Introduction

Summary

The posthuman is a field of multiple and often conflicting definitions, timeframes, subject positions, bodily alterations, and rearrangements of knowledge. For some, the posthuman is an extension of human powers and lifetimes; a realization of new possibilities for human nature (Huxley, 1957), perhaps even its “perfectibility” (Bostrom, 2005a, 2). For others, more historically minded, it is a dramatic departure from humanist and Enlightenment traditions that have settled in over the past 500 years: after all, if a humanist disposition emerged along with the Gutenberg Press, we should not be surprised if humanism approaches its end during our present postdigital era. Indeed, some of the “fundamental premises of the Enlightenment” are being questioned, in particular “the progress of mankind through a self-regulatory and teleological ordained use of reason and of secular scientific rationality allegedly aimed at the perfectibility of ‘Man’” (Braidotti, The Posthuman, 37; see also “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,” 18).