Posthumanism: Prometheus and the Revenge of Deconstruction

Posthumanism is more than a philosophical zeitgeist; it is a new epistemology that challenges the separation between the sciences and the humanities, doubting the centrality afforded to the human in the “natural order.” Its tropes of critical posthumanism and transhumanism assume seemingly different positions on the continuum between challenging the definition of the “human” as a category and the actual attempts to transcend human boundaries. However, this paper suggests that even the discursive deconstruction of humanism necessarily has material consequences for the human. The paper introduces posthumanism as a nonmaterialist reaction to postmodernism, through the narratives of “we have never been human,” “how we became posthuman,” and “we are yet to become posthuman.” Finally, through a discussion of Israeli right-wing veganism (or “alt veganism”), the paper suggests that posthumanism is terrified by a self-contradicting ritual of recursion.