Once an insurgent discourse, posthumanism has emerged as one of the central theoretical frameworks in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Whereas earlier humanisms, and even antihumanisms, stopped their speculations at the limits of human perception and culture, posthumanism has deconstructed the line between the human and the nonhuman, thereby producing an agential understanding of nonhuman entities such as animals, plants, weather systems, and various nonhuman forms of materiality. Yet, powerful as these posthumanisms remain, they also threaten to take the focus off the human precisely at a moment when humans around the globe are most threatened by developments of “too late capitalism” (Anna Kornbluh) such as climate change, emergent pandemics, and ever-increasing wealth inequality. Indeed, one less charitable reading of posthumanism would see it as an escapist fantasy from human responsibility for the climate crisis. Of course, posthumanists would retort that only by moving beyond the exceptionalist notions of “the human” responsible for having caused this crisis can we adequately address it. Taking this debate as its starting point, this panel asks: do we still need the posthuman?

The panel’s opening paper, Christopher Breu’s “The Human to Posthuman Pipeline (and vice versa),” examines the role of infrastructure in mediating the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Typically linked to the violently extractivist oil economy and the forms of ecological and neocolonial violence associated with it, the pipeline, Breu stresses, can carry other meanings and entities as well, like life-sustaining water. Drawing on posthumanist and ecoMarxist arguments—as well as Marxist and humanist critiques of the same—Breu considers the pipeline not only as a metaphor for the theoretical transactions between humanism and posthumanism, but also as a material feature of infrastructure, one that can contribute to a sustainable and flourishing relationship between the human and the nonhuman.

The panel’s second paper, Jennifer Fleissner’s “The Human as the Weird,” examines how contemporary fiction addresses the question of what we (believe we) need the posthuman to talk about. Whereas ecocritical novels like Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Joy Williams’s Harrow conceive of flawed humans as needing (or lacking) salvation from a purer, nonhuman form of being, Fleissner extends Kate Marshall’s work on “the weird” as a sign of nonhuman presence infiltrating realist form to suggest that genre hybridity has always functioned in realist fiction to indicate a concomitant weirdness of the human itself. Revelations of the weird in contemporary fiction thus speak less to the exceeding of the human, Fleissner argues, than to aberrance as the supreme attribute of the totality itself, one we humans are occasionally led to recognize we share.

The panel’s third paper, Russell Sbriglia’s “Object-Disoriented Deontology: Toward an Ethics of Inhumanism,” interrogates posthumanism’s critique of the “human subject.” Building on recent work in Lacanian theory, Sbriglia contends that, psychoanalytically considered, the very notion of a “human subject” is a misnomer insofar as “subject” names the emergence of an alien, inhuman agency/object located at the core of the human being that renders “human being” as such disoriented—disoriented by what Lacan dubbed the “object-cause of desire” or “objet petit a,” the sublime object responsible for “subjectivizing” the human being in the first place. Against the asubjective ethics of posthumanism, Sbriglia, drawing on literary examples from Sophocles’s Antigone to Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” to Morrison’s Beloved, champions a radically subjective, deontological ethics of inhumanism grounded in the subject’s accession to the Lacanian “passage à l’acte.”

Rounding out the panel is Zahi Zalloua’s paper “A Posthuman Fanon?” As is well known, Fanon claims on the first page of Black Skin, White Masks that his book aims at a “New Humanism.” Yet, as Zalloua underscores, on the book’s very next page Fanon stresses that the Black subject is not a human being, that the racialized subject of modernity is relegated to a “zone of nonbeing.” Thus, what Fanon dubs “New Humanism” necessitates a radical questioning of the category of the human itself. Reckoning with the racial matrix of the human, this New Humanism breaks with a humanist tradition that makes the racialized other constitutive of its definition of the (white) human. As Zalloua concludes, Fanon’s critical undoing of the antagonism between the human and almost human (or inhuman) makes him a posthumanist thinker.

The above panelists represent a diverse range of voices, especially with respect to racial, gender, and ethnic difference. All four have agreed to adhere to a strict, 12-14-minute time limit for their respective talks. Allowing an extra 3-4 minutes for panelist introductions, this will leave 16-20 minutes for Q&A.