What’s wrong with posthumanism?

Abstract

Theory has always been aware of its other(s). It could scarcely have been otherwise. Theory's own sustained and variegated concern with the nature and structure of alterity, the unignorable realities of the institutional and interdisciplinary "resistance to theory," and dissension within theory's conceptualities and constituencies have all contributed to otherness being constitutive of theory. One might even want to hazard the kind of provocation which would say, in the tradition of statements like "deconstruction is justice, theory is otherness." To speak of Theory's Others, as this collection of Rhizomes invites us to do, is therefore potentially to speak of everything within and without theory: to include everything and exclude nothing according to a logic of such capacious comprehensiveness that differences between the proper and the other become almost obscured. Hence for the sake of rigor, if for nothing else, a narrowing focus must be selected here. And ideally it would be one that could allegorize the general relation between theory and otherness. [excerpt]