Speculative and Unbounded Posthumanism

Session 1: Disconnection and Unbounded Posthumanism


Summary

Section one serves an introduction to the theoretical core of Speculative Posthumanism. Reading 1) develops an analytical, anti-essentialist account of the conditions for posthuman succession or ‘disconnection’. In what I term ‘Unbounded Posthumanism’ the scope for disconnection is no longer bounded by a priori constraints on agency or subjectivity. The implications of this for thinking about action in time and performance are modelled through a philosophical reflection on improvisation in reading 2) and posthuman performance compared with a more rationalist and Hegelian model of the inhuman agent found in the work of Ray Brassier. Reading 3) develops this on the more abstract plane by thinking about the work of Robert Brandom, an extensive influence on the thinking of Brassier, Negarestani and other neorationlist thinkers. The bottom line of Spectral Machines is that Brandom’s impressive theory of meaning and interpretation is fundamentally incomplete, requiring a supplementary subject (interpreter, reader or auditor) that it cannot account for. Thus, his abstract account of subjectivity or agency does not provide a secure set of constraints on posthuman possibility. Thus an unbounded posthumanism is to be preferred to the bounded posthumanism of Brassier et al.

Session 2: From Unbounded Posthumanism to the Biomorph


Summary

The second session looks at the more experimental side of SP, including the theory-fiction that I have been developing since 2016. Reading 1 argues that aesthetic and literary (and other) experimentations pre-empts philosophical theories of the subject in unbounded posthumanism as a matter of conceptual necessity and consequently invites comparisons between the it and the non-philosophical work of Laruelle, Kolozova and others. Reading 2) develops a similar account of biomorphic posthumanism using Badiou rather than Laruelle as its point of comparison. Finally, Readings 3 and 4 consider how a posthuman subjectivity and its biomorphic self-understanding can be explored in a writing that skirts theory, science fiction, erotic horror and fetishism.

Roden, David. “Posthuman: Critical, Speculative, Biomorphic”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, edited by Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Joseph Wamburg, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 81-94

Roden, David. "Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia." Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 16, no. 1-2 (2019): 40-46.

Roden, David. "Letters from the Ocean Terminus." Dis Magazine (2016). http://dismagazine.com/discussion/81950/letters-from-the-ocean-terminus-david-roden/

Opening extract from a forthcoming long-form work Snuff Memory (SM_Extract. Pdf)