Unraveled and Entangled: A Posthumanist Perspective on Bodies

Abstract

This article presents several ideas from posthumanist thought regarding the body. In seeking to understand reality by overcoming conceptual schemes of Cartesian dualism, anthropocentrism, and biocentrism, the posthumanist notion of the body is built upon assumptions from those of humanism. It does not conceive the body as a mere vessel for the mind, but instead begins from the notion of embodiment— interpreted in a broader sense as it was originally formulated by Thomas Csordas. The body is conceptualized as an assemblage of different elements, comprehensible only through intra actions (Karen Barad) with the surrounding world —contrary to the classical vision that considers the body as a unified organic whole, separated from its environment. As Donna Haraway asserts, the body extends beyond the skin. In this way, the boundaries of the body —so clearly established by epistemological structures deeply shaped by anthropocentric dualities such as individual/society and mind/body dualities—are blurred within the conceptual framework of posthumanism. In the nondualist ontology central to posthumanism, it is relations—not discrete entities—that matter. The body is thus understood not it terms of what it is, but in terms of what it can do— its capacities for action and interaction (Gilles Deleuze).