This introduction puts into conversation two seemingly divergent analytics: transgender studies and animal studies. It asks: How does the prefixial nature of trans—across, into, and through: a prepositional force—further transfigure the “animal turn”? If the animal turn has recharged inquiry into difference and ethics, what happens to these magnetic pulls when they are transformed, transacted, or transduced by trans studies? Taking as a central logic that transgender subjects have never been fully human—consider how the indeterminate pronoun “it” has been used to name transgenders—the introduction posits how a trans heuristic allows us to better understand the limits of “the human” as a biopolitical tool for privileging a few so as to de-, in-, nonhumanize the many. Trans exposes what is at stake in these prefixial maneuvers, what is materialized and dematerialized, what is made livable and unlivable, killable and un-killable.

Aside from constructing a compelling case for how rereading evolution from a neomaterialist and radical empiricist perspective undermines an enduring binary of sexual difference, Luciana Parisi underscores a tension in the work of Elizabeth Grosz, known both for her novel, feminist, neomaterialist study of Darwinian evolution and her staunch support of sexual difference. Parisi contends, and I suspect Grosz herself is keenly aware, that there is a paradox in holding these views simultaneously. Thus, this paper will not only expand upon Parisi's argument for preaccelerated, unbounded, creative, inhuman, neomaterialist, and radical empirical accounts of matter and sex but also propose a reading of Grosz's work that could potentially wrest her from the perceived paradox. I call this the “theory sex” reading, which can be characterized as a metatheoretical difference materially embodied in the unbridgeable gap between Grosz's two theoretical stances. Theory sex is not an ontology but a concept in line with a Deleuzo–Guattarian understanding of the philosopher's mode of living with chaos. Theory sex produces vibrations and dissonance, which reproduce or chart lines of flight toward theories like Parisi's. These vibrations compose the requiem both honoring and retaining the virtual legacy of sexual difference into the future.

I uppsatsen "Frågan om tekniken" från 1952 utvecklade Heidegger tanken om hur tekniken i moderniteten omstöpt hela vårt erfarenhets- och handlingsrum. Inom det mångförgrenade fältet teknikens filosofi har den kommit att spela en central och omstridd roll. Den fenomenologiska teknikanalysen har samtidigt kritiserats för att den inte beaktar teknikens samhälleliga funktion och för att den är oförmögen att tänka medialiseringens verklighet. I en serie nyskrivna uppsatser av ledande internationella och svenska forskare inom teknikens filosofi, diskuteras det fenomenologiska arvet, från Husserl över Heidegger till Derrida och Stiegler, med särskild tonvikt på Heidegger. Här upprättas nya linjer mellan kritisk teori, dekonstruktion, fenomenologi och medieteori, som sammantaget ger en unik ingång till samtida teknikfilosofi.

This paper argues that taking an historical perspective on perceived risks to bodies—be they guns, bedbugs, or viruses—exposes shifts in our understanding of both corporeal and vital ontologies, especially the extent to which it is considered bounded or porous and the effect that has on a body’s relationship to its milieu. Modes of political power implemented to respond to, or manage, these threats—from the managerial, microbiopolitical or surveillance and information based control society forms to viral politics and emerging epigenetic theories—form a feedback loop that in turn remodulates both the logics of political response and the underlying ontologies.

Using the motif of the hipster to consider the arrival of the concept “Anthropocene” into the orbit of critical theory, this essay establishes the grave existential consequences that issue from the infatuation with, and rapid, uncritical uptake and circulation of, concepts in a philosophical market overcome by neoliberal pressures. These epistemic habits align with political commitments that unwittingly controvert the original intents of critique—and this paradox requires remediation. This essay, thus, argues for a recalibration of epistemic praxis by reclaiming a retro, critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life. The hope is to counter the stultifying force of the late-capitalist praxis of commodification, consumption, and hyper-production of concepts spawned by the fatal lure of progress narratives and the fetishization of innovation and originality they entail. Accordingly, we might resolve the tension between habits and politics and account for vital differences and resistances not revealed by the mutation of critique inherent in contemporary strategies. Thus, not only might epistemic politics evolve, but critical theory may also avert extinction by revitalizing it as a dynamic life practice.

In her recent lecture on the Anthropocene (to which she adds the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene), Donna Haraway expresses some alarm that after two major insights into what counts as thinkable, it was “anthropos” that became the term for the post-Holocene (Haraway 2014). Haraway declares, with emphasis, that it is “literally unthinkable” to work with the individual unit of “man” if one is to do good intellectual work. For Haraway, the two knowledge events that ought to have precluded the use of the figure of the “anthropos” are: first, the acceptance that any seeming individual is the outcome of a series of complex relations and must be studied as such (so there would be no epoch with anything, let alone “man,” as its first cause), and, second, intellectual inquiry has acknowledged a general becoming-with, such that in order to be anything at all, “one” must be in a dynamic relation. Haraway’s work is exemplary of post-liberal feminist resistance to the figure of man—as subject, agent, and center of knowing. Terms like “Woman” or “the feminine” do not extend the field occupied by man; they instead create a different intensity. So when Haraway questions the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene she neither asks that women, too, be included in those who have scarred the planet, nor does she claim that “Woman” would occupy some innocent outside. Instead, she proposes that one think of the “anthropos” as untimely, as out of sync with an intellectual milieu that theorizes the death of the subject and the eclipse of the human, and has even begun to renounce the notion of life in itself. It is odd that in the face of this destruction of any possibility of thinking by [End Page 167] way of individualism, the epic gesture of the present deploys the figure of the “anthropos,” as it should be unthinkable today to return to the figure of man

Posthumous Life launches critical life studies: a mode of inquiry that neither endorses nor dismisses a wave of recent "turns" toward life, matter, vitality, inhumanity, animality, and the real. Questioning the nature and limits of life in the natural sciences, the essays in this volume examine the boundaries and significance of the human and the humanities in the wake of various redefinitions of what counts as life. They explore the possibility of theorizing life without assuming it to be either a simple substrate or an always-mediated effect of culture and difference. Posthumous Lifeprovides new ways of thinking about animals, plants, humans, difference, sexuality, race, gender, identity, the earth, and the future.