Rosi Braidotti: Posthumanism, Materialism, Affirmation – Feminist Perspectives

This lecture addresses the three main challenges that frame the posthuman condition as our historical location, which cannot be delegated to a distant utopian future. We are confronted by three interconnected changes. First, at the environmental level, the devastation of the environment and multiple species; second, at the technological level, as transhumanism becomes the official ethos of capitalism, the status of humans is redefined by the life sciences and advanced technologies and the digital interconnections they afford us. And third, at the social level we witness increasing structural injustices through the unequal distribution of wealth, prosperity and access to the new green economy and to advanced technologies. The lecture argues that neo-materialist cartographies of knowledge and power today and affirmative ethics are the most adequate way of accounting for the posthuman predicament and the new power relations they are developing.