ABSTRACT
Culpability for action is typically dependent on a sovereign notion of the self and the expectation of our ability to perform as rational and responsible actors. Social pressures, or medically recognised conditions, may be factored in as extenuating circumstances, but, largely, humans are meant to make good or bad choices and to be punished for their worst actions, as they impact upon others. A posthumanistic understanding of the self, however, requires us to ask questions about the concept of culpability, recognising human subjects’ entanglements with their own bodies (and its chemical and microbiomal flows and influences), other humans, our own histories and memories, the grammars of social and environmental architecture and norms, and so on through the vast number of factors which play into making us, and shaping our limitations and our potentials. Currently, posthumanist thinking ably brings out our interconnections with the world, but fails to ask how we can both take responsibility and also recognise that actions emerge out of the networks of forces that we’re inescapably embedded within. This chapter outlines some of the under-considered factors which might play into illegal activity and calls for work in posthumanism to better address the implications of its revelations of the entangled human subject.
