It showcases how posthumanism has transformed the humanities and what new work is now possible in light of this unsettling.

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS NOT WITH A BANG BUT A RERUN... What if the apocalypse had come and gone and no one noticed? What if the human race were already extinct but no one bothered to tell it? What if our reality were just a program to entertain and feed those who've been here since before time began? Now a would-be pop culture messiah has arisen to liberate mankind through a new religion of nihilism, mass murder, and suicide. His latest acts of carnage threaten to destroy the carefully constructed web of deception that holds together our reality. To stop him, Caleb Darr has been sanctified as cop and executioner. A killer in his own right, Darr has no choice but to accept the assignment from an entity even more dangerous than himself. It's a mission that will lead him through a dizzying realm of Dionysian death parties, Internet human sacrifices, and the visions of a madman who seeks to bring about an apocalypse to end all apocalypses.

From its earliest beginnings in Shelley's Frankenstein, science fiction has been concerned with defining - and redefining - what it means to be human and has explored the human relationship to technology and the natural world in far-reaching ways. Throughout these works, the human emerges as a liminal site where a range of anxieties and beliefs concerningsubjectivity, embodiment, agency, and individuality come into play. This book examines the history of the human in science fiction and the genre's complex engagements with humanism and posthumanism. Beginning with the nineteenth-century works of Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, it ranges from well-known authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula Le Guin to less widely studied texts by authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and E.E. 'Doc' Smith. The human that emerges from this tradition is a complex figure that ultimately comes to reflect the assumptions, beliefs, fears, and ambitions of a diverse range of authors and contexts, while science fiction itself can be seen as a radically - if problematically - posthuman mode of literature.

The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indifferent to the difference between the “other”’s life and other lives. Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism argues that the Nietzschean tendencies that provide the philosophical boundaries of post-humanism do not undo humanism but reform it, constructing a parallel discourse that saves humanism from itself. Grounded in materialist analysis of social life, Human, All Too (Post)Human argues that humanism and post-humanism are cultural discourses that normalize different stages of capitalism—analog and digital capitalism. They are different orders of property relations. The question, the writers argue, is not humanism or post-humanism, namely cultural representations, but the material relations of production that are centered on wage labor. Language, free will, or human rights are not the issues since “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” The question that shapes all questions, in Human, All Too (Post)Human is freedom from (wage) labor.

Fernando J. Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. Prior to this, key literary and artistic projects articulated Latin American modernity by attempting to address and supplement the state's inability to embody and enact justice. Rosenberg argues that since the topics of emancipation, identity, and revolution no longer define social concerns, Latin American artistic production is now situated at a point where the logic and conditions of marketization intersect with the notion of rights through which subjects define themselves politically. Rosenberg grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political re-foundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries.) In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

The way in which mainstream human rights discourse speaks of such evils as the Holocaust, slavery, or apartheid puts them solidly in the past. Its elaborate techniques of "transitional" justice encourage future generations to move forward by creating a false assumption of closure, enabling those who are guilty to elude responsibility. This approach to history, common to late-twentieth-century humanitarianism, doesn't presuppose that evil ends when justice begins. Rather, it assumes that a time before justice is the moment to put evil in the past. Merging examples from literature and history, Robert Meister confronts the problem of closure and the resolution of historical injustice. He boldly challenges the empty moral logic of "never again" or the theoretical reduction of evil to a cycle of violence and counterviolence, broken only once evil is remembered for what it was. Meister criticizes such methods for their deferral of justice and susceptibility to exploitation and elaborates the flawed moral logic of "never again" in relation to Auschwitz and its evolution into a twenty-first-century doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.

"Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After The Life takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history."--Cover.