Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Department

English and Film Studies

Abstract

This essay reflects on the question of posthuman(ist) art by way of Stefan Sorgner’s book, Philosophy of Posthuman Art, which makes an important initial contribution to the nascent investigation of the significance of creative and imaginative expression from a critical posthumanist perspective. From the understanding that we cannot (yet) do without the subject as ground of the self, I elaborate a theory of the dynamic ‘subjective trinity’ (self, other, and transcendent subject) underpinning the occidental aesthetic experience construed in visual-spatial terms, exemplified in the cinema. From this basis I explore two possible avenues of posthumanist aesthetic expression: First, the secular via negativa represented by Samuel Beckett’s 1958 novel The Unnamable, one of the most radical modernist interrogations of the discursive limits of subjectivity, of the self unspeaking itself. Second, Antonin Artaud’s 1932 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ manifesto, which stands amongst the most radical modernist alternatives to the Wagnerian total art work. For both artists, the through-line and the historical dividing line alike is the Holocaust as a limit-case for investigating what a meaningful posthumanist aesthetic ideology might look like: an aesthetic in response to a world that is making itself ready to do without the human, even as the human propensity to treat other humans as less-than-human clears a space for the emergence of a properly posthumanist subject.

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