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Recovering the human subject : freedom, creativity and decision
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ISBN: 1108639038 1108605001 110869232X 1108424961 Year: 2018 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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This volume responds to the often-proclaimed 'death of the subject' in post-structuralist theorizing, and to calls from across the social sciences for 'post-humanist' alternatives to liberal humanism in a distinctively anthropological manner. It asks: can we use the intellectual resources developed in those approaches and debates to reconstruct a new account of how individual human subjects are contingently put together in diverse historical and ethnographic contexts? Anthropologists know that the people they work with think in terms of particular, distinctive, individual human personalities, and that in times of change and crisis these individuals matter crucially to how things turn out. The volume features a classic essay by Caroline Humphrey, 'Reassembling individual subjects', that provides a focus for the debate, and it brings together a distinguished collection of essays, which exhibit a range of theoretical approaches and rich and varied ethnography.


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An inquiry into modes of existence : an anthropology of the moderns
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ISBN: 9780674724990 0674724992 9780674984028 0674984021 Year: 2018 Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press,

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Over the past twenty-five years, Bruno Latour developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated - a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority. Such modes of extension - or modes of existence, Latour argues here - account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge. -- from book cover.


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Shadowing the anthropocene : eco-realism for turbulent times
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ISBN: 9781947447882 1947447882 Year: 2018 Publisher: Earth, Milky Way ; [Brooklyn, NY] : punctum books,

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A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial. The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz. Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.


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Über den Menschen als Kunstwerk : zu einer Archäologie des (Post-)Humanen im Diskurs der Moderne (1750-1820)
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ISBN: 9783770559701 3770559703 3846759708 9783846759707 Year: 2018 Publisher: Paderborn : Wilhelm Fink,

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Seit der Aufklärung entwirft sich der Mensch als ein durch Technik, Wissenschaft und Kunst erst noch zu vollendendes Wesen. Welchen Anteil hat die Literatur an diesem Optimierungsprogramm? Mit Blick auf zeitgenössische Überlegungen zur elektrischen und medialen Steuerung der Körperströme, auf Züchtungs- und Reproduktionsexperimente, prothetische Optimierungen und technische Körpersimulationen rekonstruiert Britta Herrmann die Geschichte der ›Erfindung des Menschen‹ im Verhältnis zwischen Naturforschung, Philosophie, technischen Entwicklungen und poetologisch-ästhetischen Diskursen. Bereits in der scheinbar humanistischen Aufklärung produziert das Optimierungsdenken posthumane Körper und Identitäten. Teil daran haben nicht zuletzt die ästhetischen Programme von Klassizismus und Romantik, welche spezifisch an der Hervorbringung des künftigen Menschen arbeiten und ihre Poetiken gezielt danach ausrichten.


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What's left of human nature? : a post-essentialist, pluralist, and interactive account of a contested concept
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ISBN: 0262038412 0262347962 9780262347969 9780262038416 0262347970 Year: 2018 Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press,

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A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature ? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels.


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Another mind-body problem
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ISBN: 1438469977 9781438469973 9781438469959 1438469950 Year: 2018 Publisher: Albany

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The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.


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Monkey trouble : the scandal of posthumanism
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ISBN: 0823277828 082327781X 0823277798 0823277801 Year: 2018 Publisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press,

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According to scholars of the nonhuman turn, the scandal of theory lies in its failure to decenter the human. The real scandal, however, is that we keep trying. The human has become a conspicuous blind spot for many theorists seeking to extend hospitality to animals, plants, and even insentient things. The displacement of the human is essential and urgent, yet given the humanist presumption that animals lack a number of allegedly unique human capacities, such as language, reason, and awareness of mortality, we ought to remain cautious about laying claim to any power to eradicate anthropocentrism altogether. Such a power risks becoming yet another self-accredited capacity thanks to which the human reaffirms its sovereignty through its supposed erasure. Monkey Trouble argues that the turn toward immanence in contemporary posthumanism promotes a cosmocracy that absolves one from engaging in those discriminatory decisions that condition hospitality as such. Engaging with recent theoretical developments in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as well as ape and parrot language studies, the book offers close readings of literary works by J.M. Coetzee, Charles Chesnutt, and Walt Whitman and films by Alfonso Cuarón and Lars von Trier.Anthropocentrism, Peterson argues, cannot be displaced through a logic of reversal that elevates immanence above transcendence, horizontality over verticality. This decentering must cultivate instead a human/nonhuman relationality that affirms the immanent transcendency spawned by our phantasmatic humanness.


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Lacan and the Posthuman
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ISBN: 331976327X 3319763261 Year: 2018 Publisher: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,

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When Posthumanism displaces the traditional human subject, what does psychoanalysis add to contemporary conversations about subject/object relations, systems, perspectives, and values? This book discusses whether Posthumanism itself is a cultural indication of a shift in thinking that is moving from language to matter, from a politics focused on social relations to one organized according to a broader sense of object in environments. Together the authors question what is at stake in this shift and what psychoanalysis can say about it. Promoting psychoanalysis’ focus on the cybernetic relationships among subjects, language, social organizations, desire, drive, and other human motivations, this book demonstrates the continued relevance of Lacan’s work not only to continued understandings of the human subject, but to the broader cultural impasses we now face. Why Posthumanism? Why now? In what ways is Posthumanist thought linked to the emergence of digital technologies? Exploring Posthumanism from the insights of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, chapters expose and elucidate not only the conditions within which Posthumanist thought arises, but also reveal symptoms of its flaws: the blindness to anthropomorphization, projection, and unrecognized shifts in scale and perspective, as well as its mode of transcendental thought that enables many Posthumanist declarations. This book explains how Lacanian notions of the subject inform current discussions about human complicity with, and resistance to, algorithmic governing regimes, which themselves more wholly produce a “post”- humanism than any philosophical displacement of human centrality could. .

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