Document Type
Article
Abstract
[Editors' Introduction]
In "Schizophrenics, Cyborgs and the Pitfalls of Posthumanism," Angela Woods invites us to revisit two canonical analyses of the postmodern: Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" and Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Jameson and Haraway introduced to contemporary cultural criticism two posthumanist icons: the schizophrenic, a pathologized victim of postmodernity, and the cyborg, a vision of strategic posthuman subjectivity. In her timely and critical analysis of these articles, Woods challenges the established notion of an oppositional relationship between the schizophrenic and the cyborg. She turns to the "schizo-cyborgs" of cultural theory, psychiatry and psychoanalysis as evidence of the intimacy between the schizophrenic and the cyborg, an intimacy which deeply problematizes the uncritical celebration of Utopian cyborg subjectivity and raises significant questions about the capacity of either figure to account for posthuman embodiment.
Recommended Citation
Woods, Angela "Schizophrenics, Cyborgs and the Pitfalls of Posthumanism." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol. 4, no. 3, 2004, pp. 1–23.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss3/4
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