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Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being -- from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one's interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare's tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear's progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.At the center of Dionne's analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within 'adagential' being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.Dionne's reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare's central existential questions -- the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world -- in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne's final appeal is to "repurpose" our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.

Ecocriticism. --- Shakespeare, William, --- History and criticism. --- posthumanism --- William Shakespeare --- literary criticism --- anthropocene

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In And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, Katherine Behar and Emmy Mikelson explore how artists engage with nonanthropocentrism, one of the primary tenets shared by recent speculative realist and new materialist philosophies. Extending their investigations in And Another Thing, an exhibition which the authors curated in 2011, this volume documents both that exhibition and expands on two of its curatorial aims: prioritizing art historical contexts for contemporary philosophy (rather than the other way around), and apprehending artworks as historically specific objects of philosophy.The book is organized in three sections. In the first section, Behar and Mikelson provide long-form essays that chart the evolution of nonanthropocentrism and art, spanning eighteenth-century architectural drawing, performance, minimalist sculpture, and contemporary postminimalism. These essays raise the stakes for art and speculative realism, showing how artists have figured and prefigured nonanthropocentric ideas strikingly similar to those expounded in various "new" realist, materialist, and speculativist philosophies. Literally occupying the center of the volume, in section two, the exhibition is represented by full-color plates of eleven works by Carl Andre, Laura Carton, Valie Export, Regina Jose Galindo, Tom Kotik, Mary Lucking, Bruce Nauman, Grit Ruhland, Anthony Titus, Ruslan Trusewych, and Zimoun. Artworks by these emerging and canonical figures lay bare the networks of alliances underlying the exhibition. The book concludes with three short meditations on the relation between nonanthropocentrism and art, and what that relation might portend for future thought. These essays, by Bill Brown, Patricia Ticineto Clough, and Robert Jackson, are speculative in the sense that they perceive potentials for theory arising from nonanthropocentrism's manifestations in art.

Art, Modern --- Art and morals. --- Exhibitions. --- aesthetics --- cultural theory --- thing theory --- posthumanism --- anthropocene

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The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification.The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another’s being, to another’s claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself.The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman’s place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity’s domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book.

Ethical issues: scientific & technological developments --- Impact of science & technology on society --- capitalism;colonialism;ecology;liberalism;posthumanism;race;technology

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"Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects" examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the "distant" past?

Minerals --- Plants --- Animals --- Agent (Philosophy) --- Anthropomorphism. --- Social aspects. --- object-oriented ontology --- posthumanism --- cultural studies --- materialism --- thing studies

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For a good 50 years now, theses of »vanishing humanity«, its »dissolution«, or its »end« have been haunting philosophy. People constantly speak of the »death of the subject«. From Kant, Hegel, and Marx to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Foucault, a philosophical skepticism is manifesting which concerns »man«, pointing beyond him. This volume sheds light on the backgrounds and meanings of these »post-modern« postulations without succumbing to polemic prejudice. The different contributions reconstruct the historically relevant criticisms that speak out against an anthropological exaltation and absolutization of »mankind«. At the same time, the volume takes a philosophical stance against the current trend of naturalist images of humanity being revived in biological sciences and brain research. Seit bereits gut 50 Jahren geistern in der Philosophie die Thesen vom »Verschwinden des Menschen«, seiner »Auflösung« oder seinem »Ende« herum. Vom »Tod des Subjekts« ist immer wieder die Rede. Von Kant, Hegel und Marx bis zu Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno und Foucault etabliert sich eine philosophische Skepsis, die sich auf »den Menschen« bezieht und über ihn hinausweist.Dieses Buch klärt über die Hintergründe und Bedeutungen dieser als »postmodern« geltenden Postulate auf, ohne dabei in polemische Vorurteile zu verfallen. In den einzelnen Beiträgen werden die historisch einschlägigen Kritiken rekonstruiert, die sich gegen eine anthropologische Erhöhung oder Verabsolutierung »des Menschen« aussprechen.Zugleich bezieht der Band philosophisch Position gegen den aktuellen Trend einer Wiederbelebung naturalistischer Menschenbilder in Biowissenschaften und Hirnforschung.

Philosophical anthropology --- PHILOSOPHY / General. --- History. --- Anthropology. --- Critique. --- French History of Philosophy. --- German History of Philosophy. --- History of Philosophy. --- Philosophical Anthropology. --- Philosophy. --- Posthumanism. --- Subject.