WORKSHOP ORGANIZED

In this lecture, I will look at the evolving concept of the posthuman body, focusing on how technological, biological, and cultural transformations challenge traditional boundaries of the human form and how they are represented in contemporary British literature. As advancements in biotechnology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence blur the distinctions between human, machine, and non-human entities, the posthuman body emerges as a dynamic site for reimagining identity, gender, agency, and embodiment. How do these developments reshape our understanding of what it means to be human, with particular attention to the ethical, philosophical, and social implications of augmenting or transcending the biological body? And how do fictional texts imagine the posthuman body and to what end? And lastly, is the category of gender still a valid and epistemologically important one when conceptualising the posthuman body? Drawing on the work of scholars such as Katherine Hayles, Giorgio Agamben, and Rosi BraidoI, I will ask how these transformaJons disrupt convenJonal understandings of the human subject. Ultimately, I will consider the ways in which literary and filmic representations of the gendered posthuman body challenge and redefine our notions of vulnerability, freedom, and existence in a rapidly changing world.

Texts: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, London 2005; Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, London 2019;
Film: Ex Machina (Dir. Alex Garland), 2015

In the 21st century tradiJonal concepts of kinship based on genealogy, blood and gender have been contested and problemaJsed in the light of biotechnological developments, reformed marriage laws, mass migraJon and transcultural alliances. A growing awareness of the interconnecJon of all organisms, human and non-human on an endangered planet helped to formulate kinship concepts that were disjoined from biological ties.
This lecture will explore the transformaJve concepts of posthumanist and more-than-human kinship, drawing on the theoreJcal frameworks established by Donna Haraway, Rosi BraidoI, Anna Tsing, and others. I will discuss the implicaJons of redefining kinship beyond tradiJonal human-centered paradigms, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all living beings and the entangled relaJonships that shape our existence. This inquiry invites parJcipants to reflect on the ethical and poliJcal dimensions of our relaJonships with the more-than-human world, encouraging a reimagining of kinship that fosters solidarity and responsibility across species.
By examining Haraway’s and BraidoI's noJon of the posthuman, and by comparing three contemporary literary examples of narraJves taking a more-than-human perspecJve, I will ask how they transcend anthropocentrism and advocate for a more inclusive understanding of kinship that embraces non-human enJJes as integral to our ecological and social fabric. At the same Jme, these texts call for a criJcal analysis of the literary formats of more-than- human-kinship narraJves and their literary strategies such as narraJve perspecJves and voice. Whose voice is it anyway that is speaking in these narraJves?

Texts: Kazuo Texts: Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking,
London 2017; Amitav Gosh,
The Living Mountain (2022); Kapka Kassabova,
Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time (2023).

Progress and production have come to define the contemporary age as one of great techno-scientific advancements, which in-turn have compelled humanity to live in a posthuman age of machinic possibilities. The same logic has landed us in an ecological epoch called the Anthropocene, which is to say the price for Progress has been the irreversible loss of autonomy of the environment, and the ensuing ecological crises. However, the burden of catastrophe and preventive measures are doubled in postcolonial, growing economies like India. Caught between the desire for development and environmental sustainability, India has languished to shed her colonial past and rejuvenate her pre-colonial ecosystems. NASA, using its global imaging, revealed that India, along with China, had increased the world green cover to match that of the Amazon rainforests. Nonetheless, unpredictable monsoon rains and flashfloods in Kerala and Nagaland, hurricanes and sea erosion in Odisha, and draught in Tamil Nadu have taught us that only a collective, unified effort of all world nations can combat climate change, which is also why the recent Amazon fires drew the ire of world leaders. The coming together of global powers and a shift in perspective from individual nation states to citizens of Spaceship Earth requires rigorous interrogations and altercations of contemporaneous ethical and cognitive standards. This unique situation necessitates the Humanities, which theorizes human activities, to move forward by addressing and communicating with these changes and possibilities, particularly their impact on and consequences for human perception and pedagogy.

Geophilosophy I, Earth as Artisan, Framing the Human

In this lecture, I ask the questions, “what conditions the human?” and “what role does the earth have in guiding cultural, social, and economic production?” To think about the cosmic and the earth as that which frames the human, I introduced the example of the Vredefort meteor impact, the oldest and largest meteor impact on the planet located just outside of Johannesburg South Africa. The first section of the presentation was an analysis and explication of the fundamental principles of geophilosophy as a methodology that is both cartographic, a matter of tracing the relations out of which we are composed to understand the set of potentialities available to us, and diagrammatic, a matter of discerning the unrealized potentials of different milieus to create new assemblages that cede some space for those artisanal events that exceed our anthropocentric machinations. The second section of the presentation was the application of geophilosophy to Vredefort, in order to understand how to connect the rise of empires, economies, and human histories to the contingencies of the cosmic and the movements of the earth. By using geophilosophy as a methodology, we were able to see the way that different levels of stratification, from geological events, to economic systems and social concepts of race and power, lead to the intersection of the gold mining industries of South Africa with apartheid and various political upheavals.

Geophilosophy II, Cosmic Consciousness, Reframing the Human

The second lecture shifts focus to the question of how to create a new image of thought that remains true to the earth. This lecture focused on several conceptual personas given through the work of Deleuze and Guattari,to tease out a new image of thought that remains open to the vacillations of the earth. The first is that of the itinerate wanderer, a way of being that translates to thinking as a kind of following and nuanced observation of the flows and disruptions of earth and territories. The second is that of the metallurgist and miners, who learn the inner workings of rock and earth, drill and bore into the earth as a profession and also deal with the societal demands for ore and mineral deposits. Deleuze and Guattari use these figures as examples of a way of thinking that are rooted in the materiality of the earth and sensitive to the political and economic conditions of human power structures. The miners’ way of engaging the strata, following the flows of the earth, is a model for the transitional beings that we must become - beings who discover a new way to be intimate with the earth and our material surroundings. Likewise, the subterraneanism of the miner must inspire us to the subterraneanness of thought – to constantly move beyond thought’s stagnation, towards the virtual unthought. The last section derives an affective comportment towards the earth which can be taken up to enhance our ethico-political engagements. It is an affective attunement that enhances and perpetuates our engagement with our own limits, joyously, while, at the same time, identifying and exposing the exploitation upon which our empires have been formed, the allegiances, the compromises, and the way that capitalism and state render many invisible or unworthy.

The Ways of Becoming

The Deleuzian notion of becoming is something that ‘resists’ its subjection to a particular ‘fixed’ identity. The difficulty of thinking, let alone writing about, becoming, as we stated, lies in the fact that once we ask the question ‘what is a becoming?’ we automatically lose its core sense and most likely all we can then do is turn to just another way of defining a subject (though this time as the being of a becoming); and this in a way whereby its identity still takes precedent from its experience, and thus acts as yet another concrete ‘ground.’
On the other hand, an examination of the notion of becoming remains paramount and it has to be thought as, in our view, it is a way of, potentially, suspending or disorienting this primacy of the unified subject and, to that extent, of the human rights framework and their western mode of thought, in general. The question of becoming is from the start ethical and political in its nature. The ethical plane corresponds to the question, ‘how may we (re)shape our modes of existing differently on the condition that we start ‘taking becoming(s) seriously?’ In other words, how can our starting point be the living experience of the subject rather than a preconceived universal subjectivity that only acts at best as an aspiration for the vast majority of the planetary population? The political place which is of course closely interconnected to the ethical, asks ‘how may these new ways of existing lead to a formation of ‘a new politics?’