Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of A Posthumanist

Posthuman, All Too Human:
The Memoirs and Aspirations

of a Posthumanist
ROSI BR AIDOTTI
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Delivered at
Yale University
March 1–2, 2017
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht Uni-
versity, where she previously was Dean’s Professor and founding direc-
tor of the Centre for the Humanities (2005–2016), founding director of
the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies (1995–2005), and
founding professor in Women’s Studies (1988–1995). Braidotti’s recent
publications include The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), Nomadic The-
ory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (Columbia University Press, 2011), and
La philosophie, lá où on ne l’attend pas (Larousse, 2009). She also recently
co-edited Conflicting Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) with
Paul Gilroy, and The Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
with Maria Hlavajova. Her work has been translated into twenty-one lan-
guages. She received a knighthood from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands
in 2005.
[Braidotti] Posthuman, All Too Human 5
Acknowledgments
It is a great honor to be here, and I am very happy to deliver the presti-
gious 2017 Tanner Lectures at Yale University, not the least because of the
foundational role this distinguished university played in the making of an
international audience for French philosophies of subjectivity and differ-
ence, which are my fields of expertise. I would like to thank firstly the Tan-
ner Foundation and the Tanner Lectures Committee at Yale University
for their invitation to deliver these lectures. A special word of thanks for
Yale University President Peter Salovey for the warm and witty hospital-
ity he extended to me during my stay. Sincere thanks to Professor Gary
Tomlinson and his colleagues and staff at the Whitney Humanities Center
for a splendid organizational team effort that made my visit so comfortable
and productive. I am grateful to my respondents, Professor Joanna Radin
and Professor Rüdiger Campe, for their insightful contributions during
the open discussion, and to many other colleagues and students for their
formal and informal comments during the sessions.
A big thank you to my old friend Moira Fradinger for the most mov-
ing—as well as entertaining—public introduction I ever got. My sin-
cere thanks to Genevieve Lloyd for her wise and enlightening guidance
through the drafting process. Thanks also to Matthew Fuller and Keith
Ansell-Pearson for their generous and precise bibliographic and theoreti-
cal insights and advice.
I also thank my personal assistant, Gry Ulstein, for her unfailing logisti-
cal and organizational assistance.
Finally, my gratitude to my partner, Anneke Smelik, for her intellec-
tual, emotional, and moral support.
Preamble
Discussions about the human and, more specifically, what constitutes the
basic unit of reference to define what counts as human, are not what they
used to be. For instance, the question “What is human about the humani-
ties?” is not one that we—humanities scholars—were accustomed to ask-
ing. The “human”—whatever that may mean—is that which we used to
take for granted in order to do what we do in the humanities. Yet over the
last thirty years we have witnessed, in public debates as well as in scientific
research and academic scholarship, the exposure of the implicit assump-
tions, the images and representations of that “human.”
6 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
In these lectures I want to explore this phenomenon. I will argue for

a definition of the posthuman as our historical condition, and not some
future dystopia. Furthermore, I will approach the posthuman as an affir-
mative condition, not as a terminal crisis, with special emphasis on the
qualitative aspects of this predicament. My aim is to provide a rigorous and
accessible account of the philosophical assumptions and arguments that
have opened up the posthuman horizon, so as to make it intelligible. This
will be achieved in the first instance by giving my philosophical overview
of the posthuman condition, pointing out its defining structures and the
leading issues in the debates. I will then proceed to present a selective over-
view of the reshaped postdisciplinary terrain emerging after the impact of
posthuman scholarship. Last but not least, I will explore the implications
of the posthuman turn for the present status and the future perspectives
of the humanities by highlighting the promises of the fast-growing field
of the critical posthumanities.
In the first lecture, I will outline the defining features for the forma-
tion of the posthuman subject, and propose an ethics for the posthuman
predicament. The thesis I will defend is that the posthuman subject is a
materially embedded, multilayered, nomadic entity (Braidotti 1994, 2011),
engaging in interrelations with human and nonhuman agents. Although
such a definition inherits some aspects of the postmodernism debate,
it moves beyond it, both in terms of concepts and of ethical and politi-
cal premises. In the second lecture, I will work out the implications of
the posthuman ethical subject for the theoretical foundations and the
institutional practice of the critical posthumanities in the twenty-first-
century university. In passing, I will also address the “unfinished business”
of theory in general and French poststructuralist theory in particular, and
assess how it impacts the posthuman moment and posthuman scholarship.
LECTURE I.
MEMOIRS OF A POSTHUMANIST
Why “Memoirs”?
I chose the term “memoirs” to start off my argument in order to suggest
a personal narrative tone, but also to establish from the outset my cre-
dentials as a genealogical and neomaterialist thinker. For me, philosophy
starts off with embedded and embodied, partial, and hence accountable
cartographies of complex intellectual and social phenomena. It is less of an
intellectual autobiography than the account of a nomadic crossing, a jour-
ney across texts, teachers, and traditions. I am a neomaterialist, grounded
thinker of dynamic and complex social and discursive processes, with a
keen eye for issues of social and political justice.
The fact that I studied with Foucault, Irigaray, and Deleuze in Paris in
the 1980s does play a role in defining such an approach. These innovative
thinkers taught me to respect the complexity of language as a material
and semiotic structure that we inhabit but do not control, and based their
critique of unitary identities and hegemonic power formations upon this
insight. I feel deep and enduring respect and loyalty for my teachers, who
belong to the tradition of French neomaterialism and Continental natu-
ralism. This tradition avoids an exclusive emphasis on social constructiv-
ism on the one hand, but also on reductive essentialism on the other. The
French poststructuralists are thinkers of processes and complexity. Know-
ing, however, that French theory is an exquisitely American invention, and
that Yale played such a central role in it (Redfield 2016), I want to revisit
it through a different spectrum: embedded and embodied vital material-
ism, which I shall also bring to bear on the contemporary recomposition
of posthuman knowledge.
My cognitive and ethical compass to make sense of the posthuman
condition is therefore constituted by this neomaterialist and relational
vision of subjectivity, enhanced with feminist theory. Rejecting dualism—
Descartes’s error (Damasio 1995)—I will question with equal conviction
the claims of transcendental universalism. This philosophical line runs into
French philosophy through Kant into Levinas and Derrida, and differs
significantly from the line of immanence, which defines French material-
ism and runs through Spinoza and Nietzsche into Foucault and Deleuze.
The embodied and embedded, affective and relational approach that is
constitutive of bodily materialism makes for an ideal combination with the
[7]
feminist politics of locations (Rich 1987), also known as situated knowl-

edges (Harding 1986; Haraway 1988) and nomadic thought (Braidotti
1994, 2011).
I take the feminist politics of locations as the historical and political
manifestation of the immanence of real-life experience and the significance
of corporeal or sensible empiricism. It enables one to account for one’s
position in terms of space (geopolitical or ecological dimension) as well
as time (historical memory or genealogical dimension). Accountability is
both epistemic and ethical: it is both a matter of producing knowledge in
and for the world and of making it generate affirmative relations.
In other words: to understand the complexity and multilayeredness
of the present, I want to start from the world. From there, I will construct
the affirmative aspects of my philosophical approach. I will not privilege
textual authority, but map out encounters and relay points, generative
connections, and productive zig-zagging. This nonlinear spatial itinerary
requires also renewed attention to the time factor: the present is not a
static bloc, but a flow pointing in different directions at once.
To do justice to the complexity of our times, we need to think of the
posthuman present as both the record of what we are ceasing to be (the actual)
and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming (the virtual). Multiply-
ing the present along these parallel plateaus of actual and virtual (Deleuze
and Guattari ([1991] 1994) will prove crucial for these lectures, and I will
return to it often enough. It is not a binary opposition, but the simultaneous
occurrence of multidirectional processes: complexity is indeed the issue.
As nomadic subject-in-process, in perpetual becoming, thinking about the
present makes us confront but also exceed the immediate conditions we
inhabit. If the present is a complex process, critical philosophy cannot stop
at the critique of the actual (of what we are ceasing to be), but needs to move
on to the creative actualization of the virtual (of what we are in the process
of becoming). The interplay between the present as actual and the present
as virtual spells the rhythms of subject formation.
This time continuum as a process ontology of becoming, supplements
and supports the vital neomaterialism that I want to propose as the philo-
sophical underpinning of the posthuman predicament. In attempting to
describe the predicament we are in, therefore, the best we can do is to speak
in the future past (futur antérieur): “It will have been the best of times, and
the worst of times, but it will have been our time, though we were only
passing through.”
Memoirs of the present, then.
[Braidotti] Memoirs of a Posthumanist 9
The Posthuman
Defining the posthuman predicament
Considering the state of the contemporary public debate and the gen-
eral degree of cultural anxiety, I want to start by situating the posthuman
predicament in the context of the Anthropocene. This is the geological
time during which humanity’s negative effect upon the planet’s health and
sustainability has reached empirically measurable levels.1 The impact is
multilayered and it mobilizes our multiple ecologies of belonging (Guat-
tari [1989] 2000), triggering unprecedented problems of an environmen-
tal and social-economical, as well as affective and psychical, character.
My position is that the posthuman condition includes, but also exceeds,
the specific framework of the Anthropocene, which is a popular—albeit
controversial—notion in the scientific community.
The crisis of the Anthropocene is compounded by the combination of
fast technological advances on the one hand and the exacerbation of eco-
nomic and social inequalities on the other, making for a multifaceted and
conflict-ridden landscape. In some way, simply referring to the Anthropo-
cene begs the question. Einstein taught us long ago that we cannot solve
our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.2 New
notions and terms are needed to address the constituencies and configura-
tions of the present and to map future directions. We need more concep-
tual creativity—a renewed trust in the cognitive and political importance
of the imagination.
Moreover, even as a relative neologism, the Anthropocene has already
become another “Anthropomeme” (Macfarlane 2016), spawning several
alternative terms such as “Chthulucene” (Haraway 2016), “Capitalocene”
(Moore 2015), and “Anthrobscene” (Parikka 2015). And there are yet oth-
ers: “Plasticene” (New York Times 2014), “Plantationcene” (Tsing 2015),
and “Misanthropocene” (Clover and Spahr 2014). The terminological
vitality here reflects the speedy and self-replicating discursive economy
of our times. It also expresses both the excitement and the exasperation
involved in attempting to account for the posthuman predicament within
the Anthropocenic frame.
I propose therefore to widen the picture and take a broader look.
My focus throughout the reading of the posthuman in the Anthropocene
will be on the issue of subjectivity—what kind of subjects we are becom-
ing in this context. In order to approach the posthuman subject with some
degree of complexity, I prefer to show you a few images that tell a story.
Illustration 1. Greenhouse, El Ejido Spain. © 2013 Armin Linke. Used by

permission.
Firstly, let us consider the state of our so-called natural order. To say
that “naturecultures” (Haraway 1997) today are fully integrated into a
technological apparatus that maximizes efficiency and profit is stating the
obvious. But coming to terms—psychically, socially, and ethically—with
this statement seems a problem of an altogether different order and scale.
Eco-critics are writing eco-elegiac texts to define our changing relationship
to the techno-natural-cultural continuum in which we now live. Others
speak more bluntly of “eco-horror.” In any case, the response is affective,
and these powerful affects call out for new languages: What do you call
that haunting feeling of ecological memories of the landscapes of your
youth, now transfigured by violent development? Eco-nostalgia? Remem-
brance of trees past? Geophysical semiotics? Portrait of a young waste-
land? Colonial transfigurations? Scar wars? And how should we describe
that sinking feeling at the thought of the unsustainability of our future?
Post-anthropocentric nausea? Extinction-attraction syndrome? Terrestrial
delirium? Global obscenities overload? No country for any human?
Biopower and necro-politics

The affective—or zoe/geo/techno-poetic dimension—embodied in literary,
artistic, and cultural practices cannot be separated from broader geopoliti-
cal and theoretical considerations. The Anthropocene is not taking place in
a void, but within the frame of cognitive, biogenetic advanced capitalism
and media and information technologies. What constitutes capital value
today is the informational power of living matter itself—the politics of life
itself (Rose 2007)—its immanent qualities and self-organizing capacity.
The biogenetic structure of contemporary capitalism enhances the ability
to generate profits from the scientific and economic comprehension of
all that lives. This creates as many problems as it solves, particularly if you
broaden the picture to include the issue of anthropomorphic subjectivity.
Thus, the greenhouses may look like moon stations, but their produce is
mostly picked by unregistered migrants who move from one site to another
during the harvest season, constituting the proletariat of today—economic
fodder vulnerable to widespread vilification and xenophobic rejection.
Disposable bodies, invisible but indispensable.
Moreover, our culture has moved even beyond this biopiracy (Shiva
1997) and its global proletariat on to more advanced mastery of living mat-
ter—through synthetic biology, stem-cell research, gene-editing, robotics,
and bioengineering. Today, we re-create lifelines by codes of a biogenetic
and informational nature. Writing and editing code is what we do best.
Technological mediation is our second nature—from de-extinction to
genetically modified food, Facebook, and WikiLeaks. Our universities
are in the middle of these phenomenal and exciting developments—we are
motors of what has become known as “cognitive capitalism” (Moulier-
Boutang 2012). Let me give you just one example of this.
Artificial meat was first made in 2013 at Maastricht University in the
Netherlands, from real meat stem cells grown in a lab and mixed with
calf serum. The first prototype cost $325,000, but by now that price has
dropped to just over $11 for one synthetic burger ($80 per kilogram of
meat). The neural part of humans’ interaction with synthetic meat is not
up to scratch yet, but the proteins are in place. All ecologically minded
citizens, let alone vegetarian and vegan activists, should be delighted by
these developments. Synthetic biology brings the exploitation of natural
resources to an end, and even allows for de-extinction (Minteer 2015) and
rewilding practices (Frasier 2010; Monbiot 2013), in a way that formal-
izes the de-naturalization of matter. Although this idea is in equal parts
liberating and problematic, I am struck by the slightly disgusted reactions

it is often met with in public debates. What this contradictory reaction
tells us is something significant about the complexity of our emotional
responses to the capitalization of living matter. What are we missing
exactly, now that matter has emancipated itself from bound organisms
and meat is de-linked from the body? Is this another telling tale of eco-
nostalgia? How do these affective responses interplay with the intellectual
excitement so many of us feel at what is known as the “Fourth Industrial
Revolution” and its advanced technologies?
In the contemporary political economy, where life generates surplus
profits (Cooper 2008), informational data is the true capital. Knowledge
about the vital power of matter gets transposed into data banks of biogenetic,
neural, and mediatic information. Data mining includes profiling practices
and risk assessments that identify different types or characteristics as strategic
targets for investment, but also for our security and surveillance practices.
This has implications for posthuman subjectivity as well. The paradoxi-
cal result of mining the basic codes of life itself is that it induces, if not the
actual erasure, at least the blurring of the categorical distinction between
the human and other species, when it comes to profiting from them. Seeds,
cells, plants, animals, and bacteria fit into this logic of commodification
alongside various specimens of humanity, producing a functional form of
post-anthropocentrism that spuriously unifies all species under the impera-
tive of the market economy. The excesses of the Capitalocene threaten the
uniqueness of Anthropos, as well as the sustainability of the planet as a whole.
The position of both nonhumans and humans is dislocated along mul-
tiple axes within these advanced yet brutal posthuman landscapes. This
internally divided picture becomes even sharper if we look specifically at
the dispossessed. The inhuman is a significant component of the posthu-
man predicament. And the contemporary world has more than its fair
share of cruelty to account for. The brutality of new power relations has
established a necro-political mode of governing, which targets not only the
management of the living but also multiple practices of managed decline
and dying. Consider the generalized material destruction of human bodies,
populations, and the environment through the industrial-scale warfare led
by drones and other unmanned vehicles. Think also of the global effects of
migration as a result of dispossession, expulsions, and terror. The refugee
camps and other zones of detention are multiplying, as are our militarized
borders and humanitarian interventions. Whole sections of humanity are
downgraded to the status of infra-humans, extraterritorial, like the refugees,
Illustration 2. “Disposable Bodies” New Degrees of Freedom, Act 3: Water,

2014 © Jenna Sutela et al. Reproduced by permission.
trying to cross the solid sea that is the Mediterranean, by now turning into
a liquid grave. They are the alien others, not meant to be here to stay.
The inhuman(e) aspects of the posthuman condition is one of the rea-
sons why I want to foreground the question of the subject and subjectivity,
so as to work out what the posthuman may mean for our collective self-
understanding and ethical accountability. Let it be clear therefore that, far
from marking the extinction or the impoverishment of the human,3 the
posthuman condition is a way of reconstituting the human—for some as a
return to neohumanist universalism, coupled with forms of enhancement;
for others a downsizing of human arrogance coupled with the acknowledg-
ment of solidarity with other humans. There are many dynamics of subject
formation coming into being in this posthuman conjunction, as a result of
the dislocation of the grounds on which the human used to be composed
and experienced socially.
The Posthuman Subject as Critique

Overexposure and evanescence
Let me pause at this stage and strike a meditative note. The posthuman pre-
dicament is constructed by a major paradox, because there is widespread
production of knowledge and speculation both in the academy and in

society about a category—the human—at the very time when this category
has lost all consensus and self-evidence. I hope you will have noticed—
here comes the future past again!—that the argument I am building is
gradually constructing an embattled and endangered people—a “we-are-
in-this-together” kind of people—that is vulnerable because of the times,
internally fractured and not at all the same or universal, but also deter-
mined to adopt a critical and creative stance towards the great opportuni-
ties, but also the injustices and threats, of present times.
The paradox at work here is the simultaneous overexposure and evanes-
cence of the “human” in posthuman discourses and practices: the category
emerges as urgent just as it enters a terminal crisis. It does not even hold as
a category, other than as an expression of anxiety about survival, plus the
fear of loss of privileges. This paradox is not only logical but also ethical-
political, and it can be put as a polemical question: Whose crisis is it?
To what extent can one speak of an undifferentiated humanity (“we”) that
is allegedly sharing a common condition of both technological mediation
and crisis and extinction (“this”)?
Think, for example, of the classic posthumanist example of Michel
Foucault’s (1970) image of the face of “Man” drawn on the sand by the
seashore, which is gradually erased by the waves of history. Is it about
extinction or renewal? Never mind the social constructivist point about
Man being a recent invention—what matters here is how Foucault’s genea-
logical method grapples with this conceptual paradox: it is at the moment
of its dissolution that Man becomes thinkable as such and emerges as a
present concern. Up until that moment it had not surfaced to the critical
eye, because it functioned as an implicit notion.
Maybe this is why, as I stated at the beginning, we were not trained to
question directly the identity of the human in the humanities—this was
simply not a question. It had to be recast and reformatted discursively
within the protocols and methods of each humanities discipline, where
it conventionally falls into a pattern of dualistic oppositions that define
the human mostly by what it is not. Mullarky (2013) wittily observes, for
instance, that the animal provides an index of death for Derrida, an index
of life for Deleuze, and an index of dehumanization for Agamben,
to name just a few. My point is that the posthuman condition encourages
us to move beyond these representational habits and the philosophical
anthropocentrism they entail: we simply cannot start from the central-
ity of the human and uphold the old dualities. But this acknowledgment
does not necessarily or inevitably throw us into the abyss of neo-bestiality

or the terror of extinction. There has to be some other middle ground,
another milieu.
This is where the conceptual distinction between the perception of
what we are ceasing to be (the present as the record of the past) and that
which we are in the process of becoming (the present as the unfolding
of the virtual/the future) offers critical and creative margins of interven-
tion upon the paradox of simultaneous overexposure and evanescence of
the human.
This distinction allows us to think differently by opening up a new
space—the space of the non-coincidence between the given and the cri-
tique of the given. This is another kind of middle ground, or milieu, which
points to the future, that is to say to what we are capable of becoming in
and out of what we are ceasing to be. On the basis of vital neomaterialism,
a number of consequences emerge.
Firstly, there is no paradox in the simultaneous overexposure and non-
existence of the “human,” because there is no linear time, but a thousand
plateaus of possible becoming, each following its own multidirectional
or rhizomic course. A nonlinear temporality requires and enables us to
produce multiple complex and diversified lines of embodied, embed-
ded, relational, and affective posthuman subjectivity. Secondly, there is
no extinction/survival binary, because posthuman thought is not about
dialectical oppositions, “either/or,” but rather about immanent relations
of, “and/and.” By extension, this means that there is no justification for
panic-stricken reinventions of a wounded humanity. What we rather need
to stress is the urgency to provide adequate and differential accounts (car-
tographies) of multiple subject-positions that are in process at the same
time, but not in the same manner or direction.
Thus I come to my first concluding proposition: the proper subject of
posthuman enquiry is not Man, but a new collective subject, a “we-are-
in-this-together” kind of subject. This can be understood as a process of
becoming in its own immanence and not in binary oppositional terms. It is
a becoming other-than the Homo Universalis of humanism or other-than
the Anthropos of anthropocentrism. To cope with it, we need a subtler
and more diversified affective range that avoids the polarization between
mourning (apocalyptic variant) and celebration (euphoric variable) in rela-
tion to humanity as both a vulnerable and an insurgent category. What
we do need above all is to develop a specific form of complexity proper to
the humanities. The humanities are the subtle, not the soft, sciences.
Posthumanism
Let me now go on to offer my working definition: the posthuman is a
convergence phenomenon unfolding at the intersection between posthu-
manism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other. Post-
humanism proposes the philosophical critique of the Western humanist
ideal of the “man of reason” as the allegedly universal measure of all things,
whereas post-anthropocentrism rests on the rejection of species hierarchy
and human exceptionalism. They are equally powerful discourses, but they
refer to different theoretical and philosophical genealogies and engen-
der different political stances, which encompass both forms of empower-
ment and, in many ways, new modes of entrapment. This convergence is
producing a chain of theoretical, social, and political effects that is more
than the sum of its parts and that points to a qualitative leap in new con-
ceptual directions. Before further exploring the affirmative ethics of the
posthuman and giving you an idea of what the posthuman subject is or
can become, let me give a bit of background to the idea of posthumanism.
Posthumanism drags us back to debates we may not wish to revisit—
though I fear we cannot completely avoid them—about the unfinished
business of the French and the postmodern critique of the human, namely
the quarrel with Him, the Homo Universalis of humanist universalism:
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Considering the complex and
polemical nature of this legacy, let me say just this: while the philosophi-
cal poststructuralist generation developed its own critique of humanism,
multiple feminist waves, antiracist activists, indigenous and First Nations
people, environmentalists, disability rights advocates, media activists, and
LGBTQ+ theorists have always questioned the scope, the founding prin-
ciples, and the achievements of European humanism and its role in the
project of Western modernity. Their criticism is twofold: It targets the
unfulfilled promises of the Enlightenment project, while also producing
counter-notions of the human and of humanity—in nonmasculinist and
non-Eurocentric terms. Moreover, it stresses that humanity is not a neu-
tral term but rather one that indexes access to specific powers, values, and
norms, privileges and entitlements, rights and visibility.
None of this is particularly “new.” In fact, critical questions about the
limits of humanist universalism have been raised since the eighteenth
century. For instance, the French feminist activist Olympe de Gouges—
who wrote the Declaration of Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,
in 1791—was critical of this ideal, arguing that it did nothing for women
Illustration 3. Leonardo da Vinci, L’Uomo Vitruviano, ca. 1490. Wikimedia

Commons.
and other minorities. She campaigned and protested but ended up under
the guillotine. François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, the antislavery
leader of the Haitian Revolution in Santo Domingo (which also started
in 1791), attempted to apply the universal principles of equality to the
status of slaves in the colonies. Toussaint L’Ouverture tried to establish
an independent Haitian government. He almost succeeded but was put
down violently by the French in due course.
These critical voices teach us that the fundamental social categories
such as class, race, gender and sexual orientation, age, and able-bodiedness
have functioned as markers of human “normality.” They still are key fac-
tors in framing the notion of and policing access to something we may call
“humanity.” But who qualifies as a human in that view? The experience of
the marginal and the dispossessed teaches us that “the human,” far from
being a universal or neutral category, is a term that indexes access to entitle-
ment and privileges.
The humanist ideal inflates the human to universal dimensions: it skil-
fully combines high standards of physical perfection with intellectual and
moral values, turning into a civilizational standard. Foucault’s critique
linked this humanist ideal to a sovereign notion of “reason” that, since the
eighteenth century, has provided the basic unit of reference for the human
and for everything European culture holds dear. This exclusively human
Illustration 4. Vitruvian Cat. www.CartoonStock.com.
faculty allegedly qualifies our species for the pursuit of both individual
and collective perfectibility, making it uniquely capable of self-regulating
moral rational judgment. The boundless faith in reason as the motor of
human evolution ties in with the teleological prospect of the rational prog-
ress of humanity through science and technology, positioning Europe as
the cradle of that civilizing mission.
Thus, from the angle of posthumanism, the posthuman turn, far from
being deconstructivist and relativistic, is materialist and neofoundational-
ist in the many dimensions that structure it. It stresses that “we” are not
one and the same but are rather internally differentiated by power divides.
Moreover, because this process of overcoming the limitations of both
humanism and antihumanism is neither linear nor simple, many aspects
of the poststructuralist debates are relevant for the current situation, but
mostly as a cautionary tale.
Post-anthropocentrism
Now that we have an idea of how posthumanism came out of a critique of
the human, let’s look more closely at post-anthropocentrism. I see posthu-
manism and post-anthropocentrism as distinct genealogical lines rather
than automatically linked. Assuming that most scholars in the humanities
are fatally attracted to anthropomorphic objects of study, when they are not
belligerently anthropocentric, can we even begin to imagine nonhuman
Illustration 5. Vitruvian Dog. www.CartoonStock.com.
entities becoming “the measure of all things”? Post-anthropocentrism pro-

pels us forward to topics we may not feel a particular aptitude for: animals,
plants, cells, viruses, bacteria, algorithms, etc. And yet, posthuman, but all
too human, “think we must,” as Virginia Woolf eloquently phrased it in
Three Guineas, on the eve of World War II—coining a sentence that will
have proved foundational for feminist theory.
How do we go about thinking along these complex but interwoven
posthuman lines of critique? For one thing, posthuman thought has resur-
rected the same anxieties and virulent rejection that previous generations
reserved for French poststructuralist theory and its alleged postmodern-
ist relativism. The analogy between the anti-posthuman and the anti-
postmodern discussions is striking. But we also know by now that French
poststructuralism is the preferred public scapegoat for all evils that befall
us, so we should not take these allegations too seriously.
Other critical voices, however, display a distinct lack of enthusiasm for
the posthuman predicament. Social thinkers from different political back-
grounds, such as Habermas (2003), Fukuyama (2002), Sloterdijk (2009),
and Derrida (in Borradori 2003), have expressed concern bordering on
moral panic about the status of the human in our advanced technologi-
cal times. Recently, Pope Francis (2015) joined this debate, supplement-
ing Catholic dogma on Natural Law with Naomi Klein’s analysis of the
destructive role of capitalism (Klein 2014). My argument is quite the
opposite: while it is undeniably true that the technological devices today

are very alive, and the humans quite inert (Haraway 1988), the evidence
provided by posthuman scholarship shows no “crisis,” but a remarkable
upsurge of inspiration.
So let me repeat the question: Supposing “we” are in this together,
who are “we”? Whose crisis is this? This is where I want to insist on adopt-
ing a philosophical stance that defies dualistic oppositions and sustains
the material, embodied and embedded, interconnected nature of things
both human and nonhuman. We need to connect critique to creativity
and invent new ways of thinking, interwoven lines of posthuman cri-
tique, because we cannot solve problems in the same language we used to
create them.
The Posthuman Subject as Creativity

The posthuman subject produces a seismic shift of the grounds on which
the humanist/anthropocentric subject used to be postulated. It is not,
however, merely critical but also an alternative affirmative figure. The next
step of my argument will be to think about a posthuman ethics for this
subject that is not unitary but not postmodern either; it is dynamic but
not antifoundationalist, it is well defined but in process.
In order to get there, let me start again from the line of immanence and
my differential, but embodied and embedded, bodily materialism. This
position mistrusts the metaphysical grandiosity of the line of transcen-
dence; it grounds the activity of thinking in the mobility and fluctuations
of an embodied mind that connects constantly, changes and yet remains
stable—belonging and flowing at the same time. I have also referred to
this materialist continuum as zoe, that is to say an intertwined web of
humans and nonhuman living matter, as opposed to bios, the specific
slice of material and discursive life traditionally reserved for Anthropos
(Braidotti 2006).
How does a philosophy of immanence teach us to think differ-
ently? By situating the thinking subjects in the world, as relational, post-
anthropocentric, mediated, and outward-bound. By extension, posthuman
ethics is about interacting affirmatively in the world, together with a mul-
titude of human and nonhuman others. The emphasis on immanence
means that the posthuman subjects—as the effect of the convergence of
posthumanism and post-a nthropocentrism—are “we-a re-i n-this-together-
but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” kinds of subjects. That is to say they are
not unitary but rather complex and multilayered. They are also immanent
and intrinsically connected to the very condition they are also critically
disengaged from. The embodied and embedded, relational nature of this
technologically mediated, globally interlinked, and yet internally fractured
subject results in what I call “ontological pacifism.” That notion implies
trust in our shared intimacy with and knowledge of the world and in our
lived experience of it.
In this frame of thought, the differences that define us get constituted
not oppositionally but as internal modulations within a common matter,
that is intelligent and self-organized. For Spinoza, the ethical life consists
of understanding ourselves as integral parts of the totality of being. It is the
case, therefore, that not only are our bodies dynamically embedded in the
interconnected whole that is the material world, but also so are our minds
(Lloyd 1996). The immanent ethical subject apprehends itself—with ever
increasing adequacy—as part of that interconnected totality of both mat-
ter and thought.
What this means for the task of posthuman thinkers is that we must be
worthy of our times, in order to interact with them, in order to resist them,
that is to say differ from them, especially when they perpetuate injustice
and negativity. We need to detox our thinking from the poison of negative
passions like resentment, envy, hatred, despair, but also sheer tedium. The
ethical ideal is to aspire to the joyful affirmation of virtual possibilities,
of what “we” are capable of becoming. We have to labor towards becoming
a new kind of subject that is immanent to the world, that is to say confident
about the world, but critical of its injustices and negativity. Such a subject
can only become actualized together with others, in praxis, and through
action in the world.
Posthuman subjects assume not only the materialist totality of things
(i.e., that all matter is One, intelligent and self-organizing) but also that
this totality includes technology. This is important because it inscribes
the technological apparatus as second nature. Do remember that this
“life” the posthuman subject is immanent to is no longer bios but rather
zoe: non-anthropocentric but also non-anthropomorphic. Zoe also needs
to embrace geo- and techno-bound egalitarianism, acknowledging that
intelligence, thinking, and the capacity to produce knowledge are not the
exclusive prerogatives of humans alone, but are distributed across all liv-
ing matter and self-organizing technological networks. This statement,
which may seem self-evident or even a banality for science studies scholars,
anthropologists of science and technology, or environmentalists, is more
indigestible for philosophers and other humanists. The transcendental
nature of human consciousness is simply one of the foundational and

cherished ideas that one relinquishes at one’s risk and peril.
And yet, thinking does take place everywhere, not only within the
anthropomorphic subject—if by “thinking” we do not mean the des-
potic eye of transcendental consciousness but also the powers (potentia)
of embodied and embedded subjects, which are the same in their essential
capacity to affect and be affected, and to express their unrealized, that is to
say virtual, potentialities. But these powers obviously differ in what stuff
they are actually made of, that is to say in the degree and force of their
capacity to actualize the virtual potential. Thinking, in the sense of rela-
tional and collaborative co-construction of sustainable ways of persevering
in our existence, is the task of producing adequate ways of understanding
what is happening to us so that we can intersect productively with others.
Thinking, thus defined, is what being alive feels like. Once this profound
intimacy with living systems—organic and technological, born and manu-
factured, bred and designed—is established, we have posthuman, all too
human, vital materialist subjects embedded in the conditions of their own
historicity, but also contained (and hence limited) by the frame of what
their embrained bodies can do.
As a consequence, posthuman critical theory needs to fulfill the mul-
tiple—and potentially contradictory—requirements of vital materialist
ontology. What is new is the scale, the speed, and the structure of the
transformations we are undergoing, that is to say of what is simultaneously
ceasing to be and in the process of becoming. It is crucial, for instance,
to see the interconnections among the greenhouse effect, the status of
women and LGBTQ+, racism and xenophobia, and frantic consumer-
ism. We must not stop at any fragmented portions of these realities but
rather trace transversal interconnections among them. Species equality in
a post-anthropocentric world does urge us to question the violence and the
hierarchical thinking that result from human arrogance and the assump-
tion of transcendental human exceptionalism. In my view, relational ethics
stresses instead the more compassionate aspect of subjectivity.
It follows therefore that “we”—the posthuman subjects of knowledge
people emerging from the humanities—need to change how we think
about thought, thinking, and reason. We need to write the collective
memoirs of how things will have come to pass, how it will have come to
this. In other words, we need to embrace the posthuman condition as our
chance to develop together an adequate understanding of the mutation we
are undergoing, in all of its complex and confrontational aspects, and labor
together to compose a people who can—hopefully—steer the qualitative

leap in an affirmative direction.
Posthuman subjects will have been all too human in that they are
facing, right here and now, an inhuman present and an ahuman future.
Learning to think differently about what we do when we think about the
humans that we will have been enlists the resources of the imagination,
of our deepest aspirations, of vision and trust. These qualities require a
new understanding of the collaborative and interconnected “we-are-in-
this-together” kind of subject. Ultimately, this leads us to the need for a
new ethics, posthumanist and non-anthropocentric, materially grounded
but differential, and, above all, nonrelativistic.
Which takes me to the next level up, namely what sort of ethics can
help us then to think past the deeply entrenched anthropocentrism and
the benevolent humanism of even the most emancipatory discourses?
Zoe-D riven Ethics of Affirmation

The need for a new ethics is due to the urgency of the challenges that “we”
are facing.
Considering the scale of the convulsive and internally contradictory
events that define the posthuman predicament and the painful, glaring
degrees of injustice and violence they entail, standard values appear inade-
quate. What kind of ethical accountability can we develop in the aftermath
of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism? What does it mean to
think in and with the world, when that world seems to be falling apart by
the minute?
Remembering that reaching an adequate understanding of the condi-
tions of our bondage is Spinoza’s definition not only of philosophy, but
also of the ethical life, ethics means a life lived in the pursuit of the expres-
sion of our innermost essence. This essence being the joyful affirmation
of our freedom, our desire to endure, to persevere, to survive. And with
us, the rest of this planet. This ontological interconnectedness changes
everything indeed, because the posthuman subjects of the Anthropo-
cene simply cannot afford, in view of their specific historical condition,
to restrict the ethical life to bios alone, let alone an anthropomorphic or
anthropocentric one.
Posthuman ethics is about reinventing the connection to nonhu-
man, inhuman, faster-than-human forces. This “eco-sophical” dimen-
sion, as Guattari called it, resonates with the technosphere as well, in a
movement that pushes the quest for an ethics of affirmation not only to
terrestrial and global but also to cosmic dimensions. Please follow this
sequential argument: The traditional ethical formula of humanist subjects
was the contemplation of their own mortality, balanced by the prospect
of the eternity of their rational soul. The ethical formula of postmodern
subjects, on the other hand, was deep skepticism about the foundational
robustness of any category, including that of subjectivity itself. The post-
nuclear subjects’ ethical formula focused on extinction of their and other
species as a distinct possibility that ought to be avoided (and please note
that the Anthropocene is officially dated from 1950, the dawn of the
nuclear age).
It then follows that the ethical formula of posthuman subjects may
well be to learn to think differently about what they are in the process of
becoming. But what does the “difference” of posthuman subjects mean?
It refers to their relational capacity to elaborate adequate understanding of
the interconnection to all matter, at a historical time when our science and
technology have revolutionized our knowledge of matter in a multiscale
manner. Posthuman ethics is about the pursuit of the unrealized potential
of complex assemblages of subjects, at a time when the future seems rather
to shrink dramatically.
To help steer a course through these complex ideas, let me bring back
at this point the insight about the nonlinearity of time, notably the mul-
tilayered structure of the present as both the record of what we are ceasing
to be and the seeds of what we are in the process of becoming. This means
that the conditions for political and ethical agency are not dependent on
the current state of the terrain: they are not oppositional and thus not
tied to the present by negation. Instead they are projected across time as
affirmative praxis, geared to creating empowering relations aimed at pos-
sible futures. One has to become ethical, as opposed to applying moral
rules and protocols as a form of self-protection; one has to endure and to
transform. Saying “no” to the unacceptable aspects of present conditions
cuts both ways. It means both “I prefer not to” and “I desire otherwise.”
Ethical relations create possible worlds by mobilizing resources that have
been left untapped in the present, including our desires, and they activate
the virtual in a web or rhizome of interconnection with others.
What is positive in the ethics of affirmation is the belief that nega-
tive affects can be transformed. This implies a dynamic view of all affects,
including the painful ones. Every present event contains within it the
potential for being overcome and overtaken—its negative charge can be
transposed. The moment of the actualization of its virtual potential is
also the moment of the neutralization of the toxic/poisonous effects of

the pain. Ethics is the force that contributes to conditions of affirmative
becoming. It is an ethics equated with ontological relationality, aiming at
affirmative empowerment, that is to say the ability to increase one’s modes
of relation with multiple others, and to create a community that actualizes
this ethical propensity.
The ethical evil is equated with negative affects, and what is negative
about them is not a normative value judgment but rather the effect of
arrest, blockage, rigidification that comes as a result of a blow, a shock,
an act of violence, betrayal, a trauma, or just intense boredom.
This ethics consists not in denying negativity but in reworking it out-
side the dialectical oppositions because negative passions diminish our
relational competence and deny our vital interdependence on others. They
negate the positive power (potentia) of our ethical essence, of life as the
desire to endure, to continue, by becoming other than itself. The black hole
of narcissism and paranoia, the despotic glee in humiliating others—all
this negativity hurts the victims but also harms the perpetuators’ capac-
ity to pursue the ethical opening-outwards. Negative passions harm and
diminish the self ’s capacity to relate to others, both human and nonhu-
man others, and thus to grow in and through others in a vital form of
interdependence.
Posthuman zoe/geo/techno-bound ethics is therefore also a praxis—
collectively desired, upheld, and implemented—that aims at reworking
and transforming negative affects and relations. In order to implement
this, we need to de-psychologize this discussion about negativity and
affirmation and approach it instead in more conceptual but also more
pragmatic terms. The distinction between good and evil is replaced with
that between affirmation and negation, or positive and negative affects.
Thinking in posthuman times is a subtle art, requiring broader alliances
with multiple subjects.
Saying that ethics is essentially about transformation of negative into
positive passions—i.e., moving beyond the pain—does not mean denying
the pain, but rather activating it, working it through, beyond the dialectics
of recognition and the politics of resentment. The positivity here is not
supposed to indicate a facile optimism or a careless dismissal of human
suffering. It is about transcending the resignation and passivity that ensue
from being hurt, lost, and dispossessed, and enduring so as to transform.
The emphasis on the pursuit and actualization of positive relations and
the ethical value attributed to affirmation do not imply any avoidance or
disavowal of conflict either. Of course repugnant and unbearable events do

happen. Ethics consists, however, in reworking these events in the direc-
tion of positive relations. This is not lack of compassion but rather an
oversupply of it, aspiring to an adequate understanding of the conditions
of our relational dependency on the negative. Critical thought feeds on
negativity, as Nietzsche sharply observed. To disengage the process of sub-
ject formation from negativity and attach it to affirmative otherness means
that the ethical good is redefined not as recognition as much as the reci-
procity of mutual specification within a shared praxis of co-construction
of affirmation. This virtue is all the more valuable in posthuman times,
when alterity encompasses a multitude of nonhuman others.
Yes, we are in this together, but this togetherness is not given, it has to
be constructed. We need to be ever mindful of the fact that the “human”
never was a unitary term to begin with, but rather one that indexes access
to rights and entitlements. No amount of universalism can conceal the
fractures, the internal contradictions and external exclusions that have
always composed a notion of the human. And leaving the question of
the subject out of the posthuman picture altogether would just beg the
question. In other words, being posthuman is not a mark of contempt for
mankind. It rather expresses the belief that the human is its own overcom-
ing, because the human is a relational entity that becomes in and with the
world: “We are in this together but we are not one and the same.”
Conclusion
I have argued throughout this first lecture that the posthuman is our his-
torical condition, which is multifaceted and affects all fields of human
endeavour. It operates at all scales of constitution of our multiple ecolo-
gies of becoming-subjects, and it inhabits multiple and internally contra-
dictory temporalities. The posthuman predicament points to a change of
paradigm: far from being postmodernist, deconstructivist, and relativistic,
posthuman thought is materialist, pragmatic, and neofoundationalist.
The posthuman knowing subject is a complex assemblage of human
and nonhuman, ecological, technological, planetary and cosmic, given
and manufactured, organic and technological relations. This subject is
inscribed in the power formations of the current phase of cognitive capi-
talism and ubiquitous mediation, bio-piracy, necro-politics and world-
wide dispossession, expulsions and migration. The posthuman subjects
need to develop an ethics that combines the recognition of our collective
belonging to the totality of a vital material universe with respect for the
Illustration 6. Vuilnis in het water. Photo by David Bokuchava.

www.istockphoto.com.
structural differences and inequalities that compose our social existence

and the desire to develop a collective ethics of becoming.
The affirmative ethics of the posthuman subject is zoe/geo/techno-
bound egalitarianism, based on respect for the nonhuman. It is postidenti-
tarian and tends to run against the spirit of contemporary identity-loaded,
consumeristic capitalism and its commodification of life itself. It favors
instead nonprofit experimentations with what we are capable of becoming.
Posthuman subjects pursue an ethical praxis that entails a mix of
humans and nonhumans, computational networks and earthlings, in a
vital interconnection that is smart and self-organizing but not chaotic.
However it may hurt, we need to inscribe the contemporary subjects
in the conditions of their present predicament, in order to transform it
affirmatively.
Everything starts with the composition of a people, a community that
collectively recognizes that “we are in this together but we are not one and
the same,” but are driven by a collaborative ethics of empowerment, affir-
mation, and social horizons of hope for yet unrealized futures. This is the
ethical platform from which to confront the challenges of our posthuman
times in their achievements, as well as horror.
“We are in this together” is the ethical formula par excellence, and all
the more so in a posthuman vital political economy of becoming. The
neomaterialist ethics of affirmation or joy is the stance I want to propose
for posthuman subjects. This rests upon a vital-materialist framework that
foregrounds the relational elements of the process. This view of subjectivity

does not condition the ethical relation on negation, or lack, but on vital
generative forces. It also stresses that the subjects’ ethical core is clearly not
their moral intentionality but their relational capacity. The impact of their
actions upon the world is the power to affect and be affected, meaning
that power is always double-edged, both repressive (potestas) and posi-
tive (potential). Ethics is a process of engendering empowering affirmative
modes of becoming. It is a pragmatics of affirmation. It is a form of amor
fati, a way of living up to the intensities of life, so as to be worthy of all that
happens to us—to live out our shared capacity to affect and to be affected.
The next step of the argument will be that we—teachers and thinkers
in the humanities—need to embrace the multiple opportunities offered
by the posthuman condition, while keeping up our other competences.
If the proper study of mankind used to be “Man,” and the proper study
of humanity was the human, it seems to follow that the proper study of
the posthuman condition is the posthuman knowing subject itself. This
question constitutes the core of Lecture II, which will apply these ideas to
the development of the “subtle” humanities in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term “Anthropocene” in
2002 to describe our current geological era in terms of human impact upon the
sustainability of the planet. The term was officially adopted by the International
Geological Association in Cape Town in August 2016.
2. Albert Einstein: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking
we used when we created them.” Brainy Quote. Accessed August 3, 2017. http://
www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins385842.html.
3. The literature of extinction is also proliferating. See, for instance, works on
ceasing to be human (Bruns 2010), extinction of life on earth (Lovelock 2009),
and extinction of the human tout court (Colebroook 2014a, 2014b).
LECTURE II.
ASPIRATIONS OF A POSTHUMANIST
What Is Posthuman about the Humanities?

Maybe androids do dream of electric sheep, but academics tend to dream
about unfinished sentences, half-baked ideas, and, of course, the latest
review articles. My daydreams and aspirations will always have been about
transformative processes, events, and concepts. It may be generational:
born in the nuclear era, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, raised during
the Cold War, for me it has always been “Apocalypse from now on!” And
after the Cold War came global warming. So, I will have been postapoca-
lyptic for most of my life. The posthuman being my historical condition,
I will have been situated at the tail end of biopower, amidst the savage
devastation of necro-politics, dying species, salinated earth, and toxic air.
But also—and at the same time—I will have been a participant to and wit-
ness of the breathtaking scientific and technological advances of our times.
These opposite phenomena are not mutually exclusive, not outside
some abstract logical scheme, given that they are happening all around us,
right now. We—the all-too-human class of teachers and thinkers of these
posthuman times—really cannot simplify our own lived complexities.
The posthuman moment marks this fracture, this encounter with seem-
ingly dissonant elements and events. And, to be honest, things seem to be
getting worse, with growing economic disparities and the rise of illiberal
governance. So there is nothing left for critical thinkers to do except to
pursue the posthuman, all-too-human praxis of speaking truth to power
and working towards the composition of planes of immanence for new
subjects of knowledge. They are the missing peoples who can think oth-
erwise and are able to generate knowledge by new methods. But at times,
our hearts do fail.
Therefore, in this second lecture I will make a point of demonstrating
the heartwarming vitality of posthuman scholarship and arguing that the
fields of the subtle sciences that used to be the conventional humanities are
already pointing in the direction of many inspiring new posthuman knowl-
edge practices. The self-organizing energy of the field encourages us to go
on with the task of learning to think differently about ourselves. The new
horizons of knowledge being produced collectively, by human and non-
human assemblages, are giving us a measure of what we are actually in the
process of becoming. My point is that they support a qualitative change,
[29]
both in epistemic and in ethical terms, thereby infusing new energy into
the humanities (Braidotti 2016).
Please don’t get irritated by the occasionally specialized language—
it is the fate of philosophers to ask ordinary language to do extraordinary
things and work overtime, as Humpty Dumpty knew so well. Don’t just
dismiss it as jargon, but approach it as if it were a set of formulae, or a
special code. We are dealing with the posthumanities after all!
Thinking the Posthuman

Posthuman scholarship approaches life not only as bios, the specific life
quality of humans, but also as a zoe—nonhuman life. It celebrates the diver-
sity of zoe in a nonhierarchical matter, recognizing the respective degrees
of intelligence, ability, and creativity of all organisms. This implies, as I
argued in the first lecture, that thinking and knowing are not the preroga-
tive of humans alone, but take place in the world, which is the terrestrial,
grounded location for multiple thinking species—we are all eco-sophically
connected. Zoe/geo/techno-bound perspectives indeed.
I am aware that it is somehow counterintuitive—within the humani-
ties—to acknowledge that being a knowing subject is not the exclusive pre-
rogative of the human, but my argument remains that “we” need to move
on from established habits of thought and learn to think differently about
ourselves. To do this, “we” need to imagine and implement collectively
new ways of thinking and of generating knowledge in a relational manner.
Posthuman subjects sustain a pragmatic ethical praxis, which consists in
experimenting with what materially embedded, biotechnologically medi-
ated bodies are capable of “becoming.” As I argued in the first lecture, the
pursuit of one’s freedom to become is framed by an ethics of joy or affirma-
tion, aiming at enhancing a relational bond to a multiplicity of others.
Thinking in the posthuman frame expresses the neomaterialist and
vital ontological essence proper to all things, namely their relational force
and capacity, that aims at pursuing relations and projects that empower our
capacity to act, also known as potentia, and for Spinoza, as conatus. Think-
ing is about supporting what we are capable of becoming and realizing the
untapped potentials of what our embodied brains and embrained bodies
can do. In other words, thinking is about the creation of new concepts.
This definition of thinking supports the equal worth and value of phi-
losophy, the arts, and the sciences as variations on the theme of enhancing
our relational abilities. The parallelism of these three branches of knowl-
edge—in itself not a new idea—does acquire different connotations when
[Braidotti] Aspirations of a Posthumanist 31
Illustration 7. Vitruvian Woman. Illustration by Jim Dowdalls.

www.sciencesource.com.
applied to the contradictions of the posthuman predicament in the age of

the Anthropocene. To begin with, it calls for the definitive end of disciplin-
ary purity and points in a transversal direction.
Being a practical philosophy, posthuman thought is like an online game
in that it presents a strong metamethodological angle. It prefers guide-
lines to axioms and protocols to canonical truths, in order to set up the
experiments with actualizing unrealized potentials. How do “we” go about
composing new subjects, including nonhuman agents and technologically
mediated ones? We need transversal assemblages. We need to combine

critique with creativity, enlist the powers of the imagination and uphold
the equal worth and value of all branches of knowledge, in the hope of
enhancing their mutual respect. Methodologically, we need to co-produce
adequate cartographies.
A cartography is a materially embedded, theoretically driven, and
politically informed reading of the formation of knowledge and knowing
subjects in the contemporary world. Cartographies are a mixture of docu-
ments and monuments, networks and relations, set in the present—which
is both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seed of what we are in
the process of becoming. A cartographic reading aims at tracking the praxis
of affirmation and power both as entrapment (potestas) and as empower-
ment (potentia) in the production of thought and subjectivity.
In this lecture I will use the posthuman subject as a cartographic device
to highlight the specific forms of knowledge production currently ongoing
in our world. The posthuman cartography I will present here assesses the
extent to which the humanities, a field notorious for its devotion to the
authority of the past and its own history and canon, can actually engage
with the present by embracing the posthuman condition. My argument is
that a nomadic exodus from monodisciplinary “homes” has created schol-
arship of the “outside”: thinking of, in, and for the world. This constitutes
a becoming-world of knowledge. By “world” I mean a geopolitical and
historical location, as well as a set of nature-cultural milieus. My aspira-
tion is to go nomadic and situate our thinking in the world. And what we
will find there should fill us with wonder and hope, such is its critical and
creative vitality.
Becoming-W orld
Critical posthuman scholarship is a fast-growing area of enquiry that
rests—in different ways and to different degrees—on a posthumanist and
post-anthropocentric definition of the knowing subject. It assumes that the
knower is not Anthropos alone, but a more complex, embodied and embed-
ded, nonunitary, relational and affective, nomadic and collaborative sub-
ject. In other words, the objects of research and enquiry of the humanities
have ceased to be focused exclusively on Man and his others, or any anthro-
pomorphic entity. Today, we have animal studies, eco- and geo-criticism;
the humanities are covering forests, fungi, and bio-hydro-solar-techno
powers. We have hyperobjects and the hypersea, while “human/imal” and
algorithmic studies ignite the imagination of our graduate students.
I see these new discourses as implementing a neomaterialist philosophy

of immanence, which assumes that all matter is one (the material total-
ity of all living things); that matter is intelligent and self-organizing; and
that subjectivity includes relations to a multitude of nonhumans, both
organic and techno-bodies. The expanded definition of life also allows for
the inclusion of and interaction with technological artefacts and media-
tion (“machinic autopoiesis”). This idea discards the nature-culture divide
and replaces it with the continuum: “naturecultures” (Haraway 1997) and
“media ecologies” (Fuller 2008) to produce “medianatures” (Parikka 2015)
and “terrestrial materialism” (Protevi 2013).
Posthuman thought rejects any form of nostalgia for the humanist
“Man of reason.” Both in Deleuze’s philosophy and in the feminist episte-
mology that is so important for my work, this non-nostalgic approach is
cultivated through the pedagogical tactic of de-familiarization. This entails
unlearning humanistic and anthropocentric habits of thought, and the
forms of representation they sustain, so as to make some room for the
new. The method of disidentification from the familiar is also linked to
cartographies of power that aim to account for and learn to relinquish
unearned privileges.
In order to explore this point further, let me expand on my cartography
of posthuman knowledge.
First-generation “studies”
The first building block of posthuman scholarship is only slightly younger
than the Anthropocene itself. Over the last thirty years the core of theo-
retical innovation in the humanities has emerged around a cluster of new,
often radical, and always interdisciplinary fields of enquiry that called
themselves “studies.” Many of the thematic, methodological, and concep-
tual innovations in the humanities have emerged from these new and unex-
pected quarters. Gender, feminist, queer, race, and postcolonial studies,
alongside cultural studies and film and media studies, are the prototypes
of the radical epistemologies that propelled these innovative movements
of ideas. Institutionally, they have remained relatively underfunded in rela-
tion to the classical disciplines, yet have provided a range of new methods
and innovative concepts. Many of these studies—but by no means all of
them—were activated and propelled by the incisive philosophical, lin-
guistic, cultural, and textual innovations introduced by the French post-
structuralist generation since the 1970s. These studies introduced both
conceptual and methodological shifts, and expanded original institutional
experiments throughout the 1990s. They brought alternative perspectives

and sources of inspiration to the posthuman moment.
The creative proliferation of studies is an institutional phenomenon
that takes place across Northern Europe, Northern America, and Australia,
but not as much in Catholic Southern Europe and not at all in France. It is
known by now that the French poststructuralist theories had no impact on
the institutional practice of French society and the academy, and that—
especially in President François Mitterrand’s years—a specific French form
of Republican universalism was reasserted. Notice also that my beloved
nonuniversalist French teachers—Foucault as much as Deleuze and Iri-
garay—were very much philosophers. As such, they were not particu-
larly interested in or supportive of the new interdisciplinary studies that
emerged also in response to their own work. Their basic objection was
that the change of scale introduced by these studies may not be enough to
introduce a qualitative shift in discursive powers of inclusion and exclu-
sion. Moreover, the studies ran the risk of promoting a quantitative growth
of identity claims. Similarly, Edward Said himself was not very keen on
the field of postcolonial studies that nonetheless celebrated him as a foun-
dational figure (Braidotti 2016). They all preferred a classical humanistic
education—the better to critique it, of course.
The conflicting and contradictory receptions of the studies do bring us
reluctantly back to the unfinished business of the 1990s’ “theory wars.” The
rather violent campaign against minority discourses—rightly or wrongly
imputed to the masters of poststructuralism, but mostly made in the US—
coincided not only with the rise of the political Right, the consequences of
which we are all experiencing today, but also with the rise of digital culture,
of biogenetic and cognitive capitalism. It also coincided with a profound
transformation of the university structure, which included the creation of
classes of both academic stars and the academic “precariat.” This neologism
merges “precarious” with “proletariat,” to designate the bottom social class
in advanced capitalism.
Since the 1970s, when the first generation of studies sprang into life,
the institutional landscape has changed so dramatically that even the ques-
tion of interdisciplinarity has acquired a more critical edge. One asserts
such matters with some trepidation here at Yale, but Western humanistic
culture and its canonical texts no longer constitute a non-negotiable point
of reference for a university education, let alone society as a whole. Genera-
tions of scholars have been questioning the strengths and the limitations
of humanism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and their connection to
the very epistemic structure of the academic humanities. Conservative

political forces resisted these critical movements, but even they could not
stop the cynical dismissal of the very mission of our field and the budgetary
cutbacks we currently suffer in the humanities. Now, even more than back
then, affirmative critical voices are needed to provide creative alternatives.
The studies have just boomed on, offering qualitative shifts of perspective,
not just a quantitative growth that can be perceived negatively as fragmen-
tation, or identity politics. They constitute the first row of the building
blocks of the critical posthumanities.
These studies share a number of theoretical premises: Firstly, they voice
the critiques of the human I outlined in the previous lecture. They have
often criticized the academic humanities on the grounds of structural
anthropocentrism and “methodological nationalism” (Beck 2007). Not all
the studies oppose humanism, but also offer alternative visions of the self,
the human, knowledge, and society. Notions such as a female/feminist/
queer humanity and black humanity are examples of this more inclusive
kind of neohumanism. My notion of the posthuman subject argues quite a
different case, for a leap forward towards a posthuman ethics of collabora-
tive construction of alternative ways of “being in this together.”
Secondly, these studies emphasize the immanence of lived experience
and are thus situated in the present and grounded in the world. They
express original forms of bodily materialist immanence, which generates
knowledge through sensible (Irigaray [1984] 1993) and transcendental
(Deleuze 1994) empiricism. This means that they trust real-life events
and experiences, even and especially the negative ones. By grounding
their knowing practices and quest for adequate understanding, even and
especially of negative events, into lived experience, the discourses of these
studies also take power relations seriously. It’s crowded on the margins,
so by foregrounding the insights and competences of marginalized sub-
jects, we end up renewing our shared understanding of what it means to
be human, to become posthuman, to confront the inhuman.
In this respect, the first generation of critical studies exposes the com-
patibility of rationality and violence, of scientific progress on the one hand
and practices of structural devastation and exclusion on the other. This
is not an antiscience stance, but rather a nonbinary, multilayered way of
implementing the parallelism between science, philosophy, and the arts,
and of redefining the relation between the different scientific cultures in
posthuman times: it really is a matter of “and/and.” And it is a matter of
pragmatism and loyalty to experience.
I want to insist therefore that these studies are well placed to develop
a posthuman practice of self-renewal in a critical and creative man-
ner, because they have already shown themselves capable of complexity,
subtlety, and versatility in dealing with the negative aspects of the pres-
ent, as well as its affirmative potential. They have adapted remarkably well
to changes in both popular media cultures and science, as well as in the
university structure.
Second-generation studies
The proliferation of studies accelerated with the posthuman turn in the
Anthropocene, when Man came under further criticism as Anthropos, that
is to say as a supremacist species that monopolized the right to access the
bodies of all living entities. The anthropocentric core of the humanities
was also challenged by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of technological
mediation and new human-nonhuman linkages of biological “wetware”
and nonbiological “hardware.” As I argued in the first lecture, decenter-
ing anthropomorphic thinking (let alone anthropocentric patterns of
thought) has especially difficult implications for the humanities in that
it positions terrestrial, planetary, cosmic concerns—as well as the con-
ventional naturalized others, animals, plants, and the technological appa-
ratus—as serious agents and co-constructors of collective thinking and
knowing.
Of course, there is a qualitative difference between accepting the struc-
tural interdependence among species and actually treating the nonhumans
as knowledge collaborators. But my point is that, in the age of compu-
tational networks and synthetic biology on the one hand, and climate
change and erosion of liberties on the other, this is precisely what we need
to learn to do, in addition to all that we know already. The conventional
humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to deal with the eco-
logical environment, media-nature-cultural continuums, and nonhuman
others—although we provide most of the metaphors and representations
for them. There is a methodological issue as well: the social constructiv-
ist, oppositional approach that is also current in many studies areas does
not always help to deal with the challenges of our eco-sophical, post-
anthropocentric, geo-bound, and techno-mediated milieus.
What is emerging as a result is a second generation of studies, genealog-
ically indebted to the first generation in terms of aims and political affects,
but carrying the critique into new spaces and in a more transversal mode
of enquiry. They address more directly the question of anthropocentrism,
Illustration 8. Concept of Disability. www.shutterstock.com.
which had been left relatively underexamined, while remaining committed

to developments in the real world. Consider, for instance, posthuman/
inhuman/nonhuman studies; critical animal studies; green studies; criti-
cal plant studies; cultural studies of science and technology; secularism
and postsecular studies; posthuman disability, fat, sleep, fashion, and diet
studies; critical management studies; Deleuze studies; success and celeb-
rity studies. New media proliferated into a whole series of subsections
and metafields: software, internet, game, algorithmic, critical code studies;
post-Snowden studies; and more.
Then there are the inhuman and inhumane aspects of our historical
condition, namely the recurrence of mass migration, wars, racism, terror,
conflicts, and economic inequalities. These questions have been taken up
by conflict studies and peace research; post-Soviet/communist studies;
human rights studies; humanitarian management; migration studies;
mobility studies; human rights–oriented medicine; trauma, memory,
and reconciliation studies; security studies; death studies; suicide studies;
queer inhuman studies; extinction studies; and the list is still growing.
These discourses should be read in the framework of an ethics of
affirmation that leads them to engage actively with instances of injustice
and dispossession, pain and hurt, in a transformative manner. They are
institutional structures that combine pastoral care with both a healing

and a critical function in relation to the negative charge they take on—
compassionate and humane posthumanities for inhuman times. Although
many of the studies mentioned still tend to voice the pain and hence
express the embodied and embedded experience of humans, their post-
anthropocentric tendencies are manifest. As I argued in the first lecture,
I am not satisfied by the anthropocentric gesture that would consist in
attributing “human” rights to all organisms and species. What I would like
to do instead is to develop a posthuman ethics suitable to the complexity
of our times.
Most importantly, I urge us to resist the negative pull of competitive
claims to recognition and to acknowledge that nobody and no thing has
the monopoly on pain. And that the task of developing a suitable ethical
interconnection is a task “we” all share. It is not a case of “either/or,” but
“and/and”: we have to acknowledge multiplicity and complex intercon-
nection, while avoiding any form of relativism. I am aware that this is quite
a challenge, but posthuman scholarship strikes a balancing act by stressing
the relational and affective force of knowing subjects.
Both institutionally and theoretically, studies—which historically have
been the motor of both critique and creativity, innovative and challenging
in equal measure—have an inspirational role to play also in relation to the
posthuman context we inhabit. Far from being the symptom of crisis and
fragmentation, these discourses open up new eco-sophical, posthumanist,
and post-anthropocentric dimensions for the humanities. And—crucial
for my materialist cartography—these developments are empirically veri-
fiable; they are already here.
In the next step of my argument, I will try to demonstrate that, at pres-
ent, new transdisciplinary discursive fronts and alliances are growing
around the edges of the classical disciplines but also across these—by now
established—studies. They are crossbreeding nomadically and generating
what I call the “critical posthumanities.”
Towards the Critical Posthumanities

Today, the critical posthumanities are emerging as postdisciplinary dis-
cursive fronts not only around the edges of the classical disciplines but
also as offshoots of the different generations of established studies. They
rest on post-anthropocentric premises and a technologically mediated
emphasis on life as a zoe-centered system of species egalitarianism, which
is very promising for new research in the field. They embrace creatively
the challenge of our historicity without giving in to cognitive panic and

without losing sight of the pursuit of social justice.
The critical posthumanities provide the answer to what the humani-
ties can become, in the posthuman era, after the decline of the primacy of
universalist Man and of supremacist Anthropos. The building block/plane
of composition for the critical posthumanities is the materialist vitalism I
sketched in the first lecture. This is driven by nomadic, embedded, embod-
ied, and technologically mediated subjects (Braidotti 2011) and by complex
assemblages of human and nonhuman, planetary and cosmic, given and
manufactured forces. This zoe-centered framework is further enhanced by
the analyses of power relations and the social forms of exclusion and domi-
nations perpetuated by the current world order of bio-piracy (Shiva 1997),
necro-politics (Mbembe 2003), and systemic dispossession (Sassen 2014).
Again, the terminological exuberance is telling, as shown by even a
cursory glance at the diversification of the field. The humanities are cur-
rently advocated as inhuman humanities (Grosz 2011), digital (Hayles
1999, 2005), environmental, transformative (Epstein 2012), emerging,
adjectival (de Graef 2016), and nomadic (Stimpson 2016).
Let me focus on two pillars of the posthumanities, namely the digi-
tal humanities and the environmental humanities—also known as “green
humanities” if they focus on the earth, and “blue humanities” if they focus
on the sea and water, and sometimes also referred to as “sustainable human-
ities.” And the series stays open. What are their defining features?
The first striking feature shared by the environmental and the digital
humanities is that they both claim to be the real “new humanities,” and
to be best attuned to the times—being immersed in urgent contempo-
rary sociopolitical concerns. The environmental humanities are in the
middle of the Anthropocene debate, and explore the social and cultural
factors that underscore the representations and hence the public percep-
tion of climate change. The digital humanities—often close to the neural
sciences—propose advanced reflection on new forms of technologically
mediated sensibility and post-anthropomorphic, enhanced, and altered
modes of perception, as well as issues of community and security. Both
are pragmatic and materially based discourses, with a strong historical and
literary component akin to the conventional humanities, but also a strong
link to science studies and to cultural studies of science and technology.
The evolution of media studies is the best indicator of the shift that is
happening, because the field posits human-technological relations as its
core question. The position of media technologies shifts dramatically from
the postmodern to the posthuman era. Whereas issues of representation,

surfaces, and images are central to postmodern discussions—down to the
early debates on the simulacrum—today, the agenda is about data process-
ing, code, and network circulation. This is a materialist shift, which brings
information technology to the core of the posthuman discussion about
intelligent, self-organizing non-anthropomorphic life forms (the onto-
genetic capacities of networks).1 The basic premise of the critical posthu-
manities, therefore, is the need to overcome the vision of a de-naturalized
social order somehow disconnected from its environmental and organic
foundations. They call for more complex schemes of understanding the
multilayered interdependence among “naturecultures” today.
What is posthuman about the digital and environmental humanities?
It is a question of thematic, methodological, and conceptual changes. The-
matically, both of them deal with nonhuman objects/subjects of study:
the digital, with network culture and new media; the environmental,
with Gaia or the planet as a whole. Methodologically, both work through
a mixture of empirical data, ethnographic observation, artistic experi-
mentation, and theoretical framing. They are openly relational in their
approach, and though they differ on the degree of disengagement from
Anthropos that they endorse, both work with the vital immanence of non-
anthropomorphic life systems.
Conceptually, the defining feature of the posthumanities—which
makes them critical in the intensive sense of the term—is their “supradisci-
plinary” character. The driving force for their knowledge production is not
the policing force of disciplinary purity, but rather the modes of relation
and cross-hybridization these discourses are able and willing to engage in.
They prosper to the extent that they show the ability and the willingness
to move on. The strength of the critical posthumanities is the acknowledg-
ment of the porous nature not only of their institutional boundaries but
also of their epistemic core, which gets redefined in terms of relational
capacity. This supradisciplinary sensibility allows for movement to be set
in action within, between, and across the different fields of contemporary
knowledge production. Whether this is subsequently reinvested into the
existing disciplines, or whether it is operationalized in the rhizomic growth
of more studies areas, the epistemic core of the exercise remains supradis-
ciplinary. You not only need to reason, you also need to rhizome!
Again, the eco-sophical, geo-bound, and techno-mediated turn that
sustains the critical posthumanities does not only take the form of a
quantitative proliferation of new, fundable fields, but also of qualitative
and methodological shifts. The critical posthumanities represent both

an alternative to the neoliberal governance of academic knowledge and
a renegotiation of its terms. If I read the critical posthumanities with my
immanent, neomaterialist, vital lenses, I would wager that the healthy
hybrid offsprings are likely to go on, mutating into new heterogeneous
assemblages, fueled by transdisciplinary forces, but plunging headlong into
a postdisciplinary world (Lykke 2011). They are actualizing something that
is not yet there, or not completely that: unprecedented modes of epistemic
relations and knowledge production. The critical posthumanities are val-
iant and necessary responses to the present, propelled also by powerful
financial interests and by large popular support. They do a great job of
reminding us of what we are ceasing to be—exit the Gutenberg galaxy,
and exit Anthropos Rex. Enter Dolly (the sheep, of course).
A Theoretical framework for the posthumanities

Although I am perfectly aware that the dominant institutional model of
the environmental and digital humanities is a combination of corporate
and academic interests, backed by public policies and support, I wish to
approach these emergent studies as the seeds of what they are in the process
of becoming. This “minoritarian” reading shifts the terms of the discussion.
What kind of knowledge patterns may emerge if we start from the project
of actualizing unrealized possibilities in terms of subject formation? What
kind of knowing subjects are emerging here, whose potential for under-
standing and knowledge has not yet been realized?
What I aspire to is to combine the environmental and digital humani-
ties—as prototypes of the critical posthumanities—with practices and
theories of subjectivity that combine “species thinking” and “network
thinking” with post-anthropocentric configuration of the subject of
knowledge and affirmative ethics. This approach grants, respectively, to the
earth and to the computational networks the same role and agency as the
human subjects that inhabit them, while acknowledging embodied and
embedded, relational and affective differences in degrees and intensity
of what they are made of and what they can do. The transdisciplinary
character of posthuman scholarship can be activated towards a culture of
mutual respect between the humanities—the subtle sciences—and the life
sciences, pushing their respective complexities to explore multiple shared
visions. On the axis of becoming, the growth of posthuman knowledge
takes the form of constant process, interbreeding and cross-pollinating
through connections, contaminations, and assembling missing links.
Let us return to the environmental humanities for a moment. What

happens if I pursue the posthuman subject to create an affirmative assem-
bly? Let us say, for instance, the Gaia movement and other environmental
activists, antinuclear and pacifist movements, and eco-feminists compose
an assemblage. This embodied and embedded assembly meets the body of
knowledge of the humanities—literature (poetry, novels, plays), cinema,
art, video, and games—and together they encounter the corporate sector,
notably corporate social responsibility, government sustainability policy
and green economy plans, and broader public awareness of the Anthro-
pocene. These multiple encounters produce what I would call the critical
environmental posthumanities.
Similarly, let’s take the digital humanities and set up a different, affir-
mative assembly. Let’s say media activists—notably the digital commons
movement and multitudes of networkers, makers, and programmers—
meet the countercultural/hippie roots of the internet, which historically
has always been linked to popular music, literature, poetry, cinema, the
arts, and science fiction. Together, they encounter corporate interests,
government infrastructural projects, and the entertainment/infotainment
industry. Thus, they compose the critical digital posthumanities.
The encounters—that is to say the institutional, material, and theoreti-
cal connections among the parties involved in the composition of these
critical environmental and digital posthumanities—are assemblages that,
being multilayered, function in a zig-zagging, not linear, manner. They act
on the assumption that they can benefit from the capital of knowledge of
the conventional humanities—notably literature, music, poetry, science
fiction, cinema, and media—but they also draw from the original sources
provided by many generations of critical studies, which have grown all
around and in between the disciplines. Together, this plateau of knowledge
can help us understand and represent adequately the climate change crisis
and the risks it entails for every dweller of the earth, or explore original
sources of design along community-oriented principles of free access.
Moreover, the digital and the environmental humanities foreground
the notion that posthumanities scholars across the generations, disciplines,
and studies are motors of transformation in the very structures of subjec-
tivity. We, the scholars of this complex and subtle field, are the cultural
engineers of the social imaginary. Most people’s awareness of an abstraction
such as the Anthropocene or cyberspace is mediated through images and
representations emerging from literature, history, and culture—the fields
of specialization of the humanities. Therefore, the critical posthumanities
are uniquely placed to encourage people to reflect upon and possibly

change their living habits in order to confront the current challenge. They
can steer the process in an affirmative direction away from flat consumer-
ism, in order to make the most of the posthuman predicament.
This approach opens up new perspectives and provides conceptual
grounding for the emergence of the critical posthumanities as a supradis-
ciplinary, relational field of knowledge that is contiguous with, but not
identical to, cognitive capitalism. It functions at different speeds, moves
on different timelines, and is fuelled by different ethical affects. Because of
its transdisciplinary structure, the field of critical posthumanities involves
social and cultural movements, new kinds of economically productive
practices, and multiple curiosity-driven knowledge formations that do not
always coincide with the surplus-value profit motive. In other words, the
critical posthumanities design a horizon of becoming that the contempo-
rary university and especially the academic humanities will benefit from.
Please note that this is not a relativistic scheme, but rather a multilay-
ered and multidirectional account of what is already happening. The word
I would use is “perspectivism,” different nomadic viewpoints from equally
materially embedded and embodied locations, expressing the degree and
quality of experience of different subjects. We need to acknowledge the
multiple and internally contradictory aspects of our own knowledge prac-
tices by adopting a diversified materialist approach, which I would propose
as the antidote to relativism. The difference is a matter of ethics. Becom-
ing is the realization of affirmative, collaborative ethics, as opposed to the
axiom of profit and maximization of consumers’ quantitative options.
Affirmative ethics must guide our politics.
The Emergent Missing People

The last stage of my argument shows how the critical posthumanities,
by tracing a different mode of relational subjectivity through affirmative
ethics, help us to compose a “missing people.” By this I mean a “we-are-
in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” kind of posthuman
subject of knowledge. This is a subject that acknowledges it is intertwined
with the totality of things—including zoe/geo/techno “things.” A missing
people is a people in the process of becoming not-One: a complex multi-
plicity held together by shared ethical passions for and a social imaginary
supportive of affirmative alternatives.
But how does such a subject relate to the high degrees of specializa-
tion expressed by the critical posthumanities and the multiple planes of
reorganization of knowledge that are taking place within and across them?
Again, we need to be both critical and creative. What are we to make, for
instance, of the fact that so few institutional organizations have emerged
around the minor discourses generated by emerging missing people?
For instance, where are the programs and curricula that might privilege
non-nationally indexed humanities or the feminist and queer humani-
ties; migrant/diasporic humanities; poor/trailer park humanities; post/
de-colonial humanities; a child’s humanities; the otherwise-abled/disabled
humanities?
Historically, all sorts of communities were already empirically miss-
ing. Whether we look at women and LGBTQ+, indigenous knowledge
systems, at queers, otherwise-enabled, trailer parks, nonhumans, or tech-
nologically mediated existences, these are real-life subjects whose knowl-
edge never made it into any of the official cartographies. Their struggle
for visibility and emergence also affects the knowledge they are capable of
generating.
But the other missing people are the virtual ones, those that can emerge
only as the result of a neomaterialist praxis of affirmation, aimed at con-
structing the plane of composition for such an assembly. This composi-
tion requires affirmative relational alliances of a high degree of subtlety
and complexity. These alliances need to go beyond identity claims, not
by denying them, but by expanding them into diversified embedded and
embodied materialist platforms of different “missing people.”
The transversal alliance of the missing people today is technologically
mediated, and it always involves nonhuman agents, such as land, water,
plastic, wires, information highways, algorithms, etc. New border crossings
are being set up in contemporary knowledge production that aim at actual-
izing the virtual knowledges and visions of these missing peoples. We are
currently witnessing the complexity and subtlety of neomaterialist compo-
sitions of different missing peoples, capable of creating different methods
to generate knowledge. The people who were missing—even from “minor
science”—get constituted as political subjects of knowledge through such
alliances. The critical posthumanities are in constant process, interbreeding
through multiple alliances, topics, and missing links. Which does not mean
that anything goes, but rather that rhizomic multidirectionality is the rule.
So the energy of the field is already providing some answers. Different
assemblages are being formed, for instance one that composes an encoun-
ter between feminist, LGBTQ+, and gender studies; postcolonial, decolo-
nial, and indigenous studies; critical legal studies; media activists; hackers
and makers; First Nations land rights activists. These encounters are trans-
forming both the critical environmental and digital posthumanities. The
assemblages they compose are as multiple as their lived experiences, pro-
ducing new areas of research, such as the transnational justice postcolonial
environmental and digital humanities.
It would be intellectually lazy to take the ongoing proliferation of new
discourses as the mere expression of relativism—though I am aware this is a
problem. And it may be tempting but fallacious to simply read the fast rate
of growth of the critical posthumanities as self-generating. The fact that
rhizomic knowledge production backed by the internet may be going viral
does not make it spontaneous. The multiple hybrid connections among the
established disciplines, the successive waves of studies that sustain these
new developments in the critical posthumanities today, are the result of the
hard work of communities of thinkers, scholars, and activists—alternative
collective assemblages—that reconstitute not only the missing links in
academic practices but also and especially the missing people.
These communities share the desire to redesign the contours of envi-
ronmental and digital culture away from profit motives, and thus to acti-
vate a posthuman ethics of affirmation in the quest for alternatives.
These theoretically sophisticated transversal discourses combine atten-
tion to the zoe/geo/techno aspects of terrestrial materialism, with endur-
ing care for the dispossessed and the disempowered, adding that many of
those are neither human nor necessarily anthropomorphic.
This is where we need to go back to the ethics of affirmation. If the
present is both actual and virtual, then “the missing people” is a constantly
emerging category. It refers to a complex singularity, expressing the embed-
ded, embodied, relational, and affective forces that generate patterns of
becoming, of minor science, of intensive shifts. The activating factor in the
politics of immanence is a plane of transposition of forces—in both spa-
tial and temporal terms—from past to future and from the virtual to the
actual. It is the actualization of a virtuality. The point of this actualization
is to provide an adequate expression of what bodies can do and think and
enact. Adequate to what? To one’s intensity—i.e., one’s ability to process
pain and negativity, to extract knowledge from pain, to turn the painful
experience of inexistence into relational encounters and knowledge pro-
duction. The politics of immanence composes planes of becoming for a
missing people that was never fully part of the “human,” whose crisis so
preoccupies the “humanities” today. The human is a vector of becoming:
we need to compose a new people and a new earth.
What does it mean, for us university people of the posthuman era?

It means that we need to organize scholarly and critical communities
around shared ethical passions and collectively drawn cartographies of the
present that reflect and enhance an ethically empowering vision of the sub-
ject. Posthumanist, vital, nonunitary, and all the more ethically accountable
for it. The plane of composition of “we are in this together”—a commu-
nity of nomadic and accountable thinkers—constitutes the shareable
workbench of critical posthuman scholars, bonded by an ethics of joy and
affirmation, devoted to resistance against negativity and catatonia. They
defend secularity without fanaticism, developing a collaborative research
ethics by redefining a new form of empiricism based on relationality and
affirmation. Critical posthuman scholars are collectively empowered to
experiment with intensity, knowing that our political force lies in actu-
alizing our “collective imaginings” (Gatens and Lloyd 1999). The critical
posthumanities, by redefining the image of thought, also recast the image
of the thinker and, notably, the critical intellectual function of thinking.
Conclusion
Throughout these two lectures, I have stressed the importance of subjec-
tivity and subject formation. I wanted to demonstrate both the vitality
and importance of the posthuman subject. I have situated this subject
within a posthuman predicament that I see as our historical condition.
As a materialist feminist and antiracist, mindful of the exclusionary nature
of the category of “the human,” I prefer to foreground the posthuman
as a multiscale, multilinear, internally contradictory feature of our pres-
ent. As empirical evidence, I have surveyed the new forms of knowledge
production that are proliferating around us, both in the university and in
society. Posthuman scholarship is here to stay.
In so doing, I pursue the tradition of immanence, and position sub-
jectivity in a continuum with the totality of things—both born and
designed—but I inscribe in this picture also the multitude of missing
peoples and marginalized others, whose humanity had to be negotiated
through century-old struggles. I reworked all this with the ethics of affir-
mation, a trust in the mutual collaborative nature of our being in the world
together. While acknowledging the brutal nature of our times, I have also
argued for the need to confront them in order to change them—we have
to be “worthy of our times” in order to resist them. We need to engage with
the negativity, the better to transform it. We need to make our home in a
world that is booming and busting at the same time.
This is probably the most demanding step of this posthuman ethical

process: we may well be disgusted and have to fight back the tears, but
this still is and remains our world, the only one we have. We are in the
immanent here and now of this planet, which is the result of our shared
efforts, aspirations, and desires, and therefore it is the best we could do—
the best of posthuman worlds we managed to create. And the only way
we can act upon it, in this difficult posthuman moment, is by compos-
ing multitudes of missing peoples, a “we-are-in-this-together-but-we-are-
not-one-and-the-same” sort of people. They are the collective multiplicity,
materially embedded but differential, that aspires to take its place, stum-
bling across the posthuman landscape—in this hypermodern and protoar-
chaic world of ours—so that we can play out the potentials for affirmative
transformations.
In spite of our times and out of love for our times.
Note
1. With thanks to Matthew Fuller.
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What is Rosi Braidotti's area of expertise?

What is Rosi Braidotti's area of expertise?

What role did Yale University play in Braidotti's fields of expertise?

What role did Yale University play in Braidotti's fields of expertise?

Posthuman, All Too Human:

The Memoirs and Aspirations

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

In these lectures I want to explore this phenomenon. I will argue for

feminist politics of locations (Rich 1987), also known as situated knowl-

Illustration 1. Greenhouse, El Ejido Spain. © 2013 Armin Linke. Used by

Biopower and necro-​politics

liberating and problematic, I am struck by the slightly disgusted reactions

Illustration 2. “Disposable Bodies” New Degrees of Freedom, Act 3: Water,

The Posthuman Subject as Critique

production of knowledge and speculation both in the academy and in

does not necessarily or inevitably throw us into the abyss of neo-​bestiality

Illustration 3. Leonardo da Vinci, L’Uomo Vitruviano, ca. 1490. Wikimedia

Illustration 4. Vitruvian Cat. www​.CartoonStock​.com.

Illustration 5. Vitruvian Dog. www​.CartoonStock​.com.

entities becoming “the measure of all things”? Post-​anthropocentrism pro-

opposite: while it is undeniably true that the technological devices today

The Posthuman Subject as Creativity

nature of human consciousness is simply one of the foundational and

together to compose a people who can—hopefully—steer the qualitative

Zoe-​D riven Ethics of Affirmation

also the moment of the neutralization of the toxic/poisonous effects of

disavowal of conflict either. Of course repugnant and unbearable events do

Illustration 6. Vuilnis in het water. Photo by David Bokuchava.

structural differences and inequalities that compose our social existence

foregrounds the relational elements of the process. This view of subjectivity

What Is Posthuman about the Humanities?

Thinking the Posthuman

Illustration 7. Vitruvian Woman. Illustration by Jim Dowdalls.

applied to the contradictions of the posthuman predicament in the age of

mediated ones? We need transversal assemblages. We need to combine

I see these new discourses as implementing a neomaterialist philosophy

experiments throughout the 1990s. They brought alternative perspectives

the very epistemic structure of the academic humanities. Conservative

Illustration 8. Concept of Disability. www​.shutterstock​.com.

which had been left relatively underexamined, while remaining committed

institutional structures that combine pastoral care with both a healing

Towards the Critical Posthumanities

the challenge of our historicity without giving in to cognitive panic and

the postmodern to the posthuman era. Whereas issues of representation,

and methodological shifts. The critical posthumanities represent both

A Theoretical framework for the posthumanities

Let us return to the environmental humanities for a moment. What

are uniquely placed to encourage people to reflect upon and possibly

The Emergent Missing People

What does it mean, for us university people of the posthuman era?

This is probably the most demanding step of this posthuman ethical

Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the

Hayles, Katherine N. 2005. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and

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Biopower and necro-politics

does not necessarily or inevitably throw us into the abyss of neo-bestiality

Illustration 4. Vitruvian Cat. www.CartoonStock.com.

Illustration 5. Vitruvian Dog. www.CartoonStock.com.

entities becoming “the measure of all things”? Post-anthropocentrism pro-

Zoe-D riven Ethics of Affirmation

Illustration 8. Concept of Disability. www.shutterstock.com.