Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism

Beyond Human investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions "the human" in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or "animals that think" has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals. It is the direction and consequences of this transition that is the central concern of Beyond Human.

Table of Contents:
List of figures \ Contributors \ Preface Sean Cubitt \ Acknowledgements \ Introduction Steven Shakespeare, Claire Molloy and Charlie Blake \ Part I: Animality: Boundaries and Definitions \ 1. Incidents in the Animal Revolution Ron Broglio \ 2.Being a Known Animal Claire Molloy \ 3. Beyond the Pain Principle Giovanni Aloi \ Part II: Representing Animality \ 4. What We Can Do: Art Methodologies and Parities in Meeting Bryndis Snæbjornsdóttir and Mark Wilson \ 5. Horse-Crazy Girls: Alternative Embodiments and Socialities Natalie Corinne Hansen \ 6. Writing Relations: the Lobster, the Orchid, the Primrose, You, Me, Chaos and Literature Lucile Desblache \ Part III: Thinking Beyond the Divide \ 7. Affective Animal: Bataille, Lascaux and the Mediatization of the Sacred Felicity Colman \ 8. Levinas, Bataille and the Theology of Animal Life Donald L. Turner \ 9. Degrees of 'Freedom': Humans as Primates in Dialogue with Hans urs von Balthasar Celia Deane-Drummond \ Part IV: Animal- Human- Machine- God \ 10. Inhuman Geometries: Aurochs and Angels and The Refuge of Art Charlie Blake \ 11. Articulating the Inhuman: God, Animal, Machine Steven Shakespeare \ 12. Transforming the Human Body Gareth Jones and Maja Whitaker \ Index

About the Author :
Claire Molloy is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics, History, Media & Communication at Liverpool Hope University, UK and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She has published on anthropomorphism, representations of animals in videogames and literature and dangerous dogs, media and risk. She is the author of Memento (EUP 2010) and Popular Media and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor of American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Steven Shakespeare is Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His publications include The Inclusive God (co authored with Hugh Rayment-Pickard, SCM, 2006), Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (SPCK, 2007) and Derrida and Theology (T and T Clark, 2009).

Review :
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. 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.