Colleen McQuillen, Julia Vaingurt (eds.): The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, cosmism, enlightenment, human, humanism, literary history, posthumanism, russia, self, technology, transhumanism, utopia
“The enmeshment of the human body with various forms of technology is a phenomenon that characterizes lived and imagined experiences in Russian arts of the modernist and postmodernist eras. In contrast to the postrevolutionary fixation on mechanical engineering, industrial progress, and the body as a machine, the postmodern, postindustrial period probes the meaning of being human not only from a physical, bodily perspective, but also from the philosophical perspectives of subjectivity and consciousness. The Human Reimagined examines the ways in which literary and artistic representations of the body, selfhood, subjectivity, and consciousness illuminate late- and post-Soviet ideas about the changing relationships among the individual, the environment, technology, and society.”
Contributors include: Alex Anikina, Keti Chukhrov, Jacob Emery, Elana Gomel, Sofya Khagi, Katerina Lakhmitko, Colleen McQuillen, Jonathan Brooks Platt, Kristina Toland, Julia Vaingurt, Diana Kurkovsky West, Trevor Wilson
Publisher Academic Studies Press, Boston, 2018
Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the 20th and 21st Centuries series
ISBN 9781618117328, 1618117327
viii+268 pages
Reviews: Aaron Winslow (LA Review of Books, 2019), Maria Rubins (Slavonic and East European Review, 2019).
PDF (3 MB)
Comment (0)Asher Seidel: Inhuman Thoughts: Philosophical Explorations of Posthumanity (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · life, philosophy, posthumanism, transhumanism
Inhuman Thoughts is a philosophical exploration of the possibility of increasing the physiological and psychological capacities of humans to the point that they are no longer biologically, psychologically, or socially human. The movement is from the human through the trans-human, to the post-human. The tone is optimistic; Seidel argues that such an evolution would be of positive value on the whole.
Seidel’s initial argument supports the need for a comprehensive ethical theory, the success of which would parallel that of a large-scale scientific revolution, such as Newtonian mechanics. He elaborates the movement from the improved-but-still-human to the post-human, and philosophically examines speculated examples of post-human forms of life, including indefinitely extended life-span, parallel consciousness, altered perception, a-sociality, and a-sexuality.
Inhuman Thoughts is directed at those interested in philosophical questions on human nature and the best life given the possibilities of that nature. Seidel’s overall argument is that the most satisfactory answer to the latter question involves a transcendence of the present confines of human nature.
Publisher Lexington Books, 2008
ISBN 0739123289, 9780739123287
130 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-3-9)
Comment (1)Richard Doyle: Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial life, cryonics, transhumanism, wetware
The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century. Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality–in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality–from cryonics to artificial life–as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816640092, 9780816640096
235 pages
Keywords and phrases
SimLife, deterritorialization, Thousand Plateaus, Alan Sokal, Gilles Deleuze, ribotype, Dead Zone, autopoiesis, Robert Ettinger, wetware, nanotechnology, technoscience, Philip K, alife, information theoretic death, exotic derivatives, coma, Mike Darwin, ecology, brain death
PDF (updated on 2012-3-9)
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