Beyond Human From Animality to Transhumanism

by Blake, Charlie; Molloy, Claire; Shakespeare, Steven

• ISBN13: 9781441150110
• ISBN10: 1441150110
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-10
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Beyond Human investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions "the human" in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or "animals that think" has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals. It is the direction and consequences of this transition that is the central concern of Beyond Human.

Author Biography

Charlie Blake is. Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory and Head of the Department of Media, Film and Communication at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Claire Molloy is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at University of Brighton, UK and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She has published on anthropomorphism, representations of animals in videogames and Literature and dangerous dogs, media and risk. She is the author of Memento (EUP, 2010) and Popular Media and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor of American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond. Steven Shakespeare is Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University, UK, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His publications include The Inclusive God [co-authored with Hugh Rayment-Pickard, SCM, 2006), Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (SPCK, 2007) and Derrida and Theology (T T Clark, 2009).

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Notes on Contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xiv
Preface	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Animality: Boundaries and Definitions	p. 11
Incidents in the Animal Revolution	p. 13
Being a Known Animal	p. 31
Beyond the Pain Principle	p. 50
Representing Animality	p. 75
What We Can Do: Art Methodologies and Parities in Meeting	p. 77
Horse-Crazy Girls: Alternative Embodiments and Socialities	p. 97
Writing Relations: The Crab, the Lobster, the Orchid, the Primrose, You, Me, Chaos and Literature	p. 122
Thinking Beyond the Divide	p. 143
Affective Animal: Bataille, Lascaux and the Mediatization of the Sacred	p. 145
Levinas, Bataille and the Theology of Animal Life	p. 167
Degrees of 'Freedom': Humans as Primates in Dialogue with Hans Urs von Balthasar	p. 180
Animal-Human-Machine-God	p. 201
Inhuman Geometry: Aurochs, Angels and the Refuge of Art	p. 203
Articulating the Inhuman: God, Animal, Machine	p. 227
Transforming the Human Body	p. 254
Bibliography	p. 281
Index	p. 285
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