Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:04:22.596Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

We Have Never Been Biological

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Priscilla Wald
Priscilla Wald*
Affiliation:
Duke University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

We have never been biological. Across disciplines, human beings are hybrids, to use Bruno Latour's formulation, inhabiting the realm of what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture.” Literature and biology, art history and physics, chemical engineering and philosophy approach the question of “human being” differently, but the tacit acceptance of a hybrid (natureculture) world is common to all these fields. So why does the question of the biological seem to be looming larger in the humanities in recent years?

Type
Forum: Conference Debates
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 953 - 955
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Collins, Francis S. “What We Do and Don't Know about 'Race,' 'Ethnicity,' Genetics, and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era.” Genetics for the Human Race. Ed. Patrinos, Ari. Spec. issue of Nature Genetics 36.11s (2004): S13–S15. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donna, Haraway. How Like a Leaf. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Muriel, Rukeyser. “The Speed of Darkness.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Kaufman, Janet E. and Herzog, Anne F., with Levin, Jay Heller. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. 465–68. Print.Google Scholar