This electronic book gathers twenty papers presented at the 6th Global Conference Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction, which took place in the Mansfield College of Oxford, between the 12th and the 14th of July 2011.

The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

The question of what defines the human, and of what is human about the humanities, have been shaken up by the radical critiques of humanism and the displacement of anthropomorphism that have gained currency in recent years, propelled in part by rapid advances in our knowledge of living systems and of their genetic and algorithmic codes coupled with the global expansion of a knowledge-intensive capitalism. In Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the impact of these developments on three major areas: the constitution of our subjectivity, the general production of knowledge and the practice of the academic humanities. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist theory, she argues that the human was never a neutral category but one always linked to power and privilege. Hence we must move beyond the old dualities in which Man defined himself, beyond the sexualized and racialized others that were excluded from humanity. Posthuman knowledge, as Braidotti understands it, is not so much an alternative form of knowledge as a critical call: a call to build a multi-layered and multi-directional project that displaces anthropocentrism while pursuing the analysis of the discriminatory and violent aspects of human activity and interaction wherever they occur. Situated between the exhilaration of scientific and technological advances on the one hand and the threat of climate change devastation on the other, the posthuman convergence encourages us to think hard and creatively about what we are in the process of becoming.

The notion of 'the human' is in need of urgent redefinition. At a time of radical bio-technological developments, and in light of the political and environmental imperatives of our age, the term 'posthuman' provides an alternative. The philosophical landscape which has developed as a response to the crisis of the human, includes several movements, such as: Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism and Object Oriented Ontology. This book explains the similarities and differences between these currents and offers a detailed examination of a number of topics that fall under the “posthuman” umbrella, including the anthropocene, artificial intelligence and the deconstruction of the human. Francesca Ferrando affords particular focus to Philosophical Posthumanism, defined as a philosophy of mediation which addresses the meaning of humanity not in separation, but in relation to technology and ecology. The posthuman shift thus emerges in the global call for social change, responsible science and multispecies coexistence.

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Life provides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.

By revealing the fragility of mainstream narratives of the 'human, ' each author in this collection contributes to an unsettling vision of a posthuman world

Be sure to fasten your seatbelts while reading Craig Dionne's POSTHUMAN LEAR. In addition to being a wild ride through time and space, hurtling from late antiquity to post-Fukushima-radiated Japan by way of Shakespeare's motley crew of castaways on a storm-battered heath, the book also offers a reparative salve for our troubled anthropocene. As long as we speak what we feel, and reversing Edgar's famous line, even what we *ought* to say, with the shards and broken fragments of borrowed proverbial speech, we will at least have shelter with each other and with a newly denuded world, and in a consoling if partly ruined human language, from the coming Winter. Eileen JoyCraig Dionne has written Shakespearean criticism as it should be written: theoretically sophisticated, historically situated, while tied to the present moment, and thoroughly engaging as a piece of writing. Posthuman Lear will change the way you think ... about Lear and about the work we do. Sharon O'DairApproaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare's tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being - from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one's interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare's tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear's progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.At the center of Dionne's analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within 'adagential' being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.Dionne's reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare's central existential questions - the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world - in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne's final appeal is to "repurpose" our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.