Before Humanity

Stefan Herbrechter was a Reader in Cultural Theory at Coventry University and Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Heidelberg University. He has published widely on literature, culture and media. His Posthumanism – A Critical Analysis (2013 [2009]) is one of the founding texts of critical posthumanism. For more information see http://stefanherbrechter.com and http://criticalposthumanism.net/.

Preamble


Introduction: Before …


1 The Other Human On William Golding’s The Inheritors

 1 Prehistoric Fiction and Ancestrality


 2 The Inheritors: Morality, Ideology, Humanism


 3 Paleontology and the Neanderthal


 4 Language, Cognition and ‘Becoming Human’


 5 Animism and Empathy


 6 Becoming Human?




interlude 1 Languages and Evolutions


interlude 2 Animism without Humans, or Belief without Belief

 1 ‘Believing’ in Animism


 2 Alter-Anthropological Animism (or a-a-a)


 3 Posthumanist Animism?


 4 Techno-Animism and the Re-Enchantment of Science


 5 Animism Under Erasure


 6 The Animism to Come


 7 Seriously, But Perhaps Not Too Seriously?




interlude 3 Ape/Man


2 About to Forget … the Human On Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

 1 Herr Geiser Is Losing His Humanity …


 2 Catastrophe, Ecocide and Extinction in Man in the Holocene


 3 Forgetting and Geiser’s Mnemotechnics


 4 Verzettelung


 5 Pre- and Posthistory, Geology and Ancestrality


 6 Before Humanity: Dementia and Ecography




interlude 4 Geology and Deep Time


interlude 5 Lascaux, Geophilia and the ‘Cradle of Humanity’

 1 Bataille – The Neolithic ‘Origin’ of Art and Humanity


 2 Baudrillard – Lascaux and Simulation


 3 Inhumanist Aesthetic?




3 Unsociable Robots Empathy in Robot & Frank

 1 Empathy Makes ‘us’ Human?


 2 Robot & Frank


 3 Empathy and Sociable Robots


 4 Posthuman(ist) Empathy?




 Conclusion Becoming Inhuman

 1 So You Think You’re Becoming Human?


 2 Post/Anthropology – Before and After Humans


 3 Inhumanism, or, Becoming Inhuman




Bibliography


Index