This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a wider range of analytical material than has usually been the case in classic works in the philosophy (...) of history. I will critically reflect upon history’s anthropocentric biases, highlighting the need to develop an alternative to history. My thinking is aligned, on the one hand, with notions of the agency of images that have emerged from art criticism and visual culture studies, and, on the other hand, with the idea of theriomorphism, which I explore in terms of new animism, new totemism and philosophical ethology. In my analysis of works by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, I argue that a future-oriented redefinition of the human should transcend the limited categories that have emerged within the framework of history understood as a Eurocentric approach to the past rooted in Greco-Judaic-Christian tradition. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on recent artworks by South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. I read these for the ways in which the discourse of species works within and against the humanist sacrificial economy of the subject that Jacques Derrida calls “carno-phallogocentric”. Drawing on Derrida's “metonymy of ‘eating well,'” Achille Mbembe's analysis of colonial violence, and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, I argue that these works inscribe and disturb a speciesist, sexual, and racial politics of animalization, and do (...) so by figuring a transgressive animality that stalks the “origins” of “the human” and troubles its carnivorous and colonial relations of “eating the other.” The works render ambiguous the humanist border that separates “man” from what he calls “the animal” and thicken the singular division between edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative eating. I suggest that this figures what Haraway might call an “eccentric subject”, one that not only holds open the possibility of a nonanthropocentrism but, as Haraway would say, “nourishes indigestion” at the heart of “carno-phallogocentric” power. But this is risky practice, as a recent controversy about reading Mntambo's work shows. (shrink)

Contemporary artworks are primary sources for a better understanding of the most important issues in our current reality. The complexities of cultural interactions are often thematized in pieces of art using the artistic means of code-switching, and where the investigation of these questions is pursued in and with regards to the issues of the broader context, including the built and the urban setting. In this paper I examine some aspects of these questions, with the help of some inspiring examples, through (...) artworks by creators coming from five different parts of the world: hence in the works by Manit Sriwanichpoom, Nandipha Mntambo, Michael Rakowitz, Yinka Shonibare, and Marja Helander. In this way I aim to emphasize the global relevance of these issues, as well as what we can thus learn from and about our own origins, current standpoints, and further possibilities. (shrink)

Posthumanism has come to synthesize philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the pressures of technology, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice. Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping (...) of this intellectual and aesthetic shift in a global context. It extends across a broad range of fields such as art theory, media studies, continental philosophy, natural science, literary studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, social and political theory, and animal studies. The reader features a diverse sampling of major thinkers including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Marder, Karen Barad, Alexander Weheliye, Jay Prosser, Anna Tsing, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, acclaimed artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, Doo-sung Yoo, and Gavin Steingo. Their provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises. An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures. (shrink)