Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman

✍ Scribed by Jami Weinstein (editor); Claire Colebrook (editor)

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 390
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life.

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent “turns” toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Essays examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface: Postscript On the Posthuman
Introduction: Critical Life Studies and the Problems of Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life
I. Posthuman Vestiges
1. Pre- and Posthuman Animals: The Limits and Possibilities of Animal-Human Relations
2. Posthumanism and Narrativity: Beginning Again with Arendt, Derrida, and Deleuze
3. Subject Matters
II. Organic Rites
4. Therefore, The Animal That Saw Derrida
5. The Plant and the Sovereign: Plant and Animal Life in Derrida
6. Of Ecology, Immunity, and Islands: The Lost Maples of Big Bend
III. Inorganic Rites
7. After Nature: The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects
8. Nonpersons
9. Supra- and Subpersonal Registers of Political Physiology
10. Geophilosophy, Geocommunism: Is There Life after Man?
IV. Posthumous Life
11. Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic
12. Spectral Life: The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction
13. Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-To-Life in Schopenhauer
14. Thinking Life: The Problem Has Changed
Contributors
Index