earticle

영어

My critical analysis of race and the posthuman examines the problems and limitations of the current posthuman discourse and its conceptualization of posthumanism from a revisionist perspective on humanism and humanity. Three assumptions are required for this purpose. First, I regard the prefix post- as signifying a complex atemporal procedure, rather than seeing it as a sign of a linear chronology. Thus the human and the posthuman are not only allowed to coexist in ever-changing configurations, but they are also supposed to affect each other reciprocally. Second, I assume that the general posthuman condition is not upon us yet. In this sense, most of the posthuman situations would be investigated in the future tense. Third, I see to it that race should not be omitted in the discussion about the human and posthuman conditions as well. Based on this revised critical position, this paper reviews what is at issue in the two genealogies of the posthuman discourse, a transhumanist version of posthumanism and the critical posthumanism. Paying due attention to the ways in which the critical posthumanism has been dealt with by such scholars as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, to name a few, I attempt to envision how the posthuman subject can be re-embodied and how the posthuman space can be produced.