A DEFENSE OF PRE-CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of
mind. 1

1. Introduction

Since emerging in nineties critical theory, transhumanism and cyberpunk literature,

the term posthuman has been used to mark a historical juncture at which the status
of the human is radically in doubt. Two main usages or, if you will, two
distinct posthumanisms can be discerned over this period.

Transhumanists, futurists and science fiction authors regularly concatenate or

hyphenate post and human` when speculating about the long-run influence of
advanced technologies on the future shape of life and mind.
By contrast, for cultural theorists and philosophers in the continental tradition the
posthuman is a condition in which the foundational status of humanism has been
undermined. The causes or symptoms of this supposed crisis of humanism are various
as the bio-engineered 'clades' ramifying through the post-anthropoform solar system
of Bruce Sterling's 1996 novel Schismatrix. Posthumanism, in this diagnostic
or critical sense, is expressed in the postmodern incredulity towards enlightenment
narratives of emancipation and material progress; the deconstruction of transcendental
or liberal subjectivities; the end of patriarchy; the emergence of contrary humanisms
in post-Colonial cultures; the reduction of living entities to resources for a burgeoning
technoscience, or, if some theorists are to be believed, all of the above.2

In this paper, I will argue that these two usages do not only reflect divergent
understandings of the posthuman the speculative and the critical - but also reflect a
foreclosure of radical technogenetic change on the part of critical posthumanists. This
1

Sterling (1996), p. 59.

This appears to be the position of Rosi Braidotti in her recent plenary address to the 2009 Society for
European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy Conference in Cardiff.

gesture can be discerned in four arguments that occur in various forms within the
extant literature of critical posthumanism:

The anti-humanist argument

The materiality argument

The technogenesis argument

The anti-essentialist argument

All four, as I hope to show, are unsound.

Analyzing why these arguments fail has the dual benefit of preventing us from being
distracted by the anti-humanist hyperbole accruing to theoretical frameworks
employed within critical posthumanism - such as deconstruction and cognitive
science - but, more importantly, contributes to the development of a rigorous,
philosophically self-aware speculative posthumanism.

2. Speculative Posthumanism
Contemporary transhumanists argue that human nature is an unsatisfactory work in
progress that should be modified through technological means where the
instrumental benefits for individuals outweigh the technological risks. This ethic of
improvement

is

premised

on

prospective

developments

in

four

areas:

Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science

the NBIC suite of technologies. For example, improved bionic neural interfaces
may allow the incorporation of a wide range of technical devices within an enhanced
cyborg body or exo-self while genetic treatments may increase the efficiency or
learning or memory (Bostrom and Sandberg 2006) or be used to increase the size of
the cerebral cortex. The wired and gene-modified denizens of the transhuman future
could be sensitive to a wider range of stimuli, faster, more durable, more intellectually
capable and morphologically varied than their unmodified forebears.

Just how unrestricted and capable transhuman minds and bodies can become is
contested since the scope for enhancement depends both on hypothetical technologies

and upon hotly contested metaphysical claims. Among the prospective technologies
which excite radical transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil are the use of micro-electric
neuroprostheses which might non-invasively stimulate or probe the brains native
neural networks, allowing it to jack directly into immersive cognitive technologies or
map its state vector prior to uploading an entire personality (Kurzweil 2005, 317);3
the elusive goal of artificial general intelligence the creation of robots or software
systems which approximate or exceed the flexibility of human belief-fixation and
comportment; or, perhaps less speculatively, improvements in processor technology
sufficient to emulate the computational capacity of human and other mammalian
brains (Ibid. 124-125).

Among the metaphysical issues that trouble all but the most facile of transhumanist
itineraries is the scope of functionalist accounts of mental states and processes.
Functionalist philosophers of mind claim that the mental states types such as beliefs
or pains are constituted by the causal role of token states within a containing system
rather than by the stuff that the system is constituted from. The causal role of a token
state is defined by the set of states that can bring it about (its inputs) and set of the
states that it causes in turn (its outputs). The substrate on which that state is realized is
irrelevant to its functional role.4 Some philosophers of mind David Chalmers, say
are functionalists with regard to representational states like beliefs or desires, but not
with regard to phenomenal states like having a toothache or seeing pink. If Chalmers
is right, then we can never produce artificial consciousness purely in virtue of
emulating the kinematics of brain states. However, if we accept the accounts of
philosophers with (however divergent) functional analyses of the property of state
consciousness like Daniel Dennett and Michael Tye the prospects for artificial
consciousness seem somewhat brighter (Dennett 1991). Given a sufficiently global
functionalism, a simulation of an embodied nervous system in which these
constitutive relationships were actually instantiated would also be a replication
lacking none of the preconditions for intentionality or conscious experience regardless
of whether they were implemented with biological material as this is currently
3

For a rather less sanguine commentary on the state of the art in non-invasive scanning see Jones 2009.

By analogy, any system could count as being in the state White Wash Cycle if inputting dirty whites at
some earlier time resulted in it outputting clean whites at some later time.

understood.

For

radical

transhumanists

influenced

by

functionalist

and

computationalist approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science, then, neural

replication opens up the possibility of copying the patterns that constitute a given
mind onto non-biological platforms that will be inconceivably faster, more flexible
and more robust than evolved biological bodies (Kurzweil 2005).

These radical augmentation scenarios indicate to some that a future convergence of

NBIC technologies could lead to a new posthuman form of existence. Following an
influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this ontological step change
is sometimes referred to as the technological singularity (Vinge 1993): an epochal
discontinuity resulting from positive feedback exerted by technical change upon
itself (Bostrom 2005, 8). Characteristically the scenario is painted in terms of the
creation of artificial super-intelligence - intelligence being the variable considered
most liable to affect the rate of technical growth. Vinge claims that were a single
super-intelligent machine created, it could create still more intelligent machines,
resulting in a growth in mentation to plateaux far exceeding our current capacities.
Lacking this intellectual prowess, we cannot envisage some of the ways postsingularity intelligences might re-order the world. A post-singularity world would be
constituted in ways that cannot be humanly conceived. If it could be humanly
conceived it would not be the genuine article.

The idea of the singularity implies a principled limit on human cognition, and
predictive power, in particular. It is homologous, in certain respects, to Immanuel
Kant's idea of the thing-in-itself, which lacking any mode of presentation in the
phenomenal world of space and time must necessarily elude systematic empirical
knowledge.5

Commitment to the possibility of a singularity nicely exemplifies the philosophical

position of speculative posthumanists. Posthumans in this sense are hypothetical wide
descendants of current humans that are no longer human in consequence of some
augmentation history.

In ____, however, I consider and reject the applicability of this conception of transcendence to the
singularity or the posthuman more generally.

Ive coined the term wide descent because exclusive consideration of biological
descendants of humanity as candidates for posthumanity would be excessively
restrictive. Future extensions of NBIC technologies may involve discrete biotechnical modifications of the reproductive process such as human cloning, the
introduction of transgenic or artificial genetic material or very exotic processes such
as personality uploading or mind-cloning. Thus entities warranting our concern
with the posthuman could emerge via modified biological descent, recursive
extension of AI technologies (involving human and/or non-human designers), quasibiological descent from synthetic organisms, a convergence of the above, or via some
technogenetic process yet to be envisaged.

It follows that when considering the lives of hypothetical posthuman descendants we

must understood descent as relationship that is technically mediated to an arbitrary
degree.

We can recursively define the relation of wide human descent recursively as follows:

An entity is a wide human descendant if it is the result of a technically mediated

process:

A)

Caused by a part of WH (WH stands for the "Wide Human" my shorthand for

the human socio-technical network) 6 where the ancestral part may be wholly
biological, wholly technological or some combination of the two

B)

Caused by a wide human descendant.

A is the basis clause here. It states what belongs to the initial generation of wide
human descendants without using the concept of wide descent. B is the inductive part
of the definition. Given any generation of wide human descendants it specifies a
successor generation of wide human descendants.

See ____forthcoming.

It is important that this definition does not imply that a wide human descendant need
be human in either wide or narrow senses. Any part of the human socio-technical
network ceases to be widely human if its wide descendants go feral: acquiring the
capacity for independent functioning and replication outside the human network.

Becoming posthuman would thus be an unprecedented discontinuity in the

hominization process. Human life has undergone revolutions in the past (like the shift
from hunter-gatherer to sedentary modes of life) but no part of it has been technically
altered so as to function outside of it.

A being is a posthuman WHD if it breaks out of the human network. If toothbrushes

got smartened up and became sufficiently autonomous to reproduce without having to
be teeth-cleaners, to devise their own ends, they would cease to be wide humans and
become posthumans. A posthuman is any WHD that goes feral; becomes capable of
life outside the planetary substance comprised of narrow biological humans, their
cultures and technologies.

For speculative (or pre-critical) posthumanism, a technically mediated breakout from

the human constitutes a significant ontological possibility.

Speculative posthumanism is logically independent of the normative thesis of

transhumanism: one can be consistently transhumanist while denying the ontological
possibility of posthuman transcendence. Similarly, speculative posthumanism is
consistent with the rejection of transhumanism. One could hold that a posthuman
divergence is a significant ontological possibility but not a desirable one.

3. The Anti-Humanist Argument

Critical posthumanists such as Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, Don Ihde and Neil
Badmington do not contest the potential of NBIC technologies or advance principled
arguments against enhancement (Clark is a warm-blooded, moderate transhumanist
according to my taxonomy) but argue that speculative or pre-critical posthumanism
reflects a philosophically nave conception of the human such that the posthuman
would constitute a radical break with it. This position is clearly implied in the title of
6

Katherine Hayles' seminal work of cultural history How We Became Posthuman. For
Hayles, the posthuman is not a hypothetical state which could follow some
prospective singularity event, say, but a work in progress: a complex and contested reconception of the human subject in terms drawn from the modern sciences of the
artificial: information theory, cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
(Hayles 199, 286).

One example of the intellectual tendencies that inform this new cultural moment is socalled Nouvelle AI (NAI). Where the manipulation of syntactically structured
representations is the paradigm of intelligence traditional AI, NAI draws inspiration
from computational prowess exhibited in biological phenomena involving no
symbolization, such as swarm intelligence, insect locomotion or cortical feature maps.
The guiding insight of NAI is that the preconditions of intelligence such as errorreduction strategies, pattern recognition or categorization - can emerge in biological
systems from local interactions between dumb specialized agents (like ants or
termites) without a central planner to choreograph their activities.

If human mentation likewise emerges from millions of asynchronous, parallel

interactions between dumb components, Hayles argues, there is no classically selfpresent human subjectivity for the posthuman to transcend. Mental powers of
deliberation, inference, consciousness, etc. are already distributed between biological
neural networks, actively sensing bodies and artefacts (Hayles 1999, 239).
I have christened this the anti-humanist objection to posthumanism given its
striking similarities to the deconstruction of subjectivist philosophy and
phenomenology undertaken in post-war French anti-humanisms Derridas in
particular (Ibid. 146). Hayles proximate target, here, is the putatively autonomous
subject of modern liberal theory. The autonomous liberal subject, she argues, is
unproblematically present to itself and distinct from the conceptually ordered world in
which it works out its plans for the good (Ibid. 286). The posthuman subject, by
contrast, is problematically individuated, because its agency is constituted by an
increasingly smart extra-bodily environment on which its cognitive functioning
depends and because of the open, ungrounded materiality - or iterability - of
language which is both arrested by the context of embodied action and infected by its
7

opacity (Derrida 1988 152; Hayles 1999, 264-5). The decentered or distributed
posthuman subject is no longer sufficiently distinct from the world to order it
autonomously as the subject of liberal theory is required to do.

But is this right?

Lets suppose, along with Hayles and other proponents of embodied and distributed
cognition, that the skin-bag is an ontologically permeable boundary between self and
non-self (or exo-self). Proponents of the extended mind thesis like Andy Clark and
David Chalmers argue from a principle of 'parity' between processes that go on in the
head and any functionally equivalent process in the world beyond. 7 The parity
principle implies that mental processes need not occur only in biological nervous
systems but in the environments and tools of embodied thinkers. If I have to make
marks on paper to keep in mind the steps of a lengthy logical proof, the PP states that
my mental activity is constituted by these inscriptional events as well as by the
knowledge and habits reposing in my acculturated neural networks.

However, given the parity between bodily and extra-bodily processes, this cannot
make the activity less evaluable in terms of the rationality standards we apply to
deliberative acts. Even if the humanist subject emerges from the aggregated activities
of biological and non-biological agents, this metaphysical dependence (or
supervenience) need not impair its capacity to subtend the powers of deliberation or
reasoning liberal theory requires of it.8
Derridas more systematic deconstruction of the semantically constitutive subject
nuances this picture by entailing limits on the scope of practical reason in the face of
Parity Principle. If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were
it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then
that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process (Clark and Chalmers 1998, XX).

The notion of supervenience is frequently used by non-reductive materialists to express the

dependence of mental properties on physical properties without entailing their reducibility to the latter.
Informally: M properties supervene on P properties if a things P properties determine its M
properties. If aesthetic properties supervene on physical properties, if x is physically identical to y and
x is beautiful, y must be beautiful. Supervenience accounts vary with the modal force of the
entailments involved. Natural or nomological supervenience holds in worlds whose physical laws
are like our own. Metaphysical supervenience, on the other hand, is often claimed to hold with
logical or conceptual necessity.

the outside or exception which infects any rule-governed system (Derrida 1988,
152). The rule or desire is always precipitate, in this way. But there is a difference
between being ahead of oneself and being be-headed. The posthuman, in Hayles
critical sense of the term, is not less human for confronting the fragile, constitutively
precipitate character of cognition and desire.

This is not to say, of course, that there is no merit in the model of the hybrid self that
Hayles presents as posthuman or that it has no implications for pre-critical or
speculative posthumanism. On the contrary, a deconstruction of the classically
constitutive subject of post-Cartesian thought is, I have argued, a useful prophylactic
against immaterialist fancies or transcendentally inspired objections to the
naturalizing project of cognitive science (____). However, the naturalization of
subjectivity and mind is at best a conceptual precondition for envisaging certain
transcendent posthumanist itineraries involving the emergence of artificial minds
from new technological configurations of matter. It does not represent their
culmination.

4. The Technogenesis Argument

There are two other objections that may potentially survive this analysis. Firstly, it
could be objected that the critical posthumanism like the extended mind thesis shows that the human is always already technically constituted. In her contribution to
a recent Templeton Research Seminar on transhumanism Hayles argues that
transhumanists are wedded to a technogenetic anthropology for which humans and
technologies have existed and co-evolved in symbiotic partnership. Not only would
future transhuman enhancement be a technogenetic process; but so, according to this
story, are comparable transformations in the deep past. Human technical activity has,
for example, equipped some with lactose tolerance or differential calculus without
monstering the beneficiaries into posthumans. One of the proponents of the extended
mind thesis, Andy Clark, has framed the technogenesis argument against
posthumanism particularly clearly in his book Natural Born Cyborgs:

The promise, or perhaps threatened, transition to a world of wired humans and

semi-intelligent gadgets is just one more move in an ancient game. . . We are
9

already masters at incorporating nonbiological stuff and structure deep into

our physical and cognitive routines. To appreciate this is to cease to believe in
any post-human future and to resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal
opposition to the very worlds in which so many of us now live, love and work
(Clark 2003, 142).
Natural born cyborgs, as suggested, are already dealers in hybrid mental
representations which exploit both a linguistically mapped environment and the
pattern detecting talents of our multifariously talented brains. This is significant
because our capacity to ascribe structured propositional attitudes to others arguably
presupposes the capacity to use language to represent their contents. Representing the
contents of beliefs is necessary for evaluating them and it is independently plausible
to suppose that, as Donald Davidson argues in his essay Thought and Talk, having
the capacity to evaluate beliefs is part of what is required in a believer (Davidson
1984).

Clearly, if we restrict the evidence base for the technogenesis argument to cases
where augmentation has not resulted in a species divergence or something very like it,
then we will induce that this is not liable to happen in the future. However, some prehuman divergence had to have happened in our evolutionary past and it is at least
plausible given the natural born cyborgs thesis - that technologies such as public
symbol systems were a factor in the hominization process. Given a pre-human
divergence has occurred in the past, perhaps due to evolutionary pressures brought
about the development of simpler symbolization techniques, why preclude the
possibility that convergent NBIC technologies might prompt a similar step change in
the future?

I have argued elsewhere that a cognitive augmentation that replaced public language
with a non-symbolic vehicle of cognition and communication might assuming
Clark's account of hybrid representations lead to the instrumental elimination of
propositional attitude psychology through the elimination of its public vehicles of
content. Post-folk folk might, arguably, be opaque to the practices of intentional
interpretation we bring to bear in our i.e. human - social intercourse and thus
might well form initially discrete social and reproductive enclaves that might later
10

seed entirely posthuman republics.

5. The Materiality Argument

Another of Hayles objections to standard posthumanists visions of transcendence is
their supposed elision of the materiality of human embodiment and cognition: the
materiality argument. The fact that computer simulations can help us understand the
self-organizing capacities of biological systems does not entail that these can be fully
replicated by some system by virtue of implementing a sufficiently fine-grained
software representation of their functional structure.

It is true that some posthumanist scenarios presuppose that minds or organisms can be
fully replicated on speculative non-biological substrates like the computronium or
'smart matter' imagined in Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution novels. However, this
objection applies to a fairly restricted class of posthuman itineraries: namely those
involving the replication of existing minds and organisms in computational form.
Although Hayles provides no arguments against pan-computationalism or globalfunctionalism, it might well be the case that synthetic-life forms or robots,
being differently embodied, will be differently minded as well (who knows?).

Thus the materiality of embodiment argument works in favour of the pre-critical

posthumanist account, not against it.9 On the other hand, she may be wrong and the
pan-computationalists right. Mental properties of things may, for all we know,
supervene on their computational properties because every other property supervenes
on them as well.

5. The Anti-Essentialist Argument

I turn, finally, to an objection that is perhaps implicit rather than explicit in the
arguments of Critical Posthumanists to date but is worth considering on its own, if
only for its speculative payoff. I refer to this as the anti-essentialist argument.

It may militate against transhumanist dreams of virtual immortality, but, as many have pointed out,
this is a humanist or hyper-humanist scenario, not a posthumanist one.

11

The anti-essentialist objection to posthumanism starts from a particular interpretation

of the disjointness of the human and the posthuman. This is that the only thing that
could distinguish the set of posthumans and the set of humans is that all posthumans
would lack some essential property of humanness by virtue of their augmentation
history. An essential property of a kind is a property that no member of that kind can
be without. If humans are necessary rational, for example, then it is a necessary truth
that if x is human, then x is rational.10 It follows that if there is no human essence no
properties that humans possess in all possible worlds there can be no posthuman
divergence or transcendence.

This is a potentially serious objection to speculative posthumanism because there

seem to be plausible grounds for rejecting essentialism in the sciences of complexity
or self-organization that underwrite many posthumanist prognostications. Some
philosophers of biology hold that the interpretation of biological taxa most consonant
with Darwinian evolution is that they are not kinds (i.e. properties) but individuals.
Evolution by natural selection is a form of self-organization involving feedback
relationships between the distribution of genetic traits across populations and their
phenotypic consequences in particular environments. An individual or protoindividual can undergo a self-organizing process, but an abstract kind or universal
cannot. Thus, the argument goes, evolution happens to species qua individuals (or
proto-individuals) not species qua kinds. To be biologically human on this view
is not to exemplify some set of necessary and sufficient properties, but to be
genealogically related to earlier members of the population of humans (Hull 1988).

Clearly, if biological categories are not kinds and posthuman transcendence requires
the technically mediated loss of properties essential to membership of some biological
kind, then posthuman transcendence envisaged by pre-critical posthumanism is
metaphysically impossible.11
10

Another way of putting this is to say that in any possible world that humans exist they are rational.
Other properties of humans may be purely accidental e.g. their colour or language. It is not part of
the essence of humans that they speak English, for example. Insofar as speaking English is an
accidental property of humans, there are possible worlds in which there are humans but no English
speakers.
11
This objection is overdetermined because the possibility of successfully implementing radical
transhumanist policies seems incompatible with a stable human nature. If there are few cognitive or
body invariants that could not in principle be modified with the help of some hypothetical NBIC
technology then transhumanism arguably presupposes that there are no such essential properties for

12

Underlying the anti-essentialist objection is the assumption that the only significant
differences are differences in the essential properties demarcating natural kinds.
But why adhere to this philosophy of difference?12 The view that nature is articulated
by differences in the instantiation of abstract universals sits poorly with the idea of an
actively self-organizing nature underlying the leading edge cognitive and life
sciences. A view of difference consistent with self-organization would locate the
engines of differentiation in those micro-components and structural properties whose
cumulative activity generates the emergent regularities of complex systems.

For example, we might adopt an immanent and particularist ontology of difference for
which individuating boundaries are generated by local states of matter: such as
differences in pressure, temperature, miscibility or chemical concentration. For
immanent ontologies of difference that of Gilles Deleuze, say the conceptual
differences articulated in the natural language kind lexicons are asymmetrically
dependent upon active individuating differences (Delanda 2004, 10). The emergent
consequences of actively individuated differences can obviously include the human
socio-technical networks to which I referred in the basis clause of the definition of
wide human descent. Thus becoming posthuman in the sense recommended here can
be understood ontologically as losing one set of external relations and replacing them
with new ones: breaking out of socio-technical assemblages13 where narrowly human
biological individuals are an obligatory biological component and generating novel
socio-technical networks.

humanness.
12

David Hull points out that the genealogical boundaries between species can be considerably sharper
than boundaries in character space (Hull 1988, 4). The fact that nectar-feeding hummingbird hawk
moths and nectar-feeding hummingbirds look and behave in similar ways does not invalidate the claim
that they have utterly distinct lines of evolutionary descent (Laporte 2004, 44).
The term assemblage is used by the Deleuzean philosopher Manuel Delanda to refer to any
emergent but decomposable whole and belongs to the conceptual armory of his particularist flat
ontology. Assemblages are emergent wholes in that they exhibit powers and properties not attributable
to their parts but which causally depend upon their parts. Assemblages are also decomposable insofar
as all the relations between their components are external: each part can be detached from the whole
to exist independently (Assemblages are thus opposed to totalities in an idealist or holist sense). This
is the case even where the part is functionally necessary for the continuation of the whole (DeLanda
2006: 184).
13

13

In short: we can be anti-essentialists and anti-Platonists (if we wish) while holding

that the world is profoundly differentiated in a way that owes nothing to the
transcendental causality of abstract universals, subjectivity or language.

Conclusion

I have argued that critical posthumanists provide few convincing reasons for
abandoning pre-critical or speculative posthumanism. The anti-essentialist argument
presupposes a model of difference that is ill adapted to the sciences that critical
posthumanists cite in favour of their naturalized deconstruction of the human subject.
The deconstruction of the humanist subject implied in the anti-humanist objection
may itself be a useful prolegomenon to a posthuman-engendering cognitive science;
but it complicates rather than corrodes the philosophical humanism that critical
posthumanism problematizes while leaving open the possibility of a radical
differentiation of the human and the posthuman. The technogenesis objection is weak,
if conceptually productive. The elision of materiality argument is based on
problematic assumptions and, even if sound, would preclude only some scenarios for
posthuman divergence.

Of these, the anti-essentialist objection seems the strongest and most wide ranging in
its implication. Our response to it suggested that it might be circumvented with an
immanent ontology of emergent differences such as Deleuze's ontology of the virtual.
However, a consequence of embracing locally emergent differences in this way is that
there can be no adequate concept of posthuman difference without posthumans. For it
is surely a consequence of any such account that a science of the different cannot
precede its historical emergence or morphogenesis, even if only in simulated form.
This implies that the posthuman is at best a placeholder signifying a possibility that
we cannot adequately conceptualize ahead of its actualization. However, this does not
preclude a theoretical development of the implications of the posthuman insofar as we
can conceptualize it.

Moreover, the emptiness of the signifier 'posthuman' has an ethical or, perhaps, 'antiethical' consequence that arguably should be considered more fully in the light of

14

Derrida's remarks about the precipitate character of thought.14 If the speculative idea
of the posthuman is a placeholder for differences that are determinable only via some
synthetic process - such as the creation of actual posthumans, modified transhumans,
or a range of simulations or aesthetic models (as in cybernetic art) - these differences
can be determined only by progressive actualization. Thus posthumanist philosophy
is locked into a dialectically unstable preterition falling between speculative and
synthetic activity. To understand what it as yet undetermined, it must attempt
however incrementally to bring it into being and to give it shape.
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14

In her address to the Cardiff, SEP-FEP conference, 'The Ethics of Extinction' Claire Colebrook
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climate change) imply the need to overcome these rooted modes of action and affect. Hence the
prospect of humanity being superseded by non-humans requires an anti-ethics which imagines or
simulates the radically non-human.

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