ABSTRACT
Posthumanism marks a careful, ongoing, overdue rethinking of the dominant humanist (or anthropocentric) account of who “we” are as human beings. In the light of posthumanist theory and culture, “we” are not who “we” once believed ourselves to be. And neither are “our” others. According to humanism – a clear and influential example of which can be
found in René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637) – the human being occupies a natural and eternal place at the very center of things, where it is distinguished absolutely from machines, animals, and other inhuman entities; where it shares with all other human beings a unique essence; where it is the origin of meaning and the sovereign subject of history; and where it behaves and believes according to something called “human nature.” In the humanist account, human beings are exceptional, autonomous, and set above the world that lies at their feet. “Man,” to use the profoundly problematic signifier conventionally found in descriptions of “the human condition,” is the hegemonic measure of all things.1
