Humanism as prosthesis: science fiction as ceremony

• Autores: Sherryl Vint
• Localización: The posthuman condition in 21st century literature and culture: interdisciplinary Insights / María Ferrández Sanmiguel (ed. lit.), Esther Muñoz González (ed. lit.), Carmen Laguarta Bueno (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 978-3-031-83701-2, págs. 205-226
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Engaging with Sylvia Wynter’s work on the genre of the human, this chapter begins from the premise that we can understand humanism as a prosthesis to our species identity. In Wynter’s conceptualization, what is unique about homo sapiens is that we are creatures formed of both biology and ideology, of instincts and of story. In an era of globalized modernity, she contends, a single genre of the human has been mistaken for our entire species. Wynter calls for a revolution in our governing modes of figuration, which she calls a “counter cosmogeny” and describes as “ceremony.” This chapter suggests that science fiction is a rich source of such visions, reading Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021) and Maja Lund’s The History of Bees (2017) as works that show we must rethink humanism’s “human” to respond to climate change. Both suggest ways speculative aesthetics provide a techne for the task of self-consciously rather than autonomically becoming through our cultural programs, something we might theorize as prosthetic autopoiesis.