ABSTRACT
Within the humanities, after a succession of fundamental controversies (“wars” and “turns”) about the role of theory, language, culture, and science, a number of questions have returned which signal a shift towards posthumanism (understood as a turn towards post-anthropocentrism, or the “nonhuman turn” and its associated “life wars”). These questions are: What is technology? What is the human? and What is life? Even though none of these questions is particularly new, what provokes their return is the changed context and historical situation in which they have been regaining urgency. In this new age of generalised biopolitics, from a posthumanist point of view, the remit of bioethics needs to be extended as far as both the “bios” and the “ethical” are concerned to take into account new biotechnological but also ecopolitical challenges from a post-anthropocentric point of view. While the current focus of bioethics is often on questions of technological enhancement and the impact of artificial intelligence on future humans (i.e. transhumanism), this chapter argues that a posthumanist bioethics (i.e. a bioethics that takes the critique of humanism seriously) will have to embrace a new materialist notion of life to face the eco-biological challenges of our time (especially, anthropogenic climate change, the loss of biodiversity, globalisation, and mass migration). The crucial question of a posthumanist bioethics informing what might be called the “biohumanities” is thus: In what way may humans have to change in order to be able to focus on affirming and preserving life?
