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  • Essay / Posthumanism

    In preparation for writing this essay, I decided to look up the definition of "posthumanism" in the Oxford English Dictionary, which, interestingly enough, provides two separate definitions, depending on how you write it down. The first, written "posthumanism", asserts that humanity can be transformed, transcended or eliminated either by technological progress or by the evolutionary process; artistic, scientific or philosophical practice that reflects this belief. (Oxford Dictionary). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay And the second, where a hyphen is added between "post" and "humanism", indicates that it is a "system of thought formulated in reaction to the fundamental principles of humanism, particularly its focus on humanity rather than the divine or supernatural. Also (particularly in postmodernist and feminist discourse): writing or thinking characterized by the rejection of the notion of the rational and autonomous individual, instead conceiving the nature of the self as fragmentary and socially and historically conditioned. (Oxford Dictionary). I believe that for the purposes of this essay it is important to mention these definitions as I attempt to analyze how the notion of the "posthuman" is a critique of the "humanist ideal" (which draws on the idea of ​​the Enlightenment). of the rational subject and its perfectibility) and rather constitutes a “hegemonic cultural model” which is based on a “universalist posture and its binary logic”. (Braidotti)At the forefront of posthuman theory are Donna Haraway's seminal manifestos on cyborgs. In the "Cyborg Manifesto", Haraway identifies three main boundaries that are continually blurred and reconfigured so that the formation of the "cyborg" can be made possible: those of human and animal, of animal and machine, and the physical and the non-physical. She writes: “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two centers united structuring any possibility of historical transformation. [...] the relationship between the organism and the machine has been a war of boundaries. » (Haraway) and in her latest “Companion Species Manifesto”, she expands by saying: “Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and the non-human, the organic and the technological, the carbon and the silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and exhaustion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in ways unexpected. (Harraway)Blade RunnerIn order to give a tangible understanding (at least for my own benefit) of Haraway's aforementioned statements, I will attempt to apply his critical theory and that of other scholars focusing on the "posthuman" in the context of the work of Ridley Scott. 1982 classic "Blade Runner" The reason is that one of the uses of popular cinema is to occupy a "place of honor in bioethical rhetoric and popular debate about genetically modified entities" (Battaglia 495), and that the scientific genre fiction helps us examine "the binary oppositions of the real and the imaginary, the human and the artificial, and the self and the other" and to comment on "the direction in which our world” (Kirely 285). As Elaine L. Graham argues, fictional worlds can be "just as revealing, in their own way, of the ethical and political dimensions of the digital and biotechnological age as are the material artifacts of humankind's technological efforts" ( 1). The first film tells that, in a, 2010)