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This chapter addresses ethical issues provoked by the prospect of genetic enhancement. It begins with a brief exploration of the concept of enhancement. Next, several examples of possible future genetic enhancements are presented. Eight of these have a clear basis in current scientific understanding and in that sense may be considered nearer-term; two others, concerning post-humans and post-persons, are far-fetched and have the feel of science fiction, given the current state of technology, but are certainly conceivable. The chapter then provides a perspicuous analysis of the concept of human identity, a concept frequently invoked in objections to biomedical enhancement. Providing the bulk of the ethical analysis, the next two sections develop and address concerns about (1) authenticity (an identity-related value) and (2) perceived risks to human nature (and possibly humanity itself), referring back to the previously described possibilities for genetic enhancement. The overall position that is defended could be described as fairly liberal.

This chapter traces the modern image of zombies back to Richard Matheson's 1954 novella, I Am Legend, and George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The chapter argues that because readers and audiences most closely identify with the survivors of an apocalyptic event, they often miss the larger implications of such narratives. Within many apocalyptic narratives, such as a zombie apocalypse, there is a overlying message of violent, transformative renewal that asks us to question normative humanist categories. Matheson and Romero both pointedly direct our attention back on our own body politic and demonstrate humanity's inability to discern its own capacity for inhuman behaviour.

This afterword discusses the continuing appeal of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). First, the film recognised that contemporary existence would be increasingly augmented. The fear today that augmentation will lead to us loving our screens more than we do each other is already found in the screenscapes of Blade Runner. Second, Blade Runner recognised that the human condition was about to enter a fully post-human state. This is the conceit of digital-age, science fiction film in general: not only does it replicate the core values, hopes, and concerns of the post-human condition — prophesises on its future possibilities — but helps herald in the actual experience of humans living cybernetic lives. In part, Blade Runner also builds its narrative out of the commercialisation of knowledge in the (coming) age of a computerised society where the grand narratives of pre-modernity no longer hold true; surveillance culture is writ large across the film. Last, at the aesthetic level, Blade Runner prophesises on the way space and place was (is) being deterritorialised and reterritorialised, never simply grounded or rooted to a fixed location, but constantly remediated and reconstituted.

This chapter offers a provocative study of dehumanization—or zombification—in several post-modern films that explore the depersonalizing force of the military-industrial complex on the psyche of ordinary humans. It argues that the resulting post-human solider exists in a liminal space between our traditional understanding of zombies and a contemporary awareness of victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. The chapter offers an unflinching analysis of the dehumanization of the person, through the removal of individual thought, explicitly characterized by soldiers in modern warfare, especially in films like 28 Days Later, Universal Soldier, Full Metal Jacket, and Jacob's Ladder.

This chapter examines the ‘techno-fantasy’ of a disembodied thought in cyber and post-human discourses, and discusses the importance of Gilles Deleuze's thoughts in articulating an embodied relationship to technology. It discusses Deleuze's rejection of transcendent thinking and his ontological critique of representation, and suggests that his work can be critically and productively employed to challenge certain tendencies in cyber theory, particularly the central question of the body, its materiality, and its relation to identity. The chapter contends that there are very good reasons for maintaining fidelity to Deleuze's materialism and his repeated rejection of any transcendent worldview.

This chapter uses Ponge’s ‘Le Cycle des saisons’ and Jaccottet’s ‘Les Pivoines’ as two useful models for understanding how late-twentieth-century French poets give voice to plant-life. It explores how Ponge’s delight in the dynamics of language and Jaccottet’s wariness of its distractions have come to define two different approaches to the organic world and, more generally, two different strands of the French poetic tradition: Ponge’s linguistically experimental texts approach plants by cultivating the ‘efflorescence’ of language; Jaccottet’s texts use a rhetoric of hesitation to gesture towards plants’ inherent excess or mystery. Whilst these two approaches to the natural world are now familiar models in late-twentieth-century French poetics, this paper examines how the poems of Eugène Guillevic adopt an altogether more radical, weird, and even productive approach to plant-life. Investigating the speculative nature of Guillevic’s poetics, this chapter explores how he is not content simply to question the subject’s perceptions of and access to physical existence, as Ponge and Jaccottet do, but continually speculates about what life might be like for other forms of existence, in particular, plants. This chapter explores how Guillevic’s poetry makes the presences of the physical world seem more alive to us, more worthy of respect and attention, but also makes us more curious and more daring in how we think about our own sentient and cognitive faculties. 

In evaluating the interplay of biological and social interpretations of the incest taboo, most literary commentaries have used fiction to show how notions of incest have changed historically through the variable of culture; in these accounts, the biological body remains a constant, whilst society adapts its parameters for what counts as incest. However, science fiction introduces material embodiment itself as a variable, as it hypothesises bodies that can be altered (e.g. through genetics) or even eliminated (e.g. through virtualising the mind via a computer). Through comparing three science fiction novels, this chapter evaluates whether such changing types of embodiment will also change the way in which society approaches the incest taboo, or even remove it entirely.

This chapter takes as its starting point the Thomistic interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement, on which the role of the atonement is to bring a human person into a life in grace; and it argues against one interpretation—Eckhart’s or else an Eckhart-like interpretation—of what a life in grace is. Understanding the internal psychic state of a person in grace is a help to understanding the atonement, but this chapter argues that the psychic state Eckhart recommends for life in grace is actually pernicious to the traditionally understood purpose of both suffering and atonement. Whatever the internal configuration is of a human person in a condition of mutual indwelling with God, it is not the self-destructive absence of desire urged by Eckhart. Aquinas’s view that Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is the model for such a state is much more promising.

This section introduces Edgar/Tom’s role as one that epitomizes Shakespeare’s radical testing of theatrical, political, experiential, and metaphysical possibility. It also explains how the book will be a sustained reading of King Lear. The Edgar-part witnesses, suffers, or refracts everything in the playworld. It distils and explodes theatrical form. It moves in the shadowlands between here and elsewhere, sense and transcendence. This section summarizes how the book understands the relation between the Quarto and Folio Lear-texts, and how Edgar/Tom encapsulates this divided, layered textuality. It summarizes the sources of both Edgar and Tom of Bedlam, and the character’s history in criticism and performance. It explains how the character evades expected types, is at once human, non-human, and post-human, and thus resists easy accommodation or sentiments. The Edgar-part is very intimate to Shakespeare’s most intimate purposes. To get at its secrets, we need to pay unsleeping attention.

Can it make sense to say that biomedical enhancements to human beings are morally unappealing? This chapter begins by considering what “human nature” must mean in the context of the debate about human enhancement and argues that a detailed theory of a fixed human nature is not necessary to ground objections to human enhancement. It explores the range of moral arguments against human enhancement, including the positions of Leon Kass, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Lauritzen, Michael Sandel, Jürgen Habermas, and Thomas Murray. The chapter argues that none of the arguments gives conclusive reasons to regard human enhancement across the board as violating publicly enforceable moral obligations. It argues instead for working toward a more complex view of enhancement, in which some forms of enhancement might be considered impermissible, some could actually be obligatory, and many would be regarded as a matter of personal moral ideals.

This chapter looks at how the attacks of September 11, 2001, affected the production of Muslim monsters in American popular culture and draws conclusions regarding the importance of Muslim monsters in the Western imaginaire from the Middle Ages to the present. Political discourse, film, and television feature Muslim characters generated by the fear and anxiety associated with the 9/11 attacks. These monsters exhibit the Saracen doxology first established in the medieval era that is substantiated by Orientalist neo-colonial ideologies in vogue in recent years. Consequences of this discourse include the punishments meted out on Muslim bodies, defined by some scholars as post-human, at Abu Ghraib and other sites of horror. This book suggests that the dehumanization of Muslim men, which is seen in the Muslim monsters documented in this study, has led to the torture and murder of Muslim subjects.

This chapter focuses on the digital revolution and virtual reality, which overtook material reality in the 1990s. These developments offered new critical possibilities while challenging the organisation of visual perception, the structure of information, and the traditional sociopolitical role of objects and opening up a new range of possibilities between virtual representations and actual artefacts. This new popular culture cast a critical gaze at traditional economic perceptions by producing open design platforms that enabled participation in a collaborative economy as an alternative to capitalistic competition and rivalry. At the same time, it blurred oppositional categories such as human/machine or nature/culture – vestiges of the pre-digital age that had been perceived as unshakeable truths. This chapter centres on contemporary designers such as Wakita Akira and Sputniko! and design studios such as Nosigner and Takram Design Engineering, which are concerned with post-human design, open design, IoT (Internet of Things), and human–machine interfaces. These new technologies and their realisation by means of digital images – and sometimes also in material form – offer their users new insights and perspectives, doing away with traditional categories of thought and constructing a new reality.

This chapter focuses on two mid-century American screen equines who possess the power of speech: Francis, a patriotic U.S. Army mule serving during WWII, and Mr. Ed, a palomino horse living in the suburbanizing postwar San Fernando Valley. Contextualizing Arthur Lubin’s wildly popular Francis films (1950–1956) and Mr. Ed television series (1961–1966) within the tradition of talking horses in literary classics such as The Iliad and Gulliver’s Travels—and also in relation to mid-twentieth-century American debates around gender—the chapter argues that Francis and Mr. Ed’s ventriloquial voices not only serve as vehicles for a critique of traditional masculinity, but also channel some startlingly queer and post-human interspecies alternatives to human heteronormativity.