The posthumanism to come

The diverse aims of contemporary scholarship that calls itself ‘‘animal studies’’ or ‘‘posthumanism’’ renders inoperable any universally accepted definition of these fields. Generally speaking, however, scholars who work in these areas direct our attention to the permeable boundary that separates human from animal, or more forcefully, urge us to avow the human animality that we have historically denied. Such arguments are certainly not altogether novel coming more than 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. That 39 percent of Americans currently reject the theory of evolution, however, suggests that blindness to human animality shows little abatement, thus underscoring the necessity of both scholarly and activist work that seeks to challenge the humanist ideologies that fuel such disavowals.1 Of course, posthumanist scholarship goes well beyond reaffirming Darwinian monogenesis. More urgently, it embraces a conception of the human that refuses to define itself in violent opposition to the nonhuman. Such work thus emphasizes the vulnerability that humans share with animals: our exposure to others that makes all living beings available to both hospitality and violence