The human, as a category, has been subjected to a thorough battering. Various post-humanist, anti-humanist, trans-humanist, or anti-colonial analyses have positioned ‘the human’, conceived as the rational individual of the enlightenment, as at best a state to be exceeded, at worst a mere fictive tool of violent extraction. These critiques have been made with good reason, but they also often hesitate to fully disavow the concept of the human. If we accept many of the points of such x-humanist turns, (the exclusionary nature of such categories, their tendency towards the fixity of the individual against its incorporation in multi-agent networks, etc), it leaves little remaining but some strange kernel of loosely organised coherence. Indeed, much of what replaces ‘the human’ leans on such indeterminate coherence, be it assemblages or actor-networks. But is this empty coherence of the category ‘human’ simply a dead metaphor, or might something remain for us in the human? 

To this question, I return to Immanuel Kant’s later work – especially his Critique of Judgement and Opus Postumum – finding that these later works offer useful answers in terms of judgement and purposiveness. Reading the already post-human currents latent within this work, I emphasise the theorisation of structured indeterminacy and (trans)individuation that opens Kant’s earlier, more rigid thought to ideas still not fully realised. Rational purposiveness and indeterminate judgement offer routes for thinking the kind of structural coherence without determination that seems to have occupied the ‘human’ following its evacuation. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Yuk Hui in particular, I suggest how these ideas of judgement and purposiveness offer a path beyond the human, and indeed beyond the ‘organic’ as a means of organising thought about the human, or rational coherent agents in general. 

This paper criticises contemporary post-humanist theories of anthropocentrism by reading an early essay by Bertrand Russell alongside work by Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett. It argues that, despite appearances, scientism and post-humanism share key commitments in common, such that clarifying the problems with which Russell struggles regarding nature and significance can illuminate symmetrical problems in post-humanism. Against these alternatives, the paper draws on insights from Bernard Williams, contemporary Hegelian philosophy, and J. J. Gibson’s work on animal agency to sketch a picture of what it means to take a human perspective. It is the perspective of one species among others, with a particular evolutionary history; it is also the perspective of a species that, because of certain developments in that history, knows itself as such. That opens us to forms of answerability to the world that do not touch the lives of unselfconscious animals. Some critics of the theoretical discourse on anthropocentrism have argued that taking a human perspective is morally unobjectionable. This paper goes further: it is necessary for grasping our relation to the rest of nature and so our responsibilities for it.  

The physically enhanced bodies of superheroes lie at the centre of their iconic difference, functioning as the source of their exceptionality and often exceeding the limitations of the human flesh.  This understanding of physical prowess has inspired the decades-long iconography that has painted superheroes – often problematically – ‘superior’. It is then within this dialogical space that discussions of disability become particularly salient, as the superhero’s ostensive physical perfection is also exposed as inevitably entangled with ideas of ableism and bio-ethics, where understandings of what is ‘normal’ and what is perceived as either extra-ordinary or substandard mingle and merge. Taking these interwoven notions as  a point of departure, this paper explores the representation of disability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Superhero representation within the MCU is commonly entangled with the experience of loss and grief, which is often associated with changes to the body, both in terms of enhancement, as well as the outcome of injury and  torture. Focusing particularly on the figure of Bucky Barnes, the eponymous Winter Soldier of several narratives, the discussion in this presentation will explore intersecting notions of disability and disfigurement as markers of identity. Here, the idea of disability, and its association with prosthetics, is particularly shown as existing with complicated notions of monstrosity and fear. As a result, the very notion of humanity – especially projected as transhumanity, and even posthumanity – emerges as a slippery and contested epistemological area. The body of the techno-enhanced disabled superhero oscillates between humanity and Otherness, precisely because of its physiological liminality, pushing the boundaries of acceptability, as it also uncovers the fears and anxieties that surround the politicised experience of corporeality in our contemporary moment.