Posthumanism

Working Definition

Posthumanism is a theoretical position that rejects the assumption that the human being is the autonomous, exceptional, and central measure of knowledge, ethics, and politics. In its technical sense (the critical posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, and Cary Wolfe), it critiques classical humanism as a historical construction that defined “Man” by excluding animals, machines, non-normative bodies, and colonized peoples, and proposes instead a relational, embodied, and cross-species account of subjectivity. In popular usage the term is routinely conflated with transhumanism—the techno-utopian project of enhancing human capacities through biotechnology and computing—which critical posthumanists regard as an intensification of Enlightenment humanism rather than its overcoming. Operationally, posthumanism asks: who or what had to be excluded from the category of “the human” so that this category could appear self-evident?

Genesis and Global Lineage

The word has an exact birth date in literary theory: Ihab Hassan coined it in his essay Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture? (The Georgia Review, Winter 1977), calling it a “dubious neologism.” The contemporary concept was forged along three converging lines. The first was feminist science studies: in A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985), Donna Haraway turned the cyborg into an ironic figure that breaches the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical, later shifting her focus toward “companion species” and multispecies cohabitation. The second was the history of cybernetics and literature: in How We Became Posthuman (1999), N. Katherine Hayles reconstructed how postwar cybernetics—from the Macy Conferences of 1946–1953 to 1990s artificial-life research—severed information from its material substrate and generated the fantasy of mind as a disembodied pattern ready to be uploaded into a computer; her posthumanism is explicitly embodied and aimed against that fantasy. The third was continental philosophy: Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman, 2013), drawing on Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and feminist theory, combined the critique of anthropocentrism with an affirmative ethics of non-human life (zoe), while Cary Wolfe (What Is Posthumanism?, 2009) used Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and Derridean deconstruction to draw a sharp boundary against transhumanism.

Central European Lineage

Long before the term entered Anglo-American theory, Stanisław Lem—who began his medical studies in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) in 1940–1941 and 1944 before relocating after the war to Kraków and Jagiellonian University—formulated a remarkably parallel inquiry. In his philosophical-futurological treatise Summa technologiae (published in Kraków in 1964; translated into English by Joanna Zylinska for the University of Minnesota Press in 2013), Lem developed the concepts of “autoevolution”—humanity taking deliberate engineering control over its own biological design—and “phantomatics,” the generation of total virtual realities indistinguishable from physical experience. These are the very questions raised thirteen years later by Hassan and elaborated in 1980s and 1990s American posthumanism. As Paweł Majewski demonstrates in his monograph Between an Animal and a Machine: Stanisław Lem’s Technological Utopia (2007; English edition 2018), the convergence is substantive but independent: Lem and Western posthumanists belong to a shared postwar intellectual arc in which cybernetics and molecular biology destabilized the boundaries of the human, without either side drawing directly on the other (Hayles later wrote chapters on Lem’s fiction, though not on the Summa). One qualification is essential: Lem anticipated above all the technological, autoevolutionary strand of posthuman thought, yet paired it with a sober, skeptical analysis of how engineering projects to transcend human nature founder on their own internal contradictions.

Why Now

Three developments between 2016 and 2026 moved posthumanism from literary and art-theory seminars into public policy and technology debates. First, the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5°C warming and subsequent IPBES biodiversity assessments gave the critique of anthropocentrism hard empirical footing: a species acting as a planetary geological force can no longer frame itself as an external spectator standing apart from “nature.” Second, the public release of large language models (starting with ChatGPT in November 2022) revived the exact debate Hayles had diagnosed in 1999: whether intelligence is a disembodied informational pattern independent of biological embodiment, and whether non-human systems can be authors, interlocutors, or legal persons. Third, the granting of legal personhood to non-human entities—from the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Atrato River in Colombia to courtroom petitions over great apes and elephants—demonstrated that decentering the human has become an institutional legal question rather than a purely philosophical metaphor.

Explanatory Power

The concept reveals that the universal “Man” of classical humanism was always modeled on a specific historical figure—Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: adult, able-bodied, rational, property-owning, European, and male—while all other beings were ranked by their distance from that prototype. This insight reshapes three active fields. First, in artificial intelligence: embodied posthumanism explains why asking “does the machine think like a human?” starts from a false premise, since it assumes human cognition is disembodied symbol manipulation rather than an activity inseparable from a living body and its environment. Second, in animal ethics: instead of extending liberal individual rights only to great apes or dolphins that resemble “us” cognitively, posthumanism examines the material entanglements in which animals already live alongside humans as co-workers, ecological partners, and laboratory subjects. Third, in climate politics: it shows why geoengineering proposals to “manage the planet” often reproduce the very anthropocentric hubris—treating the Earth as an external machine for a human engineer—that produced the ecological crisis in the first place.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The most durable—and least read—component of posthumanism is its concrete history of science. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles traced how specific technical choices at the postwar Macy Conferences on cybernetics (1946–1953), where Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information triumphed over Donald MacKay’s context-dependent model, stripped information of its material body—and how second-order cybernetics (Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela) spent decades trying to put the observer’s body back into the system. That historical reconstruction is far more illuminating today than celebratory manifestos: current disputes over whether large language models “understand” meaning replay the 1950s clash between disembodied Shannon information and embodied autopoiesis almost verbatim, usually without any memory of the first round. A second overlooked angle comes from Central Europe: in postwar Poland and the Eastern Bloc, where cybernetics passed from ideological ban in the early 1950s to official enthusiasm in the 1960s as a science of economic planning and systems engineering, questions about the limits of the human were posed in the sober language of systems design rather than French poststructuralism—explaining both Lem’s early breakthrough in Kraków and the healthy skepticism of Polish scholars toward the more euphoric registers of Western posthumanist prose.