Since the 1980s, the theories of subjectivity that have most influenced literary studies have shared an antihumanist perspective, one that posits that both human selfhood and the experience of authentic contact with another are merely illusions born of a modern Western ideology. Along with other subfields, the domain of literature and psychoanalysis has been affected by this bias toward antihumanist theories of subjectivity. But it is not because these represent the most sophisticated, best validated theories available to us. As I here argue, practicing psychoanalysts have taken a very different conceptual path, grounded in their own clinical findings and in recent experimental work in psychiatry. In fact the most influential current psychoanalytic theories support the idea that some form of self-integration is valuable. Ironically, then, scholars working in literature and psychoanalysis adhere to our profession’s default antihumanism at the expense of hiding out from the most important conversations in psychoanalysis today. What keeps this system in place is a widespread form of intellectual intimidation, which in fact depends conceptual trickery. In explaining the trickery, I hope to help to clear the way for a more capacious theoretical conversation within this subfield.

This chapter outlines some of the intellectual currents that have led to the development of contemporary critical posthumanism(s). Critical posthumanist thought aims to abandon the essentialisms of humanism and to theorize a human subject constituted not by self-sameness but by difference, not fixed but in process, and entangled in human, non-human, and technological relations. I trace some of the challenges to humanism posed by the antihumanisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then offer an overview of some recent and positive philosophical and cultural responses to these challenges, including new ways to think about embodiment and materiality, about our embeddedness in and dependence on the non-human world, and about our simultaneous and globalized entanglement in the cultures of technology. If nothing else, the imminent threat of the climate crisis demonstrates the pressing need to rethink ourselves in/and the world.

Poststructuralism is one of the most important theoretical precursors of contemporary posthumanism. There is, for example, a close affinity between the poststructuralist topos of the “end of man” (Foucault, Derrida) and current posthumanist or postanthropocentric thinking about a time “after the human”. The “afterness” or belatedness that characterizes all post-isms creates a critical space for rethinking the human, or for thinking the human otherwise. In this sense, what poststructuralism reminds posthumanism of is the continued need for theorizing. The practice of (poststructuralist) theorizing thus survives in the work of many thinkers that have been instrumental in the development of a critical posthumanism (Haraway, Hayles, Braidotti, Butler, Agamben, Stiegler, Colebrook, Barad, Kirby, Esposito, Wolfe etc.). What poststructuralism brings to current thinking “after the human” is a critical instinct that understands the posthuman and the nonhuman as an otherness that continues to haunt any notion of human identity.

My essay explores how left- and right-wing antihumanist discourses share certain tones. It focuses, in particular, on discourses that understand modernity as a series of dispossessions (especially of community, or of self) and on the critique of the symbol as a form of false consolation.  Across the twentieth century, modernity-narratives blend with critiques of the symbol to create a tone of baleful negativity that runs the political gamut from right to left and that comes to count, in the humanistic academy, as the identifying note of critical theory. My paper will push back against the dominance of the negative tone in critical theory by outlining how advances in our understanding of capitalism have long since left modernity - and demystification-critiques behind, and by demonstrating that contemporary literature, especially poetry, has developed a tremendous tonal range by which to think about political suffering, the experience of “nature,” and the character of symbols.