Stefan HerbrechterUniversität Heidelberg · Department of English Studies
Stefan Herbrechter
Habilitation (English Studies and Cultural Theory), Heidelberg University; PhD (English & Critical and Cultural Theory), Cardiff University; MA & Staatsexamen (English and Romance Philologies), Heidelberg University
About
82
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199
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
I'm one of the directors of the Critical Posthumanism Network and its Genelaogy of the Posthuman ((http://criticalposthumanism.net/genealogy). If you have a proposal for a genealogy topic please contact me at stefan.herbrechter_at_coventry.ac.uk.
For a full list of my publicatios and links to many full texts visit my home page: http://stefanherbrechter.com.
Additional affiliations
May 2015 - September 2015
September 2010 - August 2011
September 2009 - September 2014
Position
- Reader in Cultural Theory
Description
- Postgraduate Programme Manager (Media)
Publications
Publications (82)
This initial overview maps critical posthumanism as a theoretical and self-reflective discourse that has been establishing itself over the last twenty years or so. While popular notions of posthumanism and the figure of the posthuman tend to focus on technology and its current dynamic of transforming the ‘human’ into some ‘posthuman’ or even ‘trans...
This is a short statement invited by the editors. It doesn't warrant an abstract.
After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and perspectives, it puts into dialogue the major influences from philosophy, literary study, anthr...
Posthumanist literature—question mark. The question mark in the title gestures towards the conundrum that something like posthumanist literature might well be a contradiction in terms. This essay discusses the connection between posthumanism, the posthuman, and posthumanisation, on the one hand, and literature, the literary and post-literary (or th...
This is a final draft of an essay to be published in a volume on Italian Posthumanism (edited by Gloria Lauri-Lucente and Fabrizio Foni). It performs a posthumanist reading of Elio Vittorini's Uomini e no, 1945 (trans. as Men and Not Men, 1985) with a special focus on Vittorini's "dogged" humanism based on the idea theat "the victim is always more...
This is an essay I wrote in 2006 for a volume that, unfortunately, never materialised. It engages the return of "the question of the animal" and the early development of "animal studies" and critiques it through a "posthumanist reading" of a literary text, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I believe the argument is still sound and...
This contribution distinguishes between different varieties of posthumanism. It promotes a ‘critical posthumanism’ which engages with an emerging new world picture at the level of ethics, ecology, politics, technology and epistemology. On this basis, it explores the question of a posthumanist and postanthropocentric education both from a philosophi...
This article explores the relationship between critical distance and the idea of proximity. In times that are often described as ‘global’, ‘24/7’, ‘connected’, ‘networked’ and ‘immersive’, distance seems ever reduced and proximity omnipresent. The contemporary impression of ubiquitous proximity might constitute a threat to the survival of critical...
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman is the first work of its kind to gather diverse critical treatments of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume. Fifteen scholars from six different countries address the historical and aesthetic dimensions of posthuman figures alongside posthumanism as a new paradigm in the...
This essay explores the connection between early and late modernity, and thus between proto- and posthumanism, through Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that a rereading of the play and Derrida’s interpretation of it in Specters of Marx are helpful for addressing some of the pressing concerns raised by the current ‘spectre’ of the posthuman. In this...
The article takes its cue from Olivier Rey's recent book Une question de taille (a question of size) and develops the idea of humanity ‘losing its measure, or scale’ in the context of contemporary ecological catastrophe. It seems true that the current level of global threats, from climate change to asteroids, has produced a culture of ambient ‘spec...
Some may be surprised to see a chapter on Derrida in a Handbook on Posthumanism in Film and Television. There are two reasons for this. One lies in the fact that Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) is not usually related to posthumanism, even though he has certainly influenced a number of writers who do own up to that label, most notably Cary Wolfe (2010),...
Posthumanismus hat sich als neues Theorie-Paradigma etabliert. Wie alle gesellschaftlichen Diskurse, ist auch dieser eine Summe aus Machtkämpfen, Subjektpositionen, Identitäten und deshalb voller Konflikte. In diesem Diskurs, der vor allem zeitgenössische und somit technokulturelle Motive beinhaltet, aber natürlich auch eine lange Vorgeschichte hat...
Unpublished essay revised and updated (October 2015).
The article discusses the notion of the ‘post-literary’ and ‘countertextuality’ by reconnecting them to previous theoretical contexts that have dealt with the question of ‘text’ and ‘textuality’. The word ‘countertextuality’ evokes the rise and fall of poststructuralism and deconstruction within the globalised, Anglo-American-dominated humanities....
Keynote given at the Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman conference (Geneva, June 2015)
Unpublished keynote address at the 'Oh-Man, Oh-Machine - The Politics and Aesthetics of Posthumanism' conference in Tel Aviv (15-20 May 2014)
Some may be surprised to see a chapter on Derrida in a Handbook on Posthumanism in Film and Television. There are two reasons for this. One lies in the fact that Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) is not usually related to posthumanism, even though he has certainly influenced a number of writers who do own up to that label, most notably Cary Wolfe (2010),...
The full paper is available here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13825577.2014.916999#abstract
Zusammenfassung
Dieser Beitrag besteht auf einer Unterscheidung zwischen verschiedenen Posthumanismen und vertritt selbst eine ,,kritische“ Variante, die sich ethisch-ökologisch, politisch-technologisch und epistemologisch-kognitiv mit einem neuen postanthropozentrischen
Weltbild auseinandersetzt. Ausgehend von dieser Prämisse stellt sich die Frage...
Von Beginn an steht die Frage nach Identität und insbesondere nach der Identität des Menschen im Mittelpunkt Hamlets. Das Stück trägt alle Merkmale einer Schauergeschichte: ein gothic Setting, ein unheimliches Gespenst, ein furchtbares Geheimnis, Mord und Selbstmord, (politische) Intrigen, tragische Verwechslungen, ein von Selbstzweifeln gequälter...
The higher-ed business is in for a lot of pain as a new era of creative destruction produces a merciless shakeout of those institutions that adapt and prosper from those that stall and die. Meanwhile, students themselves are in for a golden age, characterized by near-universal access to the highest quality teaching and scholarship at minimal cost....
In the following essay I would like to go back and reconnect a few things that may have become disjointed in sketches of posthumanist theory. In particular, the points to revisit are: the poststructuralist critique of the subject, the postmodernist approach to autobiography and the notion of the posthuman itself. I will briefly return to the work o...
Historically speaking, there is uncertainty if and when posthumanism started or when we became posthuman.1 Conceptually, however, it is quite inevitable that with the ‘invention of the human’ the posthuman as one of his or her ‘others’ also becomes thinkable, representable, possible, necessary etc. As soon as some form of humanitas begins to charac...
Edward Pechter’s What Was Shakespeare (1995) set out to evaluate Shakespeare Studies after the so-called ‘Theory Wars’ and concluded that, at the turn of the millennium at least, there was no ‘end of Shakespeare Studies as We Know It’ in sight, rather a ‘transformation’ (Pechter, 1995, p. 14). This transformation — the result of ideological battles...
What are the affinities between two works with seemingly related titles, Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities [1930–42]) and Giorgio Agamben’s L’Uomo senza contenuto (The Man without Content [1999])? What might be their contribution to that rethinking of humanism which posthumanism warrants? And what might be made o...
This is no longer the earth on which man lives. Heidegger 1993: 106. There is no doubt that Jorge Luis Borges is a major literary precursor of contemporary interactive and multimedia works. It is almost commonplace to see tales such as ‘Funes el memorioso’ [Funes the Memorious], ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ [The Library of Babel], or ‘El jardín de send...
Encountering Derrida explores the points of engagement between Jacques Derrida and a host of other European thinkers, past and present, in order to counter recent claims that the era of deconstruction is finally drawing to a close. The book rereads Derrida in order to renew deconstruction's various conceptions of language, poetry, philosophy, insti...
This essay tests the hypothesis that "posthumanism" today constitutes the most radical questioning of the "subject." It does so by putting posthumanist theories and concepts by proponents like Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, N. Katherine Hayles and others to the test in a juxtaposing reading of The Matrix. The essay argues that cultural criticism t...
As part of the ongoing struggle with the peculiar logic of the 'post-' this essay aims to defend Lyotard's philosophical and aesthetic notion of the postmodern against mainly sociological understandings of postmodernism and late or postmodernity. It argues that a psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading of major forms of contemporary cultural repr...
Projects
Projects (3)
Environmental criticism and posthumanism share an interest in nonhuman agency and nonhuman forms and practices of inscription. Ecography refers to analyses of how literature deals with nonhuman writing, both in terms of formal innovation and conceptualisation.
Some parts of this monograph project already published are:
- “Perdre la mesure… Or, The Ecologics of Extinction”, CounterText 2.1 (2016).
- “Posthumanist Literature?”, Keynote (Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman, University of Geneva, June 2015).
- “‘Nicht dass ich fürchtete, ein Tier zu werden…’; Ökographie in Marlen Haushofers Die Wand”, Figurationen 15.1 (2014): 41-55.
Pre-publication versions of these texts are available on my home page:
http://stefanherbrechter.com/?page_id=618
Posthumanism is one of the most powerful paradigms of our time. There is a lot more to it than the ideas with which it is most often associated, which typically turn on how human bodies, minds and existence might be enhanced — or exceeded — by technology. The Critical Posthumanism website provides a space reflecting posthumanism’s deep heritage, as well as its rich, varied and contested contexts in culture and thought. Go to the Genealogy on the project website (criticalposthumanism.net), a multi-authored, growing online initiative that maps this quickly evolving field and responds to its expanding range of themes, outlooks and approaches.
