Abstract
This essay asks what kind of trope or rhetorical operation is activated by the call of the ‘post-human’? What modes of inscription does the term deploy? I argue that the ‘post-ing’ of the human proceeds by refiguring of the ‘human’ as telephone or screen, as a surface that registers the action or presencing of the inhuman via an overwhelming apostrophe or prosopopeia. Allied to this call is a refiguring of the ‘post-humanities’ as an inquiry into how the modeling of non-human entities inflects the constitution of a common world, leading us to embark on a quest for less lethal or more friendly modes of inscription or writing. The philosophical movement known as ‘speculative metaphysics’ provides a rubric for this quest and so for a speculative literary history that would refigure our contacts with the textual traces named ‘past’ as a contact zone with alternate ways of being.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For an attempt to do this in Renaissance studies, see Yates (2004, 2006).
The text of Gerard's memoir exists now in one manuscript at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. For the purposes of this short and impressionistic essay I have chosen to use the translation by Philip Caraman (1952) as Gerard's manuscript is not readily available to readers.
References
Agamben, G . 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G . 2004. The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Benjamin, W . 1968. The Task of the Translator. In Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Brasier, R . 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clark, A . 2004. Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Man, P . 1984. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press.
De Man, P . 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J . 1974. Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Doyle, R . 2003. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Gerard, J . 1952. The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. P. Caraman. New York: Pellegrini & Cudhay.
Haraway, D . 2001. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, D . 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Harman, G . 2002. Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago, IL: Open Court Press.
Harman, G . 2005. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago, IL: Open Court Press.
Hayles, N.K . 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N.K . 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Heidegger, M . 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Latour, B . 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B . 1996. Aramis: Or the Love of Technology, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B . 2004. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Meillasoux, Q . 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. R. Brassier. London: Continuum.
Ronell, A . 1989. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Roosth, S . 2009. Screaming Yeast: Sonocytology, Cytoplasmic Milieus, and Cellular Subjectivities. Critical Inquiry 35: 332–350.
Shakespeare, W . 2003. Much Ado about Nothing, ed. F.H. Mares. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Serres, M . 1982. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, trans. J. Harari and D.F. Bell. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Serres, M . 1995. Genesis, trans. G. James and J. Nielson. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Stengers, I . 1997. Power and Invention: Situating Science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Thompson, C . 2007. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Wolfe, C . 2009. Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities. PMLA 124 (2): 564–575.
Wolfe, C . 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Yates, J . 2004. Counting Sheep; Or, Dolly Does Utopia (Again). Rhizomes 8, http://rhizomes.net/issue8/yates2.htm.
Yates, J . 2006. Accidental Shakespeare. Shakespeare Studies 34: 90–122.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Richard Burt with whom the idea for this essay was hatched and honed as part of our ongoing conversation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yates, J. It's (for) you; or, the tele-t/r/opical post-human. Postmedieval 1, 223–234 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.20
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.20