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Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures pp 13–32Cite as

Posthuman Critical Theory

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Abstract

This essay proposes a genealogical cartography of the emergence of a posthuman turn in critical theory, including feminist theory, based on the convergence of posthumanism with post-anthropocentrism. The former critiques the universalist posture of the idea of ‘Man’ as the alleged ‘measure of all things’. The latter criticizes species hierarchy and the assumption of human exceptionalism. It then explores the implications of the posthuman turn for political subjectivity, notably in terms of the relation between human and nonhuman agents. The essay then critiques the current tendency to create new negative or reactive re-compositions of a new pan-humanity based on vulnerability and fear. The case is made instead for critical posthuman thought and a definition of the subject as nomadic, that is to say: transversal, relational, affective, embedded and embodied.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Nobel Prize winning chemist, Paul Crutzen, in 2002 coined the term ‘anthropocene’ to describe our current geological era. This term stresses both the technologically mediated power acquired by our species and its potentially lethal consequences for everyone else.

  2. 2.

    See for instance, The New Scientist review of my book on the posthuman: ‘What’s death to do with it?’, by Cohen (2013), which argues that the posthuman is too important to be left only to academics or rather ‘social science cognoscenti’.

  3. 3.

    Anders Behring Breivik is the Norwegian mass murderer and the confessed perpetuator of the 2011 attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utoya, killing, respectively, eight and 69 people, mostly socialist youth.

  4. 4.

    In 2005, CIA drones struck targets in Pakistan three times; in 2011, there were 76 strikes, by now there are hundreds. Google Earth has designed a special programme to delete the drones’ flying paths from their satellite photos. Drones come in all sorts of sizes: ‘DelFly’, a dragonfly shaped surveillance drone built at the technical university in Delft, weighs less than a gold wedding ring, camera included. On the other end of the scale comes America’s biggest and fastest drone, Avenger (15 mn USA $), which can carry up to 2.7 tonnes of bombs, sensors and other equipment, at more than 740 km per hour.

  5. 5.

    This is radically different from the negative definition of zoe proposed by Giorgio Agamben (1998), who has been taken to task by feminist scholars (Colebrook 2009; Braidotti 2013) for his erasure of feminist perspectives on the politics of natality and mortality and for his indictment of the project of modernity as a whole.

  6. 6.

    Deleuze calls it ‘the Majority subject’ or the Molar centre of being (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Irigaray calls it ‘the Same’, or the hyper-inflated, falsely universal ‘He’ (Irigaray 1985, 1993), whereas Collins (1991) calls to account the white and Eurocentric bias of this particular subject of humanistic knowledge.

  7. 7.

    In Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to foresee even the financialization of the economy and the emergence of a system based on debt.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Rosi Braidotti

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  1. Rosi Braidotti
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Correspondence to Rosi Braidotti .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. California Institute of Integral Studies , San Francisco, California, USA

    Debashish Banerji

  2. Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor of English, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Makarand R. Paranjape

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Braidotti, R. (2016). Posthuman Critical Theory. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_2

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