ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar discusses forms of “the human” that do not rest on the too-simple binaries like “human”/“other” or “human”/“non-/post-/in-human” privileged by many of today’s scholars whose work references Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Such too-simple differences reify concepts of the subject, identity, and agency to privilege Western images of individuality, naturalizing a humanist fallacy and privileging the victim/perpetrator dialectic. The first set of papers in this seminar pose theoretical challenges to the politics of the personal and contemporary concepts of the human. The second set addresses these paradigms through example, using literary and cultural texts to stage different kinds of theoretical challenges. Together, these discussions question “the human” as a necessary reference point for critics, interrogating how it reifies specific epistemologies and occludes alternate theorizations of the epistemological and real politics inherent in the post-industrial, globalized world of information societies.

Friday, March 24

Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry, University of California, Davis
“A Zombie Manifesto: The Non-Human Condition”
Monica Duchnowski, The Graduate Center (CUNY)
“How Elastic is the Idea of the Human?”
John Murray, University of Rhode Island
“Tracing the Absence of Critique within the Technological Sphere”
Carlos Amador, University of Texas at Austin
“Re-Affirming the Subject, Innovating the Human: Badiou and the Posthuman”

Saturday, March 25

Gregory Lattanzio, Wayne State University
“Transhuman Biosystems of Desire, Turbulence, and Flux: Kathy Acker, Angela Carter, and Harold Jaffe”
Bhanu Kapil, Naropa University
“Cyborg Births, Monstrous Offspring”
Maria Carcelen Estrada, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“A Post-Human/Human Semiotic and Philosophical Analysis: Narrating Huysmans and Black Elk”
Katherine Arens, University of Texas at Austin
“The Call of Cthulu: The Premodern PostCyber Subject”