civilization calls for urgent, respon-
sible, and more altruistic, human action.
The other meaning of “critical” in “critical posthumanism” concerns a
re-evaluation or even a reinvention of some humanist values and methodologies
(including the very question of what critique is and does). In the face of a funda-
mental transformation provoked by digitalization and the advent of ubiquitous
computing and social media platforms, those value sets can appear to have become
obsolete, or out of touch with new practices, identities, communities, cognitive
patterns, and knowledges. They would therefore be in urgent need of revision
(especially those critical methodologies related to traditional forms of literacy,
reading, thinking, and analysis). The question that is raised here is how to remain
critical in the sense of developing reading and analytical techniques, forms of
conceptualizations, and subjectivities that are both self-reflexive and aware of their
own genealogies (i.e., able to stay critically connected with humanist traditions, or
“stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway (2016) calls it, and which seem to
threaten literal, literary, and textual approaches in particular), in a time that is
increasingly characterized as both “post-truth” and “post-critique.” For core disci-
plines in the traditional humanities like literature and philosophy, this means that not
only their humanistic knowledge base but also their main addressee, the humanist
subject who is in need of “Bildung,” are fast disappearing or being more and more
“decentered” (or dethroned).
Studies of literature’s twenty-first-century extensions and remediations, for exam-
ple, are having to engage with the broader resonances of the idea that the literary is
currently being overtaken by processes of digitalization, globalization, and technol-
ogy- and media-driven change. In this, arguably, “post-literary” and maybe even
“post-literate,” “countertextual” climate (see Callus and Corby, 2015), a critical
posthumanist approach needs to be both aware and wary of the contemporary desire
to leave the humanist apparatus of literacy and its central institutions like literature,
with all its social, economic, and cultural-political implications, its regimes of
power, and its aesthetics, behind. Critique, however, is not the same as resistance.
An increasing part of the academy and the (theoretical) humanities in particular has
been embracing this new context to form new, interdisciplinary alliances with the
sciences and their own critical commentaries (e.g., the so-called critical science
studies informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, speculative realism, or
new (feminist) materialisms (Rossini, 2006; Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Kirby, 2017)
all share affinities with critical posthumanism despite their many differences). The
emerging “posthumanities” are thus having to engage with the positive but also the
problematic aspects of the transformative potential that a new dialogue or alliance
between the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences features. The focus on
the posthuman as a discursive object, on posthumanism as a social discourse and on
posthumanization as an ongoing historical and ontological process of transformation
allows the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences to create new encounters and
test new hypotheses. That opportunity may lead to greater political and ethical
awareness of the place of the human, the nonhuman, and their entanglement,
especially in connection with pressing issues like climate change, the depletion of
natural resources, the destruction of biodiversity, global migration flows, terrorism
and global insecurity, or current and future biopolitics.
What is therefore at stake in critical posthumanism is a rethinking of the relation-
ship between human agency, the role of technology, and environmental and cultural
factors from a post- or non-anthropocentric perspective. As Cristin Ellis points out,
“the human is not synonymous with Homo sapiens” (Ellis, 2018, p. 137). Post-
anthropocentric posthumanities are still about humans and their cultures but only in
so far as these are placed within a larger ecological picture, as can be seen, for
example, in the proliferation and institutionalization of a variety of alternative
“humanities,” like the medical humanities, the environmental humanities, and the
digital humanities. The digital humanities, for example, are informed by critical
posthumanism in the sense that they address the role of new and converging media
with their social and cultural implications, as well as their proliferation of digital and
virtual realities and their biopolitical dimensions for what it means to be human (e.g.,
by investigating new forms of surveillance and commodification, the construction of
new subjectivities, and the merging of bio- and media technologies in the form of
“biomedia”; cf. Thacker, 2004). It is becoming clear that the scale and the complex-
ity of global challenges like anthropogenic climate change, human overpopulation,
the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, intensified automation and
virtualization, and so on require new forms of social, political, ethical, and ecological
ways of thinking that can help ensure the survival not only of the human species but,
also, the survival of multiple ways of being human, the survival of other species,
environments and ecosystems, and the survival of life in general.
Critical posthumanism thus draws together a number of aspects that constitute
“our” early twenty-first-century reality and cosmology – our “posthuman condi-
tion” – and, at the same time, links these back genealogically to their beginnings and
prefigurations within humanism itself (cf. Herbrechter & Callus, 2009, 2012). The
function that a genealogical understanding of posthumanism and approach to the
posthuman serves is to refer back to the question of the post- and to what extent this
signals continuity or discontinuity – a break, overcoming, succession or indeed
anamnesis, rewriting, and deconstruction – as outlined above. Apart from asking
“what is the posthuman?”, it also focuses on “when is the posthuman?”, “what
cultures does it belong to?”. This is why an important aspect of the criticality of
critical posthumanism lies in its genealogical dimension. Genealogies are about
ancestors, lineages, progeny, and the knowledge they produce. They are historical
in the sense that they trace past developments to investigate how “things” have
become the way they “are” (or, at least, were thought to be at a certain time).
Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogical analyses focus on the social and
historical production of systems of knowledge, power, and discourse. Their under-
lying methodology is to expose what is regarded as obvious, natural, or unchange-
able and to reveal it as constructed in the sense that it is the result of historical and
political (or, one could say, cultural evolutionary, maybe even “epigenetic”)
selection. Genealogies are however not about uncovering absolute truths or origins
but are instead interested in the processes of knowledge production as such. While,
for Nietzsche, truth famously was a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthro-
pomorphisms” (Nietzsche, 1976, pp. 46–47), Foucault is primarily interested in the
(human) subjectivities that specific discourses and social practices afford (Foucault,
2013, p. 208). According to Foucault, individuals are subjected to power by mech-
anisms of control and dependence that are closely aligned with identity and self-
knowledge, which means that they are subject to processes (i.e., “technologies of the
self”; Foucault, 1988) that involve identification and embodiment or indeed resis-
tance to them, and which are not necessarily seen as coercive but, under modern,
liberal conditions, as “choice.”
The discursive knowledge that is inevitably perspectival, historically and cultur-
ally situated – and thus specific – recruits and positions subjects for whom this
knowledge is supposed to make sense. Foucault is therefore specifically interested in
the processes of legitimation as well as in their disruptions, discontinuities, contra-
dictions, and exclusions in order to create possibilities for an articulation of alterna-
tive, “subjugated” knowledges. Consequently genealogy is about transformation and
change provoked by “denaturalization” (cf. Barthes, 1993). A genealogical
approach, in this sense, is necessarily critical in that it questions accepted truths,
institutional power, strong notions of identity, normality, and reality, by emphasizing
the power struggles that have led to their establishing and legitimation. In doing so, it
opens up possibilities for counter-memories and alternative narratives. In short, by
stressing historical contingency, genealogies begin to show alternative possibilities
of how “things” could have been otherwise or might still develop differently in the
future. In connection with posthumanism and the posthuman, both Donna
Haraway’s re-reading of the cyborg figure from a feminist materialist point of
view (Haraway, 1991) as well as N. Katherine Hayles’s recovery of the lost histories
of cybernetics and technological embodiment in How We Became Posthuman
(Hayles, 1999) can be said to be genealogical in that sense.
This kind of genealogical approach in general has been very influential in
transforming the theory and practice of historiographies that are often associated
with new historicism and cultural materialism or postmodernism. Genealogy, how-
ever, is not predominantly an interpretation of the past through a present-day
perspective. Its aim instead is to produce “histories of the present,” or “effective
histories” that start with contemporary problems or current issues (Dean, 1994).
Writing history is here understood as a process of producing power-knowledge that
is based on selection and exclusion, narrativization and emplotment, as well as
subject-positioning (cf. White, 1989, 2003). Genealogy is an analysis of the specific
connections of subjectivity, truth, knowledge, and power, i.e., the “discursive for-
mations” at work in historiography and its political legitimation. This is exactly what
is at stake in critical posthumanism’s “rewriting” of humanism and the reopening of
the question of what it means to be human (today).
Foucault’s “antihumanism” most famously expressed itself in the image of
“man,” as a construct of humanism and the “human sciences” (or, the humanities)
as a recent historical figure that is about to disappear “like a face drawn in sand at the
edge of the sea” (Foucault, 1973, p. 387). The apparent apocalyptics of this state-
ment should not detract from the fact that Foucault’s aim was a genealogical
rereading of the “history of humanity” in the sense of “the history of morals, ideals,
and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic of
life” (Foucault, 1984, p. 86). Foucault’s genealogical method in producing effective
histories is strategic in that “it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it
divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against
itself” (88). In this sense, it remains pertinent for a critical posthumanism in
three ways: “First, [as] a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through
which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, [as] a historical
ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute
ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, [as] a historical ontology in relation to
ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents” (Foucault, 1984,
p. 351). Critical posthumanism, however, importantly and significantly extends the
remit of Foucault’s framework by addressing its residual anthropocentric bias and by
including nonhuman forms of agency and subjectivity.
The other important advantage of seeing critical posthumanism as a genealogical
venture is that it creates an antidote to seeing posthumanism as an exclusively futural
or future-oriented discourse. Instead, it adds an investigation into posthumanism’s
“prefigurations,” tracks “posthumanism across the ages,” discovering what one
might call “early posthumanisms” or “proto-posthumanisms.” In fact, it is possible
and necessary for a “rewriting” of (the history of) humanity to work through the idea
of human self-identity from its paleoanthropological beginnings in deep time right
through to its past and contemporary “constructions of the future.” Humanism and
anthropocentrism go back to the Renaissance, but they also affect the worldviews of
Greek and Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages of course. Retroactively, via the
concept of the Anthropocene, they also throw us back into “deep time” and a time
“before humanity,” as well as catapulting us forward into a speculative time “without
humans” either in the form of an evolutionary (technological) successor species or in
the sense of apocalyptic scenarios of human or planetary extinction (Grusin, 2018).
There is thus a growing literature on posthumanism and its relevance, prefiguration,
and genealogy throughout human and nonhuman time. It looks at “classical” post-
humanism (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2019); at medieval posthumanism (cf. the journal
Postmedieval 2010ff; and works like Cohen (2003) and Steel (2011)); at early
modern posthumanism (cf. early works on renaissance animal studies by Fudge
(2000, 2004 and 2006) and Fudge et al (2002) and posthumanist readings of
Shakespeare in Herbrechter and Callus (2012) and the early thinking about machines
and computers (e.g. Rhodes and Sawday (2000) and Sawday (2007), and overviews
like Campana and Maisano (2016)); as well as at the Enlightenment (Landgraf et al.,
2019) and beyond. Together these approaches to a prefigurative and genealogical
understanding of posthumanism and the posthuman make for a rich tapestry that
pays tribute to the fact that “if the limits of the human have always exercised both our
thinking and our esthetic practices, then some aspects of what is now termed
‘posthumanism’ and ‘the posthuman’ go as far back as the beginning of the
human itself” (Clarke & Rossini, 2017, p. xv). However, if all these early
posthumanist prefigurations do not add up to a new comprehensive “history of the

posthuman,” this is because every single rereading also affects and “remediates” the
whole idea of periodization and succession.
One of the main reasons (but of course not the only one) why critical post-
humanism can thus be called “critical” is precisely because of this affinity to a
genealogical understanding of critique. As Foucault explains, critique is “genealog-
ical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is
impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency
that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking
what we are, do, or think” (Foucault, 1984, p. 46). This means that genealogies are
critical precisely because they operate as denaturalizing critiques of ideas and
practices that hide the contingency of human life behind formal ahistorical or
developmental perspectives. For Foucault more specifically, “genealogies are usu-
ally histories of present subjectivities, for their critical impact depends on people still
being immersed in the beliefs and practices that they denaturalize” (Bevir, 2008:
263). It is in this sense that critical posthumanism, explicitly or implicitly, under-
stands itself as a critical denaturalization of (liberal) humanist subjectivity or, again,
as an “ongoing deconstruction of humanism.” In doing so, genealogy and critical
posthumanism both “explore the conditions of possibility of contemporary beliefs
and practices” and “uncover the historical contingencies that made it possible for
people today to think and act as they do” (Bevir, 2008, p. 272). Genealogical critique
understood in this way aims to open up what Bevir refers to as “novel spaces for
personal and social transformation” by loosening the hold on us of “entrenched ideas
and institutions; it frees us to imagine other possibilities.” That is precisely what the
“figure” of the posthuman signals (cf. Braidotti, 2013): namely, a counter-memory to
the humanist tradition of anthropocentrism. In this sense, importantly, genealogy can
be understood as history “effective”: in other words, opened up and oriented toward
the future.
Conclusion
To conclude, one might say that critical posthumanism proceeds genealogically in

the sense that it contextualizes and investigates figures of the posthuman and
discourses on posthumanism by placing them within “theoretical and philosophical
developments and ways of thinking within modernity” (Herbrechter, 2013, p. vii).
Its ultimate aim is to re-evaluate the “human” (especially. its exceptionalism,
anthropocentrism, its “nature”), and in doing so, it challenges the legitimation
(the power-knowledge apparatus) of humanism and its late heirs. It seeks out
discontinuities and counter-memories from which to tell the story of the human
and its others differently, without, however, underestimating the power of the
human desire for self-surpassing and perfectibility. While this is undoubtedly a
political stance, critical posthumanism’s raison d’être is ultimately an ethical one.
It is motivated by care – care for different human and nonhuman ways of beings. In
this sense, whoever cares about human beings and their past, present, and future
might want to engage critically with humanism’s anthropocentric ideology. Crit-

ical posthumanism is genealogical as well as critical because it begins with a
current problem, an urgency – the insistence of the “posthuman” in all its forms.
Its objective is to write effective histories that would do justice to “the cultural
malaise or euphoria that is caused by the feeling that arises once you start taking
the idea of ‘postanthropocentrism’ seriously . . . and to think the ‘end of the human’
without giving in to apocalyptic mysticism or to new forms of spirituality and
transcendence” (Herbrechter, 2013, p. 3), to return to the definition with which this
contribution began.
It can thus be said that it is, in fact, the desire of the posthuman that is both the
subject and object of critical posthumanism’s critique. It is a desire that constitutes
“us” and a desire that “we” nevertheless cannot trust. In this sense, it is worth
insisting that critique can never be “detached,” since it is necessarily involved, or
entangled, in and with that which it critiques, or in other words, critique is complicit
with this/its desire. A sympathetic understanding of critique since Kant, however,
will stress the fact that it has never just been the work of pure negativity to shore up
the human against any hybridization with nonhuman others, as Bruno Latour claims
(1993), but that as a practice (i.e., critical thinking) it has always been and remains
capable of dealing just as well with “matters of fact” as with “matters of concern”
(Latour, 2004), or, in other words, that it is, in its generosity, both analytical and
speculative, creative, dismantling, and (re)assembling, motivated by skepticism and
care, all at the same time. It is in this spirit that critical posthumanism still cares
about the human; but this is a care that cannot exist at the expense of nonhuman other
and that necessitates an urgent pluralization and critique of Western normativism. It
dismantles “our” self-understanding, but not without reassembling “the social” in
postanthropocentric terms, while analyzing and distrusting “our” humanist reflexes
and legacies with a view to speculating about alternatives and creating different
futures.
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Part II
Posthumanism Across the Ages
Posthumanism and Deep Time
2
Stefan Herbrechter
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Anthropocene: Worlds With and Without Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Proliferation of Geostories and the Geologization of Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Ancestrality and the Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Extinction and Deep Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Abstract
Posthumanism is often perceived as a more or less science fictional discourse
focused on the imagination of posthuman futures that involve some form of
technological enhancement, artificial intelligence, or space travel. Critical post-
humanism has been engaging critically with the desire to transcend the “human
condition” that usually informs post-, or rather, transhumanist fantasies of
disembodiment, dematerialization, and overcoming “our animal bodies” (i.e.,
biology, biological evolution, and “nature”). Instead, it has been engaging in
the ongoing deconstruction of the underlying humanist, anthropocentric,
speciesist, and exceptionalist values that inform post- or transhumanist discourse,
and has emphasized the material and biological entanglement between human
and nonhuman life at a planetary level. Apart from seeking alternative and
affirmative forms of biopolitics in a time when humans are said to have become
the most important geological and atmospheric force – this is what the new
geological term of the Anthropocene stands for – the humanities and social
sciences have undergone a “geological” turn. As a result, the notion of deep
time that a geological imaginary affords has also led to a “geologization” of
posthumanism, which provides an important antipode to the techno-utopian and
S. Herbrechter (*)
Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: stefan.herbrechter@as.uni-heidelberg.de
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 29

S. Herbrechter et al. (eds.), Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04958-3_26
30 S. Herbrechter
techno-centered figure of the posthuman. Placing the human within a deep-time

geopolitical and geo-ecological framework in the context of the Anthropocene,
global climate change, and extinction threats allows for a new deep ecological
thinking and new forms of postanthropocentric narrativizations, or “geostories.”
These deep-time narrativizations can also provide alternative and differential
accounts of ancestrality and extinction events.
Keywords
Ancestrality · Anthropocene · Deep time · Ecology · Extinction ·
Geoengineering · Postanthropocentrism
Introduction
While our current “posthuman times” (Braidotti, 2019: 1) tend to be largely focused
on the prospect of a posthuman future, the geological notion of “deep time“ must be
thought both forward and backward (Wood, 2019: 2). One of the distinctive features
of a critical posthumansim is therefore the recognition that the futural and often
openly futuristic orientation in most posthumanist thinking, with its focus on
cyborgs, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and geoengineering, in fact throws
us back to our origins. Asking where humans are going or what they are evolving
into at the same time brings up the question of where we come from and how we
became what we think we are. The anticipated deep future of the posthuman thus
cannot help but also recall a deep past (cf. e.g. Shyrock & Smail 2011). Both contain
worlds “without” us. Both are, in a sense, “before” us – a prehuman time that
somehow contains the answer of the origin of our species – and a posthuman one,
that may still lie before us, but which may also spell out our end, in the form of
extinction or evolutionary supersession. What makes the ongoing search for an
answer to what it means to be human so urgent in our time are two perspectives
that are closely related: the realization that humans may have become the most
important geomorphic factor on the planet (this is what is behind the notion of the
Anthropocene) and the increasing fusion between humans and technology (to a point
where “transhumanists” are projecting a post-biological future).
In this context, geology – one of the leading realms of inquiry in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – has become once more a focus of
philosophical and cultural inquiry (Farmer, 2018: 193; cf. also McGurl 2012).
Deep time, traditionally the province of geology’s investigation into mineralization,
rock formation, sedimentation, strata and atmospheric change, and so on, has
captured the current posthumanist imaginary to a point where Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen speaks of “geophilia” or a “love of stone” (2015: 72–73; see also Zalasiewicz
2010). In this context, a reminder of deep time at the very moment human society
seems suspended between cataclysmic technological and ecological development,
between speed and looming catastrophe, is increasingly seen as a kind of antidote. In
a recent article aimed at a general readership, for example, the anthropologist
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whatsoever he called each, that was the name thereof. So horse
must be the name of the animal all over the world for ever. Being an
animal, it can have only one name: the name Adam gave it.’
Argument was useless. For him to have been persuaded of
anything that contradicted his literal interpretation would have been
to abandon belief in the authenticity of the book.
Here then we have the popular method actually at work. We see
the whole process. And the way in which it demonstrated to my
gardener that equus could not possibly be Latin for horse, is much
the same as the way in which some other conclusions have been
arrived at, with which everybody is familiar, but with which very few
people are satisfied.
The attempt to get over the difficulties of the literal method, in the
instance that was just now before us, by abandoning it at one point
only, that of the meaning of the word ‘day,’ has three disadvantages.
First that of abandoning a principle while loudly and energetically
professing to maintain it. Secondly that of addressing itself to one
particular, and not to the whole of the subject. And, thirdly, that of
being, in itself, surpassingly preposterous. For who ever did doubt,
or could doubt, that in the place referred to, the word ‘day’ means,
and was intended to mean, the space of our twenty-four hours? Is
not this the meaning attributed to the word in the reference made to
the first chapter of Genesis in the Decalogue? And are we not told, in
the body of the narrative itself, with the most emphatic iteration, that
the period of time intended by the word is what is comprised in the
evening and morning?
On the other hand the historical method of interpretation explains
satisfactorily, both why the work is divided into days, and why the
constituent parts of each day are spoken of. This was done, because
to do so was in conformity with archaic modes of thought and
expression.
In this there is nothing forced or strained. Above all it is perfectly
true. It also explains everything.
The attempt to place all we know of the stratification of our earth,
of the series of changes that have been effected in the relations of
the sea and land, and in extinct Floras and Faunas, on the further
side of ‘the beginning’ of the first verse of this first chapter of
Genesis, is equally portentous. Here again, all the difficulties of the
narrative are left wholly unexplained, and the student is referred to
an arbitrary, and contextually impossible, assumption, and told that it
contains a sufficient answer to every objection. This interpretation
makes the explicit statements of the subsequent account direct
contradictions to the (by the supposition) implicit meaning of the first
verse. One cannot but think that those who propound an
interpretation of this kind have no suspicion of the mischief they are
doing. It is impossible that its worse than hollowness could, in any
case, escape detection one moment beyond the time that a man,
who has but a very small store of knowledge, begins to think. And
then, as all experience proves, the revulsion that ensues against
such teaching (and revulsions of this kind generally reach the subject
itself also, on behalf of which such teaching is advanced) is out of all
proportion to the gain—and what kind of gain is it?—temporarily
secured from ignorant and unthinking acquiescence.
Of course, the word ‘beginning,’ just like the word ‘day,’ and all the
rest of the narrative, was intended to be taken by the rude people to
whom the pictures of which the narrative is composed were
submitted, precisely in the sense in which it was always taken by
them; that is to say in the sense in which plain words are taken by
plain people. And then arises the question we have been
considering, How is all this to be taken by ourselves?
As our ideas rest on a different basis, that of scientific
demonstration, we can acknowledge, in respect of any particular,
that we are ignorant, either of the modus operandi, or of the time
required for the operation, or of both. But Moses could not do this: he
could deal with these matters only in conformity with the
requirements of his purpose, and with the facts of the times.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE DELTA: DISAPPEARANCE OF ITS
MONUMENTS.
Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another
that shall not be cast down.—St. Mark.
The respective fortunes of the monuments of Upper Egypt and of

the Delta have been very different.
In the Delta there was a large number of populous and wealthy
cities. Five of them—Tanis, Bubastis, Sais, Mendes, and Sebennytus
—were of sufficient importance to have given rise to dynasties; and,
therefore, each had, in turn, become the capital. So many great
cities were probably never before arrayed on so small an area. The
duster of flourishing commercial and manufacturing towns in the Low
Countries, offers the nearest approach to it in modern times. These,
however, were supported primarily by manufactures and trade, while
those of the Delta were supported primarily by agriculture. The base
of the Delta along the air line, from Canopus to Pelusium, was not
140 miles, while its two sides, from its apex to those cities, were only
about 100 miles in length.
Every one of these numerous cities of the Delta had its grand
temple—some more than one. Many were, even for Egypt, of
unusual extent and massiveness. They were generally built of the
finest granite. At Tanis there was a temple of this kind. It had been
erected by the great Rameses. In one respect, at all events, more
had been done for it than for any other temple in Egypt, for it was
enriched by at least ten obelisks. In its construction granite had been
largely used. As Rameses built with sandstone at Karnak, Luxor, and
Thebes, which were different quarters of his great capital, and where
he must have wished to make the chief display of his magnificence,
why was he not content with it in the Delta? We here find him using a
far more costly material, and one which he had to fetch from a
greater distance than the sandstone quarries of Silsiléh. The only
imaginable reason is, that he desired to build for eternity, and that he
was afraid that the sandstone he was employing in Upper Egypt
might, in a long series of years, feel the effects of the damp in the
Delta, at all events to such an extent as that the sculptures might
suffer. The sandstone is remarkably hard and compact, and he was
satisfied with it in the dry climate of Upper Egypt; but he had
misgivings as to its power of resistance to the climate of Lower
Egypt; and therefore, that he might not incur any avoidable risk, he
went, in the Delta, to the additional expense of employing granite
from Assouan.
And now a word or two about the city itself. This Tanis had from
very early days, as we now know, been conspicuously connected
with the history of Egypt. The importance of the place had been
recognized in the days of the old primæval Monarchy, for we find in it
traces of Sesortesen III., a mighty Pharaoh of the XIIth Dynasty, and
whose name is found at the other extremity of the land on the
Theban temples. Its position it was that gave it this importance, for it
was on the flank of all invaders from the North or East; and, too, on
the very spot where there were more facilities for establishing a
stronghold than anywhere else in Egypt. Being on the Tanitic branch
of the Nile, and not far from its mouth, it could receive supplies and
reinforcements both by the river, and by sea; and being behind the
Pelusiac branch, it could make that its first line of defence against an
enemy coming across the desert, who as he would be without boats,
and would find no materials for constructing them in such a district,
would have but a very slight chance of effecting the passage of the
river. As the city was also placed in the low district which now forms
Lake Menzaléh, it, doubtless, was in the power of its defenders at
any time to lay the surrounding country under water. The forces
collected in this strong position, would, if themselves strong enough,
be able to attack an invader, while yet in the desert; or, if this were
thought more advisable, to fall either on his flank or rear, as he
advanced along the Pelusiac branch.
In the Hebrew Scriptures the place is called ‘the Field of Zoan.’
Sân is its present name, and Zoan is probably a nearer approach to
the old Egyptian form than the Greek Tanis. The expression of ‘the
Field of Zoan’ was, of course, meant to be descriptive of the
character of the surrounding country. There would have been
nothing appropriate in speaking of the Field of Memphis, or of
Thebes. It indicated that the district had been originally, as it is again
at the present day, composed of pools and marshes, just what our
fens once were, but that by a system of dykes and drains it had been
reclaimed. And so, just as we might talk of the Fen of Boston, they
talked of the Field, we should say the Fen, of Zoan.
Such having been the character and position of Tanis, it does not
surprise us that it was made the royal residence, and in some
respect, the capital, in the time of the Hyksos. Not only was it the
nearest point to their old home, from which they might at times be
glad to receive some assistance, but as it commanded the road into
Egypt they had themselves so successfully traversed, they would
naturally wish by strengthening the defences of the place, and
residing there themselves, to use it as a bar against any who might
make a similar attempt. More traces of these conquerors are found
here than anywhere else in the land. And it is very interesting to see
in these traces that they adopted, just as we might have expected,
the religion of Egypt; and yet that they did not, in so doing, abandon
that of their old home. For there is evidence that they placed by the
side of the temples of the gods of Egypt, temples to Set or Soutekh,
the Egyptian name of the Assyrian Baal. This was the obvious
compromise of the opposing difficulties that beset them in this
matter. They could not abandon their own morality; and, on the other
hand, the conquerors and the conquered could never become one
people as long as their moral ideas and sentiments were different. Of
course the Gods, and the services of religion, were the external
embodiment and representation of these ideas and sentiments.
On the expulsion of the Hyksos we find the history of the Great
Pharaohs of the XIXth Dynasty closely connected with Tanis. Its
magnificent temple, as we have already mentioned, was built by
Rameses the Great. Meneptha, his son, was holding his court here
at the time of the Exodus; and it must have been with the militia of
the neighbourhood, where a considerable force of the military caste
was settled, that he pursued the fugitive Israelites. We are, therefore,
prepared to find that at last it became the actual recognized capital
of Egypt. This was brought about under the XXIst Dynasty. It had
come to be seen that under existing circumstances Thebes was no
longer the best position from which the country could be guarded
and governed. It was now the opposite extremity of the country that
needed all the vigilance that could be exercised, and where should
be placed the head quarters of the military power of the Empire.
We now come to Bubastis. The great temple of this famous city, of
which Herodotus gives a minute account, and which appeared to him
more finished and beautiful than any other structure in Egypt, was
nearly a furlong in length, and of the same width. It was built
throughout of granite. Its sculptures also bear the name of the great
Rameses. It was placed on a peninsula, formed in an artificial lake in
the middle of the city. The isthmus leading to the sacred enclosure
was a strip of land between two parallel canals from the Nile. Each of
them was 100 feet wide. They fed the lake which completely
surrounded the temple, with the exception of the isthmic entrance.
The width of the lake was 1,400 feet. Along the sides of the isthmus
were rows of lofty evergreen trees. As the ground on which the city
stood had been raised by the earth excavated from the bed of the
lake, and by other accumulations, to a considerable height above the
temple enclosure, the spectator looked down on the temple of red
granite, the green trees, and the water from all sides. We can
understand Herodotus’s preference for this temple. Most of the
particulars of his description and measurements can still be traced
out. Of the temple itself, however, only a few scattered stones
remain, but these are sufficient to show of what materials, and by
whom, it was built.
It was to Bubastis that the XXIInd Dynasty transferred the seat of
Government. Almost all the names of this Dynasty are Assyrian. The
strange apparition of these names is accounted for by the probable
supposition that its founder was a military adventurer, who, while
stationed in this city, had become connected by marriage with the
Royal Family. This semi-foreign House occupied the throne for a little
more than a century and a half, when Tanis again became the capital
under the XXIIIrd Dynasty.
The temple of Sais could not have been inferior, in extent, or in
costliness, to those either of Tanis, or of Bubastis. It was built partly
of limestone and partly of granite. Here were buried all the kings of
the Saite Dynasty. Herodotus dwells upon its magnificence. Its
propylæa exceeded all others in dimensions. It, too, had its lake, on
which were celebrated the mysteries of the sufferings of the
martyred Osiris. Like the temple of Tanis, it had its obelisks, and,
besides, several colossi and androsphinxes. The margin of its
sacred lake was cased with stone; but its chief ornament was a
shrine composed of a single block of granite, in the transport of
which, from Elephantiné to Sais, two thousand boatmen had been
employed for three years. This shrine was 31 feet long, 22 broad,
and 12 high. The lake, but without the stone casing of its margin, and
the site of the temple remain, but every other trace of all this
magnificence has almost entirely disappeared.
The last Capital of Egypt, in which the wealth, culture, and glory of
the old Pharaohnic Empire were completely revived, and exhibited to
the world, was Sais. This revival took place under the XXVIth
Dynasty; and, fortunately for us, was witnessed and described by the
Greeks. Absolutely, and in itself, the country, probably, was then
quite as great in all the elements of power as it ever had been in the
palmiest days of the famous times of old; but, relatively, the sceptre
had departed from Egypt. The arts which minister to and maintain
civilization, and endow it with the ability to organize, wield, and
support large armies, had travelled to the banks of the Euphrates,
and from thence were spreading over the highlands of Media and
Persia. By a law of nature civilization first germinated, and bore its
precious fruit, in the teeming South, but by a right of nature Empire
belongs to the enduring and thoughtful North. History contains the
oft-repeated narrative of the fashion in which those, who have
successively received the gift, have successively repaid it by
subjugating the donors. The Assyrians had already, taking
advantage of the disturbed state of the country during the XXVth
Dynasty, looted all the great cities of Egypt, from Migdol to Syené.
But where prosperity does not depend on the use and profits of
accumulated capital, but on the annual bounty of Nature, recovery is
very rapid. And to this bounty, which was larger and more varied in
Egypt than anywhere else in the world, by reason of its winter as well
as summer harvest, there had now been superadded the unbought
gains resulting from her having been allowed to become what nature
had intended her to be, that is, the centre for the interchange of the
commodities of Asia, including India, of Africa, and of Europe.
Sais was placed on the Canopic, the most westerly branch of the
river, at a distance of about forty miles from the sea; between which
and it was Naucratis, where the Greeks had been allowed to
establish a factory and emporium. In the city also of Sais itself a
quarter was assigned to them, where they were governed by their
own laws, administered by magistrates selected from among their
own body. As Psammetichus, the founder of the Saite Dynasty, had
been raised to the throne, and was maintained upon it, mainly by the
aid of Greek mercenaries, we can hardly suppose that this contiguity
of the city he made his Capital to the source from which so much of
his support was derived, was accidental. It was in accordance with
his policy towards the Greeks that he granted a Factory to every
other nation which was desirous of maintaining one, giving to all
equal liberty to trade in the land. From the same motive he had his
children taught Greek.
Facts of this kind imply the complete reversal of the old national
policy of seclusion. The Government, and it must have been
seconded by the general approval of the people, saw that seclusion
could no longer be maintained, while at the same time the opposite
system was offering to the country very great advantages; and so,
just as is the case at the present day with the Japanese, the
requirements of the new conditions were speedily and unreservedly
accepted. The military caste, however, whose susceptibility was
offended at the employment of, and still more at the preference
which was shown to, a large body of Greek mercenaries, was an
exception to the general acquiescence. To the number of 240,000
they seceded from Egypt; and, having been well received in the now
rival country of Ethiopia, were settled in a fertile tract of land which
was bestowed upon them in the neighbourhood of Meroé.
Necho, the son and successor of Psammetichus, was desirous of
pushing the new commercial policy of his Father to its utmost limits.
With this view, he undertook to adapt for navigation, and to prolong
to the head of the Arabian Gulf, an old canal, that had for many
centuries connected Bubastis with Lake Timsah, in order that every
impediment to the traffic of the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean
might be removed. He had carried this great work as far as the Bitter
Lakes, when, from some military, or perhaps for an agricultural,
reason, he abandoned the work, after having expended upon it the
lives of 120,000 of the Fellahs of those times. Herodotus saw the
Docks which, as a part of this plan, he had constructed on the Red
Sea.
The only incident in the History of Geographical Discovery which
can be set by the side of the great achievement of Columbus, is this
Necho’s circumnavigation of Africa. These two enterprises resemble
each other not only in hardihood, grandeur, and success, but also in
being equally instances of the happy way in which the scientific, and
even the semi-scientific, imagination at times divines the truth, or the
real nature of things. The truth, indeed, appears to possess not only
some power of suggesting itself, but also of compelling the mind, to
which it has suggested itself, to undertake the demonstration of its
being the truth.
It would be unfair to the Father of History to make mention of this
famous undertaking in any words but his. “Libya itself,” he says,
“enables us to ascertain that it is everywhere surrounded by water,
except so far as it is conterminous with Asia. The Egyptian King,
Necho, was the first we know of who demonstrated this. He did it in
this wise: when he had abandoned the attempt to dig the Canal from
the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, he despatched a squadron manned by
Phœnicians, with instructions to sail on till they got back into the
Northern (Mediterranean) Sea, through the Pillars of Hercules; and
in this way to return to Egypt. These Phœnicians, then, having set
sail from the Erythrœan (Red) Sea, entered on the navigation of the
Southern Sea (the Indian Ocean). When the autumn came, they
would draw up their vessels on the beach, and sow what land was
required, wherever they might happen to be at that point of the
voyage. They would then wait for the harvest, and when they had got
it in, would again set sail. In this way two years were spent; and, in
the third year, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules, they returned
to Egypt. They said what I cannot believe, though some, perhaps,
may, that while they were sailing round Libya, they had the sun on
their right hand. So was first acquired a knowledge of the contour of
Libya.”
Necho also pursued the policy of his Father in attempting to
recover for the Double Crown of the then reunited Upper and Lower
Egypt, the Asiatic dependencies, of which the Assyrians had
despoiled it. For nine and twenty years had Psammetichus been
barred in the first step of this enterprise by the obstinate resistance
of Ashdod, which had thus sustained, as Herodotus observes, the
longest siege then known to History. At last, however, it had
succumbed; and being now, again, in the hands of the Egyptians, the
old line of march into, and through, Syria was open, and Necho set
out for the re-conquest of the old provinces. He could not deem that
his Egypt was the Egypt of Tuthmosis and Rameses, unless what
they had held along the maritime plain of Syria, and back to
Carchemish on the Euphrates, and which had been—more or less
completely—in subjection to Egypt during the intervening nine
centuries, with the exception of the short period of Assyrian
supremacy, had been recovered. As might have been expected, he
could not see that, though Nineveh had fallen, its power had only
been transferred to Babylon; and that behind Babylon was being
organized the Empire of the still more energetic Persians, which was
soon to overshadow all that part of the world. It was, in truth, only
wasting his resources to retake Carchemish: he should have
attacked Babylon itself. Nothing was gained if its power was not
destroyed. But, however, as he advanced along the maritime plain,
with which the Egyptians had been familiar from time out of mind,
Josiah, we know, attempted to stop him at Megiddo, where he was
defeated and slain.
The Hebrew Prophets of these times saw as clearly, as we do
now, that the course of events had transferred the constituents of
power from the Nile to the Euphrates; and so they became the
uncompromising instigators of this anti-Egyptian policy. Of course it
would have been wise in Josiah to have remained quiet: his best
policy would have been that of “masterly inactivity.” Necho, however,
as it happened, having easily crushed him, did not allow himself to
be diverted from his main object by the tempting facility thus offered
to him for at once taking possession of the Kingdom of Judah, but
continued, as rapidly as he could, his advance to the Euphrates.
Having reached Carchemish, and provided sufficiently, as he
thought, for the permanent re-occupation of all that had thereabouts
“pertained to Egypt,” he returned home; and, by the way, settled,
without any resistance having been offered to him, the conditions of
the subjection of the Kingdom of Judah.
At this juncture Egypt must have deemed that all was recovered,
and that everything was again, and would continue to be, as of old.
Isaiah, however, and Jeremiah, and the other Prophets of the time
were right; for the Babylonians were not long in expelling the
Egyptians from Asia.
Necho was succeeded by his son Psammis; and he by the Apries
of Herodotus, the Pharaoh Hophra of the Hebrew Scriptures. Egypt
is still very rich and prosperous, and so he makes another attempt
for the recovery of the dominion of Western Asia. In this effort he
attacked Phœnicia both by sea and land. Still no change, or
vacillation, is perceptible in the utterances of the Hebrew Prophets.
They at all events are not misled, or dazzled, by the riches and
greatness of Egypt. Ezekiel sees, just as Isaiah and Jeremiah had
seen, that the valley of the Nile can no longer be the seat of Empire;
and that the capacity for acquiring it had passed into the hands of
their North-Eastern neighbours.
In the reign of Amasis, the successor of Apries, “Egypt,” as
Herodotus tells us, “reached the very acmé of its prosperity. Never
before had the river been more bountiful to the land, or the land to
those who dwelt in it. It contained 20,000 inhabited cities.” Such was
the Egypt Amasis marshalled against this invading host of Persia.
But to no purpose: the single and signal defeat his son sustained at
Pelusium, the very threshold of the land, gave to Cambyses the
whole country. From that day to this Power has continued the
Northward course it had then commenced; and, consequently, there
has been no resurrection for the first-born of civilization, the
inventress of Letters, and of Political Organization, and of so many of
the arts that better man’s Estate, and embellish life. This, to some
extent, hides from our view the fact that we are, greatly, what we are
at this day, because Egypt had been what she was in the prehistoric
times.
At Sais and Bubastis were held two of the great annual religious
Assemblies and Festivals of the Egyptians. It naturally occurs to us
to ask, why at these two cities of the Delta, and not at primæval This,
royal Memphis, or imperial Thebes? The answer that first occurs is
that these two then modern Capitals may have been selected in
order to bring them into repute, and invest them with an importance,
they would not otherwise have possessed. This supposition,
however, is, to some extent, negatived by the known antiquity, at all
events, of Bubastis, and by the remark of Herodotus that the
Egyptians were the first of mankind to institute these religious
gatherings and fêtes: we are, therefore, precluded from imagining
that their chief celebrations of this kind dated only from the Bubastic
or Saite Dynasties. We can also see that the people of Upper Egypt,
all of whom dwelt on the actual bank of the river, would be more
disposed to come down the stream to the Delta, than the people of
the broad Delta would be to ascend the stream to This or Thebes.
These great annual Feasts answered several important purposes.
They impressed the same religious ideas on all who participated in
them; and this contributed much to national, as well as to religious,
unity and amalgamation. By their tone also of gladness, festivity, and
licence they temporarily lightened the yoke of an austere religion,
and provided a recognized vent for some very natural, and not
unhealthy, impulses of our common humanity. Just what the
Saturnalia were to the ancient Roman, and what the Carnival is to
his modern representative, the Feast of Bubastis was to the old
Egyptian for some thousands of years before the name of Rome had
been heard on the seven Hills. The reader may form his own opinion
on this point by turning to the account of the Festival given by one
who four centuries and a half before our era was travelling through
Egypt, and who we may be pretty sure himself witnessed what he
thus describes. “While those, who are about to keep the Feast, are
on the way to Bubastis, this is what they do. The men and women go
together; and there is a large number of both sexes in each boat.
Some of the women are provided with castanets, and some of the
men with pipes, upon which they perform throughout the whole of
the voyage. The rest of the men, and of the women, accompany
them with singing, and with clapping their hands. When, as they sail
along, they have reached any city, having made fast their boat to the
bank, some of the women do what has been already mentioned,
while of the rest some assail the women of the city with loud cries
and scurrilous jibes, others dance, and others stand up, and make
immodest exhibitions. They go through these performances at every
river-side city. When they have reached Bubastis they keep the feast
with unusually large offerings, and there is a greater consumption of
grape wine at this feast than in the remainder of the whole of the
twelve months. The number of men and women who are brought
together on this occasion, for the children are not reckoned, reaches,
as the Egyptians themselves say, to 700,000 souls.”
I will append his account of the Feast at Sais. “When the people
are assembled at Sais for the solemnity, on a certain night
everybody lights a great number of lamps, in the open air, in a circle
round his house. The lamps are cups full of oil mixed with salt. The
wick rests on the surface, and burns all night. This is called the Feast
of Lamps. All Egyptians who happen not to be present at the
gathering, wherever they may be, light lamps; and thus there is an
illumination not only in Sais, but throughout the whole of the country.
A religious reason is given to account for this particular night having
been thus honoured by illumination.” He does not give the reason;
but as we know that the Festival was in honour of Neith, the
Egyptian Athena or Minerva, or of Osiris, we may suppose that the
old Egyptians were the first to use light shining in darkness as the
symbol of the mind-illuminating power of the Divine Spirit.
A few fragments of granite, in the mounds of the old city, are all
the remains of the former greatness of Sebennytus.
Only six miles, however, from Sebennytus are the rubbish-heaps
of Iseum. Here are the ruins of a most stately temple, every stone in
the walls and roof of which was an enormous block of granite. No
other material had been used. So regardless had been its builders of
cost, that throughout the greater part of the structure they had
sculptured this intractable adamant in unusually high relief. But
though it had been thus massively constructed of imperishable
materials, and decorated with such lavish expenditure, it was so
completely wrecked, that now the traveller finds in its place merely a
heap of stones. What had been the temple is there, but not one
stone has been left standing on another.
And so we might go on throughout the whole Delta. Every few
miles would bring us to the site of a city that once was great—the
distinguishing feature of the greatness of which had been its temple.
The peculiarity of them all was that the material chiefly used in their
construction was granite. In most cases, the very materials of which
the temples were constructed have utterly disappeared, though the
spot on which each stood is still easily distinguishable. In some few
cases, where the temple was of unusual extent—Iseum is the most
conspicuous instance of this—considerable proportions of the
materials remain, but even there everything has been thrown down,
and, as far as possible, destroyed.
The reason generally given for this, in every case, utter ruin, and
in most cases complete disappearance of the monuments of
antiquity throughout the Delta is, that the climate being rendered
comparatively moist by the contiguity of the sea, has not been so
favourable to their preservation as the drier climate of Upper Egypt
has proved to the monuments of that district. The difference in the
hygrometrical condition of the air, and the rain that falls occasionally
in the Delta, will not account, I think, for the effect that has been
produced. The climate of Gizeh is not very different from that of the
actual Delta, and here five or six thousand years have not in the
least affected the original casing at the top of the Second Pyramid.
The obelisk that had been standing for very nearly two thousand
years on the very beach at Alexandria, and which for the previous
two thousand years had stood at the apex of the Delta, has not been
affected to such an extent as would contribute, in any appreciable
degree, I will not say to the overthrow, but to the injury, of any
building ever raised by an Egyptian architect. And yet at Alexandria
these supposed disintegrating influences are at their maximum, and
are aided by the salt-impregnated drift from the sea in the case of
this obelisk, which has, notwithstanding, outlived for so long a period
every temple and palace throughout the Delta, after having
witnessed the erection of every one of them. If it had a tongue, it
would, I think, tell us that it was not the climate that had been the
destroyer, but man.
The decree which the Emperor Theodosius issued at the instance
of the Archbishop and Christians of Alexandria, to authorize the
destruction of the great temple of Serapis in that city, shows what
was probably the cause of the first overthrow of the temples of the
Delta. As long as they stood, it was thought there would be priests to
minister in them, and worshippers to frequent them. And in those
days of religious faction-fights, we know that they were frequently
used as fortresses. We might say that the way to meet these
difficulties was to trust to the imperishableness of truth, and to the
sure decay of falsehood; but whatever we might do, we certainly
should not destroy the historic monuments of a glorious antiquity.
They, however, had not our ideas on these subjects; and, moreover,
were blinded by the dust and smoke of the battle that was raging
around them; and so they acted on the principle that was afterwards
formulated to the north of the Tweed, that the way to get rid of the
rooks is to pull down the nests.
When the overthrow of a temple had been once effected, we may
be quite sure that all the limestone that could be found in it would be
very soon sent to the kiln. A great deal of lime is used in Egypt for
walls, and for plastering; and everywhere throughout the country,
even in places where the stone might be had for the quarrying, the
Arab has preferred the stones of old tombs and temples to the
somewhat more costly process of cutting what he wanted from the
living rock. Mehemet Ali, while constructing his paltry nitre-works at
Karnak, although the mountain on the opposite bank was of
limestone, to get what of this material was requisite for his purpose,
destroyed one of the historic propylons within the sacred enclosure.
In the pyramid district, often with the limestone under their feet and
all around them, it has been the common practice to calcine the, to
us, precious sculptured and painted stones from the tombs. And in
this the modern Arab is only following the example of the old
Egyptian, and of all other people who wanted the materials of
unused buildings close at hand. We may, therefore, be sure that, a
few centuries after the overthrow of these temples of the Delta, all
the limestone that could be picked out of their ruins was consumed
in this way.
We have seen, however, that the chief material employed in the
construction of the grandest of them was not limestone, but granite.
This was utterly indestructible by the climate; and yet, in some
places, it has entirely vanished as completely as the limestone; and
has in the rest been much diminished. The same cause, I believe,
has brought about the disappearance of both. As was done with the
limestone, so has it happened to the granite: it has been used for
whatever purposes it was adapted. The smaller pieces, as may
frequently be seen, have been carried off for building material; and
the larger pieces have been turned to account in the way in which
we find that fragments of the granite colossus of Rameses the Great
at Thebes have been employed, that is to say, as millstones for
grinding, and mortars for pounding corn. In the alluvial Delta the old
buildings were the only quarries.
All the phenomena of the case are thus accounted for. Every one
must wish that these imposing historic monuments of a great past
had been preserved to our times. We feel as if those who threw them
down, and those who afterwards employed their displaced, but still
sacred, stones for their own petty purposes, had done to ourselves,
and to the civilized world, an irreparable wrong. It may, however,
mitigate our indignation, to remember that the former acted under a
misapprehension of the nature and requirements of their cause; and
that we ought not to be hard upon the poor Arab for having done
what popes and cardinals did, when, to build palaces for themselves,
they pulled down, with sacrilegious hands, the monuments of old
Rome.
This destruction of tombs and temples has in Egypt been going on
always. Of late years, indeed, there has been an increased demand
for building materials, in consequence of some portion of the
Khedivé’s numerous loans having been spent in public works, and in
giving employment to a great many people who have had to build
houses for themselves: the work of destruction, therefore, is now
advancing at a greater rate than it ever did before. Many can confirm
this from their own observation. Every one who revisits the country
sees how rapidly and completely the stones of newly-opened tombs
have disappeared. He saw them a few years ago: now he hears that
they have been sent to the kiln.
CHAPTER XXIX.
POST-PHARAOHNIC TEMPLES IN UPPER EGYPT.
Cui bono?—Cicero.
The Ptolemaic temple of Edfou, unlike those of the Delta, has

suffered little from the injuries either of time, or of man. It is
substantially, both internally and externally, in the state in which it
was two thousand years ago, when the inhabitants of the great city
of Apollo passed in procession between its stately propylons, and
entered its great court, to hear hymns sung in praise of, and to
witness offerings made to, the child Horus, and the Egyptian Venus,
or, as she is described in an inscription on the walls, “the Queen of
men and of women,” to whom the temple was dedicated.
The external walls are complete, so are all the chambers, halls,
corridors, and courts within, even to the monolithic granite shrine.
The well, too, to which you descend by a flight of steps, is still full of
water. I seldom found a temple without its well. Many had lakes also
annexed to them for ornament, for the performance of religious
ceremonies, as that at Sais for the mysteries of Osiris, or for the boat
procession in the funeral function, as at Thebes; or, in addition to
these objects, to strengthen the defensive position of the temple. We
know that this was a purpose for which the temples were used: in
fact, each had its own trained and armed militia: and it is impossible
to look upon such a structure as this temple of Edfou without
perceiving that the idea of having a stronghold was included by the
builder in his original design. The height and massiveness of the
surrounding wall were such as to make either battery, or escalade,
impossible, and there were no apertures left in it by which entrance
could be effected. In fact, the temples gave the priests, and
government, in every city an impregnable citadel, and one against
which no exception could be taken, however strong it was made, for
was it not all done for the glory of the gods of the city? And so the
people were tricked into assisting to forge their own chains.
Thoughts of this kind arise in your mind as you pass through the
courts and galleries, ascend the propylons, and walk upon the roof of
this magnificent fortress temple. Some of the sculptures on the walls,
representing a royal boat procession on the river, enable us to
picture to ourselves how the last of the Ptolemies, the Circe of the
Nile, appeared on these occasions. Here, too, is an inscription of
much interest, for it gives some account of several estates belonging
to the temple.
At Dendera the greater part of the work, and of the sculptures,
belong to the Roman period. The Egyptian architect now receives
through the Roman governor of the province, his instructions from,
and reports back their execution to, the banks of the Tiber. On the
walls we read the names of Augustus and of his four successors in
the Empire, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. On an older part
of the structure occurs the name of the Egyptian son of the greatest
of the Cæsars, together with his mother’s, the great Egyptian
enchantress. In the Ptolemaic temple also at the south-west angle of
the enclosure at Karnak, both these names are repeated several
times. In each case the name is accompanied with what is meant for
a sculptured portrait of this famous lady. In the fulness and
roundness of the face there is some resemblance to the features
with which Guido embodies his idea of her in his celebrated picture.
His intuitive perception of refined and enduring voluptuousness has
thus proved true to nature.
But, though at Dendera the existing buildings are modern, dating
from a little before and after the Christian era, yet the site is as old as
any in Egypt. An inscription has been found by which we are
informed that a temple was completed on this spot by Apappus (that
is to say, perhaps three thousand years before Christ), which had
been commenced three or four hundred years previously by Cheops,
the builder of the Great Pyramid. (We may ask, by the way,—How
does this agree with the legend that he closed the temples?) And
that eighteen hundred years after the foundation of the temple by
Cheops, that is one thousand five hundred years before Christ, the
structure which Apappus had completed was reconstructed by
Tuthmosis III.
At Esné is another of the great post-Pharaohnic temples of Upper
Egypt. What has been disinterred here belongs also to the Roman
period. The list of inscribed names includes Tiberius, Germanicus,
Vespasian, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus, and Decius. The last is of the
date 250 a.d., and is the latest instance yet found of the name of a
Roman emperor on an Egyptian temple, inscribed in hieroglyphics.
Here, too, has been found the shield of Tuthmosis III. We may infer,
therefore, that the work of the Roman period now standing was
placed, as at Dendera, upon the site of a temple erected by this
great Pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty. Perhaps, as the
excavations here have not yet extended beyond what may be
regarded as merely the front of the temple, some of the older
structure may hereafter be brought to light from beneath the still
undisturbed mounds behind.
These three temples of Edfou, Dendera, and Esné, to which some
others in Upper Egypt may be added, are of great value historically.
They enable us to understand what was the condition of Egyptian
art, and, to some extent, in what condition the Egyptians themselves
were in the Greek, and in the Roman period. From the time of Menes
to the time of Decius we see that they possessed the same
language, the same arts, the same style of art, the same method of
writing, the same mythology, and the same social arrangements. The
mind is almost overwhelmed at the contemplation of such stability in
human affairs. With this vast tract of time, spread over four thousand
years, we are acquainted historically. Of the period that preceded it
we have no monuments, and know nothing historically. What we
know, however, of the historical period enables us to infer with
confidence that the period which preceded it, and in which all this
knowledge, all these arts, and these aptitudes were acquired, this
mythology constructed, and this social organization, possessing so
much vitality and permanence, grew into form, and established itself,
could not possibly have been a short period.
The antiquity of the sites of Dendera and Esné, and perhaps also
of Edfou, must have contributed largely towards the eventual

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Palgrave Handbook of Critical

Posthumanism Stefan Herbrechter

With 36 Figures and 3 Tables

Manuela Rossini Marija Grech

Megen de Bruin-Molé Christopher John Müller

ISBN 978-3-031-04957-6 ISBN 978-3-031-04958-3 (eBook)

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism assembles critical interventions

for all – individually, emotionally, ethically, economically, and socially. At a time

Heidelberg, Germany Stefan Herbrechter

Part I Introduction ....................................... 1

1 Critical Posthumanism: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Part II Posthumanism Across the Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2 Posthumanism and Deep Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

11 Posthumanism and Speculative Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Part III Technologies and Figurations of the Posthuman ....... 247

12 The Monstrous and Critical Posthumanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

Part IV Posthumanist Practices and Methodologies ........... 467

22 An Emerging Posthumanist Design Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469

25 The Incommensurability of Decolonizing Critical

Part V Posthumanist Transformations ...................... 671

31 Literature and Posthumanism ............................ 673

40 Environmental Posthumanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 881

Part VI Posthumanist In(ter)ventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 969

Dr. Stefan Herbrechter is Privatdozent at the English

Prof. Ivan Callus is Professor of English at the Uni-

Dr. Manuela Rossini is an independent researcher,

Dr. Marija Grech is a Lecturer in English Literature at

Dr. Megen de Bruin-Molé (@MegenJM, she/her) is a

Dr. Christopher John Müller is a senior lecturer in

Peter Adkins University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Megen de Bruin-Molé University of Southampton, Winchester, UK

Deborah Lawler-Dormer Curatorial, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

Hillary Predko School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston,

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 3

in its attempt at a more rigorous and more “philosophical” undertaking, is

In 2013, one of the ﬁrst comprehensive introductions to the emerging theoretical

Critical Posthumanism: An Overview

Posthumanism, with its renewed insistence on the question of what it means to be

technology, which tends to see it as an almost “fated” instrument of human devel-

boundary between science ﬁction and science fact, or “science faction”

history – is an essential aspect of the legitimation of posthumanism as a discourse.

continuity) is the technologically induced process of posthumanization it tracks (i.e.,

represents the logical outcome of a process of posthumanization with which human-

posthumanist preﬁgurations do not add up to a new comprehensive “history of the

To conclude, one might say that critical posthumanism proceeds genealogically in

might want to engage critically with humanism’s anthropocentric ideology. Crit-

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 29

techno-centered ﬁgure of the posthuman. Placing the human within a deep-time

The respective fortunes of the monuments of Upper Egypt and of

The Ptolemaic temple of Edfou, unlike those of the Delta, has

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