Human, All Too (Post)Human : The Humanities after Humanism

Jennifer Cotter

ISBN 10: 1498505732 / ISBN 13: 9781498505734

Published by Lexington Books, 2016

About this Item

nach der Bestellung gedruckt Neuware - Printed after ordering - Humanism views the human as the conscious subject of free will against the non-human periphery. Posthumanism puts forth a major change to humanism by undoing the separation of human from non-human. Human, All Too (Post)Human argues humanism and post-humanism both normalize capitalism, the obstacle to social change. The book makes the case that real change is ending class relations to free humanity from wage labor and place human and non-human in a new order of being.

Seller Inventory # 9781498505734

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Human, All Too (Post)Human : The Humanities after Humanism
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498505732
• ISBN 13: 9781498505734
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 235W x 157H x 20D millimeters 235 millimeters width by 157 millimeters height by 20 millimeters depth
• Weight: 568 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indifferent to the difference between the “other”’s life and other lives. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism argues that the Nietzschean tendencies that provide the philosophical boundaries of post-humanism do not undo humanism but reform it, constructing a parallel discourse that saves humanism from itself.

Grounded in materialist analysis of social life, Human, All Too (Post)Human argues that humanism and post-humanism are cultural discourses that normalize different stages of capitalism—analog and digital capitalism. They are different orders of property relations. The question, the writers argue, is not humanism or post-humanism, namely cultural representations, but the material relations of production that are centered on wage labor. Language, free will, or human rights are not the issues since “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” The question that shapes all questions, in Human, All Too (Post)Human is freedom from (wage) labor.

About the Author

Jennifer Cotter is associate professor of English at William Jewell College.

Kimberly DeFazio is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

Robert Faivreis professor of English at SUNY Adirondack.

Amrohini Sahay is assistant professor of English at Hofstra University.

Julie P. Torrant is assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College.

Stephen Tumino is adjunct assistant professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY).

Rob Wilkie is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.