Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman

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. Following on from a questioning of the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, essays in this volume question the limits and significance of the human and the humanites 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.