Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory – A Comprehensive Critical Review. Patricia MacCormack (Author), Ashgate Publishing, 2012

Abstract

Patricia MacCormack's Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory is a fierce, poetic, and uncompromising intervention into contemporary posthumanist thought. Published in 2012 as part of Ashgate's growing catalog of critical and cultural theory, the book stands apart from more mainstream posthumanist works—such as those by Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, or Donna Haraway—by grounding its ethics firmly in the Continental philosophical tradition of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Serres, Blanchot, and Irigaray, while largely sidelining the Anglo-American, liberal-humanist, and transhumanist strands of posthumanism. MacCormack, a professor at Anglia Ruskin University known for her work on queer theory, feminism, and horror, writes with an intensity that mirrors her subject matter: the ecstatic, the monstrous, and the inhuman. The book's central thesis is radical and deliberately provocative. MacCormack argues that ethics, properly understood, cannot be founded on recognition, representation, or the extension of rights. Instead, posthuman ethics must embrace withdrawal, grace, and the affirmation of the incommensurable other—an other that includes modified bodies, animals, monsters, works of art, and ultimately the non-human as such. She insists that the posthuman is not what comes after the human but what has always already been excluded from the category of the human: the queer, the disabled, the animal, the monstrous, the ecstatic, the dead. The book is structured as a series of meditations on specific figures of posthuman embodiment, each chapter exploring a different site of ethical encounter.