Posthuman Subjectivity in Contemporary Fiction

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

Horzum reads Griffith’s novel from material-feminist and material-ecocritical perspectives, highlighting how Ammonite is conducive to a contemporary posthumanist worldview. The author argues that the novel demonstrates the intertwined nature of human and viral bodies through its critique of androcentrism, often equated with anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment ‘Man.’ Horzum’s analysis illustrates how Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, Margaret Price’s bodymind, and Başak Ağın’s mattertext are always already enmeshed within one another, with examples from the text and with supports from the recent theoretical intersections of environmental humanities and posthumanities. Reading Marghe, the protagonist of the novel, as a posthuman subject who undergoes symbiotic experiences with the nonhuman and the planet, Horzum contends that the entangled bodies of the woman, the Jeep virus, and the planet GP unfold as an assemblage presenting an emergent relationality within the narrative. Noting these actors’ involvement in multiple becomings, the author pinpoints the flat ontology on which each actor dwells within an ongoing, dynamic process of narrating and becoming with each of its components. This process, according to Horzum, is one that creates and navigates the entire narrativity and horizontal relationality in Ammonite. This chapter concludes with the author’s indication of a never-ending dynamism where every non/living entity is a vibrant, lively agent.

Awarded ‘Distinction’ for my BDes Honours Dissertation: ‘BEYOND THE HUMAN: SUBJECTIVITY AT THE TRANSITION OF OUR POSTHUMAN FUTURE’ which articulates the significance of philosophical ‘posthumanism’ within our ever-transient world; citing contemporary technological developments, particularly in relation to the emerging technological revolution of ‘transhumanism' causing an ontological paradigm shift in human subjectivity and ethical consciousness of what is yet to come. ‘Posthumanism’ is a morally ambiguous concept that refers to notions about transcending what it means to be human by means of transformative technology, but to what level does the fusion between natural and artificial becomes indeterminable, as well as ethically unexplainable?

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley and the characters within, tell a prominent story of the posthuman condition in a society where humanist thought is the only conception of subjectivity. The use of not only posthuman studies, but more specifically studies including subjectivity was needed, in order to analyse the relationship between the humanist and the posthuman subjects. Theories of posthuman subjectivity and subjectivity by Rosi Braidotti and Michel Foucault were used in order to examine the posthuman condition of “Frankenstein’s monster” and the role of humanist vs. posthuman subjectivity between Victor Frankenstein and the monster. The tension between Victor and the monster was analysed in order to investigate the monster’s struggle at acquiring subjectivity in a posthuman state, which revealed why it is impossible for the humanist and posthuman subject to peacefully coexist.

A short paper, from a feminist perspective, covering the production of representational narrative space in Daphne Marlatt's novel, Ana Historic. Exploring space (both narrative and physical) in relation to the female body, identity, and subjectivity, this paper argues that the novel's narrator is able to re-member a forgotten woman from the obscurity of Vancouver's historical archives by imagining her the space within her narrative to exist and become.

Although trauma studies and critical posthumanism have simultaneously developed, only in the last few years have critics started to see the imbrications of both disciplines. Trauma studies and critical posthumanism acknowledge that the traditional definition of the human as autonomous, exceptional, self-willed, and rational subject, distinct from and dominating other life forms, needs to be revised and reconfigured. Whereas classical trauma theory dwells on the wound and the fragmentation that human subjectivity has endured and is concerned with the process of “acting out” and “working through” that will lead to the reintegration of the self’s bounded internal equilibrium, critical posthumanism sees the wound as an opportunity to redefine subjectivity as relational, interdependent, and co-evolving with other bodies, machines, and material forms. In the last few years, classical trauma studies has evolved from a Eurocentric, event-based, static conception of trauma to a more embedded and embodied vision of the trauma process that takes into account the ties of humans to other organic bodies, machines, and material forms. In turn, critical posthumanism has found in trauma studies the vocabulary to understand and deal with the wound that moving beyond human exceptionalism and exemptionalism produces on us.

1) “Posthumanistic”

2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”

These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.

Both of these poems present a far-distant future.

Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.