Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 3/2022

This article questions the logic of human self-transcendence and enhancement that underlies all forms of humanism, including transhumanism, as well as the role technology is supposed to play in »improving« human nature and overcoming aggression, violence and self-destruction. It argues, instead, that a critical posthumanist stance has to undertake the deconstruction of the very notion of perfectibility as well as the purely instrumental understanding of technology that usually underlie discussions of human enhancement or »improvement«. Humanism with its inevitable anthropocentrism is unable to address the problem of violence (against humans) as long as it represses the issue of violence against nonhumans animals. The true challenge for a posthumanist politics (and ethics) that seeks to move closer towards the horizon of nonviolence and inter- and intraspecies justice, is to effectuate a fundamental change in attitude towards »our« animality.

The paper outlines the thinking of suspension that characterizes the work of Bernard Stiegler. On the one hand, it lays out the problem of ›doubly epokhal redoubling‹ [double redoublement épokhal] Stiegler develops to work through the question of epochal change as the core of his technophenomenology of disorientation. On this basis, on the other hand, it presents Stiegler’s reflections on being-in-disruption, that define our present of the computational Gestell and the Entropocene, as the final stage of the Anthropocene, as an un-time of absence of epoch. It is this condition of epochlesness, this difficult constellation of a comprehensive absence, that enjoins, that forces us today to think carefully, and thereby radically rearticulates the question of thinking in terms of care. The main thesis of the paper is that what is breaking through in Stiegler’s thinking of suspension is a new sense of sense, a trans-formative sense that, given the urgent new ›Great Transformation‹ of which we have seen merely the beginning, may be of great philosophical and political relevance.

As every other discourse, the global »#MeToo« movement is centered around specific narratives and counter-narratives: With the »Weinstein effect« soon reaching beyond Hollywood, the hashtag has raised widespread awareness for the ubiquity of everyday sexism in patriarchal societies over the past four years—but the digital activism was also countered by anti-feminist backlash. At the same time, early European and North American novels and films have now also taken up the subject and developed their very own narratives: Within the fictional space, for example, the narrative focus gives voice to female experiences, the stories reflect the potential of female empowerment, can play with metafictionality or critically depict the ›other side‹.

Obwohl Plastik viele Vorteile hat, konnte es sein schlechtes Image nie ganz abschütteln. Doch noch nie zuvor stand das Material so sehr unter Beschuss wie zurzeit. Ausgehend von gegenwärtig geführten Kunststoffdebatten werden in einem schnellen Durchlauf einige einschlägige Publikationen zur Thematik vorgestellt. Anschließend wird der Korpus der noch zu schreibenden (deutschsprachigen) Literaturgeschichte der Kunststoffe in groben Zügen abgesteckt. Im letzten Teil wird anhand des Romans Alles Plastik (1998) von David Flusfeder vorgeführt, wie ›literarische Kunststoffbearbeitung‹ aussehen kann.