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. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.
- Table of Contents
- Preface: Postscript on the Posthuman
- Introduction: Critical Life Studies and the Problems of Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life, by Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook
- Part I. Posthuman Vestiges
- 1. Pre- and Posthuman Animals: The Limits and Possibilities of Animal-Human Relations, by Nicole Anderson
- 2. Posthumanism and Narrativity: Beginning Again with Arendt, Derrida, and Deleuze, by Frida Beckman
- 3. Subject Matters, by Susan Hekman
- Part II. Organic Rites
- 4. Therefore, the Animal That Saw Derrida, by Akira Mizuta Lippit
- 5. The Plant and the Sovereign: Plant and Animal Life in Derrida, by Jeffrey T. Nealon
- 6. Of Ecology, Immunity, and Islands: The Lost Maples of Big Bend, by Cary Wolfe
- Part III. Inorganic Rites
- 7. After Nature: The Dynamic Automation of Technical Objects, by Luciana Parisi
- 8. Nonpersons, by Alastair Hunt
- 9. Supra- and Subpersonal Registers of Political Physiology, by John Protevi
- 10. Geophilosophy, Geocommunism: Is There Life After Man?, by Arun Saldanha
- Part IV. Posthumous Life
- 11. Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic, by Myra J. Hird
- 12. Spectral Life: The Uncanny Valley Is in Fact a Gigantic Plain, Stretching as Far as the Eye Can See in Every Direction, by Timothy Morton
- 13. Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer, by Eugene Thacker
- 14. Thinking Life: The Problem Has Changed, by Isabelle Stengers
- Index
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