ABSTRACT
As Donna Haraway (1991) noted almost thirty years ago, biotechnologies, virtual realties, prosthetics, pharmacology, robotics, and genetic manipulation all create a situation in which distinguishing the “ontologically” human from the inhuman or nonhuman is difficult if not impossible. Working from this axiom, N. Katherine Hayles (1999) argues that we have already become posthuman. It is not a question of consciousness or recognition or even of a task. The present moment is posthuman (without becoming “transhuman”). A posthumanist viewpoint, however, is different (Wolfe 2010). It is about how one relates to that present and to the enormous, almost crushing weight of several millennia of humanist thought. Although posthumanists vary enormously in the specifics of their engagements (and we believe we are nowhere near discovering all the permutations), they share in turning toward the legacies of humanism and using posthumanist reconceptualizations of human/animal/machine/thing relations to diagnose how humanism ignores, obscures, and disavows the real relations among beings and things that make up the stuff of the world.
