Book "Philosophical Posthumanism"

Philosophical Posthumanism “In this stunning book Francesca Ferrando paints a clear and inspirational picture of the future of humankind. Her book is both thorough and exciting. It is a delight to see that she does not simply toe the line and follow ‘official’ thinking, but quite rightly the philosophy of Nietzsche and Lamarck gets an airing. If you want to know what Posthumanism is all about and peek into our future world, then dive into the book and wallow in its pages.” — Kevin Warwick, Emeritus Professor, Coventry University and Reading University, UK Theory Series editor: Rosi Braidotti Theory is back! The vitality of critical thinking in the world today is palpable, as is a spirit of insurgency that sustains it. Theoretical practice has exploded with renewed energy in media, society, the arts and the corporate world. New generations of critical “studies” areas have grown alongside the classical radical epistemologies of the 1970s: gender, feminist, queer, race, postcolonial and subaltern studies, cultural studies, film, television and media studies. This series aims to present cartographic accounts of emerging critical theories and to reflect the vitality and inspirational force of on-going theoretical debates. Editorial board Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington, USA) Simone Bignall (Flinders University, Australia) Judith Butler (University of Berkeley, USA) Christine Daigle (Brock University, Canada) Rick Dolphijn (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London, UK, and University of London Institute in Paris, France) Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) Achille Mbembe (University Witwatersrand, South Africa) Henrietta Moore (University College London, UK) Titles in the series so far Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova Conflicting Humanities, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl with James Burton Philosophical Posthumanism Francesca Ferrando BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Francesca Ferrando, 2019 Francesca Ferrando has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Jason Hopkins / abhominal.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5950-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5948-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-5949-8 Series: Theory Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. To us, human and posthuman beings. To existence. Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface: The Posthuman as Exuberant Excess Rosi Braidotti xi Bibliographic Note xvii Introduction: From Human to Posthuman 1 Navigational Tool: A Glossary of Questions 7 Part One What Is Philosophical Posthumanism? 1 Premises 21 2 From Postmodern to Posthuman 24 3 Posthumanism and Its Others 27 4 The Birth of Transhumanism 29 5 Contemporary Transhumanism(s) 31 6 The Roots of Transhumanism 33 7 Transhumanism and Techno-Enchantment 35 8 Posthumanist Technologies as Ways of Revealing 39 9 Antihumanism and the Übermensch 45 10 Philosophical Posthumanism 54 Interlude 1 60 Part Two Of Which “Human” Is the Posthuman a “Post”? 11 The Power of the Hyphen 65 12 Humanizing 68 13 The Anthropological Machine 73 14 Almost, Human 77 15 Technologies of the Self as Posthumanist (Re)Sources 82 16 The Epiphany of Becoming Human 85 17 Where Does the Word “Human” Come From? 89 18 Mammals or Homo sapiens? 93 Interlude 2 98 viii Contents Part Three Have Humans Always Been Posthuman? 19 Post-Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene 103 20 Posthuman Life 109 a. Bios and Zoē 109 b. Animate/Inanimate 110 21 Artificial Life 115 22 Evolving Species 120 23 Posthumanities 124 24 Posthuman Bioethics 128 25 Human Enhancement 133 26 Cognitive Autopoiesis 140 27 Posthumanist Perspectivism 148 28 From New Materialisms to Object-Oriented Ontology 158 29 Philosophical Posthumanist Ontology 166 30 The Multiverse 171 a. The Multiverse in Science 171 b. The Multiverse in Philosophy 175 c. A Thought Experiment: The Posthuman Multiverse 177 Interlude 3 183 Concluding Celebration 185 Notes 191 Bibliography 231 Index 259 Acknowledgments My sincerest thanks to Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Prof. Francesca Brezzi, and Prof. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, the trinity of wisdom. Academic Tribe Many thanks to Prof. Kevin Warwick, Prof. Achille Varzi, Prof. Luisa Passerini, Prof. Gianni Vattimo, Prof. Giacomo Marramao, Prof. Simona Marino, Prof. Angelo Morino, Prof. Evi Sampanikou, Dr. Natasha Vita-More, Prof. David Roden, and Jaime del Val, for their inestimable intellectual, human, and posthuman support. Many thanks to the Sainati Prize, the ETS publishing house, Bloomsbury, Frankie Mace, and the anonymous reviewers, for supporting this project with passion, vision, and patience. Many thanks to NYU-Liberal Studies, for believing in my work and offering me the ideal place to share, teach, and learn. Many thanks to all my amazing students, who inspire my life every day and who taught me how to teach the posthuman in clear and engaging ways: your feedback has been most precious in the articulation of this book. Special thanks to the Beyond Humanism Network, the NY Posthuman Research Group, the co-organizers—(in alphabetic order): Kevin Lagrandeur, Farzad Mahootian, Jim McBride, and Yunus Tuncel—the World Posthuman Society, and Thomas Steinbuch, for nourishing the posthuman paradigm shift and constantly inspiring intellectual vision. I would also recognize my translators in other languages, for enabling the posthuman discussion to flourish outside of the English-speaking world—in particular Dr. Angela Balzano and Prof. Roman Stansiesko. My heartfelt thanks to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre, Italy; the Department of Philosophy and the “IRWGS” Research Center of Columbia University, United States; the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England; “CIRSDe,” the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Turin; and the Doctorate of Gender at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. x Acknowledgments Family Tribe Special thanks, full of love and gratitude, to Sofia Sahara Shanti, for coming into my life—you are pure enlightenment; to Thomas Roby, for his support, love, and presence in my life; to Renata Prato, not only for having conceived me and loved me since my birth, but also for sending the book to the Sainati Prize; to Ugo Ferrando, for nurturing my love for philosophy and for believing in my ideas. I thank Tiziana Lacchio, for her love, strength, and precision; Ellen Delahunty Roby, for her generosity, love, and contribution to the development of my thought in English; Barbara and Federica Ferrando, for inspiring my life; Tom Roby and his family, for believing in my vision; Ida Bacigalupo, Agostino Prato, Caterina Manassero, and Giovanni Ferrando—you are always in my heart; Ridgewood, and all the amazing people at the Golden Oasis. I am also grateful to Tristan, Alisa and Remi, Garon and Gisella, Maria, Marisa and Eileen, for their presence in our life. World Tribe Much gratitude to the posthuman community worldwide—thanks for supporting my work and vision with your e-mails, feedbacks, comments, and likes. Thanks to all the philosophers who shaped my thought—in particular Friedrich Nietzsche and Rosi Braidotti. Thanks to feminism, anarchism, yoga, mindfulness, Buddhism, and other movements that have greatly influenced my life. Thanks to everyone in Italy and, in general, Europe, in New York and across the United States, in Costa Rica, Morocco, India, and across planet Earth, for supporting my existential research with great kindness; to my body, for sustaining the incandescent rhythms of philosophical writing; to you, who will read this work and share the exciting posthuman wave. Also, a special thanks to this book, Philosophical Posthumanism, which has exponentially expanded my existential awareness. And deep ontological gratitude to existence. Thank You. Preface: The Posthuman as Exuberant Excess Rosi Braidotti Ferrando’s brand of posthuman thought is as far removed from a sense of terminal crisis of the human, as posthumanism gets. What Ferrando enacts instead is a generous overflowing of ideas, affects, desires, and aspirations, which she operationalizes across a broad span of discourses within the humanities. They include strict disciplines, such as philosophy, and more interdisciplinary areas, such as media, gender, and postcolonial studies, but they are never limited to any one of them. Ferrando is both a classicist and a futurist thinker: erudite and upbeat, committed but critical, conceptual and poetic, at once; she combines and holds in balance potentially contradictory ideas and affects. In so doing, she forges an original argumentative style and produces texts that inform, stimulate, and provoke. What allows Francesca Ferrando to reconcile these tensions and lift them to a higher qualitative level of discourse is her appreciation of the paradoxical structure of the posthuman condition itself. I have defined the posthuman as a convergence phenomenon between post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism, that is to say, the critique of the universal ideal of the Man of reason on the one hand and the reject of species supremacy on the other. Ferrando’s work is situated within this turbulent field and the force that inspires her to deterritorialize both humanism and anthropocentrism is exuberant excess. Ferrando understands excess as a form of over-compilation and saturation of concepts that results in pushing them to their outmost boundaries and ends up exploding them. It is almost a methodological application of the concept of desire as overflowing, as opposed to desire as lack; that is to say, it resonates with Deleuze’s position, not Lacan, with Spinoza, rather than Hegel. This exuberant mode, however, is not an end in itself, nor is it primarily or exclusively critical: it both expresses and sustains productive doses of creativity. What Ferrando aspires to—that is to say, the conceptual desire that animates her work—is to open up new horizons of thinking to express speculative insights that are still in the realm of the “not yet,” and yet are urgently needed. This strategic use of excess therefore allows Francesca Ferrando to overflow the established structures of philosophical xii Preface thinking in order to design the contour of a new image of thought and of the thinking subject. Thinking for Ferrando is not the exclusive prerogative of Man/ Anthropos, but is rather distributed across a wide spectrum of human and nonhuman entities. This produces also a new understanding of the human, not as an autonomous agent endowed with transcendental consciousness, but rather an immanent—embodied and embedded relational—entity that thinks with and through multiple connections to others, both human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic others. This vision of the subject, and the generous embrace of otherness that defines it, makes for heady reading at times, but the theoretical complexity exposed is compensated by the visionary force of Ferrando’s text. In Excess of Humanism Over the last decades, while the academic humanities circles lived through the fallout of philosophical post-structuralism and deconstruction, and their respective brands of critical anti-humanism, many new developments also took place. A radical wave of theory that included feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist critical theory, environmental activists, disability rights advocates, queer and LGBT theorists questioned the scope, the founding principles, and the achievements of European humanism and its role in the project of Western modernity. These movements questioned more specifically the idea of the human that is implicit in the humanist ideal of “Man,” as the alleged “measure of all things.” This ideal combines individual physical perfection with intellectual and moral perfectibility. Over the centuries, it also has turned into an exceptionalist civilizational standard that claims privileged access to self-reflexive reason for the human species as a whole and for European culture more specifically. Faith in reason ties in with the teleological prospect of the rational progress of a Eurocentric vision of humanity through the deployment of science and technology. According to Foucault’s sharp analysis of the Death of Man written in 1966, even Marxism, through the method of historical materialism, continued to assign to the subject of European thought a royal place as the motor of human social and cultural evolution. Moreover, rational self-assurance has also played a major historical role in both justifying and paving the ground for a civilizational model which equated Europe with the universal powers of reason and progress, a claim that became central to the colonial ideology of European expansion. Ferrando’s work is nurtured and inspired by these fundamental philosophical critiques of humanism, but not confined by them. Whereas the poststructuralist Preface xiii and the postmodern generations embraced anti-humanism as both a theoretical and political project, de-linking subjectivity from universalistic postures in order to produce more precise analyses of the power relations that structure it, other movements handled humanism with greater care. Feminist politics of location, for instance, valued both the lived experience and the specificity of female embodiment and took the “standpoint theory” approach as foundational. Although it paid great attention to the diversity among women, the subject of feminism was not relinquished, but rather re-cast as a nomadic non-unitary singularity. This subject produces embodied and embedded, affective and relational situated knowledges as both the method and the political tactic for grounding micro-political analyses of power and for positing workable alternatives. This immanent and materialist approach, favored by feminist, anti-racist, and other social movements, developed its own variations of radical neo-humanism in a manner that shows up distinctly in different moments of Ferrando’s work. The radical criticism of classical humanism had targeted two interrelated ideas: the self-other dialectics, on the one hand, and the notion of difference as pejoration, on the other. Otherness defined as the negative opposite of the dominant subject position and inscribed in a hierarchical scale that spells inferiority is challenged by a situated or an immanent method, inspired by Spinozist neo-materialism. The dialectics of difference in fact has dire consequences for real-life people who happen to coincide with categories of negative difference: women, indigenous, and earth “others,” whose social and symbolic existence is precarious and exposed to all kinds of risk. Their own bodies raise crucial issues of power, domination, and exclusion that look to humanism as a possible solution. A variety of forms of revised humanism is present also in postcolonial theory, inspired by the anticolonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon and of his teacher, Aimé Césaire. They took humanism as an unfulfilled project in Europe, betrayed by imperialist violence and structural racism, but argued that there exist many other brands of humanism in other cultures. This position is echoed by environmental and transnational environmental justice activists, who combine the critique of the epistemic and physical violence of modernity with that of European colonialism. Ferrando’s take on humanism, grounded in the classics of the Italian Renaissance and fuelled by contemporary post- and trans-humanist literature, is structured by all these critical concerns and yet is in excess of them. She spins her own web across multiple discursive communities, honoring them all, but pledging allegiance to none. xiv Preface In Excess of Anthropocentrism The debate on displacing anthropocentrism is of a different order and pertains to a different genealogical line from the critique of humanism, though it often intersects with it. The critique of species supremacy—the violent rule of Anthropos over this planet—opens another line of criticism of the parameters that define the human itself. “Man” is called to task as the representative of a hierarchical and violent species whose greed and rapacity are enhanced by a combination of scientific advances and global economic domination. As Ferrando’s work clearly explains, neither “Man” as the universal humanistic measure of all things nor Anthropos as dominant species can claim the central position in the task of thinking. In the posthuman convergence that frames the contemporary world, the power of thinking is distributed across many species and often executed by technologically mediated knowledge production systems, run by networks and computational processes. Biogenetic and computational advances have challenged the separation of bios, as exclusively human life, from zoē, the life of animals and nonhuman entities. What comes to the fore instead is a human/nonhuman continuum, which is consolidated by pervasive technological mediation. The political implications of this shift are significant. If the revisions of Humanism advanced by feminist, queer, anti-racist, ecological, and postcolonial critiques empowered the sexualized and racialized—but still human—“others,” the crisis of Anthropos enlists the naturalized others. Animals, insects, plants, cells, bacteria, and in fact the planet and the cosmos are turned into a political arena. These nonhuman entities and agents play a significant role in Ferrando’s work, where they are reviewed and reconceptualized like “conceptual personae.” Their primary function is to challenge the nature-culture distinction and, with it, to claim the anthropocentric exceptionalism. What is striking about Ferrando’s work is also her capacity to rejoice especially in the radical otherness of nonhuman species—their diversity becoming a source of wonder and admiration, rather than fear and control. Another remarkable aspect of Francesca Ferrando’s work is the gift of multiple literacies. The readers will be struck by the ease with which she transits from the culture of the humanities to that of science and technology, avoiding any dichotomy between the two. It is as if Ferrando demanded that history, literature, philosophy, and the study of religion should develop planetary perspectives in a geo-centered, mediated, and non-anthropocentric frame of reference. This demands a lot of the traditional humanities disciplines, because they are so Preface xv deeply structured by anthropocentric habits that cannot easily contemplate the de-centering of anthropocentrism, let alone the specter of human extinction. But Ferrando’s scholarship has another level of complexity, in so far as it relies on radical interdisciplinary fields of enquiry like gender, feminist, queer, race, and postcolonial studies, as well as cultural studies, film, television, and media studies. These “studies” areas have exposed Eurocentrism, sexism, racism, and methodological nationalism as the major flaws at the core of the humanities. They expand and to some degree explode the boundaries of the humanities disciplines. It bears repeating, however, that acknowledging the compatibility of scientific reason and violence does not inevitably result in a refusal of humanism. What emerges instead is a set of alternative visions of the human and of the relational webs it is caught in, including innovative reformulations of a humanism for the twenty-first century. Being profoundly technophilic, and at home in the mediated word of contemporary science and technology, Ferrando has perfected both the critique of humanism and the rejection of anthropocentrism. In keeping with the feminist tradition of integrating feminist body politics into science and technology studies, however, Ferrando aims to change the rules of the scientific game altogether. Following Haraway and Braidotti, she wants to replace anthropocentrism with a set of relational links to human and nonhuman others, including indigenous peoples, LGBT people, other species, technological artifacts, and cosmic others. The collective feminist exit from Anthropos does not mark a crisis, but the explosion of multiple new beginnings. Although Ferrando is very aware of the inhuman(e) aspects of our technologically advanced historical condition, namely mass migration, wars, terrorism, evictions, xenophobia, and expulsions, or rather because of it, she stresses the importance of solidarity, empathy, and ultimately love. There is a deep affective vein running through this book: it includes disloyalty to one’s species, but is enriched by compassion and by the awareness that critical distance does not come easy, but requires collaborative effort. Even the most technophilic among us must admit that the liberating and even transgressive potential of the new technologies, more often than not, clashes with the entrenched conservatism of the financial and other social institutions that support them. The posthuman turn is charged with affective forces, even with passion, which, as we all know, includes pathologies and even suffering. Furthermore, Ferrando’s multispecies discursive universe invites us to rethink sexuality without and beyond genders, starting from a vitalist return to xvi Preface the polymorphous and perverse structure of human and nonhuman sexuality. Ever mindful of the Italian school of sexual difference, she also reappraises the generative powers of female embodiment, including its reproductive capacities—maternal materialism at work. Ferrando’s approach reminds us that sexuality may be caught in the socialized sex-gender binary, but is not reducible to it. The binary mechanism of capture of the gender system moreover does not alter the fact that sexuality carries transversal, structural, and vital connotations. As life-force, sexuality provides a non-essentialist and trans-species ontological structure for the organization of human and nonhuman affectivity and desire. In Ferrando’s intellectual universe, it involves a phantasmagoria of possible sexes and relations that include hybrid cross-fertilizations and generative encounters with multiple human and nonhuman others. The affect that most struck me upon reading this text is the profound trust Ferrando expresses in critical thinking as a creative practice. She practices a joyful de-familiarization that can help us take distance from old habits of thought, such as anthropocentrism, and rejoice in them. She seduces us into unfamiliar territories, going with the flow of non-unitary reason, and is elated rather than frightened by the new horizons of thought and practice that she discovers. Ferrando’s culture of methodological excess supports the process of re-composing what I call, citing Deleuze, a “missing” people. She longs for an intercultural, intraspecies, and mediated community that could be brought into being by a generous gesture of collective self-styling, or mutual specification. For her, the posthuman is never post-political, but ever transversal and relational. This book demonstrates convincingly that dis-identification from familiar values—or de-territorializations—can not only be emotionally demanding but also enables creative nomadic shifts. They act like conceptual and affective stepping stones toward the new, the “not yet.” For Francesca, this move is not a tragic break, but rather a rapturous departure—the line of flight of a queen bee. Bibliographic Note This work is a revised and updated translation of Dr. Francesca Ferrando’s book Il Postumanesimo filosofico e le sue alterità published by ETS in 2016 and based on her PhD dissertation, which was the recipient of the “Sainati” Philosophical Prize awarded by the president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, in 2014. Introduction: From Human to Posthuman Posthumanism is the philosophy of our time. This shows in the great interest that is developing around the theme, in the multiplication of conferences, studies, and reflections around the world. “Posthuman” has become a key concept in the contemporary academic debate, to cope with the urgency for an integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological, as well as scientific and bio-technological developments, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The philosophical landscape which has since developed includes several movements and schools of thought. The label “posthuman” is often evoked in a generic and all-inclusive way to indicate any of these different perspectives, creating methodological and theoretical confusion between experts and non-experts alike.1 Specifically, “posthuman” has become an umbrella term to include Posthumanism (Philosophical, Cultural, and Critical); Transhumanism (in its variants as Extropianism, Liberal Transhumanism, and Democratic Transhumanism, among other currents); New Materialisms (a specific feminist development within the posthumanist frame); the heterogeneous landscape of Anti-humanism; the field of Object-Oriented Ontology; Posthumanities and Metahumanities. This book attempts, on one side, to highlight the similarities and differences between the various terms and schools of thought, tracing their genealogies, analogies, and overlaps. On the other, it offers an original contribution to Philosophical Posthumanism, developing its theoretical endeavors on ontological, epistemological, and ethical grounds. The book is divided into three parts developed around three thematic nodes, identified in the following questions: 1. What Is Philosophical Posthumanism? 2. Of Which “Human” Is the Posthuman a “Post”? 3. Have Humans Always Been Posthuman? The three questions do not constitute sharp thematic divisions, but they shall be regarded as suggestions which inform the development of the discourse. For this reason, the chapters, through which each part is articulated, are successively numbered across the three parts, to emphasize the fluidity of the narrative path. 2 Philosophical Posthumanis As a navigational tool, specific questions have been implemented throughout the text, to assist the readers as they move through the revealing narrative (the full list of questions is available at the end of this introduction). Notes section offer a necessary contribution to the text and shall be considered an integral part of narration. Going back to the three thematic nodes, a historical recollection of Philosophical Posthumanism (Chapters 1 to 10) corresponds to the first question. Philosophical Posthumanism is presented as a recent development of Critical and Cultural Posthumanism, which arose within the field of literary criticism— from the first appearance of the term (Hassan 1977) until the 1990s and the publication of the key text How We Became Posthuman (1999) by Katherine Hayles. With respect to Critical and Cultural Posthumanism, Philosophical Posthumanism, which is still a philosophy in the making, has developed a more strictly philosophical approach, from the first decade of the twenty-first century until today. Its genealogy, traced from the “Letter on Humanism” (1947) by Martin Heidegger, passes through Postmodernism, the studies of the difference (including, among others, gender studies, critical race studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, disability studies), and cyborg theory. Philosophical Posthumanism is genealogically related to the radical deconstruction of the “human,” which began as a political cause in the 1960s, turned into an academic project in the 1970s, and evolved into an epistemological approach in the 1990s, resulting in a multiplication of situated perspectives. While aware of its epistemic limitations (as theorized by and for humans), the non-hierarchical perspective of the posthuman does not grant any primacy to the human and articulates the conditions for an epistemology concerned with nonhuman experience as site of knowledge—from the nonhuman animal (Wolfe 2010) to artificial intelligence, robotics, and even unknown forms of life (Badmington 2004). Such a comprehensive approach is rooted in the recognition that the difference is already constitutive of the human species, with all of its gendered, ethnic, social, and individual varieties. In other words, the posthuman recognition of nonhuman alterities starts with the recognition of human alterities. Posthumanism can be considered as a second generation of Postmodernism, leading the deconstruction of the human to its extreme consequences by bringing to its theoretical revision speciesism, that is, the privilege of some species over others. The onto-epistemological openness of Posthumanism is placed in a hybrid vision of humanity itself: through the cyborg,2 specifically located in the critical reflection of Donna Haraway (1985), Posthumanism has internalized the hybrid as its point of departure (that is, an origin which has no origin3). On the one hand, Posthumanism can be seen as a Introduction 3 “post-humanism,” that is, a radical critique of humanism and anthropocentrism; on the other hand, in its significations as a “posthuman-ism,” it recognizes those aspects which are constitutively human, and nevertheless, beyond the constitutive limits of the human in the strict sense of the term. Posthumanism is a praxis, as well as a philosophy of mediation, which manifests post-dualistic, post-centralizing, comprehensive, and “acknowledging” types of approaches, in the sense that they acknowledge alterity and recognize themselves in alterity (this term is particularly suitable because of its double signification of acknowledging and expressing gratitude—modalities paired in the philosophy of “acknowledgment”). Posthumanism will then be compared with other currents of thought (Chapter 3), starting with the main distinction between Posthumanism and Transhumanism (Chapters 4 to 7). Both movements arose more clearly in the 1990s, orientating their interests around similar topics, but they share neither the same roots nor perspectives. While Posthumanism generated out of Postmodernism, Transhumanism seeks its origins in the Enlightenment, and therefore does not expropriate humanism; on the contrary, it can be defined as an “ultra-humanism” (Onishi 2011). In order to greatly enhance human abilities, Transhumanism opts for a radical transformation of the human condition by existing, emerging, and speculative technologies (as in the case of regenerative medicine, radical life extension, mind uploading, and cryonics). For some transhumanists, human beings may eventually transform themselves so radically as to become posthuman (the concept of posthuman itself is interpreted in a specific transhumanist way). Here, it is important to note that Transhumanism is not an homogeneous movement. In particular, we will present some of the main voices of Extropianism (More 1990, 1998) (Vita-More 2004), Democratic Transhumanism (Hughes 2004), and the Singularity (Kurzweil 2005). These various currents, while differing on certain aspects, share the main goal of Transhumanism, which is human enhancement. More in general, if the strength of the transhumanist vision consists in its openness to the possibilities offered by science and technology, therein lays its weakness, which can be detected in a techno-reductionist assimilation of existence, and in a progressivist approach that does not leave space to deconstructionist practices. If rationality and progress are at the core of the transhumanist postulation, a radical critique of those same notions is the kernel of Antihumanism, a philosophical position which, although sharing its roots in Postmodernity with the posthuman, should not be assimilated to it (Chapter 9). The deconstruction of the human, which is almost absent in the transhumanist reflection, is crucial 4 Philosophical Posthumanis to Antihumanism. This is one of its main points in common with Posthumanism, while their main distinction is already embedded in their morphologies and, specifically, in their composition: the structural opposition implied by the prefix “anti-” has been challenged by the posthumanist post-dualistic process- ontological horizon. Posthumanism, after all, is aware of the fact that hierarchical humanistic presumptions cannot be easily dismissed or erased. In this respect, more than with Foucault’s death of Man, the posthuman is in tune with Derrida’s deconstructive approach (1967). In this chapter, the Übermensch of Friedrich Nietzsche (1882; 1883–5) will be related, from different perspectives, to both Post- and Trans- and Anti-Humanism. Another aspect which will be presented in a comparative way within the posthuman scenario (understood here in its broadest sense) is technology and its potentials offered to the revisitation of the notion of the human (Chapter 8). In the transhumanist reflection, such a focus is mostly centralized and instrumentalized: technology resolves as a means and an end for obtaining specific goals—from increasingly advanced technology to immortality, redefined as radical life extension. Philosophical Posthumanism, on one side, explores technology as a mode of revealing, passing through “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953) by Martin Heidegger, and thus re-accessing its ontological and existential potentials; on the other, the notion of technologies of the self (Foucault 1988) becomes significant in a posthumanist scenario which has deconstructed the dualism Self/Others (Chapter 10). We can now address the second question: Of which “human” is the posthuman a “post”? Historically, the recognition of the human status has been regularly switched on and off. In Western history, for instance, the concept of the “human” has been reinscribed within categories marked by exclusionary practices. Sexism, racism, classism, ageism, homophobia, and ableism, alongside other forms of discrimination, have informed the written and unwritten laws of recognition as to who was to be considered human. For instance, slaves and women, among many other categories, have represented the margins of the human, the chaos, the non-disciplinable (Chapter 14). In Western history, “human” referred, more specifically, to white, male, heterosexual and propertied citizens, who would comply with institutionalized norms, as well as with ethnic, cultural, and physical characteristics. In order to comply with a comprehensive and “acknowledging” approach to the notion of the human, one consequent question needs to be asked: How have the (categories of) humans who have been repeatedly dehumanized dealt with their humanness? How have they reconfigured such a denied status? In order to conceive a posthumanist approach, it is first necessary to reflect on the meaning of the notion of the “human,” both by investigating on the Introduction 5 technologies of the self historically developed by the human “others” (Chapter 15) and by disclosing the ways by which its hegemonic groups have formed and established. We will inquire into the process of humanizing—here conceived as a verb, “to humanize” (Chapter 12) rather than as an “anthropological machine” (Agamben 2002) (Chapter 13)—and then delve into the semantics and pragmatics supporting the term “human” (Chapter 16). Specifically, the human will be investigated both in its Latin etymology (Humanitas) (Chapter 17) and in its taxonomic classification as Homo sapiens (Chapter 18). Such inquiries are necessary in order to reflect upon the relevance of postulating a “post” to the notion of the human. On the one hand, the posthuman must be aware of its genealogical relationship to the human, and thus delve into the historical as well as philosophical meanings of what this may entail. On the other hand, Posthumanism successfully manifests its critical commitment and establishes its approach through the conditions of the “post” (Chapter 11). The posthuman destabilizes the limits and symbolic borders posed by the notion of the human. Dualisms such as human/animal, human/machine, and, more in general, human/nonhuman are re-investigated through a perception which does not work on oppositional schemata. In the same way, the posthuman deconstructs the clear division between life/death, organic/synthetic, and natural/artificial. We are now entering the domain of the third question: Have humans always been posthuman? Here, we will investigate the “bio” realm: life and biology (Chapters 19 to 22) as well as bioethics and the biotechnological evolutions of posthumanities (Chapters 23 to 25). The anthropocentric choice of privileging bios, instead of zoē, exposes the exclusivist domain of “life” itself, which is more clearly presented as a human notion based on the human cognitive apparatus. In this part, the posthuman perspectivist approach will be acknowledged in its embodied character, delineated historically through the proposal of Friedrich Nietzsche (1887; 1901/6) (Chapter 27) and biologically through a critical appraisal of the concept of “autopoiesis” (Maturana/Varela 1972) (Chapter 26). Ultimately, Posthumanism challenges biocentrism, sentiocentrism, vitalism, and the concept of life itself, blurring the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, in a quantum approach to the physics of existence. It is now time to access the third level of reconfiguration of the posthuman, which is more specifically ontological. We will start by investigating the dynamic and pluralistic natureculture4 of matter (Chapter 29) through quantum physics and the string theory, philosophically explored within the frame of New Materialisms (Chapter 28), and in particular, through the reflection of Karen Barad (2007) and her relational ontology. Within this frame, 6 Philosophical Posthumanis the human is perceived not as a single agent, but as part of a semiotic, material, as well as multidimensional network (Latour 1987, 2005); in this sense, the human is already posthuman. Evolution, in its materialist configurations, can be approached as a technology of existence; every material manifestation may be perceived as nodes of becoming, in a pluralistic monist, as well as a monistic pluralist approach to the multiverse. The notion of the multiverse (Chapter 30) refers to the scientific investigations on matter from the micro to the macro level of materialization, which recently brought different fields (from quantum physics to cosmology and astrophysics) to the same hypothetical conclusion: this universe might be one of many. The hypothesis of the multiverse is inherently posthuman; it not only stretches any universe-centric perspective (problematizing the inclusive, but still centralized, notion of a universe), but materializes the dissolution of strict binaries, dualistic modes, and exclusivist approaches. And still, despite the undoubtedly nonhuman-centric character of this notion, the hypothesis of the multiverse has been mostly developed in human-centric and solipsistic terms, both scientifically (Everett 1956) and philosophically (Lewis 1986). Instead, we will revisit such a notion through the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and develop it speculatively, not by counting on any essentialism, polarity, or strict dualism but by relying on a hybrid, mediated, and process-ontological perspective. We will present such an interpretation of the multiverse, which we will refer to as the “posthuman multiverse,” as both a thought experiment, which might expand a speculative perception of the self, and a material hypothesis, which may conceal a possible physics outfit of the actual multiverse. Such a hypothesis, based on the deconstruction of the Self/Others paradigm, entails that matter, while constituting this universe, it would also be actualizing an indefinite number of other universes, in a process of both relationality and autonomy. This original acquisition of meaning of the multiverse reveals itself inductive for a posthuman ontology which materializes the posthumanist overcoming of any strict dichotomy. Navigational Tool: A Glossary of Questions This is a glossary of the main questions that the book covers in each section. Part 1 What Is Philosophical Posthumanism? 1. Premises a. Are these scenarios inducing a paradigm shift in the ontological and epistemological perception of the human? Is this shift “post-human”? b. Where does this easiness on the use of the “post” come from? c. How to define Philosophical Posthumanism? 2. From Postmodern to Posthuman a. What does Posthumanism mean? b. Where does Posthumanism come from? c. When was the term “posthuman” coined? d. What is Critical Posthumanism? e. What is Cultural Posthumanism? f. Which movements go under the umbrella term “posthuman”? 3. Posthumanism and Its Others a. Within the umbrella term “posthuman,” which movements are more often confused? b. What are the main differences between Transhumanism and Posthumanism? c. Are “we” already posthuman? 4. The Birth of Transhumanism a. What are the genealogical roots of Transhumanism? b. Why was Julian Huxley’s vision anthropocentric? 8 Philosophical Posthumanism 5. Contemporary Transhumanism(s) a. What is Transhumanism? b. What do all these movements share? c. How can human enhancement be achieved? d. What is Extropianism? 6. The Roots of Transhumanism a. Where does Transhumanism come from? b. Why is the transhumanist embracing of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment problematic, from a posthumanist standpoint? 7. Transhumanism and Techno-Enchantment a. Why is technology central to the discussion on Transhumanism? b. How can the human be redesigned, according to Transhumanism? c. How are the histories and herstories of the historical human body going to affect our posthuman future? 8. Posthumanist Technologies as Ways of Revealing a. Why is technology relevant to the discussion on Posthumanism? b. Why Heidegger? c. What is technology? d. Do we really know what we are talking about when we reflect on technology? e. What does “poiesis” mean? f. Why is modern technology an Enframing? g. What is this danger that Heidegger is referring to? h. When did this switch in worldviews take place? 9. Antihumanism and the Übermensch a. What is the main characteristic of Antihumanism? b. In what do Antihumanism and Posthumanism harmonize, and in what do they differ? c. What does episteme mean, according to Foucault? d. If, according to Foucault, the current notion of “man” is near its end, when did such a notion come along? Navigational Tool 9 e. What does Übermensch mean? f. Why is Nietzsche’s Übermensch relevant to the posthuman discussion? g. What are the metamorphoses of the spirit, according to Nietzsche? h. Would Nietzsche have supported human enhancement? i. What about the overhuman in relation to Philosophical Posthumanism? j. Why is Zarathustra the one to proclaim the death of God? k. Why did Nietzsche proclaim the death of God? l. How can Nietzsche be relevant in our daily life? m. What if your life was going to come back exactly the same forever? n. Does Posthumanism support the death of God? o. If God and Man are dead, who killed them? p. What are some of the other movements related to the posthuman turn? 10. Philosophical Posthumanism a. What is Philosophical Posthumanism? b. Where does Philosophical Posthumanism come from? c. What are the sources of this specific take of Philosophical Posthumanism? Interlude 1 a. What about post-dualism? b. What kind of dualism is deconstructed by Philosophical Posthumanism? c. Why is post-dualism important? d. What are the genealogical sources of post-dualism in relation to Philosophical Posthumanism? e. Why is the prefix “post” relevant? Where does the notion of the “human” come from? More specifically: of which “human” is the posthuman a “post”? Part 2 Of Which “Human” Is the Posthuman a “Post”? 11. The Power of the Hyphen a. Where does the term “human” come from? b. Why are the “post” and the hyphen “-” relevant to the discussion on the posthuman? c. Why is “post-” needed in the emergence of Post(-)humanism? d. When and how have we become “human”? 10 Philosophical Posthumanism 12. Humanizing a. Is the “human” a notion (i.e., a noun) or a process (i.e., a verb)? b. Why does de Beauvoir refer to the Woman as the “Other”? c. Why was the reaction of the intellectual establishment so extreme to Irigaray’s ideas? d. Is there a subject enacting the process of humanizing? Is humanizing a process or a project (or both)? 13. The Anthropological Machine a. Who were these humans, and who set the standards of the “human”? b. “Who” is humanizing “whom”? c. Is language “that” important in the formulation of philosophical accounts? 14. Almost, Human a. How to achieve a comprehensive analysis of the process of humanizing? b. How did the excluded subjectivities perceive themselves in relation to the notion of the human? c. Which humans have been excluded from the notion of the human? d. Why are we going back to the time of the Conquista? e. How may genocide result out of processes of dehumanization? f. Have all the human “outsiders” been considered less-than human? 15. Technologies of the Self as Posthumanist (Re)Sources a. How have the (categories of) humans who have been repeatedly dehumanized dealt with their humanness? How have they reconfigured such a denied status? b. How to account for the outsiders of the discourse? c. What are the technologies of the self? d. How to access non-hegemonic perspectives on the notion of the human? e. What about spirituality? 16. The Epiphany of Becoming Human a. What are some of the possible outcomes of the process of humanizing? Navigational Tool 11 b. How can we detect a purpose for the human(s) as a species if the human is not one but many? c. Why is the overview effect significant to the posthuman approach? d. When and how did humans become “human”? e. Is the notion of the human inherently biased? f. What is the human? 17. Where Does the Word “Human” Come From? a. When and how did the Latin notion of “humanus” emerge? b. If “humanus” was coined in the age of the Roman Republican, which writers started to employ this term? 18. Mammals or Homo sapiens? a. How are humans classified in biology? b. When and how were humans first classified as Homo sapiens? c. Are there any biased assumptions in Linnaeus’s system? If so, do they allow for an impartial comprehension of all human beings under the notion of Homo sapiens? Interlude 2 a. Of which human is the posthuman a “post”? Part 3 Have Humans Always Been Posthuman? 19. Post-Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene a. Why is anthropocentrism a problem? b. When can we trace the beginning of the informal geological era of the Anthropocene? c. Has the notion of the Anthropocene been contested? d. How can we achieve a post-anthropocentric paradigm shift? e. What is the Earth? Can a planet be considered an organism? f. What is the Gaia hypothesis? g. What kind of issues does the Gaia theory raise? h. How can life and death coexist?