Critical Posthumanism Network

Critical Posthumanism Network è il sito del network che comprende ricercatori, artisti, scrittori e scienziati interessati al nuovo paradigma del “posthumanism” e delle “posthumanities”.

“What does it mean to be human? This age-old question, today, is being asked with increased urgency. Technological and global economic challenges, looming environmental disaster and the erosion of traditional demarcations between human and nonhuman have been producing new and alternative ways of thinking about humanity. The ongoing critique or deconstruction of humanism that the label posthumanism points towards increasingly affects human self-understanding in terms of ethics (a critique of anthropocentrism, speciesism…), politics (cyborgization, a critique of biopolitics…), aesthetics (bioart, new media art, (electronic) literature…), institutions (new (life) sciences, posthumanities, new media…) and life style (prosthesization, enhancement, virtual reality…).

The proliferating ideas and visions of our posthumanity are reaching a wider public and are now circulating in the traditional mass media and increasingly of course in the so-called new, digital and social media. The transformative potential of posthumanism has become undeniable – for better or for worse. The people who are here joining forces in the name of Critical Posthumanism Network have been critical commentators of these developments for at least the past decade or so. The critical in Critical Posthumanism Network is aimed at evaluating the truly innovative potential of posthumanism. It welcomes for example the new and extensive possibilities for co-operations between the sciences (and the new bio- or life sciences in particular) and the humanities and the social sciences. On the other hand, critical also means appreciating the resistance to the ideas relating to the posthuman, posthumanisation, posthumanism or posthumanity. The aim is to historicize and contextualize the anxieties and desires at work when dealing with concepts of the human, posthuman and nonhuman and to look at prefigurations, genealogies, disavowals and alternative futures”.

Nel sito trovate una bibliografia delle pubblicazioni uscite sull’argomento, gli eventi e un  glossario.

eBook di filosofia: G. Anders, The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television

Gunther Anders, The world as phantom and as matrix: philosophical considerations on radio and television

“English translation of a remarkable 1956 essay about television from Vol. I of The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders, who—using phenomenological analyses, excerpts from his diaries and reflections on daily life—depicts a capitalist world that manufactures a warped “mass-man” by imposing nonparticipation, consumption of images, artificial “needs” (“drug addiction is the model for today’s needs”), separation, “conditioning”, an eternal present, commodified leisure and the dissolution of the individual in vapid mass produced roles, in a text that in many ways anticipates the theory of the “spectacle” of Guy Debord and the situationists”