Document Type
Editorial
Abstract
[First paragraph]
"The Death of the Human" is in many ways one of those characteristic intellectual bids for attention, in the vein of Lacan's "Woman does not exist" or Baudrillard's "the Gulf War never happened." Flashy and rhetorically misleading, such assertions nevertheless create a discursive space in what otherwise appears to be a closed, natural(ized) system. "Posthumanism," like any other movement or "-ism", is difficult to introduce, first and foremost, because of this kind of rhetoric: its first infiltrating tactic is to call the time of death on the current age. Perhaps the most salient example of this self-defined loss was the proposition initiated by T.S. Eliot and his circle that modernism was something other than the continuation of the Romantic era, when that rich tradition was in actuality flooding their every word. We respect our readers too much to bombard them with foolish polemics: Reconstruction is not a place for manifestos. Rather, Reconstruction is a medium for thought and discussion on the complexities of theory and practice in a wide range of disciplines, and a strengthening of what Michele Serres termed "those rare and narrow passages" that test the boundaries between the disciplines.
Repository Citation
Smith, C. J., Geoff Klock, and Ximena Gallardo-C.. "Post·hum·an·ous." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss3/1