11 Posthumanism and the ‘posterizing impulse’ Yolande Jansen, Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp and Leire Urricelqui Introduction With the increasing awareness of the devastating consequences of what some call ‘the Anthropocene’ and others a ‘crisis of humanism’, the ‘posthuman’ has become a focal term in contemporary debates at the crossroads of science, politics and the humanities. Participants in this debate in the last decades of the twentieth century and the frst decade of the twenty-frst century, have often claimed that we are living in a historical moment in which the human is losing its centrality by ‘its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks’. 1 Over the last decade, the human’s imbrication in biological, ecological and geological assemblages has been added to that list. 2 Authors in this feld insist that we are living in a critical historical moment ‘impossible to ignore’, and necessitating new theoretical frameworks. 3 Or as philosopher and gender studies scholar Francesca Ferrando put it in 2013: ‘[I]n contemporary academic debate, “posthuman” has become a key term to cope with an urgency for the integral redefnition of the notion of the human.’ 4 Her colleague Rosi Braidotti argues that we need ‘new cartogra- phies’ to challenge and go beyond the paradigms of the dominant enlightened humanism that understood the ‘human’ or ‘Man’ as the unique and superior form of life. 5 Others, however, consider not so much a crisis of humanism, but rather the enhancement of the human through progress and technologi- cal development as the most crucial aspect of the ‘post-moment’ we are in. 6 The latter version of posthumanism, also called ‘transhumanism’, expresses an enthusiasm for science and technology, often in tandem with capitalism, that is on a tense footing with the more critical strand of posthumanism. The ‘posthuman’ thus inspires quite divergent discourses, in terms of either crisis or progress, that are not easily combinable. Critical posthumanism, transhu- manism, extropianism, new materialism, technoscience studies and animal studies are examples of these multiple and contrasting felds and approaches, all of them referring to a notion of the ‘posthuman’, and their variety brings together some of the big tensions of our time. Yolande Jansen, Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp, and Leire Urricelqui - 9781526148179 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 10/04/2023 06:49:16AM via free access