Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the (...) visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life. (shrink)

The article’s narrative begins by considering the negative attitude of women philosophers, particularly feminist philosophers, towards speculative realism (hereinafter referred to as SR) and object-oriented ontology (hereinafter referred to as OOO). This negation is partly due to anxieties of increased objectification. To dispel these anxieties, the article proposes such forms of objectivity as subject object, object as subject, experimental subject, disidentity, interject, hyposubject and others in their allures. In addition, it is suggested to re-evaluate the concept of thingification and return (...) its own philosophical valuable connotations to it. The article displays that object-oriented feminism (hereinafter referred to as OOF) demonstrates its potential political, erotic and ethical advantages. OOF is considered in connection with agential realism, new feminist materialism, xenofeminism, queer theory and other related conceptions. Together, they best outline the posthuman context. It is displayed that OOF fits into the post-postmodern posthuman speculative turn while retaining the actual features of the postmodern linguistic turn. Similarly, in the context of OOF, the turn from aesthetics to erotic, from production to seduction, etc., is understood. In the article also the inception, development process, collaborations with OOO philosophers and the influence of OOF on them are researched. As a result, the intra-action in-between treating women like objects and treating objects like women happens. Thus object-hood, affirming the democracy of any objects, appears instead of objectivation, which fully corresponds to the posthuman intentions of the OOF and contributes to the formation of the posthuman environment. The article is written on a material of contemporary art and literature and, at the same time, ecophilosophy and bioethics. (shrink)

This article examines the philosophical foundations of transhumanism in the context of humanity’s potential expansion beyond Earth. The posthuman subject is examined as one shaped by technological modifications, artificial intelligence, mind-machine interfaces, and the extreme conditions of extraterrestrial environments. In this framework, space is not only a physical frontier but a platform for radically rethinking the human condition. The author considers transhumanism not as a futurist utopia but as an ethical practice that transforms the relationships between embodiment, technology, and (...) morality. The article introduces conceptual tools such as adaptive subjectivity, moral recalibration, and cognitive modification within the framework of interstellar existence. Particular attention is paid to the problem of preserving moral continuity amid radical alterations of corporeality, as well as to forms of cooperation between humans and non-anthropomorphic agents in autonomous off-Earth communities. The article offers a critical examination of limit-case scenarios, including bodily deconstruction, consciousness emulation, and the emergence of algorithmic instances endowed with moral responsibility. The focus is not primarily on technologies themselves, but on the ontological shifts they trigger in how we understand freedom, autonomy, and the boundaries of the subject. The study lays the groundwork for a posthuman ethics applicable to extreme future environments in which core categories of humanism lose their intuitive self-evidence. (shrink)

This article discusses the role that algorithmic thinking and management play in health care and the kind of exclusions this might create. We argue that evidence‐based medicine relies on research and data to create pathways for patient journeys. Coupled with data‐based algorithmic prediction tools in health care, they establish what could be called health care algorithmics—a mode of management of healthcare that produces forms of algorithmic governmentality. Relying on a critical posthumanist perspective, we show how healthcare algorithmics is contingent on (...) the way authority over bodies is produced and how predictive health care algorithms can reproduce inequalities of the worlds from which they are made, centreing possible futures on existing normativities regulated through algorithmic biopower. In contrast to that, we explore posthuman speculative ethics as a way to challenge understanding of ‘ethics’ and ‘care’ in healthcare algorithmics. We suggest some possible avenues towards working speculative ethics into health care while still being critically attentive to algorithmic modes of management and prediction in health care. (shrink)

After describing Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as ontotheology, I unpack the metaphysical assumptions of several transhumanist philosophers. I claim that they deploy an ontology of power and that they also deploy a kind of theology, as Heidegger meant it. I also describe the way in which this metaphysics begets its own politics and ethics. In order to transcend the human condition, they must transgress the human.

This article contributes new insights to research on citizenship and young citizen subject formation in the context of the posthuman condition. Bringing a feminist materialist sensibility to bear, we explore citizenship as materially mobilised and produced. Considering the constitutive role that embodied and affective phenomena play in this production, we attend particularly to acts of citizenship. We show by way of vignettes how human subjects and material and natural objects ‘intra-act’ to produce civic capacities and bring citizen subjectivity into (...) effect. The forces by which these capacities are produced come into view inviting challenge to normative, human-centred framings of (youth) citizenship. The forces in question are various—affective, corporeal, temporal, spatial, spectral—but it is affect that provides the main impetus to action. Supplementing the more conventional frame of citizenship as belonging, we propose a framework of citizen becoming as a generative way to think and do citizenship in the posthuman present. The argument is made that analytic frames that attune to citizenship as an affective movement of becoming best address current conditions for producing citizen subjects and usefully extend individualised models of citizenship that have long influenced education. (shrink)

Obsession toward technology has a long background of parallel evolution between humans and machines. This obsession became irrevocable when AI began to be a part of our daily lives. However, this AI integration became a subject of controversy when the fear of AI advancement in acquiring consciousness crept among mankind. Artificial consciousness is a long-debated topic in the field of artificial intelligence and neuroscience which has many ethical challenges and threats in society ranging from daily chores to Mars missions. This (...) paper deals with the impact of AI-based science fiction films in society. This study aims to investigate the fascinating AI concept of artificial consciousness in light of posthuman terminology, technological singularity and superintelligence by analyzing the set of science fiction films to project the actual difference between science fictional AI and operational AI. Further, this paper explores the theoretical possibilities of artificial consciousness through a range of neuroscientific theories that are related to AI development. These theories are built toward prospective artificial consciousness in AI. This study discloses the posthuman fallacies that are built around the fear of AI acquiring artificial consciousness and its outcome. (shrink)

Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial travel, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology. Our approach accommodates racial passing and travel. It integrates a wide array of research across disciplines. It also helpfully distinguishes among grounds of racialization (...) and conditions facilitating impacts of such racialization. (shrink)

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, (...) the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence. (shrink)

The term “posthuman” has been used in very different senses by different authors.2 I am sympathetic to the view that the word often causes more confusion than clarity, and that we might be better off replacing it with some alternative vocabulary.

I develop an argument that believing in the survivability of a mind uploading procedure conveys value to its believers that is assessable independently of assessing the truth of the belief. Regardless of whether the first-order metaphysical belief is true, believing it conveys a kind of Darwinian fitness to the believer. Of course, a further question remains of whether having that Darwinian property can be a basis—in a rational sense of being a basis—for one’s holding the belief. I’ll also make some (...) remarks in the present article toward answering that latter question. (shrink)

The boundaries of the ethical have traditionally coincided with the boundaries of humanity. This, however, is no longer the case. Scientific developments, such as genetic engineering, stem-cell research, cloning, the Human Genome Project, new paleontological evidence, and the rise of neuropsychology call into question the very notion of human being and thus require a new conceptual map for ethical judgment. The contours of this map may be seen to emerge in works of science fiction (SF), which not only vividly dramatize (...) the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries, but also exert a powerful influence on culture, creating a feedback loop of images and ideas. This essay focuses on three SF topoi: the human/animal evolutionary boundary; non-biological subjectivity (AI); and the human/alien interaction. It explores each of these topoi in a selection of SF texts, including novels by H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem and others, showing how the boundaries of humanity are expanded and then exploded through the radical subversion of the tenets of liberal humanism. (shrink)

Within the context of neoliberal healthcare, nurses and other health professionals face working conditions that leave them perpetually feeling inadequate, as though they are not enough. They are consistently expected to achieve more with less resources. In such an environment, mere professionalism proves wholly insufficient, enforcing norms of altruism and kindness. Professionals must transcend this disciplinary tool and embody a ‘more‐than‐professional’ approach. This study, informed by critical posthumanism, employs three mythical archetypes—the Medusa, the Witch and the Siren—to illuminate potential avenues (...) for resistance against prevailing trends in healthcare. Drawing on the perspectives of Hélène Cixous, Silvia Federici and Jacques Rancière, we introduce a process of resistance for healthcare professionals pushing back against the challenges of crumbling healthcare systems. Cixous' feminist reimagining of Medusa symbolizes intensified embodied sensory experiences, emphasizing the power of irony, laughter and writing in highlighting the daily struggles faced by healthcare workers. Federici's depiction of the Witch exposes clandestine alliances among healthcare workers and patients, akin to a pact with the devil, countering the individualistic, alienating approach to care provision and resisting neoliberal pressures. The Witch archetype embodies resistance grounded in creativity against the commodification of public healthcare. Finally, Rancière's ‘politics of the Siren' offers a strategy for disrupting entrenched hierarchies from the underworld. Like Sirens, healthcare workers and patients can subversively transform their silence into songs of resistance, simultaneously operating from beneath the surface of accountability measures. Our intention is to showcase the emergence of posthuman ‘professionals’ who adapt by forging new modes of social relations in response to neoliberal constraints, straying from conventional, apolitical notions of ‘professionalism’. Drawing lessons from mythical figures of resistance offers a fresh understanding of subversion as a catalyst for social and political transformation within the healthcare sector. (shrink)

An original reading of fictional narratives that raise the question of what it means to be human in the face of rapidly developing bioenhancement technologies.

The advent of the posthuman era has blurred the boundary between the body and artifacts. Further, external materials and information are more deeply integrated into the body, making emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), a key driving force for shaping posthuman existence and promoting bodily evolution. Based on this, this study analyses the transformation process of three technological forms, namely tools, machines, and cyborgs, and reveals the construction of bodies and artifacts. From the phenomenological perspective, the essences of (...) body and artifact existences are reflected upon, and the ‘existence is construction’ viewpoint is proposed. Furthermore, a technological design concept, ‘bodioid’, is proposed to meticulously depict the characteristics of integrating similarities and differences toward unity between the body and artifacts, based on the theoretical foundation of technological mediation and the materialization of morality. Finally, through analogising the organizational form of language, the two key forms and specific mechanisms of ‘bodioid’ construction, namely ‘extension’ and ‘mirroring’, are indicated. Moreover, the posthuman existence landscape is discussed to provide theoretical insights into the study of the underlying philosophical principles of technological design. (shrink)

This book makes the unorthodox claim that there is no such thing as mental health. It also deglamourises nature-based psychotherapies, deconstructs therapeutic landscapes and redefines mental health and wellbeing as an ecological process distributed in the environment – rather than a psychological manifestation trapped within the mind of a human subject. Traditional and contemporary philosophies are merged with new science of the mind as each chapter progressively examples a posthuman account of mental health as physically dispersed amongst things – (...) emoji, photos, tattoos, graffiti, cities, mountains – in this precarious time labelled the Anthropocene. Utilising experimental walks, play scripts and creative research techniques, this book disrupts traditional notions of the subjective self, resulting in an Extended Body Hypothesis – a pathway for alternative narratives of human-environment relations to flourish more ethically. This transdisciplinary inquiry will appeal to anyone interested in non-classificatory accounts of mental health, particularly concerning areas of social and environmental equity – post-nature. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make (...) kin” with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces. (shrink)

What will be the posthuman society? As usual, there are two prospects: the pessimistic view and the optimistic view. According to pessimistic view, as technologies advance emerge new beings called as transhuman with enhanced intelligence and physical power, and extremely long lifespan and they will dominate humans. On the other hand, according to optimistic view, technology will benefit humans, so humans evolve via transhuman to posthuman with smart machines. There are complex issues tangled together in the dispute between (...) the rival views, especially such as the natural vs. artificial beings, human dignity and equality, and meaning of life. The aim of this article is to examine being and relation in posthuman age in the point of Nietzsche’s philosophy. I examine transhuman as a typical being of posthuman age and ressentiment as its relation respectively. Nietzsche has influenced the rise of transhumanism and posthumanism, as can be seen from direct or indirect confessions from pioneers of them, though there are debates about whether the influence is real or superficial. By paying particular attention to Nietzsche’s idea of Master and Slave, ressentiment, and Overman (Übermensch), I contend that (a) in the posthuman age new classes will emerge, which correspond to Master and Slave, (b) there will be a new ressentiment of Slaves toward their Masters, and (c) Overman as a creator of new value will be required in order to solve the problem by ressentiment. (shrink)

The chapter begins with discussions of personhood and how it might be defined in order to apply “personhood” to the examples discussed in the book. I draw from two famous essays by Mary Midgley and Mary Anne Warren, both of which engage the question of “what is a ‘human’ or ‘person’?” in different ways. I introduce my delineation of outward versus inward personhood, and use the HBO series Westworld (2016–2018) as an excellent example of how we see these distinctions in (...) play. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is particularly important to the idea of outward personhood, and self-awareness or consciousness is central to inward personhood. (shrink)

This paper presents the ethical nihilism that looms in the condition of sex in the posthuman. It takes over from the backdrop of Hauskeller’s description of the singularity as having a “glorious sex life.” While such a condition is heavily leaning towards hedonistic ethics, the paper critiques that it merely masks nihilistic ethics. The pleasurable picture of ‘happy rapists’ and ‘masturbatory sex’ in posthumanity with sexual affluence faces a disturbing nothingness that caters to the extreme possibility of being sexless. (...) Following from Žižek’s exposition of Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles, which runs counter to Houellebecq’s later novel The Possibility of an Island, the posthuman poses paradoxes that point to a nihilistic ethical domain. Later, the paper presents two paradoxes: First, the paradox of hedonism or happiness, and second, the paradox of wealth or nothingness. (shrink)

Introduction: cinema, globalization and the posthuman object -- Consuming objects -- Exotic objects -- Part objects: war, disavowal, and the logic of substitution -- Objects of desire -- Posthuman objects.

As long as technology has been interpreted as an expression of practical reasoning and an effort to alter the conditions of human existence, ethical language has been used to interpret and critique technology’s meaning. When this happens technology is more than implements that are expressions of human intelligence and used towards practical ends in the natural world.1 As Frederick Ferre points out, technology is always about knowledge and values—what people want and what they want to avoid—and to the extent that (...) technology increases power, one has to ask whether technology and/or the use towards which it is put is ethical.2 The ethicality of technology is based on whether that technology threatens or enhances the good for human beings. Therefore, any understanding of technology is never removed from ethics. Beyond the ethical evaluation of technology, technology is critiqued in light of whether it enhances or diminishes what it means to be human. (shrink)

인간 향상에 찬성하거나 반대하는 여러 논의들은 인간 본성에 관한 나름의 이해를 전제로 한다. 그러나 인간 본성의 개념과 그 쓸모에 관해 심각한 도전이 존재한다. 첫째, 인간에 관해 경험적으로 알려진 사실들과 조화될 수 있는 인간 본성이란 존재하지 않는다는 생각이 팽배하다. 둘째, 그런 인간 본성의 개념이 있다고 하더라도, 인간 향상을 둘러싼 윤리적 논쟁에서 아무런 역할을 하지 않는다는 반론이 존재한다. 본 논문은 인간과학과 양립가능한 인간 본성의 개념이 가능하며, 그것이 규범적 논의에서 일정한 역할을 수행한다고 주장 한다. 이를 위해, 인간 본성에 관한 전통적 입장과 현대적인 대안들을 (...) 검토하고, 여러 대안들 사이의 공통점을 발굴하여 그 개념이 규범적 논의에서 어떻게 기능하는지 살펴본다. (shrink)

이 글의 목적은 포스트휴머니즘에서 제기하는 낙관적 행복론과 향상의 윤리를 비판적으로 검토하는 것이다. 좀더 구체적으로 본다면, 이 글은 기술적 수단을 통해 감정을 제어하고, 인간의 덕성을 개선하여 행복에 도달하려는 ‘도덕적 향상’의 정당성에 의문을 제기한다. “포스트휴머니즘이 상정하는 ‘행복한 삶’, ‘행복한 세상’은 전통적 행복론과 어떤 차이가 있는가?”, “포스트휴머니즘의 맥락에서 전통적 인간 가치로서의 행복은 어떤 중요성을 지닐 수 있는가?”, “인간 가치와 도덕성이 흔들리는 위기의 시대에 포스트휴머니즘은 강력하고 확실한 도덕적 대안으로 작동할 수 있을까?”, “기술적 수단을 통해 향상된 포스트휴먼은 진정한 행복에 도달할 수 있을까?” 이러한 문제의식 아래 (...) 포스트휴머니즘의 행복론을 비판하기 위한 일종의 우회적 접근으로 행복 개념에 대한 기원적 탐색, 즉 쾌락적 행복과 자기실현적 행복의 특징을 살펴본다. 다음으로는 포스트휴머니즘의 행복론을 정서적 측면의 향상과 덕목 향상의 측면에서 고찰하면서, 도덕적 향상과 행복과의 연관성을 도출한다. 마지막으로는 앞선 논의를 기반으로 포스트휴머니즘이 상정하는 행복의 성격과 행복을 실현하는 주체의 문제, 행복에 이르기 위한 절차적 한계 등을 중심으로 포스트휴머니즘의 행복론을 비판적으로 고찰하면서, 인간 향상 기술을 통해 행복에 도달할 수 있다는 포스트휴머니즘의 전략에 문제가 있음을 보여줄 것이다. 결론적으로 기술적 수단을 통한 감정의 제어는 자기실현적 측면에서 행복의 본질을 위협하고, 도덕적 향상은 인간을 도덕적으로 향상시키지 못하며, 결국 진정한 의미에서 인간을 행복하게 하지 못한다는 점을 강조할 것이다. (shrink)

Approaches the direct experience of gaming by asking: what does it mean for the player to enter the machinic "world" of the game? What forms of subjectivity does the game offer to the player? What happens to consciousness itself when one plays?