Lacan and the Posthuman

When Posthumanism displaces the traditional human subject, what does psychoanalysis add to contemporary conversations about subject/object relations, systems, perspectives, and values? What if Posthumanism itself is a cultural indication of a perhaps temporary shift in thinking that moves from language to matter, from a politics focused on social relations to one organized according to a broader sense of object in environments? The authors of this edited collection question what is at stake in this shift and what psychoanalysis can say about it. Continuing psychoanalysis' focus on the cybernetic relationships among subjects, language, social organizations, desires, drives, and other human motivations, this collection demonstrates the continued relevance of Lacan's work not only to continued understandings of the human subject, but to the broader cultural impasses we now face. Why Posthumanism? Why now? In what ways is Posthumanist thought linked to the emergence of digital technologies? Exploring Posthumanism from the insights of Lacan's psychoanalysis, chapters expose and elucidate not only the conditions within which Posthumanist thought arises, but also reveal Posthumanism's many symptoms: its blindness to anthropomorphization, projection, and unrecognized shifts in scale and perspective as well as its mode of transcendental thought that enables many Posthumanist declarations. Lacanian notions of the subject also inform current discussions about human complicity with and resistance against algorithmic governing regimes, which themselves more wholly produce a "post"- humanism than any philosophical displacement of human centrality would.