ABSTRACT
In her recent book The Posthuman (2013), feminist theorist and philosopher Rosi Braidotti likens the question surrounding the posthuman condition to those concerning other ‘posts’, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and postindustrialism. While not drawing direct parallels, she highlights that the discourse on what is and has been emerging from the uncertain legacy of humanism is lagging behind these other fields of enquiry. Braidotti then formulates a non-absolute, yet very decided, critique of the liberal humanist subject, which has its roots in Renaissance humanism. She lays bare the ways and mechanisms by which it has infiltrated constructions of subjectivity up to the present. These, she argues, still rest on long-standing ideas of freedom, individuality and reason that empower some subjects but disenfranchise others. The parallel Braidotti sees between antihumanism and posthumanism is this shared opponent – a human model that ‘stands for normality, normalcy and normativity. … The human is a historical construct that became a social convention about “human nature”’ (27). The thus constructed liberal humanist subject becomes the template for identifying others – that is, for identifying that which is inferior: ‘to be different from’ came to mean to be ‘less than’ (28). To effectively critique this legacy of humanism that is so deeply inscribed in Western European epistemology as well as in everyday life, poses considerable difficulties and requires a self-reflexive approach, which Braidotti phrases very succinctly: ‘The emphasis falls … on the difficulty of erasing the trace of the epistemic violence by which a non-humanist position might be carved out of the institutions of Humanism’ (30).
