It was so easy to imitate these people …
But at the time I was not interested in the human point of view.
franz kafka, “A Report to an Academy”
Posthumanism is heavily invested in figuration as a rhetorical and political apparatus. I would argue that figuration might even be seen as one of posthumanism’s master tropes, especially in its feminist and new materialist varieties. This raises the question of what kind of rhetoric various politics of the posthuman and posthumanism rely on and by what kind of desire they are informed. Is it the desire to overcome the human or humanism, for example? Is it the desire for the posthuman that drives a specific form of theorizing or is it precisely the analysis of this desire—the desire of the posthuman—that is being explored? And what might a posthuman, if such a thing existed, (still) desire? In this context, figuration is fundamental. It is fundamental in any politics without doubt, but maybe even more so—more fundamentally so—in the kind of speculative politics that necessarily drives posthumanism due to its utopian register.
While I dedicated quite some space to the idea of posthumanism as a “discourse,” following and adapting Foucault’s notion,1 I feel I somewhat neglected what I meant by the “figure” of the posthuman. I assumed that the posthuman was quite self-evidently a rhetorical figure while posthumanism was the discourse trying to materialize what started out as maybe not quite an empty trope but at least an entirely underdetermined one. So, in the following, I will try to make up for not asking a little more insistently at the time what a figure the posthuman is and what it does.
- 1.a form of anything as determined by outline (bodily or geometrical) shape; appearance, attitude, state, bodily frame, person;
- 2.a represented form, image, likeness, phantasm, statue, effigy, character, emblem, type;
- 3.a delineated form, design, pattern, illustration, scheme, table, dance/skating movement;
- 4.a written character, symbol, amount, number, sum of money, scale;
- 5.a rhetorical figure, metaphor, image, similitude.
- 1.action or process of forming into figure, determination to a certain form, the resulting form or shape, contour, outline;
- 2.action of representing figuratively; allegorical or figurative representation; figurative style of painting;
- 3.action of framing figures or shapes in dreams or designs.
[The] posthuman “other,” understood as a threat or promise, is a product of human anxiety and desire … that other takes shape in figures and
representations which tap into the long history of humanity’s excluded (the inhuman, the non-human, the less than human, the superhuman, the animal, the alien, the monster, the stranger, God …) and reflect current “posthumanising” practices, technologies and fantasies.5
through a materialist and deconstructive reading of the cultural politics that underlie the actual representations of the posthuman and the processes of ongoing posthumanisation, [a critical posthumanist reading] helps to envisage alternative conceptualisations of both the human and the posthuman, and of their mutually informing relationship.7
In fact, what this amounts to is a politics of figuration that is based on a re(con)figuration (of the human), because “the ‘longing for the human’ as the driving force behind humanism’s constant self-replication expresses itself through the variation produced by constant self-transformation.”8
The idea of a posthumanist reading was also our first attempt at looking at the ways in which various posthumanisms were appropriating figuration as a political, prospective, or speculative mechanism to imagine, or, to use Manuela Rossini’s term, to “imagineer” alternative, often “monstrous,” figurations of the human as “promises” of political change.9
Figuration is about resetting the stage for possible pasts and futures. Figuration is the mode of theory when the more “normal” rhetorics of systematic critical analysis seem only to repeat and sustain our entrapment in the stories of the established disorders. Humanity is a modernist figure; and this humanity has a generic face, a universal shape. Humanity’s face has been the face of man. Feminist humanity must have another shape, other gestures; but, I believe, we must have feminist figures of humanity. They cannot be man or woman; they cannot be the human as historical narrative has staged that generic universal. Feminist figures cannot, finally, have a name; they cannot be native. Feminist humanity must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility.10
Haraway’s aim is, in short, figural or reconfigural, as she says: “I want to set aside … man as we have come to know and love him in the death-of-the-subject critiques.”11 Instead of the figure of “man,” even in the ongoing process of its deconstruction, she prefers to “construct possible postcolonial, nongeneric, and irredeemably specific figures of critical subjectivity, consciousness, and humanity.”12 And since for Haraway “radical nominalism is the only route to a nongeneric humanity,”13 understood as a “radical dis-membering and dis-placing of our names and our bodies,” the main questions that arise are: “How can humanity have a figure outside the narratives of humanism; what language would such a figure speak?”14
In “The Promise of Monsters,” Haraway emphasizes that nature, too, is a “topos:” “It is figure, construction, artefact, movement, displacement,”15 to which her cyborg figures are so to speak as “monstrous kin.” Figures or figurations are
I feel like I live with a menagerie of figurations. It’s like I inhabit a critical-theoretical zoo and the cyborg just happens to be the most famous member of that zoo, although “zoo” is not the right word because all my inhabitants are not animals.18
She insists, however, that “all of my entities—primate, cyborg, genetically patented animal—all of them are ‘real’ in the ordinary everyday sense of real, but they are also simultaneously figurations involved in a kind of narrative interpellation into ways of living in the world.”19 Again Haraway thus traces her “fundamental sensibility about the literal nature of metaphor and the physical quality of symbolization” to her Catholicism. However, “the point is that this sensibility—the meaning of this menagerie I live with and in—gives me a menagerie where the literal and the figurative, the factual and the narrative, the scientific and the religious and the literary, are always imploded.”20
The effects of figuration are political in the sense that the specific discourses, images, and normativities that inform practices of figuration can work either to reinscribe existing social orderings or to challenge them. In the case of the human, the prevailing figuration in Euro-American imaginaries is one of autonomous, rational agency. 24
Figures help me grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making entanglements that I call contact zones. The Oxford English Dictionary records the meaning of “chimerical vision” for “figuration” in an eighteenth-century source, and that meaning is still implicit in my sense of figure. Figures collect the people through their invitation to inhabit the corporeal story told in their lineaments. Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all the force of lived reality. My body itself is just such a figure, literally. For many years I have written from the belly of powerful figures such as cyborgs, monkeys and apes, oncomice, and, more recently, dogs. In every case, the figures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality; the dimensions tangle and require response … All of these are figures, and all are mundanely here, on this earth, now, asking who “we” will become when species meet.25
The same connection between figures as material-semiotic tropes and a feminist politics of difference and change are at work in Rosi Braidotti’s writings. Braidotti has been most explicit about the role of figuration for feminist (and other minoritarian) politics, as a “living map, a transformative account of
In “Teratologies,” Braidotti speaks of “(Deleuzian) enfleshed complexities”29 that may form a “post-human universe” with its “metamorphic dimension”30 of “imaginary figurations.”31 More specifically, “the notion of ‘figurations’—in contrast to the representational function of ‘metaphors’—emerges as crucial to Deleuze’s notion of a conceptually charged use of the imagination,” according to Braidotti.32 These figurations of “multiple becomings [following and extending Deleuze’s universe] are: the rhizome, the nomad, the bodies-without-organs, the cyborg, the onco-mouse and acoustic masks of all electronic kinds.”33 For Braidotti and her political project of a feminist Deleuzian nomadology, “myths, metaphors, or alternative figurations have merged feminist theory with fictions.”34
[My] aim is to provide illustrations for new figurations, for alternative representations and social locations for the kind of hybrid mix we are in the process of becoming. Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, or embedded and embodied, positions. A cartography is a theoretically-based and politically-informed reading of the present … By figuration I mean a politically informed map that outlines our own situated perspective. A figuration renders our image in terms of a decentred and multi-layered vision of the subject as a dynamic and changing entity. The definition of a person’s identity takes place in between nature-technology, male-female, black-white, in the spaces that flow and connect in between. We live in
permanent processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization, and these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation. A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self—it is no metaphor.35
expresses creativity in representing the kind of nomadic subjects we have already become and the social and symbolic locations we inhabit. In a more theoretical vein, the quest for figurations attempts to recombine the propositional contents and the forms of thinking so as to attune them both to nomadic complexities. It thus also challenges the separation of reason from the imagination.36
Where figurations of alternative feminist subjectivity, like the womanist, the lesbian, the cyborg, the inappropriate(d) other, the nomadic feminist, and so on, differ from classical “metaphors” is precisely in calling into play a sense of accountability for one’s location. They express materially embedded cartographies and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a process of metaphorization of “others.”37
Instead, they are
new figurations of the subject (nomadic, cyborg, Black, etc.) [which] function like conceptual personae. As such, they are no metaphor, but rather on the critical level, materially embedded, embodying accounts of one’s power-relations. On the creative level they express the rate of change, transformation or affirmative deconstruction of the power one inhabits. “Figurations” materially embody stages of metamorphosis of a subject position towards all that the phallogocentric system does not want it to become.38
They evoke the changes and transformations which are on-going in the “g-local” context of advanced societies … Figurations are expressive of cartographic readings of the subject’s own embedded and embodied position. As such, they are linked to the social imaginary by a complex web of relations, both of the repressive and the empowering kind. The idea of figurations therefore provides an answer not only to political, but also to both epistemological and aesthetic questions: how does one invent new structures of thought? Where does conceptual change start from?44
With regard to Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg, Braidotti writes: “Translated into my own language, Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg is a sort of feminist becoming-woman that merely by-passes the feminine in order to open up toward a broader and considerably less anthropocentric horizon.”45 This is why, for Braidotti, Haraway is a “non-nostalgic posthuman thinker.”46
Figurations are not metaphors, but rather markers of more concretely situated historical positions. A figuration is the expression of one’s specific positioning in both space and time. It marks certain territorial or geopolitical coordinates, but it also points out one’s sense of genealogy or historical inscription. Figurations deterritorialize and destabilize the certainties of the subject and allow for a proliferation of situated or ‘micro’ narratives of self and others.47
Their political value precisely lies in their undecidability between “literality” and “figurality”: “Figurations are forms of literal expression which represent that which the system has declared off-limits.”48 In this sense, “figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather more materialistic mappings of situated, embedded, and embodied positions. They derive from the feminist method of the ‘politics of location’ and build it into a discursive strategy.”49
The posthuman figure makes its appearance in the early 2000s in Rosi Braidotti’s work and becomes the main focus in her The Posthuman, where she wrestles with the powerful ambiguity of the posthuman trope. It is a powerful figure that helps evaluate, maybe even retain, “our” humanness in a postanthropocentric context while, at the same time, it helps promote an affirmative politics of flexible, hybrid, and multiple identity. In an increasingly “post-theoretical” climate, Braidotti, consequently, repeatedly and strategically stresses “the importance of combining critique with creative figurations:”50
Critiques of power locations, however, are not enough. They work in tandem with the quest for alternative figurations or conceptual personae for these locations, in terms of power as restrictive (potestas) but also as empowering or affirmative (potentia). For example, figurations such as the feminist/the woman/the queer/the cyborg/the diasporic, native nomadic subjects, as well as oncomouse and Dolly the sheep are no mere metaphors, but signposts for specific geopolitical and historical locations.51
Once again Braidotti defines her use of figuration as “the expression of alternative representations of the subject as a dynamic non-unitary entity; it is the dramatization of processes of becoming.”52 Even though she does not herself use the phrase “rhetoric of the posthuman,”53 it could be argued that the way she emphasizes the transformative potential of the posthuman figure constitutes a “politics” of the posthuman that is entirely reliant on the ambiguity of the posthuman figure as conceptual persona, as mask, or prosopopoeia (of the human). In the posthuman figure, she writes, “Critique and creation strike a new deal in actualizing the practice of conceptual personae or figuration as the active pursuit of affirmative alternatives to the dominant vision.”54 The posthuman figure, for Braidotti, allows “us” to be “worthy of our times” in that “we need schemes of thought and figurations that enable us to account in empowering terms for the changes and transformations currently on the way.”55 What Braidotti’s argument presupposes is therefore first of all a certain discursivity of the location, or the idea of a “posthuman condition,” in which the figuration of the posthuman occurs. The rhetoric of the posthuman, in fact, is everywhere at work in the changes and transformations that Braidotti sees as being currently on the way.
Becoming-posthuman … is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social,
psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it enacts the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self. This is in fact a moveable assemblage within a common life-space, which the subject never masters nor possesses, but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or cluster. For posthuman theory, the subject is a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations. The zoe-centered embodied subject is shot through with relational linkages of the contaminating/viral kind which inter-connect it to a variety of others, starting from the environmental or eco-others and include the technological apparatus.56
As a theoretical figuration, the posthuman is a navigational tool that enables us to survey the material and the discursive manifestations that are engendered by advanced technological developments (am I a robot?), climate change (will I survive?), and capitalism (can I afford this?). The posthuman is a work in progress. It is a working hypothesis about the kind of subjects we are becoming.58
It is inappropriate to take the posthuman either as an apocalyptic or as an intrinsically subversive category, narrowing our options down to the binary extinction-versus-liberation (of the human). We need to check both emotional reactions and resist with equal lucidity this double fallacy. It is more adequate to approach the posthuman as an emotionally laden but normatively neutral position. It is a grounded and perspectival figuration that illuminates the complexity of on-going processes of subject formation.59
The posthuman is thus both already here, but not clearly defined in its “becoming,” clearly affectively apocalyptic while “normatively” neutral (i.e. it could be the source of radical transformation for better or for worse); even so, it still remains to achieve, or maybe asks to be saved from, itself. In fact, it is neither here nor there but an effective theoretical “screen”—a figure—an object of desire, an objet petit a.
Although the posthuman is empirically grounded, because it is embedded and embodied, it functions less as a substantive entity than as a figuration or conceptual persona. It is a theoretically powered cartographic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of the present as both actual and virtual. In other words, cartographies are both the record of what we are ceasing to be—anthropocentric, humanistic—and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming—a multiplicity of posthuman subjects.60
If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories …, my dream is a version of the posthuman
that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.61
As the sense of its mortality grows, humankind looks for its successor and heir, harbouring the secret hope that the heir can somehow be enfolded back into the self. The narratives that count as stories for us speak to this hope, even as they reveal the gendered constructions that carry sexual politics into the realm of the posthuman.62
In what is arguably one of the most iconic and most frequently cited passages of emergent posthumanism at the turn of the millennium, Hayles identifies the posthuman first and foremost as a “point of view,” i.e. not exactly as a “figure,” when she claims that: “the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.”63
Where Haraway and Braidotti rely on a politics of figuration, Hayles, one might say, is looking at con-figurations, or ways in which elements work together to form a whole, or, in other words, the “workings” of a figure. Configuration, as the oed explains, is an
arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form or figure; the form, shape, figure, resulting from such arrangement; conformation; outline, contour (of geographical features, etc.); [or an] arrangement of elements; physical composition or constitution …; [as well as] a representation by a figure, an image.
to fashion according to something else as a model; to conform in figure or fashion (to); to represent by a figure or image, to figure; to fashion by combination and arrangement; to give an astrological configuration to; to put together in a certain form or figure; [or] figurative[ly]: to give a figure to; to shape.
In computing, more specifically, it means “to choose or design a configuration for; to combine (a program or device) with other elements to perform a certain task or provide a certain capability.” Therefore, it is not that Hayles is not invested in figuration, on the contrary, and her recent turn to mimesis indeed testifies to her engagement with it.64 But given her background, she seems to come to the politics of figuration from a (technical) “design” angle, when she writes: “‘human’ and ‘posthuman’ coexist in shifting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts.”65
But the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice. What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self.66
The curious thing is, however, that this re-con-figuration is not “new,” it has always been on the cards, which allows Hayles to claim, in what one might call
More specifically, Hayles’s analysis of human reconfiguration is concerned with “the contemporary transformation from ‘biomorphism’ to ‘technomorphism’ (reconstituting the body as a technical object under human control),” as she writes in “Seductions of Cyberspace”;68 or as one might say, in bio-reconfiguration as opposed to techno-reconfiguration, or bio/techno-mimesis. Even more concretely, Hayles’s aim is to explore “how metaphor and constraint work to reconfigure agency in this posthuman era,”69 to arrive at “a configuration of the human so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”;70 or even, as Hayles formulates in a short review entitled “Refiguring the Posthuman,” “performativities that redefine the human through mimetic imitation of intelligent machines.”71
As these passages, these examples, central to three key figures in the establishing of posthumanism as a theoretical paradigm, clearly show, posthumanism and its politics are predominantly figurative, or reconfigurative, which also means it is entirely “mimetic,” in a sense. But what does that mean and is that a problem?
It may be a problem in the sense that figuring or reconfiguring as a political strategy, as the most obvious and most widely used political strategy as such, remains deeply entangled within the paradox of representation, or “representationalism.” Investing in a figure that is necessarily profoundly ambiguous (the posthuman could turn “nasty” at any moment, but is nevertheless presented as “our” only hope) and in a figure that has been announcing itself from the very beginning even while it has always already been here—is ultimately what one might call an eschatological device. It is and remains fundamentally modern; in fact, it is a return of the modern with a vengeance. All these figurations and reconfigurations are in fact governed by a dialectic of prefiguration and disfiguration or defacement as detractors of an underlying process one might refer to as “posthumanization.”
Hans Blumenberg, in Präfiguration: Arbeit am politischen Mythos, analyses the strategy of prefiguration in terms of a political program, both as a way of reducing complexity and thus as an anthropological necessity, and a highly risky and dangerous “scheme of interpretation” (Deutungsschema), i.e. as a means of bestowing legitimation: “At first, prefiguration is merely a means to assist with decision-taking—what has already been done once does not sanction, assuming the conditions remain the same, any new deliberation process, disturbance or puzzlement. It is already established as a paradigm.”72
If the meaningful prerequisite, the “pregnate” [Prägnat] is not given, but fashioned, so that should become true what was written …, then that which is being repeated merely becomes a mythical programme through its repetition, through this contingent act of selection whose contingency has to be repressed.74
The posthumanist politics of “re-con-figuration,” even though it identifies as radically transformative in the face of an apocalyptic future, still functions according to the same “mythical” principles that Blumenberg describes in his critique of prefiguration.
After any such re-con-figuration, one is thus presented with that which was originally called for and whose calling was duly heard, as the newly (re)configured other-than-or-with-myself and who is the product of my zoo-techno-hetero-auto-mimetic desire. You can easily see how close, despite all the echoes of a postmodern ethics of alterity, this (still) is to a standard Hegelian dialectic. The pre-re-con-dis-figured nonhuman alterities in this “mimetic” process are entirely exchangeable, whether they are nonhuman animals or technologies, as for example in Mark Hansen’s notion of technesis,75 which is based on “the presocial role of technology as agent of material complexification.” It is based on an understanding in which “technology embodies the very contact between humankind and the world on which societal forms are themselves constructed. It thus conditions the movement of desire itself.”76 The same counts for any form of “originary” hybridity or entanglement of nature cultures, monsters, or cyborgs—they are all symptoms of our posthumanist desire, figurations evoked for a more or less speculative politics.
Every critique of the concept of the human seems to be oriented toward a better approach to the essence of humanity … Does this mean that all discourses on the human, albeit metaphysical or deconstructionist, political or juridical, anthropological or psychoanalytic, would share the same impossibility: that of overcoming the thinking of man as a moving limit—this old limit, which Aristotle described as the medium between God and the animal? This moving or flickering in-between point, always tending to its end? … When we claim that the human is now behind us, that we are entering the posthuman age, that we are opening the “interspecies dialogue,” or that we cannot believe in cosmopolitanism for want of a universal concept of humanity, are we doing something other than trying to reconstitute, purify, re-elaborate a new essence of man?79
This repetition of the “natural” is just another example of the fact that we are not only asking the question of repetition; repetition has become the question, what questions us … are we able to deal with this new urgency of repetition without seeking revenge toward it? Are we able to repeat without seeking revenge? Without trying to crucify time and transiency, without trying to invent new forms of cruelty? In the trembling opening of this question appears the possibility of sculpting the nonhuman, or the nonhumanist human.81
Malabou here seems to be speaking about what one might call “postfiguration,” a resisting of re-con-figuration, or of a critique of plasticity—the very concept
Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), originally published in German in 2009.
All definitions from the oed are from the online edition, last accessed on June 17, 2022.
For a comprehensive genealogy of the notion of “figure” in the context of mimetic studies, see the classic essay by Erich Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), in Mimesis und Figura, ed. by Hanna Engelmeier and Friedrich Balke (Amsterdam: Brill, 2018), 119–88, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Roberto Marchesini, “Nonhuman Alterities,” Angelaki 21, no. 1 (2016): 161–72, 162. See also Roberto Marchesini, “Zoomimesis: How Birds Taught Us That We Can Fly,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 115–24.
Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, “What Is a Posthumanist Reading?” Angelaki 13, no. 1 (2008): 95–111, 97.
Herbrechter and Callus, “What Is a Posthumanist Reading?”
Herbrechter and Callus, “What Is a Posthumanist Reading?”
Herbrechter and Callus, “What Is a Posthumanist Reading?” 105.
See Manuela Rossini, “Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction: All Too Human(ist)?” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 50 (2005): 21–36.
Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. by Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 86–100, 86.
Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” 87.
Haraway, “Ecce Homo.”
Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” 88.
Haraway, “Ecce Homo.”
Donna Haraway, “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge 1992), 295–337, 296.
Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, 179.
Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf (New York: Routledge, 2000), 135–36.
Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, 140.
Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, 141.
Rossini, “Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction.”
Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 227.
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations.
Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations, 227–28.
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4–5.
Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 3.
Rosi Braidotti, “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. by Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 157.
Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 2.
Braidotti, “Teratologies,” 158.
Braidotti, “Teratologies,”165.
Braidotti, “Teratologies,”168–170.
Braidotti, “Teratologies,”170.
Braidotti, “Teratologies.”
Braidotti, “Teratologies,” 171.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 2–3.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 3.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 13.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 78.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 81.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 172.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 173.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 216–17.
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 65.
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 90.
Braidotti, Transpositions, 170.
Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, 13.
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 163.
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 164.
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 164.
See Stefan Herbrechter, “Rhetoric of the Posthuman,” keynote address at the “Ethos, Pathos, Logos” conference in Ploisti, October 2012,
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 164.
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 184.
Braidotti, The Posthuman, 193.
This performative value is indeed mimetic in the productive sense that it creates new forms. Although Braidotti doesn’t often stress the term mimesis, it might be worth pointing out that her Deleuzian ontology is very much in touch with the powers of the mimesis. This would also help the reader who hangs on to the narrow definition of mimesis as copy but posthuman performative mimesis gives us a chance to move beyond it.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 2.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 85.
Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 137.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.
N. Katherine Hayles, “The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman,” in Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 157–73, 172.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3.
See N. Katherine Hayles, “Microbiomimesis: Bacteria, Our Cognitive Collaborators,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 4 (2021): 777–87.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 6.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286–87.
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 291.
N. Katherine Hayles, “The Seductions of Cyberspace,” in Reading Digital Culture, ed. by David Trend (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 305–21, 305.
N. Katherine Hayles, “Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari,” SubStance 30, no. 1/2, issue 94/95 (2001): 144–59, 146.
Hayles, “Desiring Agency.”
N. Katherine Hayles, “Refiguring the Posthuman,” Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 311–16, 316.
Hans Blumenberg, Präfiguration: Arbeit am Politischen Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2014), 9.
Blumenberg, Präfiguration, 10.
Blumenberg, Präfiguration, 11.
Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 234–35.
Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man” (1968/1972), in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 109–36.
Catherine Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends?” in Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2015), 61–72, 67.
Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman,” 65.
Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman,” 69.
Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman,” 70–71.
Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman,” 71.
Matthew Calarco, Beyond the Anthropological Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Malabou, “From the Overman to the Posthuman,” 71.
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