Before humanity : : posthumanism and ancestrality / / Stefan Herbrechter.

• Superior document: Critical Posthumanisms ; volume 3
• VerfasserIn: Herbrechter, Stefan,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, Massachusetts : : Brill,, [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Critical posthumanisms ; v. 3.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Before Humanity takes up the question of the post- in the posthuman from the position of ancestrality. Speculating about who or what comes after the human inevitably throws us back to our very beginnings. The before in Before Humanity in this context takes on two meanings: 1) what happened before we apparently became human? - which translates into a critical reading of paleo-anthropology, as well as evolutionary narratives of hominization; 2) living through the end of a certain (humanist, anthropocentric) notion of humanity, what tasks lie before us? - which provokes a critical reading of the Anthropocene and current narratives of geologization. In other words, Before Humanity investigates conceptualizations of humanity and asks whether we have ever been human and if not, what could, or maybe what should we have been?.

Table of Contents

Half Title -- Series Information -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preamble -- Introduction: Before … -- Chapter 1 The Other Human: On William Golding's The Inheritors -- 1 Prehistoric Fiction and Ancestrality -- 2 The Inheritors: Morality, Ideology, Humanism -- 3 Paleontology and the Neanderthal -- 4 Language, Cognition and 'Becoming Human' -- 5 Animism and Empathy -- 6 Becoming Human? -- Interlude 1 Languages and Evolutions -- Interlude 2 Animism without Humans, or Belief without Belief -- 1 'Believing' in Animism -- 2 Alter-Anthropological Animism (or a-a-a) -- 3 Posthumanist Animism? -- 4 Techno-Animism and the Re-Enchantment of Science -- 5 Animism Under Erasure -- 6 The Animism to Come -- 7 Seriously, But Perhaps Not Too Seriously? -- Interlude 3 Ape/Man -- Chapter 2 About to Forget … the Human: On Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene -- 1 Herr Geiser Is Losing His Humanity … -- 2 Catastrophe, Ecocide and Extinction in Man in the Holocene -- 3 Forgetting and Geiser's Mnemotechnics -- 4 Verzettelung -- 5 Pre- and Posthistory, Geology and Ancestrality -- 6 Before Humanity: Dementia and Ecography -- Interlude 4 Geology and Deep Time -- Interlude 5 Lascaux, Geophilia and the 'Cradle of Humanity' -- 1 Bataille - The Neolithic 'Origin' of Art and Humanity -- 2 Baudrillard - Lascaux and Simulation -- 3 Inhumanist Aesthetic? -- Chapter 3 Unsociable Robots: Empathy in Robot and Frank -- 1 Empathy Makes 'Us' Human? -- 2 Robot &amp -- Frank -- 3 Empathy and Sociable Robots -- 4 Posthuman(ist) Empathy? -- Conclusion: Becoming Inhuman -- 1 So You Think You're Becoming Human? -- 2 Post/Anthropology - Before and After Humans -- 3 Inhumanism, or, Becoming Inhuman -- Bibliography -- Index.