Beyond Human

Reviews / Votes

This fascinating collection of essays is often challenging and always engaging.Drawing on an astonishing breadth of approaches this book offers a stimulating exploration of what it means to be both embodied human and animal in an increasingly post-human world. From the opening chapter with its provocative idea of handing animals tools for their own, much needed, revolution through to the final chapter which unsettlingly forces the reader to consider human-technological melding, this book will force to you see - and think about the world - differently. The chapters in this incisive collection offer important challenges to anthropocentric prejudices - just as the title promises, readers are taken "beyond human." Vivid, passionate, ethically-charged critical writing embodies resistance to fixed ideas that diminish other animals. Boundaries are contested and conventions are transgressed as these writers celebrate a consciousness that displaces man as the measure of all things. This memorable and important compilation of scholarship creatively advances the agenda of human-animal studies. This is a fascinating collection of thoughtfully subversive essays, which range over art and philosophy, science and literature, evolution and ethics, the sacred and the divine. Bringing into creative contact the pressing questions of, on the one hand, animals and animality and, on the other, technology and transhumanism, they urge the reader to move beyond humanist hang-ups, beyond anthroponormative assumptions, indeed, beyond the human. Taken together, the essays in this collection offer a persuasive argument for what should count in crafting a politics for transitional animals and their reciprocal others. * Culture Machine, July 2012 * This wide-ranging volume explores the historical and futural limits of the human subject: its constitutive animality and its technological transformation ... [T]he collection's distinctiveness is in the way it combines the earthly concerns of "the animal turn" with more otherworldly discourses, such as the oft-ignored reflections of theologians, and the technoscientific fantasies and realities of transhumanists ... Alongside its intersection of themes and multidisciplinarity, a distinguishing strength of the book is that it does not shirk the question of human distinctiveness ... Ultimately, it collects a series of intriguing and provocative forays that suggest and mark out new terrains for scholarship in the theoretical humanities. * Anthrozooes *