Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory

by Patricia MacCormack

Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time when philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity. Those subjects who were historically considered aberrant, and our future lives becoming increasingly hybrid show we have always been and are continuously transforming into posthumans. What are the ethical considerations of thinking the posthuman? Posthuman Ethics asks not what the posthuman is, but how posthuman theory creates new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives. Ethics is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims of overarching moral structures. Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, thought, experiments in being and fantasies of the future. Posthuman Ethics explores certain kinds of bodies to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power which have been exerted upon bodies. The tattooed and modified body, the body made ecstatic through art, the body of the animal as a strategy for abolitionist animal rights, the monstrous body from teratology to fabulations, queer bodies becoming angelic, the bodies of the nation of the dead and the radical ways in which we might contemplate human extinction are the bodies which populate this book creating joyous political tactics toward posthuman ethics.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

169 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Patricia is a researcher who has published in the areas of continental philosophy (especially Deleuze, Guattari, Serres, Irigaray, Lyotard, Kristeva, Blanchot, Ranciere), feminism, queer theory, posthuman theory, horror film, body modification, animal rights/abolitionism, cinesexuality and ethics.