4 :: POSTHUMAN IDENTITY
anthropocentrism and masculinism – is intricately interwoven with the fall of
Europe as an imperial world power. The worldwide geo-political shift from national
to post-national political constellations, and associated notions of a pluralist
cosmopolitanism, is part of the wider posthuman recomposition of identity and new
forms of subjectivity, of new social bonding and alternative community building.
The arrival of posthumanism, or post-anthropocentrism, is especially consequential
for subjectivity and the critique of identity. The spread of a globalized, multi-ethnic,
multi-media culture across the planet, according to Braidotti, has carried major
implications for the very understanding of identity. Nowhere is this more obviously so
than as a consequence of the intrusion of the global economy and technologically
mediated processes of digitization into the very fabric of subjectivity itself. From the
arrival of digital ‘second life’ to the spread of medical reproductive technologies, and
from prosthetics to robotics, the traditional humanistic unity ascribed to the human
subject has come utterly undone – as traditional distinctions between human actors
and non-human forces have been erased. In this connection, Braidotti speaks of the
emergence of the ‘posthuman nomadic subject’. As she theorizes this critical
posthumanist recasting of identity:
The posthuman nomadic subject is materialist and vitalist,
embodied and embedded – it is firmly located somewhere,
according to the radical immanence of the “politics of location” ...
It is a multifaceted and relational subject, conceptualized within a
monistic ontology, through the lenses of Spinoza, Deleuze and
Guatarri, plus feminist and post-colonial theories. It is a subject
actualized by the relational vitality and elemental complexity that
mark posthuman thought itself. (Braidotti 2013: 189)For Braidotti, the arrival of posthumanism spells the death of the strenuously
self-affirming subject of liberal individualism. This demise represents a wholesale
sociological, philosophical and cultural shift from the notion of unitary subjectivity
to that of nomadic identity.
Braidotti’s views on the relation between posthuman identity and contemporary society
and culture are complex and sometimes quite obscure. But the main thesis she
attempts to advance focuses on two threads of recent social thought, threads which
she seeks to interweave. The first of these concerns critical race perspectives and
postcolonial theories; the second concerns eco-feminism. Bluntly put, Braidotti finds
in postcolonial and critical race theories a productive engagement with the posthuman