Resumen de Recent cross-disciplinary approaches to the posthuman: an introduction
María Ferrández Sanmiguel, Esther Muñoz González, Carmen Laguarta Bueno
Despite our best critical efforts to decenter the human in the last few decades, it seems more necessary than ever to carry out “an integral redefinition of the notion of the human” in light of the technoscientific and onto-epistemological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Ferrando. Philosophical Posthumanism. Bloomsbury Books, 2019). This chapter discusses the most recent approaches to the (post)human by providing an overview of the latest theoretical developments in the field of critical posthumanism. On the one hand, we trace the evolution of key notions within the discipline’s different strands; on the other hand, we examine the cross-disciplinary extensions and collusions that are currently emerging as a result of the encounter between posthumanist thought and fields as varied as transhumanism, cybernetics, feminist, gender and queer theory, critical animal studies, new materialism and vulnerability studies, among others. The second part of this chapter delves into the cultural importance of the notion of the posthuman by exploring the connections between the vocabulary of the posthuman and several forms of cultural production. We discuss literature and popular culture as tools to help us explain to ourselves what it means to be (post)human in “our posthuman times” (Braidotti. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity, 2019).
