Journal of Cultural Economy

ISSN: 1753-0350 (Print) 1753-0369 (Online) Journal homepage: [Link]/journals/rjce20

On posthuman subjectivity

Annette-Carina van der Zaag

To cite this article: Annette-Carina van der Zaag (2016) On posthuman subjectivity, Journal of
Cultural Economy, 9:3, 330-336, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2015.1040436
To link to this article: [Link]

Published online: 16 Jul 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 13008

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

[Link]
JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY, 2016
VOL. 9, NO. 3, 330–336

REVIEW ESSAY

On posthuman subjectivity

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge, 180 pp., 2013, £50.00 (hardback),
ISBN 978-0-7456-4157-7, £14.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7456-4158-8, £9.99 (e-book),
ISBN 978-0-7456-6996-0

The posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the
process of becoming. (p. 12)

The Posthuman is situated at a pertinent analytical juncture in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
namely between Science and Technology Studies (hereafter STS) and neo-communist theory – an
analytical juncture where science and technology, subjectivities and advanced capitalism never
quite meet. The continuing rise of STS, a rise in which Bruno Latour’s work remains leading (see
for instance Latour 1993, 2004) is marked by a theoretical and empirical enthusiasm for human/non-
human relationality. However, in this enthusiasm, the question of how power invests subject for-
mations has almost entirely disappeared. On the other side of the juncture, political analyses of
capitalism and its biopolitical investments have neglected the force of technology and science in
favour of an emphasis on subjectivities. Here I am specifically thinking of the influential work of
Hardt and Negri (2000). In The Posthuman, Braidotti speaks across this juncture, by making explicit
the intimate relations between scientific and technological production, advanced capitalism and
human/nonhuman hybridity.
Braidotti investigates this posthuman condition by embedding herself in contemporary material-
ist feminist theory, although not seamlessly. STS’s neglect of subjectivity is symptomatic of its larger
neglect of processes of power constitutive of who gets to count as human (in terms of processes of
power pertaining to race and sex) in human/nonhuman relations. This critique has been taken up by
feminist critics such as Donna Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007). Braidotti’s The Posthuman,
at least to some extent, can be read as embedded within this critique. However, Braidotti pushes this
critique further by explicitly calling for a ‘return’ to the subject in current posthuman landscapes. In
this sense, Braidotti’s focus on the posthuman subject and her engagement with advanced capitalism
is very much in line with Elizabeth Povinelli’s concern with social projects (2011). With Povinelli, she
engages advanced capitalism while holding on to a materialist engagement with biopower, as well as
the necropolitical investment in practices of dying.
This is The Posthuman’s most significant contribution; it sets out a genealogy of the posthuman
moment we find ourselves in, while it (re)introduces the question of the subject in contemporary
materialism. A hazardous venture perhaps, but pertinent to the ethics and politics of speaking to
power in our posthuman time.

Posthumanism not anti-humanism

Braidotti locates the current posthuman moment in a larger genealogy of anti-humanism, as a cri-
tique against the Humanist dialectic of self and other. In the binary logic of universal Humanism,
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 331

subjectivity is understood as universal consciousness, rationality and ethicality, always in conjunc-

tion with the other as the negative counterpart of the Humanist subject – ‘[t]hese are the sexualized,
racialized, and naturalised others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable
bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others’ (p. 15). Speaking
with anti-humanist poststructuralist allies such as Foucault, Derrida and Irigaray, Braidotti pays
heed to her anti-humanist heritage, while extending her scholarly aim and praxis beyond the
anti-humanist moment. She writes:
Anti-humanism consists in de-linking the human agent from this universalistic posture, calling him to task, so
to speak, on the concrete actions he is enacting. Different and sharper power relations emerge, once this for-
merly dominant subject is freed from his delusions of grandeur and is no longer allegedly in charge of historical
progress. (p. 23)

Braidotti does not disagree with this anti-humanist agenda, quite the contrary, but argues that a
Humanistic residue remains at the core of anti-humanist thought. This Humanistic residue comes
to the fore most clearly in the anti-humanist ideals of freedom and its stance on progressive politics.
Specifically, Humanism has advocated for solidarity, social justice, principles of equality, secularism
and respect for science and culture, and it has argued against the authority of religious texts and
dogma (p. 29). These principles are clearly present in anti-humanist scholarly work. Braidotti argues
that this Humanistic residue is not problematic in itself, rather it raises the necessity of being able to
include Humanist goods such as freedom and emancipation in a critical analysis without falling back
onto the Human as a generalised standard and the violent exclusions this standard entails. What we
need, Braidotti argues, is ‘a move beyond these lethal binaries’ (p. 37).
Critical posthumanism marks an end to the humanism/anti-humanism stalemate and looks at
affirmative alternatives instead. To this end, Braidotti borrows from feminist theory, postcolonial
and race theory, ecology and environmentalism, STS and of course the work of Deleuze and Guattari
to construct a complex and deeply relational worldview, in which these strands of thought connect.
Within this worldview the posthuman subject emerges as multiple and inherently differentiated.
This contribution is significant, as it foregrounds the critical insights of ‘the cultural turn’ where
they are often neglected in contemporary materialist work.
Paying explicit heed to anti-humanism not only situates the current posthuman moment, and
indeed Braidotti’s own posthuman intervention, in a larger genealogy of thought, it reminds us of
the importance of standing with fellow sexualised, racialised and naturalised others as we speak
to power through the technologies of our time. I read Braidotti’s anti-humanist focus as an ampli-
fication of theory and a practice of resistance pertinent to the current academic landscape. In her
own words:
a serious concern for the subject allows us to take into account the elements of creativity and imagination,
desire, hopes and aspirations (…) without which we simply cannot make sense of contemporary global culture
and its posthuman overtones. We need a vision of the subject that is ‘worthy of the present’. (p. 52)

Postanthropocentric posthumanism
As a brand of vital materialism, posthuman theory contests the arrogance of anthropocentrism and the ‘excep-
tionalism’ of the Human as a transcendental category. It strikes instead an alliance with the productive and
immanent force of zoe, or life in its nonhuman aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding
of what it means to think at all, let alone think critically. (p. 66)

The core intervention Braidotti makes in The Posthuman is her analytical separation between
posthumanism and postanthropocentrism. Postanthropocentrism, for Braidotti, is both a field of
oppressive power relations at stake in advanced capitalism and the site of resistance articulated by
social and cultural critique. In line with Hardt and Negri (2000), capitalism has thoroughly invested
life through biopolitical machines of power. Braidotti expands this analysis by arguing that the effects
of this investment are postanthropocentric – the investment in life blurs the boundaries between
332 ANNETTE-CARINA VAN DER ZAAG

human and nonhuman. Subjectivities are important, yes, but a neglect of the way in which human
and nonhuman link and are dislodged misses one of the core mechanisms through which advanced
capitalism functions and the possible forms resistance can take.
Braidotti argues that advanced capitalism blurs the boundaries between human, other species, and
earth in an all-consuming commodification of life. ‘The global economy is post-anthropocentric in
that it ultimately unifies all species under the imperative of the market and its excesses threaten the
sustainability of our planet as a whole’ (p. 63). With regard to the global economy of advanced capit-
alism she is most concerned with its bio-genetic structure. This structure includes, for instance, the
Human Genome Project, stem cell research and bio-technological interventions into animals, seeds,
plants and cells. Through scientific and economic control, advanced capitalism both invests and
profits from these industries, thereby commodifying life itself. ‘This context produces a paradoxical
and rather opportunistic form of post-anthropocentrism on the part of market forces which happily
trade on life itself’ (p. 59).
The global economy is postanthropocentric because it blurs, if not erases, the boundaries between
human, seeds, plants, bacteria, the planet in its strive to profit. It is within a shared vulnerability – ‘[a]
negative sort of cosmopolitan interconnection’ (p. 63) –that these boundaries blur and evaporate.
However, it is exactly this notion of postanthropocentric relationality through shared vulnerability
that Braidotti wants to move away from.
Braidotti argues that the vulnerability that binds human, species and earth together, might very
well be postanthropocentric and the ties that bind us indeed breach the firm boundaries between
human, animal and earth, but they are not necessarily posthuman. This is because the oppressive
power of the Human of universal Humanism is still at stake in the Anthropos of advanced capital-
ism’s postanthropocentrism. Moreover, the resistance to these postanthropocentric effects in terms
of our shared vulnerability fails to speak effectively to the mechanisms of power at stake. Specifically,
the environmentalist and ecologist, feminist and animal rights activist forms of resistances that Brai-
dotti critiques engage our shared vulnerability by anthropomorphising the animal and the earth and
thereby re-introducing the Human through the back door.
Braidotti’s main intervention throughout the book is a call for postanthropocentric posthuman-
ism, as a deconstructive political move that is situated within the hybridisation of capitalist postan-
thropocentricism, but steers clear from re-introducing Human(istic) hierarchisation. This call for
resistance comes to the fore most clearly in her reading of the relations between the human and
machine, or specifically, the posthuman as becoming-machine. Braidotti argues for an ethics of
transformations (p. 90) that marks neither a nostalgic attachment to flesh nor a utopic investment
in technological advance. Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti argues for a vitalist
notion of the postanthropocentric posthuman subject, as a ‘body without organs’, a becoming-
machine. This project is invested in tracing the very structure of our bodies as natural–cultural enti-
ties, while also foregrounding the political dimension of recomposing this body in resistance to the
violent opportunism of advanced capitalism:
The ‘becoming-machine’ understood in this specific sense indicates and actualizes the relational powers of a
subject that is no longer cast in a dualist frame, but bears a privileged bond with multiple others and merges
with one’s technologically mediated planetary environment. (p. 92)

In a move that reminds me of Donna Haraway’s (1991) Cyborg Manifesto, postanthropocentric

hybridization composes a field of oppressive power relations invested by the capitalist commodifica-
tion of life. It is, however, also the site of resistance. Moving away from Haraway’s manifesto into
more contemporary materialism, Braidotti’s postanthropocentric posthumanism is a vitalist move,
which turns to and turns on the politics of life itself. Life in this regard, is a self-organising autop-
oietic force, a process, inter-active and open-ended: zoe (p. 60).
Within this political ontology, the subject once again comes to the fore. This notion of a postan-
thropocentric posthuman subject radically displaces the understanding of difference on a Humanis-
tic self-other dialectic. If the boundaries between animal, environment and technology are inherently
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 333

unstable, if boundaries are permeable and we leak out of our skin, the ‘self’ becomes integrally non-
unitary, relational and complex – a relationality that is affirmative, not based on shared vulnerability.
Postanthropocentric posthumanism actualises a community not through a negative bond of vulner-
ability, but rather builds a community of species and other entities together through ‘the compassio-
nate acknowledgement of their interdependence’ (p. 101).
The posthuman subject is located within its environment in deep relationality to its fellow nonhu-
man species and entities. This relationality is exactly where the transformative potential of the post-
human subject lies. Within this ontological relationality, the notion of a subject (albeit posthuman) is
still important – an enthusiastic analysis of human/nonhuman relationality and complexity is not
enough. This is because Braidotti’s ontological venture aims to make a political and ethical interven-
tion into the current posthuman landscape (including scholarly work).
Although Braidotti is clearly embedded within the materialist turn in contemporary feminism,
that embedding is not seamless. Within contemporary feminist materialism and its focus on scien-
tific production and nonhuman actors, subjects have a very subdued role to play – problematically
so. For instance, there is a clear political drive in the work of Karen Barad (2011), but this politics
lingers on the level of abstraction, as the (post)human subject is there, but always in the shadow of its
nonhuman intra-active company. In critical contrast, Braidotti’s anti-humanist heritage illuminates
the subject and inspires a drive towards collectivity.
We need some subject position to be able to stand (with naturalised others, seeds, cells and plants)
and speak to power. The struggle for a subject position is not easily given up for those of us who
never made it into full Humanity. I read Braidotti’s focus on the posthuman subject as an effort
to resituate our standpoints to fit our current posthuman theoretical practices. ‘One needs at least
some subject position: this need not be either unitary or exclusively anthropocentric, but it must
be the site for political and ethical accountability, for collective imaginaries and shared aspirations’
(p. 102).

The inhuman inside the posthuman

the biopolitical management of the living is not only transversal across species and zoe-driven, but also inher-
ently linked to death. This is the death-bound or necro-political face of post-anthropocentism and the core of its
inhuman(e) character. (p. 118)

Inherent in Braidotti’s venture to rethink subjectivity within the posthuman landscape is an effort to
engage processes of dehumanisation – the inhuman(e) effects of practices of power. Her basic insight
is that the biopolitical management of life not only triggers generative forces, but also engenders
deaths and extinctions. Thinking with Achilles Mbembe, she argues that advanced capitalism is
not only invested in the government of life but is deeply invested in practices of dying. The necro-
politics of advanced capitalism stretches across postanthropocentrically, while being deeply invested
in very (in)human(e) practices of dying.
In line with Elizabeth Povinelli’s work, Braidotti engages necropolitical processes of power that
exceed states of war. As Mbembe sets out the biopolitical as the investment of power into life against
the necropolitical as the investment of power into death, Braidotti’s work opens out into the relations
between biopolitics and necropolitics at a specific moment and time, not their distinction. Such an
analytic relationality is especially important in light of, for instance, the massive roll out of human
clinical trials by big pharmaceutical companies in developing countries. The subjects enrolled in
these trials often are vulnerable populations, socio-economically and physically due to a lack of
access to basic health care. ‘Big Pharma’ benefits from these bodies as they are not ‘drug saturated’
to the same extent as bodies in the Western world. These bodies are beneficial testing sites as they
minimise the chance of drug on drug interaction with the pharmaceutical on trial and thereby show
more clearly the effect of the drug tested. Big Pharma’s active and profitable engagement with the
socio-economic and physical vulnerability of bodies blurs the boundaries between necro and biopo-
litics. Drawing on Braidotti’s expansion of necropolitics into biopolitical terrains, I wonder: to what
334 ANNETTE-CARINA VAN DER ZAAG

extent is Big Pharma engaged in the necropolitical management of dying under the guise of devel-
oping life enhancing and saving medicine?
For Braidotti, her posthuman focus on life/zoe dissolves a clear-cut separation between life and
death. Specifically, her focus on zoe – within a philosophical framework of neo-Spinozist monism
and radical immanence – brings her to an affirmative theory of death. The power of Braidotti’s the-
ory is that it stretches beyond a narcissistic investment in life, a life that would not go on without me
being there. As life/zoe is an immanent force that encompasses but exceeds the individual, so is
death. ‘Just as the life in me is not mine or even individual in the narrow, appropriative sense
espoused by liberal individualism, so the death in me is not mine, except in a very circumscribed
sense of the term’ (p. 135).
In a postanthropocentric sense, in a deeply relational sense, our death is impersonal. Death is not
a finite limit, but a porous threshold (p. 131). For Braidotti, death is the inhuman inside all of us, and
a fear of death is an all too human quality that binds us. Specifically, she argues that at the level of
consciousness, death is that which we fear most, is already behind us.
Death is the event that has already taken place at the level of consciousness. As an individual occurrence it will
come in the form of the physical extinction of the body, but as event, in the sense of the awareness of finitude, of
the interrupted flow of my being-there, death has already taken place. (p. 133)

We carry death inside us as a conscious retrospection. Braidotti continues into a contemplation on

an affirmative theory of death which is worth quoting in full:
what we fear the most, our being dead, the source of anguish, terror and fear, does not lie ahead but is already
behind us; it has been. The death that pertains to a past that is forever present is not individual but impersonal;
it is the precondition of our existence, of the future. This proximity to death is a close and intimate friendship
that calls for endurance, in the double sense of temporal duration or continuity and spatial suffering or sustain-
ability. Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a
transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house on the crack, so to speak. We live to recover from the
shocking awareness that this game is over even before it started. The proximity to death suspends life, not into
transcendence, but rather into the radical immanence of ‘just a life’, here and now, for as long as we can and as
much as we can take. (p. 132)

Braidotti provides a beautiful contemplation on death, living with and in death. The inhuman inside
the human forms the foundation of a very relational ethics, which collects not only humans, but also
other species, plants, seeds and the earth that we live with, through, and in. Life encompasses me, and
any human, but not at its centre. This non-anthropocentric, non-narcissistic, non-individualistic
conception of life is a pertinent ethical move towards ‘an ethics that respects vulnerability while
actively constructing social horizons of hope’ (p. 122). However, this contemplation on death and
ethics provokes questions on the politics of death and dying.
To a large extent, Braidotti’s work on necropolitics can be read as in line with Elizabeth Povinelli’s
Economies of Abandonment (2011). However, Braidotti’s vitalist theory of death departs from Povi-
nelli by emphasising the sublime over concrete and ordinary deaths and modes of suffering. Braidot-
ti’s argument has significant force on a philosophical level – death at the level of consciousness.
However, an ethics based on a death that has already occurred on the level of consciousness raises
questions pertaining to the politics of those deaths yet to come, and those deaths that could be pre-
vented – not merely on the level of consciousness.
For instance, in the context of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, anti-retroviral drugs (drugs to treat
HIV) have engendered a decoupling of HIV and death. By keeping the virus in check, people living
with HIV who are on anti-retroviral treatment do not have to die of AIDS. However, access to anti-
retroviral drugs is not distributed equally across the globe and thereby across the epidemic. Many
people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa will die of AIDS due to a lack of access to anti-retro-
viral treatment. Their death is not a death that has already happened, but a death that could have
been prevented were geo-political lines of power and their material effects (access to drugs and treat-
ment) distributed differently. Braidotti foregrounds the subject, the posthuman subject, precisely
 JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 335

because she is aware of how postanthropocentric bio/necropolitics is played out on, in and through
our bodies. She explicitly foregrounds the danger of neglecting questions of oppression and domina-
tion in favour of posthuman theorising: ‘We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than
others’ (p. 15). This is exactly why she calls for a ‘return’ of the subject. However, her affirmative
theory of death as a response to contemporary necropolitics leaves me to wonder how we can
account for those whose lives fail to matter?

The posthumanities
The epistemic and ethical walk hand in hand into the complicated landscapes of the third millennium. We need
conceptual creativity and intellectual courage to rise to the occasion, as there is no going back. (p. 177)

The postanthropocentrism of our time, both in our posthuman academic practice as well as the
problems we face cannot but have a profound impact on the Humanities. It is undeniable that
the Humanities (and the arts and social sciences for that matter) are under attack, due to a lack
of funding based on their perceived irrelevance to the world at present. Instead of a nostalgic look-
ing back at the Humanities aimed at the analysis of subjectivities discrete from nonhuman entities
and forces, Braidotti proposes a step forward, a transformation of the Humanities towards a more
relational way of doing scholarly work and a more relational way of institutionalising these
practices.
For Braidotti postanthropocentric posthumanism is a deeply transdisciplinary practice, provoked
by the radical immanence, deep relationality, of the worlds we live in. Postanthropocentric posthu-
man scholarship engenders a transdisciplinary cluster of philosophy, history, cultural studies, science
and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth sciences, bio-
genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, legal theory, primatology, animal rights
and science fiction (p. 57).
Braidotti proposes a way to do scholarly work that is focused on cartographic accuracy, transdis-
ciplinarity, creative figuration, non-linearity, imagination and de-familiarisation (p. 163). In this she
sides with the work produced by scholars within the materialist turn and science and technology
studies. She emphasises the importance to move towards transdisciplinarity within a diverse univer-
sity (multi-versity) that reflects our worlds and societies. I read Braidotti’s ‘return’ of the subject not
as only a theoretical, analytical move, but as a call for building collectives while critical academia is
under attack. I agree with Braidotti – this collectivity begins with the human, our subject positions,
and locations from which we speak, act, and listen. Neglecting the question of the subject and
neglecting to claim ground for our scholarship transdisciplinarily in favour of politically neutral ana-
lyses of human/nonhuman relations is an abstraction of power none of us can afford in the current
climate.
The future is nothing more or less than inter-generational solidarity, responsibility for posterity, but it is also
our shared dream, or a consensual hallucination (p. 185).

References
BARAD, K.(2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke
University Press, Durham and London.
BARAD, K. (2011) ‘Nature’s queer performativity’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2,
pp. 121–158.
HARAWAY, D. J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, London.
HARAWAY, D. J. (1997) Modest_witness@Second_Millennium.Female©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Techno
Science. Routledge, New York and London.
HARDT, M. & NEGRI, A. (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
LATOUR, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York,
London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo and Singapore.
336 ANNETTE-CARINA VAN DER ZAAG

LATOUR, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA and London.
MBEMBE, A. (2003) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 11–40.
POVINELLI, E. A. (2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Duke University
Press, Durham and London.

Annette-Carina van der Zaag

Goldsmiths College, London, UK
[Link]@[Link]
© 2015 Annette-Carina van der Zaag
[Link]